Revenge12 min read
Snow, Knives, and a Butterfly Ring
ButterPicks13 views
The day I got out, two men were waiting.
"Jaylee, get yourself a job. Stay decent," the guard said as he shoved the iron door open.
"I will," I replied, though I wasn't sure who I was promising.
Outside, snow was falling so thick the two men looked like two pale statues in tuxedos: one in a black umbrella, one checking his watch like a man who couldn't stand being patient. The Mercedes and the Panamera glinted under the street lamps.
"Forrest?" I said when I recognized him. His face had a familiar emptiness that used to be comfort.
"Dean," I added. "Dean, are you—"
"Jaylee." Dean Ballard came forward, hands in his pockets, eyes steady. He said nothing about the sentence, the trial, or the five years. His presence felt like an accusation and a hand that might catch me if I fell.
"Forrest?" I glanced at the man in the umbrella. He didn't step closer. He watched the gate like a sentry.
"Forrest," I said again, softer, to the man who used to say he loved me in the dark. He had been the one who drove me to the courthouse the day they locked me up. He had been the one who stood in the front, comforting his sister.
"It was over before it started," Dean said quietly. "Go on. He'll leave."
I didn't listen. I walked past them, shoulders hunched, feeling every stare from the officers like pins. The first breath of outside air felt foreign, like a home I wasn't allowed to live in.
Later, when the snow had melted into slush, Dean followed me. He offered a room, then a job, then protection. I said no.
"Why are you here, then?" I asked him the day he stopped me in the street and twisted my wrist with a gentleness that had no right to be gentle.
"I want to help," he said. "You were wronged. I'm trying to fix it."
"You helped send me away," I said. "You argued me into prison."
"That was legal work," he said, voice flat. "You acted out of self-defense and the case was complicated. I did what my client asked."
"You didn't have to let them humiliate me in court," I said. "You didn't have to let his family smear me."
Dean's eyes flickered. "I couldn't fight both then."
"Now?" I snapped.
He didn't answer. Snow fell, and for a moment it felt like my chest would split open with cold.
Five years earlier, everything had been smaller. My grandfather had been alive, catching the sun on his wrinkled cheeks and saving bottles for me to trade. He had bought me my first shiny clip because he wanted me to feel like girls at school. Back then, Dean used to sit two rows behind me and help me with math. He'd hand me bags when my grandfather went to sweep a yard. He was steadfast, quiet, and careful—someone who would measure a step twice. Forrest was the other kind of warmth: impulsive, loud, and raw. He drove the big car, laughed with wide hands, and kissed like the world might stop.
Forrest became my boyfriend in the first year of college. He kissed me under blackout lights during a storm that cut our campus into shadows. He promised the sky. He promised a future. I believed him, mostly because I wanted to.
When my grandfather broke his neck chasing a runaway dog that belonged to Kayleigh Cohen's family—when he lay there with his breath like a brittle cotton string—I went to Kayleigh for money. I begged. She smirked, lifted two fingers to her nose, and said, "Maybe people like you aren't meant to be saved."
We fought. She took a kitchen knife. The room blurred. I remember blood, the smell of iron, her voice crying "Brother!"—and then being cuffed and dragged away. I remember holding a small flurry of hope like an ember—Forrest had always protected me. I expected him to storm the courthouse, to raise hell. He sat in the front row and held his sister's hand.
Five years in prison taught me how to survive silence. They beat me in places with no cameras. They pushed my head into buckets of filthy water and laughed when I coughed the taste of rust. At first I was stubborn; I took every blow like it was something I could swallow. Later, I learned to trade. I scrubbed the cellmate's back until she said thank you and, in the dim hours, she told me things that weren't safe to tell the guards.
"Karsyn," she said once, voice low as the hum of a ventilation fan. "Karsyn Cline. That's me. Keep your head. People throw you in and they expect you to be broken. Learn what they want, give them something, then keep the rest."
Karsyn became my ally. She had a smile like a blade, quick and startling. The guards listened when she spoke. I stayed with her, and in those long nights we carved plans like someone carving names into wood.
When I walked out, my hands shook. I owed Karsyn more than words. She had a way of looking at the world like everything could be arranged into useful pieces.
"Don't let them touch you again," she said, sliding a cigarette into my trembling fingers. "Make them want you. Make them need you."
"You mean, like a trap?" I asked.
"Like a bargain," she said. "You have one thing they want — their conscience. Use it."
