Face-Slapping11 min read
The Kiss That Stole His Nightmares
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My first night at the Yamaguchi estate smelled of old wood, medicine, and something that made people keep their distance. I had come to the city to find my parents, and I never expected my search to start behind the heavy oak door of a small villa where a man coughed like he was shaking pieces of himself out of his chest.
"Mr. Yamaguchi, I brought the medicine," the house servant fumbled at the door handle. His fingers trembled.
"Get out!" a voice snarled from inside. The coughing kept going, like something trying to claw its way out.
They slammed the bottle through the gap and ran. The glass rolled. A pale, long hand grabbed it, twisted the cap, and the white pills—one by one—were buried in a dead potted plant. That plant looked like it had not known sunlight in years.
When the door opened wide, a proud, excited voice said, "Jaxon, I brought someone. She’s said to be very good—she'll help." The old man who said it walked in with a small, round-faced woman next to him.
"Grandfather, don't waste your strength. My illness can't be cured," Jaxon muttered between coughs. He moved deeper into shadow, like light could find something to eat behind his ribs.
The lamplight found him anyway. He looked like a skeleton wrapped in fine clothes. His skin had that waxen, sick glow, and his face—if you dared to look—had black stains that made people cross the street. When I first saw him, I thought of fear and pity mixed together.
"Hello," the girl with bright round eyes said, stepping forward like a bird. She did not flinch at the smell, the black marks, or the way the chandeliers seemed to hide from him.
He stared. I stared. "Who are you?" he barked.
"I’m Freja. I can treat people," I said. I set down my small, blessed shrine and lifted the black cloth. A red figure slid out of the shrine for a second, then vanished. It was only Juliette—my red-bridal ghost. She loves to play hide-and-seek.
"I won't be fooled," Jaxon growled. He seemed to think every visitor wanted the Yamaguchis' money. He was sharper than his cough suggested. Maybe the city's thieves and pretenders had taught him not to trust appearances.
Before I could explain, his lips were suddenly on mine.
"Open your mouth," I murmured, more to myself than to him. I had to draw the dark breath out of him. This is how I do it: a kiss that pulls the weight of shadows off a living chest.
He froze. Then his mouth obeyed, as if that were the only sensible thing to do. I sucked and felt the chill, the ache, the black like bitter tea. I fed it to Juliette for a breath, and then the man in the corner—who I learned later was Jaxon Yamaguchi—started to breathe easier.
"You thing are crazy," he spat, after he snapped out of his shock. "You find me a fool to kiss me?"
"I was helping," I said, wide-eyed. "It’s a treatment."
"It was my first kiss!" he hissed, and I heard both shame and fury.
"It was mine too," I admitted. My face blushed even then at our shared, ridiculous firsts.
He tried to push me away, but I twisted out, proud and childlike. "I'm not a trick," I said. "I really can help."
He scowled, and I ran.
Outside, the garden glittered with lights but my feet took me nowhere: I was a terrible map reader. When a kindly butler—Walt Allen—found me lost, he framed his smile like a promise. "Stay," he said. "Eat. We have a chef who will make anything you like."
"Anything?" I brightened like dawn. "Roast duck? Cakes?"
"Yes," Walt said.
So I stayed.
That night, alone in the villa that lived with coughs and rattles, Juliette the red-bridal ghost came out when I lifted the shrine’s cloth. She liked the smell of Jaxon. "He looks good enough to eat," she sighed, bright as a red lantern. I scolded her. "He's a man, not dinner, and if you eat him I get no fee."
We argued, we joked, and later I crept up the stairs because the house’s lesser ghosts had drifted toward Jaxon’s room. I found him, motionless, and the air around him alive with black wisps. Juliette slipped out, saw him, and her eyes gleamed. "He smells divine," she purred.
"Juliette!" I grabbed her. "Stop. Not yet."
I leaned close and kissed Jaxon again—because the wisps were thick. I tasted his fear and something bitter and old. When he gasped awake our mouths pressed. He froze, then trapped me with his hands. He was stronger than he looked. My heart thumped under the pressure of his palm.
