Revenge20 min read
The Wrong Face, The Right Enemy
ButterPicks15 views
I still remember the exact tilt of Arturo Watts' jaw the first time I saw him that morning. He stepped out of the corner like a photograph come alive—tailored suit, the kind of calm you could measure with a ruler. He inhabited space the way some people inhabit sunrises: all quiet claim and impossible distance.
"Long time, Lucia," he said, like it was nothing.
I smiled because my training taught me how. "Arturo. Hi. Long time."
He raised one eyebrow. "You're getting married."
"Yes," I lied before the sentence settled in my mouth. I didn't want prying, and I especially didn't want his tone—light, sharp—to slice into my plans.
He watched me as if I were a problem to be solved. "Your fiancée is lucky," he said.
"That's kind," I said, and the elevator light blinked between us as if impatient.
"Come in," he added, and walked past me with that long, casual stride.
I let him go first because everything about him had always been first—first in class, first at the awards, first to draw on my nerves. "Go ahead," I told him.
He turned once at the car park doors, a small, cold smile. "You were always dramatic, Lucia."
The word landed like a hand on hot metal. I wanted to spit out a dozen replies—smart, stinging, perfect—and I folded them into the practiced politeness that had carried me through three years since graduation. Then I saw the tiny movement around his mouth, the almost-nothing that never used to mean anything to me.
The elevator trembled.
"What's that?" I asked.
Arturo's hand went to his phone, fingers precise. He glanced at the indicator. "Trouble in the shaft. Stay calm," he said. His voice was calm in the way storms are calm before they break.
I had a thousand reasons to pretend I didn't know him. The truth was smaller and uglier: I hated that I still felt alive when he looked at me. Under the fluorescent hum of the elevator, I scrolled my phone like a person finding a distraction. There was a wanted poster—Delphine Dominguez. Twenty thousand for information. The woman's face was not mine, but my brain chimed an odd, nervous note.
"You're getting married," Arturo said again from the other side of my silence.
"Yeah." I nodded.
"Your fiancé's luck might change," he said, then he got out when the doors slid open.
I watched him walk away and felt something stir—rage, maybe. "I curse you to marry the woman you despise most," I called after him, very loudly and very badly.
He didn't answer. He never did.
The elevator's lights went jagged. Someone pushed up from behind us—an ugly shove, a woman's breath on my ear. "You," she whispered, teeth like a seam.
I turned to the passenger who'd stepped on at the last floor: Delphine Dominguez. The wanted poster hit me with a small, sick shock. She smiled as if she recognized me. "Lucia Mori," she said. Her voice had teeth in it.
I backed up against the mirrored wall. "I think you have the wrong—"
She pulled a knife.
"Run!" Arturo shouted, and the world—metal, lights, and our small faces—slid and fell in a way the movies never captured. The elevator dropped, a stomach like a cliff opening, then the world blotted into black.
When I woke I smelled disinfectant and cheap coffee. My hands were thin and small, and my cheeks were not the cheekbones I knew. The mirror across the room reflected a stranger: Delphine's face under my hands, but softer, older, with the hollows of someone who'd lived too many hungers.
"Who are you?" a man asked, and a hand took mine—not my hand. Arturo was there. He had called. He had come back.
"I'm Lucia," I said, and the voice was wrong. Delphine moved in my face when I spoke.
Arturo didn't flinch. He didn't smile. "You're awake," he said. "Good."
I told him everything.
He listened like a man with a closed book. "Did you touch her?" he asked finally, not unkind, only precise.
"No." I meant it. We'd broken apart in the shaft like bad ceramic.
"And your name is?" he asked again, like some exam.
"Lucia Mori."
He seemed to believe me in the way an analytical instrument believes a reading. "You were hurt in the fall," he said. "You should rest."
"But Delphine—" I tried.
He barked a small laugh. "Delphine was the one with the knife. The police showed footage. We—"
"Police?" My heart punched in my ribs. "Arturo, she has my face."
