Face-Slapping17 min read
We’ll Go to Hell Together
ButterPicks13 views
"I can't breathe," I whispered to the dark room that had been my hospital ward for days, but the words felt thin and useless.
"You're awake," Zander Atkinson said from the doorway, his voice flat as if delivering profit figures instead of condolences. "That's good."
"No," I said. "Not yet."
He came closer in a way that used to make my chest warm. "Aoi, we've all suffered—your aunt's death is a tragedy."
"My aunt is dead because of Gemma," I said.
Zander smiled like a tired man who expects applause. "It was an accident. You know that."
"It was not an accident," I said. "You know that too."
"Enough," he said sharply. "You've been through enough. Now that you're awake, you can help us end this. You can drop the charges against Gemma."
"Help you?" I laughed, and the sound surprised me with how small it felt. "Why would I help you?"
Zander's eyes narrowed. "Because you can still be my wife."
"I am your fiancée who lost a child," I said. "I am the woman you proposed to, then abandoned when the company got rough. You choose—my silence, or the truth."
"That's not how this works," he said. "She's my reason. She is—"
"—your advantage," I finished. "You used my mother's help to stand, Zander. Do not pretend you owe me nothing."
He touched where his heart might have been. "That money was an investment. You make it sound like charity."
"It was my mother's life and my child's life," I said. "Three lives now. You will not let them be forgotten."
Gemma Brandt came into the room like a small storm, the pleading child she always pretended to be. "Aoi, I didn't mean—"
"Save it," I said. "Save your tears for when you need a jury."
Zander took Gemma's hand and patted it. "It's okay. She didn't mean it." He looked at me. "Drop it. Be smart."
"Be smart?" I sat up so suddenly the nurses flinched at the bed rails. "Be smart? She shoved my mother down a stairwell. She stole my life. You will not buy my quiet with a ring."
"Then what do you want?" Gemma said, voice trembling. "Prison—no, I can't—"
"I want her to have what she deserves," I said, and the word felt clean.
Zander sighed like a man forced to solve a problem he had created. "Fine. If you withdraw the charges, I will marry you."
"You will marry me?" I repeated, my laugh sharp as broken glass. "You want to marry the woman whose mother you used, whom you abandoned when he came back with money, whose child you call inconvenient?"
He didn't answer; instead he said, "If you withdraw your accusation, I will make you my wife."
I watched Gemma's color drain, watched the swallow of greedy hope. "Are you agreeing too?" I asked her softly.
She looked between us like a dog hoping for scraps. "Yes," she said. "Yes, Zander, yes."
"Then we'll marry," I said. "Seven days."
"Seven days?" Zander handed the date like he was placing a final bet. "You are unbelievable."
"Seven days," I repeated. "And everything I ask for will be provided."
Gemma's hand tightened on Zander's. "Tell her," she mouthed.
"Tell you?" I asked, and my smile was small and cold. "I want a list. Diamonds. A dress. An audience."
Zander counted off a breath. "We'll do it."
"You'll do more than that," I said. "You'll kneel."
"Kneel?" Gemma looked away.
"Not now," I said. "Later. Much later."
*
"The list is mad," Gemma hissed in the bridal lounge, tugging at the glitter of a borrowed gown. "Ten-carat? A hundred-twenty carat across the train? Do you think you are a film star?"
"I think you'll be the third wheel," I said. "So I want excitement."
"You're insane." She pinched the bridge of her nose.
"Perhaps," I said. "But if you want to save your neck, you'd better listen."
Zander stood by like a man judging the cost of a recession. "Fine. Fine. I'll provide."
"Good," I said. "See you at the altar."
The hotel was obscene in its luxury. They had booked the entire tower; petals rained from above; guests filtered in like a parade of opinions. I wore diamonds like a ridiculous crown and smiled the part of a woman stepping into a gilded cage.
"You're playing a dangerous game, Aoi," a neighbor whispered.
"I play to win," I answered.
Gemma hovered in the crowd, tears wiped on a manicured hand. She mouthed to Zander, "We will be together." He shot back, "After this, we'll figure it out."
During the ceremony, I watched the cameras and the guests and their eyes as if they were a jury.
"Say it," I said to Zander when the vows needed a show of authority.
"What?" His face flickered with irritation.
"Say in front of everyone, 'Aoi is my only wife. Any woman who comes between us is a shameless mistress.'"
The crowd hushed like a sea lowering its tide.
"Do it," I said.