He became my patient and my puzzle. I learned he had a strange body that seemed to host dark things—spirits and cold threads of shadow. My kisses eased him; the other remedies—peelings, smudges, words—helped too. And as he sat up clearer each morning, I learned another truth: his hideous black patches belonged to a season. This was not forever.
The house called itself calm, but it wasn't. A gardener named Colton Lucas turned up dead in the bushes one morning, half his face torn. "A beast," people whispered. "Jaxon killed him." Rumors are crueler than hungry dogs; they gnawed the staff.
"Help me," a shaking cook told me when she had to take Jaxon his food. "I can't go into his room."
"Then I'll take it," I said. "People shouldn't starve."
She slipped the box into my arms and ran.
When Jaxon opened his door he was an ice-slate of suspicion. "You left," he snarled, but when he saw me again something in his eyes softened. "I will try you," he said, almost to himself.
"Good," I said. "Now open your mouth. This is a treatment, not a trick."
He did. I kissed. He relaxed like a door unbolting.
Night—especially ghost-night, on Zhongyuan festival—brought dangers. Juliette and I had to fight a woman whose hair was a weapon and a mountain-primate that smelled of rotten roots. I swung my small blade and the red bride fought like a furious storm. Once, a wind opened the house windows and the room lit with something older than reason. Jaxon pushed me toward the exit. "Leave me," he yelled. "Go!"
"No," I said. "I'm staying."
He grabbed my hand like a stone dropped into him. "I can't let you."
He frightened me and yet did not look like someone who could eat men. When an old needle was found in the monster's skull, we realized this mountain-devil had been controlled. Someone had set traps, not for animals, but for blood.
Jaxon and I became allies. He trusted me enough to do strange things—drink, drive, shout at greedy lawyers—between coughing fits. I taught him what I knew: I could make charms, bind spirits, and read small signs in a bowl of tea.
The city is dangerous, and there are predators that hide in suits and diamond watches. One name kept repeating itself in whispers: Dillon Rocha. A man who had a special knack for escaping blame and hiding awful things under his tailored collars. Daniela Moreno—her life taken viciously—kept whispering to me in the shrine, a hurtness I could not ignore. She named Dillon.
"I can take you to him," I told Jaxon. "He has a protective charm I must remove."
"You do not go alone," Jaxon said again, gruff like winter wind, and then, with a softer edge I learned to follow: "If you must go, I'm coming."
We set a trap, but not the kind with ropes and men. We did it with truth, witnesses, and one plan: lure Dillon into a place where the city would be watching.
"Why are you doing this?" he sneered when he found himself cornered in a small alley. He was too sure of himself, drunk on impunity.
"We told the police," I said. "We have witnesses now."
He laughed. "You're a child with parlor tricks."
Then Daniela's ghost found him. She was nothing like our red bride—just white and sharp. She railed at him. He screamed and people gathered, the same way vultures appear where blood glitters. He was dragged, partly by his own fear, partly by those he had wronged.
I should have been satisfied then, but some punishments belong before a full room of eyes, phones, and chandeliers. Dillon would not be left to whispers.
We waited until Nathan Finley's eightieth birthday—Jaxon’s grandfather—when the Yamaguchi estate would host the city’s notables. The ballroom shone with a thousand candles and five hundred guests. Men in tailored coats clinked glasses. Women in silk shifted like small ships. The old grandfather sat proud at the head table, a picture of gray hair and stubborn kindness. Cameras from live feeds and gossip blogs were already warming up.
"Jaxon," I whispered. "Tonight."
He wore a mask of careful calm as people smiled and said the expected things about life and harvests and strong families.
Dillon Rocha arrived late, pockets heavy with arrogance. He stepped into the hall like a man owed the whole world. He knew a hundred ways to make people look away. He believed himself unstoppable.
"Good evening," he crooned when offered champagne. His grin was varnished.
"Please, take your seat," Jaxon said, as if he gave invitations to fate.
