Face-Slapping14 min read
The Engagement That Broke the City
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I remember the hotel lights like a confession. The crystal chandeliers at the Ten恒 Grand Hotel threw shards of gold across everyone. They made promises look like coin and sorrow look like glitter.
"I don't think they saw me coming," I said, straightening the thin silver pendant at my throat.
"You always underestimate your audience," Atticus Thompson answered, leaning in the doorway like a man carved out of law books and late nights. "Or you overestimate their attention span."
I laughed because it hid the tremor in my hands. "It's just an engagement. People leave in three hours and forget the rest."
"People remember three things," he said. "Names, faces, and the tone of a promise."
I looked at the giant poster at the hall — Luca Baldwin in a crisp tux, smiling with practiced tenderness. My face hovered beside his, a photograph-perfect version of myself. "We practiced everything," I said. "We rehearsed how to wave, how to cut the cake."
"You rehearsed smiling," Atticus corrected. "You never rehearsed being accused."
"Stop saying that."
He walked up so close that for a second the copy of me in the poster looked like a stranger. "Why did you let me come?" he asked.
"Because you sent a message last night," I said. "A hint. You said someone would show up who didn't belong."
He touched the graduation pendant at my throat with a finger, as if remembering how it had once been a thread between us. "Old habits and old debts," he said. "And you... you were the only person I trusted to know where truth hides."
"Atticus—"
He cut me off, eyes hard with a focus that had nothing to do with the chandelier. "Does Luca Baldwin treat you well?"
There was a small, pointless swell of anger in me. "He treats me as a division of his future."
"That's not a person," Atticus said softly. "That's an asset."
"I can handle my life," I snapped. "And besides, our engagement isn't a secret."
"The world needs secrets as much as it needs evidence," he said, but then he heard a disturbance in the corridor and the sentence died. The muffled clatter of a champagne bottle, a whispered alarm: "Someone's hurt!"
We raced toward the sound.
Heaving, frantic footsteps met us in the corridor. A server stood white-faced beside a knocked-over champagne cart. "It was in the room," he panted. "In the conference room—there's blood."
My rehearsal smile split. "Who?"
"Li Fangfang," someone said.
"Maria?" I whispered without meaning to.
Maria Nelson was my assistant, the girl who'd volunteered to be my bridesmaid the way some people volunteer sunlight. She'd always carried a camera to capture laughter in the wrong light.
Detective Fisher Lemaire arrived like a compact storm. He had the kind of calm that happens when someone has learned to hold chaos steady.
"We've cordoned the area," he told Atticus. "Preliminary reports say blunt-force trauma to the skull. We'll need statements. There's blood on the bronze sculpture in the conference room. Fingerprints show two sets: the victim's and one that matches Luca Baldwin. Nothing else yet."
"You want me to step back?" Atticus asked.
"No," I said before I could stop myself. "Atticus, please, help."
He looked at me the way he always did when he decided to carry something for me that might crush him. "I'll stay," he said. "But you—leave the emotional work to me."
We moved into the room when the police let us. Maria lay still as a photograph. Her cheek had the soft, cruel bruise of something heavy. The bronze sculpture—an abstract, heavy thing—tilted as if someone had struck it.
Luca sat in the corner, his tux smeared with red. "I didn't do this," he repeated, voice raw. "I went to the meeting, then she chased me, she begged... I left. When I came back she was there. I tried to help. I didn't—"
"You have fingerprints," Atticus said quietly. "On the sculpture."
"I touched it trying to lift her," he said. "I tried to help, I swear."
Detective Fisher took Luca's statement, his tone tight with procedure. "Did you have a relationship?"
Luca's mouth gave a hard little smile. "Two years. We were on and off. That doesn't mean—"
"It does, for a jury," Atticus said.
"You'll be my lawyer," Luca told me later, at the little private room behind the scene—eyes that had been confident now thin as a wire. "If they think I'm the killer, my family... everything collapses."
"You understand the risk," I said.
"Which is precisely why you should be on my side," he said.
Atticus surprised me by agreeing to take the case.
"On one condition," he said.
"You want money. I get it."
"You need to work as my assistant," he said.
I laughed at the pitch, at the ridiculousness of it. "You can ask the whole family to sponsor me."
"I'm asking you," he said. "You know him. You know the company. And you know the law."
I nodded. "Fine. I'll help."
The hours afterward were a blur of forensics and phone calls. Detective Fisher coordinated with the coroner. Atticus moved like someone with a map in his mind.
"Who brought the bronze piece into that room?" I asked.
"He was a prop," Atticus said. "An installation for the reception."
"Who had access?"
"Staff, catering, family. And anyone who knew the venue."
Atticus brought me back to his firm. The lights of his office were a different kind of chandelier—punctured and practical. He handed me a folder the size of a small secret.