He studied me. "Lucia, what you're saying is impossible."
"Do you think I'm happy being a wanted woman?" I asked, my voice shaking.
We both knew he wasn't a man to waste words. He left with a promise that sounded like a contract. "Stay here. Don't go near the police. I can help."
And then he left, the door closing on a path I had not chosen.
"You're safe for now," he said to a city where my face belonged to another crime. I was not safe. The city had a poster with my eyes on it.
We had known each other at university long enough to hate each other properly. Arturo and I had a history of poke-and-counterpunch. He kept his distance as if the world was a chessboard and everyone else a pawn. I burned at the edges of his measured life then, and I still burned now.
After he left, my life became a series of small, dangerous calculations.
"I want my body back," I told the woman who had stolen my life without knowing the word "steal."
Delphine's eyes—my eyes—glimmered. "Why would I?" she asked. "It seems their life suits me."
"You killed someone."
She snorted. "Killed? The law will decide that."
"You're a killer."
She licked her lip. "You use words like everyone else."
I slammed a fist on the table. "You hurt me. You took my name."
That night I escaped. I slept in alleys, rode a bicycle that wasn't mine, ate food I didn't trust. There was no hiding a face that the city offered a reward for. People looked at me like I was a walking golden ticket.
"You're Delphine," someone hissed in the market. "Run."
I tried to go home. The building that had been mine did not recognize me—neighbors peered, property managers demanded proof, my mother's voice over the phone was a small bell that told me she believed the body she saw in the hospital, not the woman with my temper crying on her doorstep.
"You must be mistaken," I told the guard. "My key—"
"Miss Mori? Your sister's on her way to the hospital." The guard's eyes had sympathy and a readiness to trust the printed poster on the wall.
A week of avoidance became a month of small thefts: disguises, different clothes, stolen shoes. I learned to move like a shadow. I learned to sleep in shadows. I learned how many ways the world can reject you when your face is a commodity.
Arturo watched from the sidelines like a chess master who had started to care about the pieces.
"Why are you helping me?" I asked him once as he handed me a file—Delphine's old billing statements, employment records, a name again and again: Lincrest Development.
He shrugged. "Someone has to document truth. You are not on the CCTV for the murder scene."
"People saw Delphine," I said. "They think I stabbed her."
He tapped the table. "They saw your face. No one saw your soul."
He also wanted something. I understood that. In exchange for a roof and access to his resources—his slightly infuriating constellation of favors and discreet calls—he wanted my help. "The Lincrest stadium project," he said. "We both know it's messy. You can read ledgers. You can find errors. You want your body back—help me examine the accounts."
"You're blackmailing me."
"I prefer 'mutual service'," he corrected. "You help me with audit findings. I help you with proof."
I didn't have better offers. I worked through the night at his insistence, pouring over numbers that smelled of concrete and old promises. The stadium project was a public dream with private teeth. Names of subcontractors and shell companies braided like serpents through the books. Someone had been siphoning money. The man who had been murdered, I found in a scanned file, had been pressing on those serpent’s tails before he was found dead.
"Why would Delphine care about a project like this?" I asked Arturo.
"She worked for Lincrest," he said. "Maybe she found a pattern and someone didn't like her. Maybe it's coincidence."
"Coincidence doesn't stab people," I said.
The more I learned, the more the threads led into the company. Lincrest's culture smelled like perfume over rotten fruit: gloss over rot. "If Delphine needed to be found guilty—if someone wanted a face to hang—my life was perfect evidence," I said.
Arturo watched me. "Lucia, you'll need more than ledgers."
"I need witnesses."
He smiled for the first time in weeks. "I can provide access. There's a public meeting on the stadium next Thursday. Investors, journalists, the mayor. Very public. If anyone is involved, it's likely they'll surface there."
"You mean catch them in a trap?" I asked, hope and fear tangling.
"If they are corrupt—yes."