Before the main speech, a hush fell. Jaxon stood, and when he spoke the room bent like trees before wind. On the large screen behind him a single image flashed—the alley where Daniela had begged and been refused. The next frame showed anonymous CCTV footage from the night she vanished. Close in, it showed Dillon - suited, cruel - and a hand that shoved a woman into a car. A thousand murmurs rose.
Dillon's face found color for the first time. His mouth tightened like a trap.
A voice from the head table clicked a remote. On the screen came new evidence: a voice call, a man's recorded threats, a copy of the charm—stolen from Dillon's waist—then a photograph, grainy and undeniable, of his expensive watch near Daniela’s hidden grave.
"He is in the footage," someone near me whispered. "There's his wedding band."
The room shifted. Phones rose like wildflowers opening—people filmed, they snapped, they shouted questions. "Is that true? Is that Dillon Rocha?" The oldest guests stiffened. The younger ones started filming, tongues of light from their pockets.
Dillon laughed at first, the laugh of the unpunished. "This is fabrication," he said. "You can't—this is defamation."
"Watch the next clip," Jaxon said, voice low, and then the screen showed the alley again. This time, Daniela’s own voice trembled from a recording, begging for help. The sound made something almost breathless in the hall. People swallowed.
Dillon's grin faltered to a thin line. Cameras were no longer optional—people streamed and uploaded. A woman in a sequined dress held her phone high; a young journalist started a live feed. "This is Dillon Rocha," she said into the lens, and the hashtag began.
The slideshow continued. Banking records. Receipts. Messages where Dillon joked about "getting what I want." A chorus of stunned voices rose around me. The room that once buzzed like bees now felt cold as glass.
He shifted from one expression to another like dynamic weather. Smug. Then the calm of someone confident he can buy truth. Next, the sting of the first unexpected fact. His jaw worked.
"This is—" he tried.
"Stop!" he shouted. "You have no proof!"
The live feed pulled the older footage of that night: the camera showed his hand pushing, the woman's scream. For a moment, an old friend of Dillon’s who sat halfway down the hall stood, hands trembling; he had been at the bar that night. He swallowed and then came forward into the light.
"I saw him," the man said, voice thin. "I helped him hide things later. I was wrong."
Gasps, then a ripple of movement—nobody expected a confession. Dillon’s expression cracked like paint. "You liar!" he howled.
He tried to step forward, to grab the recorder, to snatch phones, to reach into the glowing sea of witnesses and silence them with force. But the grandfather's old hand—Nathan Finley—lifted: "Security!" he cried. A dozen well-dressed men formed a barrier. Dillon found himself on an island of his own rage.
People pointed. A woman near the top table pushed up her sleeve and took a picture. "He used me," she whispered, and another woman at the next table murmured that Dillon had tried to bribe her when she threatened to speak. The accusations grew like a forest fire.
Dillon's face went from red to white. First incredulity, then fury, then denial—loud and animal. "You all are liars!" he shouted, slurring things that once sounded like threats. He sought the cameras, tried to make bargains—"I've donated to that charity!"—but the audience had the footage, the receipts, and the courage to hand truth to each other.
His tone turned pleading. "No—please—this is a mistake," he begged, but the room swallowed his pleas.
People standing near the doors pulled out their phones and recorded every moment. Someone's live stream hit a million views by midnight. The press would have a field day. The ones who had once bowed to him now turned their faces. Chairs scraped as some guests stood. A few laughed; many shook heads.
Then the smallest act finished him. A group of young women took off their long necklaces and tossed them toward the stage like flung ropes. They were not weapons but symbols: "We won't be bought or silenced." The clang of metal on crystal was like verdict.
Dillon dropped to his knees as if something inside him finally gave way. His expensive cufflinks rattled. His suit, always crisp, crumpled with his sudden collapse. He grabbed at the ballroom carpet with both hands.
"Please," he sobbed at first, voice uneven with terror. "Please—no, I didn't—please—"
The hotel's lights felt too bright for him now. Cameras swiveled. Someone in the crowd—brave, weary—hoisted a folding chair and pointed it like a spear. A chorus of "shame" began, low and terrible. "Shame," people said. Some took out their phones to record his kneeling like a private justice.