So I did.
"Why are you doing this?" Dean asked one night in his apartment when I had finally let him take care of the small things: a hot meal, a clean towel, a room that wasn't a cell.
"Because I need them to feel what I felt," I said. "Because my grandfather can't come back, and my child can't be born back into my arms. Because someone's going to remember what they did."
Dean's face tightened. "You don't have to do it alone."
"I know you," I said. "You are precise. You always have been. You measure everything, even the people you love. You can be brave, Dean. But you're also a lawyer. You're not built for burning down a house."
Forrest was not built for slow burning. He loved with fever. After I got out, he seemed thinner, more hollow, like someone whose center had been boiled down to smoke. He told me things in the dark one night when I confronted him at the rehab villa where he'd escaped to.
"Jaylee, I tried," he said, voice breaking. "I ran money, favors—"
"You sat with her," I cut in. "You listened to her. You held her hand while my grandfather lay dying."
Forrest's face crumpled. "I thought I was doing the right thing," he said. "She cried. She was scared. I was scared too."
"Who did you protect?" I asked.
He couldn't answer. His chest heaved. I watched him become something smaller.
"You want me to forgive you?" I asked finally.
"No," he said, whispering like a child. "No, I don't deserve it."
So I chose not to forgive. I learned how to appear broken and tender and obedient. I let Dean wrap his coat around me in public. I let him buy me new clothes. I let him slip a small ring on my finger—an oddly shaped butterfly, Dean said, because of an old story from school. It glittered like a promise. I let him think he had me. I let Forrest watch and I let Kayleigh's eyes burn like a coal every time she saw me.
The plan started small. I followed Dean when he said he was at the office. I knew how to pick locks from nights alone in the penitentiary—years of quiet work with rocks. I trailed him to the jewelry store where Kayleigh and Forrest picked rings. I stepped up to the glass, drew a small heart, then a crying face. Dean looked up and saw me through the window. He looked like he'd been startled awake. He left Kayleigh to her selection and ran out into the crowd, grabbed me, and held me so hard my ribs thought the world might crack.
That night he slipped a ring on my finger—fast, decisive. "If I won you, would you stay?" he asked.
"Maybe," I said.
It was a lie.
He moved fast. He had been patient for years; patience turns into a quiet hunger. He began to change in small, ugly ways. He started wearing black instead of navy. He smoked black coffee. He practiced a smile that wasn't his. He spoke softer; he watched me with a new intensity. He told me he wanted to take me abroad. He talked about moving and starting over like a man who had rehearsed escape.
"Will you marry me?" he asked one night, placing the butterfly ring on my finger like it was a seed.
"Maybe," I answered.
We spoke of going abroad, of hiding from a family that would never forgive me. Kayleigh, however, was not idle. She hired people, whispered into ears. She wanted me removed, silenced, sent away. She arranged a petty, ugly ceremony: I was taken down to the waterfront, meant to be "shipped off." I let it happen, because I needed the scene, needed her to stand under the lights and tell every brand of cruelty she was capable of.
At the water, I let them see me bound. Karsyn had arranged for the ropes to loosen; the knife at my throat was a prop. I dove into cold, dark water and vanished. The men flailed like they had been lied to. Panic is an art; I had learned it well.
Kayleigh's face when I didn't die was the face I painted into memory. She was furious, bright like a streetlight, and her mouth formed the word "brat" as if it hurt to speak it.
"You think you can play with us?" she hissed when she finally could speak to me, fingers digging into my cheek.
"I think I can play better," I said.
What I hadn't counted on was Forrest. When he saw me embrace Dean in the villa, when he saw the ring like a brand on my hand, something in him unlatched. He disappeared that night and returned with red on him—blood on his clothes, on his hands. He said he had "made it right." He looked at Kayleigh like he wanted to bite her.
"Why did you hurt him?" Kayleigh demanded once, voice sharp. "Why did you make him like this?"
"He did it for me," Forrest said, eyes wet and terrible. "I wanted to make sure you would never hurt her again."
"You killed my sister!" Kayleigh screamed, and then the night fell apart into howls and sirens.
The police came. Dean and I watched from the shadows as Forrest staggered in, clutching a knife, red as a storybook villain. He had gone to the old family house, and what he found there—what he did—left pieces of him everywhere. They took him away in cuffs, and later he was confined to a care unit. He kept a photograph of me tucked into his shirt like some relic.