The plan was dangerous but it had a theater to it: the opening of the next project's bid, staged as a routine meeting but crowded with men whose faces I had learned to recognize from invoices. Arturo would arrange for me to attend as an anonymous analyst; I would have Delphine's face and a voice that no one would recognize. We would plant evidence, pull threads, make a spectacle.
"You're asking me to bait my own body," I said.
"Self-help," he returned.
The night before the meeting, someone attacked me in an alley.
They knew I would be there. Someone tipped them. Two men and a truck of bravado cornered me. Fear tastes metallic and thin. A brick cracked the night. I defended myself like an animal with a cornered life. I hit back, found a stone, and hit the first man where the light could lie. The other two laughed. Then sirens cut their laugh short. They fled with curses.
When the police took my statement, I noticed Officer Angel Fuchs' look of interest. He had seen too many faces and he cataloged anomalies like a librarian. "You okay?" he asked.
"I am Lucia Mori," I said. "I was attacked."
He raised his eyebrows at the name. "Very brave of you," he said. "You have a reward poster with the same face."
I understood then that everyone saw what they wanted to see and that the truth can be a lonely thing without a megaphone.
The public meeting arrived like a carnival. The Hall of Civic Pride smelled like old carpets and newer threats. Investors chewed on canapés. Cameras lined the back. I sat in the press row under Delphine's name, translated into bad lighting and better lenses.
"What will you say?" Arturo asked me, under the hum of crowd noise.
"Everything," I said.
"Everything gets you arrested," he countered.
"Everything nets the guilty." I kept my voice low as though the wrong tone could blow the whole setup.
The presentation began with a slideshow and a man who laughed like the money in his pockets. His name was Thomas Thomas. He smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes. He was a subcontractor. He talked about foundations and community benefits and how the stadium would revive neighborhoods.
I had the ledger screenshots on my phone and the evidence ready to flash if the cue came. We had an inside man at Lincrest—Jordan Okada, a mid-level accountant who had finally come to a limit.
"Your company misreported costs," I said into the microphone when I stood, voice steady, old training snapping into place. "This project shows three million in shadow payments to a shell called Vesta Global."
A murmur. The room turned to stare. Thomas's smile thinned.
"Who are you?" someone demanded.
"I'm Delphine Dominguez," I said to the microphone, and the mutter swelled into confusion. "No," I corrected, meeting eyes with Arturo. "I'm Lucia Mori. Delphine's face isn't mine."
Cameras latched on. People whispered. A few shouted. Someone recorded. The auditorium reeked of the moment before thunder.
On the big screen I pushed the ledger. Jordan testified about payments that didn't match deliverables. He named men. One, Finlay Hahn, had pressed to bury complaints. Finlay was a man who loved the sound of his own authority; he sat near the front, hands folded, the stage lights flattening him into a portrait of corporate solidity.
"No," Finlay spat when Jordan read aloud his name. "You lie."
"Check the wires," Jordan said. "We didn't code the transfers."
An investor rose, phone in hand. "You have proof?"
"The bank trace will show," I said. "The names are on the accounts. Check Vesta's address."
Security rustled; someone wanted to stop the blood. The mayor's aide whispered into an ear. There was a small surge to the exits. This was public theater and also a court of rumor.
Then a man in the back stood up shouting about juries and arrests and how a woman with a knife had once been seen arguing with the murdered manager.
"This is not a trial," the mayor said.
"It's a public hearing," I said. "If you are clean, you will have nothing to fear."
Voices rose and fell like waves. Phones went blazing. Someone sent a text and the text landed on an editor's lap. The footage cut across channels. "Lincrest Corruption?" the headline said later that night. In the chaos, a truth surfaced: Thomas and Finlay were connected to companies that benefited when the murdered manager's complaints were silenced.
Delphine's persona—my face—sat in the audience where she had once sat and watched me. The woman who wore my features was mute and brittle and only half in the room. She rocked back and forth like a bird, like someone waiting for a crack to widen.