He tried to rise, to claim he would prove it in court, to buy silence with money. "Dillon Rocha," the manager said into the microphone, voice cold. "You are banned from this facility. The police are on their way."
"You're lying!" Dillon insisted. He looked smaller than any of us. He tried to crawl toward the stage and his hand slipped on spilled champagne.
Someone shouted, "Get off him!" as a security guard pushed him. He held up his arms as if to ward off the cameras. The spotlights were merciless. He was a man unmasked.
"Please," he whispered again, then louder, "I can pay—I'll pay—"
His bribes made no impression this time. The group of guests who had been watching him attentively now stood like a chorus of judgment. A few clapped slowly—an ugly sound at first, then joined by many. Some hissed. Others took pictures for evidence. A woman in the middle row recorded with both hands, tears on her cheeks.
Then—because rumors need water and agora needs a crowd—someone from the back shouted, "Kneel! Apologize!"
Dillon's face crumpled from tough to utterly human. He sank lower, clasping his hands and finally, finally begging: "Please! Please, forgive me, I didn't mean—"
Nobody answered with mercy. One by one, people turned their faces and left their seats. Phones were held up. The recordings went worldwide overnight. He was put into a taxi like something washed away and undone.
That night, the man who once assumed control over others’ fates was reduced to a figure of a thousand clips: shut down, despoiled of reputation, breathless. I felt bad for him in that raw human way; I was also, quietly, relieved for Daniela. She had seen him kneel at last.
After Dillon was taken away, I stood with Jaxon and Nathan among the spilled champagne and displaced confetti. "You could have left," he said softly to me. "You didn't. Why?"
"Because she couldn't tell her story alone," I answered, thinking of Daniela's sharp voice in the shrine.
Jaxon looked at me differently then—less like a guarded fortress, more like a man who had learned to value small fierce things. "You are stubborn," he said.
"If I was not," I shrugged, "we'd have left wrongs to grow roots."
From there the nights settled into a strange routine. Jaxon grew stronger. The black stains began to fade. He laughed once—an awkward sound—and then more. I taught him the simple charms, and he taught me a steadiness I didn't know I wanted. Juliette and Daniela settled into quieter corners of the shrine, sometimes bickering, sometimes making me sweets I could never eat.
We took slow steps together. I kept looking for my parents, and Jaxon helped by writing notices and paying detectives. The estate's gossip shrank to a hum. People still stared sometimes, but often with new softness.
Once, when a protective charm I made saved a gardener from a shadow that had hung over him for weeks, a neighbor whispered, "You saved him." I nodded.
"Date soon?" someone joked. I laughed and felt my mouth taste of roast duck.
We did not end everything with one banquet. There were more fights—more small perils. But after the public fall of Dillon Rocha, the biggest darkness had been cut into pieces. He had been stripped of pretense, forced to kneel, demanded: smirk, shock, denial, collapse, beg. People filmed, applauded, and walked away talking. It was a spectacle and a justice both, and for Daniela Moreno, who had nothing left to lose, it was the thing she needed.
At the end of the long season, when a tiny chrysanthemum on Jaxon's sill bloomed yellow, I pressed my palm against it and listened to the small brave world turning. Jaxon sat on the bed and said, softly, "Stay."
"Of course," I answered. "I came to find my parents, but I stayed because there are storms here I can help calm."
He smiled, a real one, and reached for my hand. "Then stay," he said, "and teach me anger into patience. Teach me how to be brave."
"I will," I promised.
And when the city outside the gates flared with gossip and light, we ate roast duck and told each other the small, human truths we were learning: that some people lose their masks before a crowd, and some people grow a face worth trusting. I rested my head on Jaxon's arm and heard his steady breath. Outside, the last cameras of the banquet wheeled away into the night, and Juliette hummed a tune I could almost count as a lullaby.
The End
— Thank you for reading —