Zander's jaw tightened. "Fine." He cleared his throat and put on the cold voice of a man who knew how to speak for the cameras. "Aoi is my only wife. Any woman who comes to me is a shameless mistress."
A ripple went through the room. People leaned forward as if gossip were salt in a wound. Gemma crumbled as if the floor had opened.
"Wonderful," I said, and kissed Zander full on the mouth. The press snapped; someone recorded in a frenzy. I wanted the image to spread.
That night, when the bed was empty and the wine too bitter, Zander kissed me once and went out into the warm dark to be with Gemma.
"Don't go," I said.
"I'm going to comfort Gemma," he said as he left.
"Do it then," I said. "Play your part."
I pressed a palm to his coat pocket as he reached for the door and slid something small and cold inside—an innocuous button, custom-made. It had wires so small they might as well be dust. It had a camera so minute it would be invisible. It had a locator.
He did not notice.
*
"I can't find him," Gemma cried. "He promised—"
"Stay quiet," Zander snapped.
Within an hour he took a call. The voice on his phone was soft. "Gemma? It's me."
He stood in the hall and the voice made him melt.
"I'll be right there," he told her.
"Come home," he mouthed to me as he kissed the air.
I let him go.
Then I sent one message: to the press.
"The presser is here in half an hour," I wrote to each of the tabloids. "I have footage."
Within minutes, the hotel room was lit by a hundred LEDs and the burst of camera flashes. I watched the live map pulse: Zander's phone, pinned.
The door exploded open. A gaggle of reporters pushed in as if invited to witness a crime. Zander was pale.
"What are you doing? Get out!" he barked.
"Mr. Atkinson," a reporter said. "Is it true you abandoned your bed on your wedding night to seek another woman?"
The flash of cameras was like insects swarming.
Gemma shriveled under the light. She hid under a blanket when they found her.
"Who did this? Please—" she squealed.
"Open the blanket," I said from the doorway, voice steady.
They pulled. Gemma's face was hot with shame and her hands clutched uselessly. The photographers circled like vultures.
"Why would you do this?" I asked her.
"It isn't what it looks like!" Gemma hiccupped.
"Isn't what it looks like," one reporter repeated into his microphone. "A groom running barefoot from his bride and—"
"Stop!" Zander snapped. "You can't pick my words apart!"
"Watch this," I said, and motioned to the screen.
Zander's phone had been broadcasting. The hotel camera that Gemma had thought covered only them turned visibility against her. The clips played—texts, whispers, the camera on the button in his pocket—images and messages. People watched two lovers meet and strip together, heard Zander's comfort and promises and watched Gemma pull away in those photographs.
The room shifted.
"You can't do this," Zander said at first, voice hollowed with bravado. "I will sue—"
"Shut up!" I said. "Shut up because you deserve to be heard."
He was smug; then his face crumpled. "It's not true—"
"Who are you protecting?" I asked.
Gemma's eyes darted. "Aoi, don't—"
"Tell them the truth," I said calm as winter.
Gemma's mouth parted, then closed. She sobbed. "It wasn't supposed to—"
"Not supposed to?" shouted a reporter. "Tell us what you meant!"
The crowd leaned in. Phones raised. Someone filmed with manic intensity.
"Zander," I said, turning to the man who had used my mother's money and left my womb scarred. "You promised to protect her. You promised to buy her silence with a ring. You used my loss like a ledger entry. Now, say what you told these men: 'Aoi is my only wife.'"
"Say it," I insisted, and watched him double over with shame.
The civil façade disintegrated. He went from composed to trembling.
"This is a private matter," he muttered, trying to claw back control. "This is—"
"Say it!" I snapped.
He stammered and then barked the words the cameras still wanted. "Aoi is my only wife," he told the world. "Other women are—"
"—shameless mistresses," I finished for him. The room exploded.
Gemma sobbed and tried to push her way out. "You're making this all so public!" she cried.
"Wasn't that the plan?" a reporter asked.
Gemma's composure broke from smug to shocked, then denial. "I didn't mean—"
"She pushed my mother," I said, voice precise. "She killed her, Zander. You knew and you left when I needed you."
The crowd hissed. "You killed her?" a voice asked.
Gemma's denial flickered helplessly. "I didn't—"
"Enough!" Zander tried to hold both the lie and her panic. "We will handle this in private."
A phone flashed a video of Gemma shoving an older woman's shoulder near the stairwell. The footage was sobering—Gemma's hand, the slide, the wetness on the floor.