When the mayor opened a question period, a chorus of desire for justice filled the hall.
"Who hired the killer?" someone asked.
A voice from the back: "Follow the money."
That was the line we had rehearsed, a small arrow to the ledger. The cameras loved it. People leaned forward like it was the last episode of a show they'd been binging. I watched the faces of the men on the panel. Some went pale. Some went white. Countenance is a poor liar over an open ledger.
After the meeting, the crowd gathered outside the hall like tide pooling. People circled like fish. A news van had been ready; lights smeared the faces of passersby. Countless strangers looked at the face I'd worn into this world and didn't recognize me where it mattered.
Then Delphine stepped forward.
She had been quiet all night, but she found a microphone and said, "I will tell what I know."
We heard her, public. The story she told was not a confession. It was a reversal. She named men I'd never heard of, relatives of Finlay, concealed transfers to accounts that had nothing to do with the project. She offered names, details, an existence of motive I hadn't suspected.
The crowd leaned in.
"Why did you help the murdered manager?" I demanded when she finished.
She looked at me with my own eyes. "He exposed something. He had proofs that left me no options. I thought he would protect me. He didn't."
"You stabbed him," I said. "You tried to kill me." I found the courage somewhere between outrage and the speaker's podium.
Delphine's face—the one that had terrorized me—stiffened. She patted a small packet in her bag and slid something across the podium: a USB, thin as a promise.
"What's on it?" someone called.
"Everything," Delphine said. "All names. All accounts."
She produced a tearful, cramped little tale—revenge for a betrayal; a sudden rage; a knife. She did not dramatize. She did not play kindly. She sounded tired, like an animal found out.
What came next was public and harsh in the way a crowd can be. Men I named—and men I did not—stood and were drawn into the light like fish. Phones flashed. Voices recorded. The mayor demanded immediate investigation. The police moved. The hall became a stage for a different kind of theater: the slow unmasking of those who profit from public projects.
Delphine stood as the cameras pulled at her. Her expression cycled like a speeded film: indignant, defiant, then small and pleading. "You don't understand. They forced me into this," she said. "They promised me safety."
"Who?" Arturo asked, voice low.
Finlay's held breath broke. "You cannot be serious," he said.
"Ask the bank," Jordan said calmly. "The wires are clean."
Finlay's smile collapsed. It looked like something done with acid.
Then the worst happened for him: someone in the crowd—a cleaner—recognized an offhand detail in a picture on the USB, a petty thing: the initials on an invoice matched the ones seen on Finlay's stationery. People stepped back so fast the aisle was a river.
"You're under investigation," Officer Angel Fuchs said when he found Finlay surrounded. "There's a warrant."
Finlay laughed once, high and brittle. It died. He turned toward the exit and left with two of his men. Cameras followed and a hundred voices trailed.
The punishment that followed was not a courthouse verdict but a public shaming and an immediate fall from pretense. A string of businesses severed ties overnight. The mayor publicly demanded an independent audit. Investors withdrew. The board meeting at Lincrest the next day was a spectacle: shareholders shouted, ledgers became torches. Men who had gloves to hide their hands were seen and named.
Finlay tried to strike back. He called lawsuits and threats and hired men to spin stories. He came to the board room with lawyers and an anger that looked like authority. But the crowd was merciless; journalists were relentless. His clients left. His phone stopped ringing. He stood in investor lobbies like a man who had dusk pressed to his face.
At a shareholders' meeting two months later, with cameras and photographers and neighbors who had once nodded, the boardroom exiled him publicly. A woman from a local nonprofit stood and recited the evidence—wires, invoices, and a ledger. "You used my neighborhood as a line item on your spreadsheet," she said. "You used their lives as an account. We will not forget."
Finlay's face did the arc of a trapped animal. His stance changed: arrogance, denial, then a slow, guttural fear. He tried to raise his voice. "I will sue," he said. "I will—"
"You will answer," the mayor said. "In public. We do not tolerate the theft of a city's future."