Then the worse part. Dean fought like a man possessed. He fought for me, but he fought like a lover who could not help but harm. In the heat of a moment when Forrest lunged in a rage and tried to hurt us, Dean took the knife from his hands. Later, they said Dean had stabbed Forrest. They said it was overzealous defense. They said it was more than necessary.
"Dean!" I shouted in the courthouse as the gavel hit wood. "He was going to kill you!"
"You caused this," Kayleigh cried, striding through the marble hall like a queen whose crown had gone missing. "You seduced them, you ruined them!"
"What do you want from me?" I asked, voice small against the echo.
She smiled like a villain and decided to crush me.
I had planned many things, but Kayleigh's public undoing needed to be more than a private satisfaction; it had to be a dismantling. She was a woman used to applause, to luxury, to people averting their eyes when she winked. She had money, contacts, a fashion line—the kind of small empire built on other people's shame. She liked to stand on stages and be adored.
So when she announced a charity gala—an eco-fashion launch with cameras and donors—I said yes like a lamb. I walked into the ballroom with Karsyn at my side. The photographers smelled like lemon. Kayleigh flashed a million-dollar grin, all pearls and engineered posture.
She saw me and her smile sharpened like a nail.
"Jaylee," she sang, "I didn't expect you here."
"I expected you," I said, and the sentence landed like a bell. "I expected to see who you really are."
She laughed, the kind of cool laugh that slides off velvet. "Really? Everyone will know? I thought you were in rehab—"
"Rehab for what?" I asked. "For being human?"
She took a step toward me. "You should be grateful someone saved you. You have Dean. You have a future."
"Do I?" I lifted my hand. The butterfly ring flashed. Cameras zoomed.
Suddenly, lights. A projector clicked on and the room hush fell into an anxious quiet. Karsyn stepped forward and pressed a button. The screen filled with footage—text messages, voicemails, CCTV of Kayleigh ordering men, negotiating payoffs, the voice like satin saying, "Make sure she disappears." The camera cut between her smiling face at galas and the voice on the recording, lodged forever beside her teeth.
The crowd shifted. Men murmured. Women crossed their arms. Kayleigh's face went cold, then red, then the color of a person who realized she had miscounted.
"No!" she said, turning to the nearest donor. "This is edited. This is—"
"Is this true?" a board member called.
A younger woman in the front row, a junior editor, finally stood. "I buried this story for a favor," she said, voice shaking. "I thought I could take the money and forget. I'm sorry." She held out a thumb drive. "It has everything."
The hush turned into a hum. People recorded with their phones. The gala's host—a philanthropic star—stared at Kayleigh with the kind of disgust that makes people lose their seats.
"How could you?" a woman in a red dress whispered loud enough for many to hear. "You pretended to be charitable."
Kayleigh's shoulders trembled. For the first time since I knew her, she looked like a small animal. Her mouth worked, trying to shape a defense, but the projector kept running: bank transfers, messages saying "We will pay for the quiet," photos of me tied at the water's edge, a recorded man saying, "Jump or she'll be shipped."
People's faces changed. Where there had been applause there was now the sound of jackets zipping and shoes moving toward the exits. A couple at the table near the front began to shout.
"This is criminal!" one man shouted. "Do you know what's in here? Did you pay for this?"
"Security!" someone called. Two men in dark suits hurried forward, faces set, and for a moment I feared the situation might snap into violence.
Kayleigh went through stages: indignation, anger, denial, pleading, then collapse. Her hands flew to her mouth. "You're lying!" she cried. "Dean, for God—"
Someone in the crowd had a long memory. "I saw what you said to that man in the alley," a valet said. "You told him you'd get whatever you wanted."
Voices layered. Cameras whirred. A woman with a business card threw it on a table; the card fluttered like a discarded wing.
"I didn't—" Kayleigh began, but her words sounded thin.
A man took out his phone and played a voicemail Kayleigh had sent a contractor: "Make sure they disappear," her voice clear as ice. She tried to snatch the phone away, fingers fumbling, then stopped, chest heaving.
"Call the police," someone demanded.
The host banged the mic. "We will cooperate with authorities. Security, escort Ms. Cohen out."
She stumbled out like someone dragged by an invisible rope. As she passed the crowd, heads turned, fingers pointed. A hand—someone's assistant—reached out and slapped her face. It was loud, and a hush fell like snow. Kayleigh froze. She had been used to being above people, and now she was below them.