"You'll start with the guest log and security footage," he said. "We need to find every set of footsteps."
I sat at the monitors with him for hours. We rewound the feed again and again, watching the wedding stream in loops—an ocean of suits, a lonely island where Maria had gone into the conference room and never come out. At 7:12 p.m. a masked man appeared for two seconds by the back stairs. He walked wrong, like someone trying to hide a limp.
"You freeze him," Atticus said. "Send the frame to Detective Fisher."
We found things that made people in our world look small. A private message from Maria to an account called 'GalileoTrouble'—someone I started to suspect had been in her life. And a string of comments on her public posts, a man who'd always been there in the background.
"I dug his profile," Atticus told me at dawn. "Harrison Benjamin. Psych professor at the University. He was at the event."
"A professor?" I scoffed. "At a hotel murder?"
"People who study minds sometimes forget to mind their hands," Atticus said. "We need his alibi."
We spent nights like that—two bodies bent over small screens, finding constellations in coffee stains. Each discovery rewired me.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked once, the fatigue in my bones like a confession.
Atticus looked at me the way someone looks at the sea—familiar and always changing. "Because truth is the only thing I've ever been faithful to," he said. "And because I can't let you be a pawn."
It wasn't until later that I learned what I didn't know. Maria had been pregnant. The hospital records Atticus pulled that evening were like a new kind of strike: the line "positive" in black and white. The baby had not reached a date to name the father in public records, but the timeline matched: two months. Two months placed conception before the engagement rehearsal. The discovery rippled outward like a stone.
"She was carrying a child's future," Detective Fisher said, eyes heavy with the business of numbers and life. "That changes motive."
"If the child belonged to Luca," Atticus said slowly, "it gives someone a reason to be desperate."
Luca denied it to my face in a hospital room where his wrists were bandaged.
"You're lying," I told him.
He laughed once, ugly and thin. "You should believe me."
"I used to," I said.
His face did what it always did when a person believes themselves immune: it hardened. "It's not my baby. I told you—I told her I couldn't marry her. I told her she should let go." He stopped. "If she was pregnant, it wasn't mine."
"No DNA yet," Atticus said. "But the timeline is... inconvenient."
That night Luca tried to kill himself.
He didn't die. He was in a white bed, bandaged and fragile, and his mother, Esperanza Carter, hovering like fog.
"You're safe with the law in your corner," she told me when I visited. "Atticus, are you sure you can secure a win?"
He replied with the thing he told himself: "We will build the truth."
It was at that low point that my stubbornness unraveled into action. I followed a clue from Maria's social feed—a username that had left timestamps and an address. A dirty alley, a stairwell, and then a hand across my mouth. My phone flew into the garbage.
"Stay where I can see you, and no one gets hurt," a voice said, muffled by plastic.
I kicked. The masked man cursed and I got a shot at his ankle. He loosened his grip and I ran until I couldn't run. He chased. I ran into a small room and the door slammed. My heart was a hammer.
"Who are you?" I shouted.
A shadow moved and then the door cracked open. Atticus came like a blade.
"Get back," he said, and the room exploded into fighting. He saved me as if he had always known the choreography.
"Why did you come alone?" I asked later, shaking.
"Because no one can rescue what they won't look for," he said. He was breathless and mad and beautiful in a way that made the chest ache.
We found more threads. Harrison Benjamin's visits, invoices showing favors to the hotel manager, a note in Maria's handwriting about a meeting where she planned to 'expose the truth.' The professor had reason to be near the sculpture. The university defended itself like a fortress. The professor's office was full of polite things and polishing. He was calm when we asked him for a statement.
"I remember Maria," he said. "She was bright. She came to lectures often."
"Did you see her the night of the engagement?" Atticus asked.
"I left early," Harrison said. "I have no alibi for every minute."
We dug into the little things that look like nothing. A domestic helper who remembered a fight in a corridor. A manager who admitted to moving a bronze to stage a photoshoot. A U-disk with a single file: a recorded conversation of the night, captured by a staffer's phone.
The recording changed everything. It had heavy breathing, a scuffle, and a voice—Luca's—saying, "I told you to leave me alone. I'm engaged. Leave!"
And another voice, much less composed, saying, "You're the coward. You'll go on and pretend you never knew me."
Metal clanged.
Silence.
Then a thud.
Atticus played it for the detective and for me in a small, dark room where the lamps felt like jury members.
"That's not proof of murder," Fisher said. "But that's a strangulation of alibis."
"You plan to make the proof public," Atticus said.
"I plan to show the layers," Atticus replied. "The money. The threats. The secret. The lie."
We arranged for a hearing—public, attended by press, by the families. The mayor's office wouldn't close the city, but the hotel allowed a televised clarification. It became the stage that would either bury us or set us free.