The cameras caught him raising his hand and then lowering it. Older investors who had once sipped Cabernet with him now turned their backs. He left the room with no applause and a police escort waiting outside the double doors. There was a hiss in the hallway: people had recorded his every move for the evening shows. Men in suits he had trusted walked past without a glance. The punishment was the end of access: calls that used to be one ring now rang into voids. The humiliation hung on him like a new coat.
Finlay's reaction moved through stages: at first he barked and demanded legal remedy; then he begged; later he tried to throw men under the bus; finally, he broke in court—just barely—when a whistleblower testified against him and the sworn ledger proved his bank transfers. The man's fall was not a neat, cinematic collapse. It was the cruel, grinding end of a man's respect: lawyers pulled, assets frozen, and society turned away like someone refusing to touch rot.
But Delphine's punishment stayed messy. She had confessed in the hall but she was also a victim of a network that was cruel and cruelly practical. The public exposure left her without shelter. She shrank into sentences: "I didn't know how they'd hurt me," or "I thought he would fix it." At times she laughed bitterly; at times she tried to cry.
The day they finally dragged her into public was not a courtroom but the plaza where Lincrest had promised a community center. Reporters packed the benches. Mayor and police had arranged for the family of the murdered man to speak. The plaza's steps were full of people who had been promised jobs and spaces. I stood with Arturo at the edge, the sun striking my borrowed cheekbones in a way that felt obscene.
Delphine was led out on the stage with handcuffs. Her progression was a study: she arrived with swagger, then small defiance, then sudden pleading. The crowd reacted predictably: anger, pity, cameras. When the murdered manager's sister spoke, she spurred the crowd into a near frenzy. "He tried to be honest," she said. "He tried to fix what you broke."
Delphine's face—my face—crumpled. She tried to talk. She tried to deny. She tried to push blame. People shouted back. "Confess," someone screamed. "Tell us who else."
For Delphine it was worse than prison: it was exposure layered with betrayal. Men she had trusted whispered away. Her reaction changed through the scene: at first a stoic bravado to hide fear; then a sharp denial; then an ugly, childish lash of "You don't know me"; finally, a broken, wet pleading that sounded too small for the plaza: "No, no, please."
The crowd's response was not theatrical: they took out phones, they cried, they recorded, some called for her arrest. A teenager threw a bottle that smashed behind the stage like punctuation. People shouted so loudly the mayor had to ask for quiet. The police made an arrest in front of everyone. The man the murdered manager had suspected was named on a live feed. The whistleblower come through, and the man was handcuffed.
Delphine's face went through shame. The soundtrack of her fall was the crowd's constant commentary—snap judgments, gasps, applause. People who had once admired Finlay now shook their heads as if cleansing themselves. She stood small, handcuffed in the noon sun, and then the crowd closed in like a tide.
That was public punishment number one: the exposure and social and financial ostracism of Finlay Hahn and his network; and the public unveiling and humiliation of Delphine Dominguez, forced into handcuffs on a plaza where she had once hoped to be invisible.
But there was another man who needed punishment, one smaller and crueler: Yuri Mohammed.
Yuri—whose odd charm and rough edges had seemed to promise a life to Anna Dumont—was not a man of corporate malfeasance. He was, in his own life, smaller and uglier: an abuser, a man who justified fists with pawned affection. He had ruined lives quietly, with a hand that left marks the world often looked away from.
His punishment needed more than exposure. It needed a scene where his violence could be seen and judged by neighbors.
We staged it.
Anna—bright, gentle, and small as a bottlebird—had been the one who'd nursed me when I was a stray. She'd taken me in like a cousin and given me egg fried rice I didn't trust. When she told me about Yuri's drunken temper and his threats about reporting Delphine, I felt a scar of fury like a physical thing.