Phones captured every motion. People whispered, some with scorn, some with the pleasure of being present at a reckoning. A young woman near the front began to clap, and then more hands joined. The clapping was not polite; it was a verdict.
Outside, the paparazzi pushed forward. Kayleigh's heels clicked on marble. She tried to compose herself, but tears leaked out, messy and red. "You don't know what it's like," she sobbed into an umbrella held by a PR man who had gone pale. "You don't know the threats I had. You don't know. I'm nothing without my name!"
"You made yourself by stepping on others," the host said, voice heavy on the cold.
She was led out. In the doorway, someone yelled, "Shame!" The word resonated like a hammer.
The punishment wasn't a legal sentence that night. It was worse for someone like Kayleigh: it was exposure. Her brand's investors called within hours. Two sponsors withdrew. A designer associate texted in a flurry: "We can't be associated." The story hit the feeds and spun into a storm. The next morning, tabloids printed her face beside the words "Charity Scandal." Her Instagram comments filled with anger. Her PR man resigned. Three board members stepped down.
I watched all this from across the room, heart thudding with a rhythm I didn't know how to name.
"You wanted blood," Karsyn whispered near my ear. "You wanted more than whispers."
"I wanted them to know what they did," I said.
Karsyn smiled like a serrated blade. "Sometimes, public ruin is the only justice."
Forrest's punishment was quieter and crueler. He was locked away in a unit where the lights never really warmed. They said he had mental episodes where he begged me not to leave him. He kept the photo like a relic, as if the paper could hold him together. Dean, on the other hand, faced legal consequences. His hands had the knife. The court said he'd overstepped. He had five years, and his sentence was announced under a bright, impartial sun.
I sat in that courtroom where once I had sat and been judged, and I watched Dean be led away. He caught my eye once. There was a look—an old school memory when he mouthed, "Don't wait." He said it with his lips, and then the guard pulled him along.
People walked past us like we were bad weather. I left without looking back. Dean's mouth formed that small shape again, almost a smile, and then he was gone.
Justice, when it is taken by spectacle and need, tastes like cold iron. I had planned for moments—Kayleigh's ruin, Forrest's fall—but I hadn't planned for what it did to me.
In the days after, there were interviews, statements, excuses. The press described me as a survivor, then as a manipulator, then as a strange heroine. Some nights I rehearsed answers in front of the mirror. Some nights I played the guitar under a peeling sky and remembered the way Forrest laughed as he jumped into a pool the night he first asked me to be his.
I kept Dean's butterfly ring for a while. It sat on my finger like a decision. Sometimes I would look at it and remember him whispering about the year he stayed up answering ten thousand questions to win me that little metal butterfly as a child. Sometimes I would touch it and hear the ocean where I jumped away from Kayleigh's men. The ring was a map of all the things I had been and all the things I'd taken.
Karsyn drove up in a bright pink car one afternoon, shades on, as if scandal had only made her polish her lipstick. She pulled out a cigarette and grinned.
"Come with me," she said. "You could disappear or you could build."
"Build what?" I asked.
"A life without their shadows," she said. "I'm not asking you to be good. I'm asking you to be alive."
I put the butterfly ring into the deepest drawer of Dean's dresser that he had left for me. I closed the drawer. I sat on the bed and picked the guitar up again. I played the song I had once sung for Forrest on a birthday by the pool—the one that had made him laugh so hard he could not stop. A single chord, then another.
Maybe one day I'd throw the ring away. Maybe one day I'd come back and open that drawer and laugh at the person who left it there. But not today.
"Do you miss him?" Karsyn asked.
"Forrest?" I paused. "Sometimes his laugh."
"For Dean?"
"I think about what a man like him becomes when he decides to devour what he can't have," I said. "I think about how hunger rewrites people."
Karsyn flicked ash. "Then don't feed it."
I stood, zipped my jacket, and went outside. The snow had begun to fall again, soft and indifferent. It covered footprints without judging. I walked forward, and each step felt like a small, sharp stitch sewing up the open places.
At the edge of the road, a child lost a paper kite and it tumbled like a desperate bird. I chased it and handed it back, and the child's mother smiled as if nothing had happened. My hands were clean for a second.
I kept walking. The world was messy and small and human. It did not owe me anything. I did not owe it forgiving.
I had my scars, my memories, and a ring in the dark. That was enough for now.
The End
— Thank you for reading —