The day of the revelation was a storm. The hotel's grand hall overflowed: clients, journalists, family, and a hundred people who had come only for the gossip. Cameras clicked like rain. Luca stood in front, tux done, his face the kind of carefully crafted shield that powerful men wear.
He smiled for cameras, smug and sure.
Atticus asked for a projector. He moved like a man who had been rehearsing a small miracle.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "We gathered because a life was taken. But we are not here to make a spectacle of grief. We are here to find the truth. We are here to show it."
He hit a key. The giant screen flickered and then opened on a message thread. The messages were raw, ugly, human. Maria's words asked for honesty. Luca's answers were short, self-protective. Then came a file: a video file.
"It shows what happened in the corridor," Atticus said. "It was captured by a staff phone. Watch."
On the screen the footage was grainy. Luca and Maria stood near the bronze. They argued. He shoved. She grabbed for the bronze for balance. He pushed harder. The sculpture toppled, scraping the back of her head. Blood went wide. He did not run. He panicked.
"Luca," Atticus said quietly.
Luca's expression flickered from control to confusion.
The footage continued. A second figure entered—a hand on Maria's back—but the face was turned away. The camera did not show the punch that killed her, but it showed Luca walking away with the look of a man who thought a secret could be buried between his fingers.
Atticus turned the screen. New images. A file of messages between Maria and Harrison Benjamin. Evidence of a meeting and threats. Invoices that placed Harrison at the hotel paying staff and orchestrating rehearsals the night before. Then, like a hammer, a bank transfer—Harrison paying for an embryo-related procedure? The implications made people gasp.
"Why?" someone cried.
Harrison's face on the stage was a mask of polite disbelief.
"How could you do this?" Maria's mother, Candace Alston, stood up. "My daughter is dead!"
Atticus stepped forward. "We will let the facts speak. But you will see that motive has been layered."
He played another audio. It was Luca on a phone call—angry, then pleading as if the truth threatened to swallow him. He played a message from Harrison that promised silence in exchange for money and misdirection. Atticus had tracked payments, invoices, conversations.
The crowd's murmurs got louder. Phones came up like a thousand moths. People recorded. The hotel's chandeliers threw light over faces that went from curiosity to hunger to horror.
"You're making it sound like everyone had a hand," Esperanza Carter shouted. "Two families, one tragedy. What are you saying?"
"I'm saying," Atticus replied, "that this death is not a simple accident. That there was a plan to keep something hidden. That Maria’s pregnancy made her a target. That someone profited from confusion."
Luca's face was still composed. He clung to the idea that a public life can be managed with private cruelty.
Atticus turned the final screen: the bronze sculpture's fingerprints, the hospital record, the bank transfer from Harrison's account to the hotel's manager, and a message that had been deleted—until Atticus recovered it: "If Luca marries, she will be erased."
The hall went silent like a held breath.
Luca's face—smug a moment before—fell through stages I had rehearsed at night. First, confusion: "What are you playing?"
Then, a small, angry denial. "This is lies. These are tricks."
"You're recorded," Atticus said. "You sent messages. You were at the scene."
The first change in him was disbelief. "This is fabricated," he spat, trying to make his voice both loud and reasonable.
"Watch," Atticus said, and the screen showed a split frame: Luca's shadow near the bronze, then Harrison's blurred silhouette inserting something into the frame—something that looked like a shove. Atticus placed a hand on the microphone as if steadying himself.
"You're under oath now," Atticus said quietly.
The second shift came when the room changed its angle toward him. Whispers turned into a rising swell. Reporters' phones lit like low suns. A middle-aged businessman recorded and announced live: "I knew these people. This is not theatre. This is shame."
Luca's posture began to crumble. He reached for the nearest anchor—his mother, Esperanza.
"Mom!" he begged, almost a child's sound.
She stepped back.
"Mom!" he repeated, and the plea turned into a pleading he hadn't planned for.
He tried to deny some more. "I didn't mean for her to—"
"Enough!" Atticus said with the kind of quiet that stops a clock. "You had options. You had a choice to be honest. The difference is now you face the truth you tried to avoid."
He leaned in. "Did you plan for this? Did you pay? Did you ask for a silence that only money could buy?"
There was a pause so complete I could hear the hotel's HVAC.
Luca's eyes went wide, then bright with panic.
"This is a set-up," he cried, voice lost in the room's expanse. "They're lying. It's not true! I didn't—"
Phones everywhere blinked. A woman in the front began taking a video and sobbed. "He's lying!" she shouted.
"No, he must be lying," a man said, trying to hold on to the habit of making excuses for power.
A teenager somewhere started a live stream. "This is wild," he said into his phone. "He looked so clean a minute ago."