"Do you want to go to the police?" I asked her one night in the kitchen that smelled of cheap garlic.
She looked away. "He has photos. He says he'll ruin me. I can't lose this job."
"You cannot live like this," I said.
The next night I set a trap. Anna, at my suggestion, recorded her evening by accident and left the window open to the street. She had learned not to cry in the dark, but she agreed. Yuri came in drunk, demanded money, and struck her. The neighbors stuck their heads out at the noise like sheep at a train. I called Officer Angel Fuchs and left a recording of the fury.
The police came quickly—faster than love can usually move—and Yuri was pulled in front of the block in handcuffs. He looked shocked, like a man who had counted on silence. "You can't—" he blurted. "This is a mistake."
"You're being charged for domestic assault," Officer Fuchs said into his radio. "We have recorded evidence."
News of the arrest spread through the neighborhood in a way that was unkind and necessary. Yuri's punishment was not only the cuffs. The factory where he'd once boasted his superiority fired him within a week. Neighbors whispered. The girl he had tried to threaten came to the precinct under a light like a torch and told her story in a voice that did not tremble.
Yuri's reaction was the stage of a man unraveling. At first he was arrogant—"I'll get out and they'll pay me"—then furious, then pleading, then inconsolable. He begged Anna for forgiveness in the holding cell that smelled of stale hope. He offered money. He offered apologies. He called his mother and tried to manipulate her. She hung up.
The crowd in front of the station watched him confess his crimes like a man in a dark theater. They spat. They took his picture. He lost more than a job—he lost friends whose silence had been his shield. The punishment happened in stages: arrest, media, job loss, community shunning. For him, the worst was not the concrete; it was the loss of a community's complacent acceptance.
I had not planned for revenge to look like lesson-learning. The city has its own appetite for correction; sometimes it feeds on the guilty and sometimes not. For Delphine and for Finlay and for Yuri, the public response was volcanic. People recorded and shamed; institutions reacted; men who had insulated wrongdoing could not withstand the light.
After the plaza, the legal machinery ground on. There were trials; there were also civil suits. I watched it all from the edges of my stolen life and learned that the world doesn't correct with perfect justice; it corrects with messy, human spectacle. People fell for different reasons. Some were dragged, others tumbled.
I wanted my life back, not merely revenge. The exposure of the corruption helped. The arrest of Yuri helped Anna. Communities rallied. It was not clean, but it was enough to open doors.
"You're tired," Arturo said once as we sat on a bench after a day that had felt like a school of fights.
"I'm always tired," I said.
He reached for my hand—brief, careful. "I'll keep helping."
"You think once the men are gone, the problem is solved?" I asked.
He looked at the ledger of the city like a map of wars. "No," he said. "But sometimes removing a man from his throne is enough for those under him to breathe."
I thought of my body—my real body—lying under hospital sheets, Delphine in my face, the woman who had been hunted and yet had run like a hunted animal. Justice had many forms. Some were loud; some were quiet. The law sometimes moved faster when the cameras were on.
A month later, a new line of evidence surfaced: footage from a garbage truck showing a coat the murderer had worn, with blood the coroner tied to the manager's death. The blood, the knife, the ledger—they braided into a case. Delphine's true confession—once exposed and then tested—took the shape of facts. She'd acted in an ugly, human collision of motive, fear, and betrayal. The court did not make her into a monster; it made her accountable.
When the final judge read the verdict, Delphine faced the press with my face. She had no friends left. The punishment was not only the sentence but the unmasking of every excuse. The people at the plaza watched the courtroom livestream on shared phones and the city's feeds scrolled with comments.
Afterward, somewhere between court filings and ledger audits, I got a call.
"You're finally yourself," moaned my mother on the other end of the line one afternoon.
"Not yet," I said, and there was both mischief and ache in my voice.
She laughed, and first time in a long while, it did not sound angry or afraid. "Come home, Lucia," she said. "We have a party to end whatever this was."
I went home with my face and my name. The house smelled of boiled cabbage and a mother's fierce forgiveness. There were new fractures to mend: a fiancé who'd judged like a man who'd loved tabs of his own peace more than me; a job that knew my name only to fear it; a city with new rumors and new reasons to look again at buildings long taken for granted.
Arturo sat at the edge of my mother's kitchen one Saturday like a guest who'd become a fact. He had his honest eyes and the ability to be both cruel and necessary.
"You kept your end," I said finally. "You gave me the proof, the stage, the push."
He shrugged. "We both paid a cost."
"Do you regret it?" I asked.
"No," he said carefully. "I don't regret the truth."
"And us?" I asked, because the question had teeth.
He looked at me like a man who had answers and liked to hide them. "We are not simple tales," he said.
We looked at each other and laughed. Laughter in my house was a brash thing and it felt like breathing for the first time in months.
But what I learned after all the public punishments, the arrests, and the fall of men is simple: justice wants a witness. Punishment, when it comes, must be seen. It must be documented. It must be watched by ordinary people who then refuse to look away.
"You owe me a future," I said to Arturo one evening when the city was rinsed in rain and the air smelled like wet concrete. "Not like before."
He met my eyes. "You owe yourself that," he said.
Slowly, deliberately, I began to rebuild a life on a foundation no ledger could list: friendships mended, trust earned, wrongs confronted. The scars were both mine and human. People walked by me at the market and smiled with recognition—not because my face had been famous on a poster but because I had returned to being simply myself: Lucia Mori, accountant, woman with a stubborn heart.
The city learned to speak my name with new tenderness. Men who once thought themselves untouchable now had to walk through days where a journalist might call. The world was clumsier and more obvious than before, but perhaps that was good.
A final thing happened in court that felt like a stamp of the world learning its lesson. Finlay was fined and sued; he lost board seats and doors that opened for him closed. He stood outside a courthouse and asked for forgiveness like a man in a play reading a line that no one wanted to applaud. He had tried to harness public charity and instead found public scorn.
Yuri, meanwhile, did his time. He begged and ranted and later tried to patch his life. He learned that apologies without real change are only words for noise.
Delphine's punishment was a darker arc: she admitted to the murder and to other crimes, and when she faced her sentence she had a look I had never seen—less of malice and more of exhaustion. She pleaded and then lowered herself into the law's machine. On the day of her sentencing the man's sister read a victim's statement and the crowd listened. Delphine watched the faces of those she'd hurt. Her reaction moved like a seismograph: denial, anger, and finally a small, human collapse into the seat. She was led away and the plaza remembered her as both a human and a criminal—a terrible, necessary paradox.
In the end, the city was safer for a while. Companies had to sign new oversight. Contracts were scrutinized. People who had once joked about corners and "how business is done" now hesitated before they whispered. Maybe that is the only kind of justice there is—the kind that makes it harder for someone to twist a ledger without a thousand witnesses seeing and saying, "No."
And I? I found a small office, my old desk, my folders. I went back to the numbers and found, with Arturo's help and Jordan's brave testimony, that accounts can be weapons or tools—depending on who holds them.
"Do you want to go back to how things were?" Arturo asked once as we left a hearing.
"No," I said. "This version is my life and it's growling and imperfect, but it's mine. If I must walk with scars, let them be my proof."
He put his hand in mine. "We both have scars," he said.
"So we will be careful with each other," I said, and this time his laugh was not a snarl but a quiet agreement.
There are stories that end with lovers walking into the sunset. This is not one of them. Our ending is a ledger balanced: crimes exposed, a skyline cleaned, a woman returned to her own skin. I still don't know why the universe swapped us. Maybe it wanted me to see the violence of being misread, to feel the animal panic of being hunted. Maybe it wanted to show me that justice needed a stage.
What I know is this: when a city decides it will watch, the men who would hide cannot hide forever.
The End
— Thank you for reading —