Luca's face moved like a recording stuck between tracks. He staggered backward, eyes searching for an exit.
The third change came when he began to shake. "It's not true," he said. "I didn't kill her. I didn't—"
The crowd's energy sharpened: some murmured shock, some whispered, some pulled out their phones and shouted questions. A circle of gossip crystallized into a public verdict propelled by pixels and the physical bodies in the room. An older woman clapped a hand over her mouth and sobbed. Someone laughed, ugly and high.
Then it broke to the fourth stage: denial became collapse. Luca's knees buckled and he sank to the carpet like a man who had misread gravity. He tried to stand and couldn't. Atticus had him in his peripheral, but Atticus did not move to touch him. He let the law and the evidence do their work.
"Get someone water," someone ordered. A dozen phones recorded the scene of a man unmasked.
"Please," Luca whispered, small, a child again. "Please—"
The crowd leaned in. You could see the social media edits forming in real-time: a dozen cameras, a hundred angles, all becoming one public archive of his collapse.
He started to sob, a broken sound. "Please. I didn't mean—"
"Say it," Atticus said, almost softly. "Say what happened."
Luca looked up like a man who had run out of scripts. He tried to reshuffle his words. "I... we... I didn't think she would—"
"Who is 'we'?" a reporter demanded.
He turned his face to his mother. "Mom—"
She took a step toward him, then away.
And then he did what men do when cornered by consequence: he begged.
"Please!" Luca shouted, voice hollowed. "Please don't let them take me. Please—"
"Beg all you like," Atticus said. "The truth does not care how loudly you beg."
The crowd watched the unspooling: the smugness, the shock, the denial, the collapse, the pleading. A woman in the second row began recording with two phones, her thumbs fretting across screens as if her hands could fasten the moment into currency.
Cameras clicked, clicked, clicked. Some cheered. Some cried. Someone applauded when Luca's purchase of silence—recorded in bank transfers—played for the room.
Luca's voice decreased into a pleading that sounded like the end of a fairytale. He tried to reach Atticus, to touch the one who had once been an enemy and had now become the villain's undoer.
"Atticus, help me," he whimpered.
Atticus looked at him like a man looking at a broken instrument that once played music.
"You had a chance to be better," Atticus said. "You gave her death instead."
The room dissolved into an organized chaos: murmurs of "arrest", a few recorded comments like beads on a string, the hotel's staff trying to keep order while the press recorded the collapse.
Luca's face, once so precise and practiced, now collected the shame that people could not take back. He cried. He begged. He contacted no one who could pull him out. He had spent his money trying to rewrite the past, and the past had written back louder than his bank.
When it was over, the video of his kneeling spread across feeds, a clip that would not leave the city for a week.
Later, in a quieter room, Atticus put a hand on my shoulder.
"You did well," he said.
"Did we prove who hit her?" I asked.
He hesitated. "We proved enough to begin. We proved that this was not a simple accident. We proved that the truth has hands that can be traced."
"And Luca?"
"He will face the law," Atticus said. "But so will others."
The days that followed were full of hearings and statements and sometimes, small human moments: a mother who grieved, a city that debated who deserved mercy. Detective Fisher kept working, Harrison Benjamin's account froze, and the university placed him on leave.
There was public punishment beyond the legal system. A board at the hotel posted names: staff found complicit, a manager dismissed. The recorded transfers were shared across financial news. People recorded themselves saying, "Not on my watch," and the phrase trended.
One afternoon, months later, there was a formal hearing in which Atticus laid everything out. He stood at the podium, and with measured calm displayed all the recovered messages, receipts, and the footage. This time there was no dramatic on-stage collapse—there was only the legal machinery grinding forward. The court's flush, the seriousness of seal and signature, did its work in the dry language of law.
But the banquet punishment—the public laying bare—had already happened. It had been a scene of humiliation and exposure that the city would not forget: a man who had thought his privilege could buy silence now found himself begging amid hundreds of people and dozens of recording devices. He had been reduced from arrogance to a shaking voice. He had watched the world he built with callous decisions turn on him, hissed and filmed and immortalized.
"What will you do now?" I asked Atticus on the night the city finally quieted.
He picked up the small silver pendant at my throat, the one he'd once given me and that I had never let go. He wound it in his fingers like it was a tiny clock.
"I'll make sure the truth is heard," he said. "And then... I'll teach you how not to carry this alone."
I touched his sleeve, the armor beneath his suit.
"Promise?" I asked.
"No promises," he said with that old smile that used to unnerve me. "Only work."
Later, when the press had gone, and the lights were dimmed and the city's noise had been compressed into a whisper, I put the pendant under my pillow. It clicked once, soft as if time had a way to forgive.
I slept.
The End
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