"No," Gemma said for the first time without charm. "No, I—"
Zander's smugness evaporated. People who had once smiled at the couple stared like jurors.
"Call the police!" shouted someone.
"Get out! Out!" a guest demanded.
Zander reached for Gemma. "Stop! We're married," he pleaded.
"Not mine," I said.
Gemma staggered, then fell to her knees. "Don't! Please!" she sobbed. "I didn't mean to—"
A hundred cameras recorded the scene: the fall from arrogance to pleading, the seeds of exposure littering the floor. Someone took her hand, the public reached for juicier details, and a stranger filmed the entire collapse of a family's façade.
"Everyone stop!" Zander begged. "Please."
"No one stopped," I said later, when the footage had spread to every screen in the city and the humiliations had multiplied tenfold. "Not because I wanted them to suffer, but because truth needed company."
People cheered. Someone clapped. A woman in the press started counting off the headlines into her recorder, breathless.
Gemma's face became smaller and smaller in the video until she could hardly breathe under the public glare.
Later, when the police took statements and Gemma was cuffed, there was a crowd. Outside, a throng pressed their phones forward. Gemma's face, once polished for sympathy, was a violent shade of red.
"Now," I told Zander, who stood frozen, "we go to the cemetery. You will kneel."
He looked at me as if I had asked him to throw away his last life savings.
"Don't be dramatic," he said.
I smiled. "Do you want the world to think you were just unlucky? Then tell the world you are sorry."
So we went.
The cemetery stretched under a gray sky. The gravestones were mostly ordinary—polished granite and names—but for me they were blips of an old life. The press followed. The camera crews lined up like a funeral parade.
"Get on your knees," I said.
Zander bathed in the sun of his own ego for a moment longer, then slowly sank. Gemma hesitated and then followed, her body shaking.
"Stay," I told them. "There will be cameras."
They looked at each other. This was not a private scene anymore. Their faces changed from defiance to confusion to fear. Someone in the back shouted, "They're finally owning it!" Another person cursed.
"Do it for the investors," I said. "Do it for your reputation."
Zander and Gemma knelt on the damp grass. The soil darkened their knees. At first they looked unrepentant. Then the faces in the crowd began to harden.
"Why are you making us do this?" Gemma whispered, voice small.
"Because you sent two people to hell," I said. "My mother, and my child."
Zander's mask cracked in a different way. He tried to hold the world in place with angry words: "This is cruel. You have no right."
"Do you still think it is an accident?" I asked.
He began to cry then—not a clean, private cry, but the grotesque release of a man whose pride was being eaten by reality. "No—no—no—"
"Admit it," I said. "Tell them what you said to her. Tell them what you planned."
The cameras rolled. Zander's voice started in a whisper, rose to a plea, then turned into a confession. His posture shifted through the stages my list demanded: smug, shocked, denial, collapse, pleading.
"I didn't mean—" he said, "It was just money—"
A reporter shouted, "Say it! Say to Aoi—"
"I owe you—I owe you—" he began to grovel. "Please—please forgive me—"
He broke into shaking pleading, knees digging into the cold earth. People crowded forward, phones held high. Some recorded. Some shouted. One person began to clap, slowly, then the crowd followed, partly in mockery, partly in relief that justice had a shape.
Gemma's reaction was theatrical and raw. She went from bluster to a hand over her mouth, to denial—"No, I didn't! I didn't push her!"—and finally to collapse, sobbing on the grass.
"Forgive me," Zander begged. "Please, don't destroy me. I didn't—"
"Look!" someone gasped. "He is begging!"
"I will do anything," Zander whispered. "Anything."
The crowd circled. Phones recorded the begging as if it were a show. Some people cried; some took pictures that would become memes. A man recorded the whole thing and posted it in ten seconds. The clip began to travel faster than we could have bought with advertising.
Zander's pride disintegrated. He got down onto his hands and knees as if the weight of what he had done had physical gravity. He scraped the grass with his fingertips. He begged for forgiveness the way a drowning man begs for air.
"Don't touch me!" Gemma screamed at a passerby who reached out. "Don't—"
They were both exposed, forced to feel small under the city’s light.
When the police lifted them out of the crowd, when the lawyers spoke of charges and when the headlines screamed for days, I knew the punishment had unfolded the way it needed to: public, humiliating, human.
They had their fall. They had begged. The crowd had shifted from curiosity to contempt to a kind of ruthless justice.
And yet, I had more to do.
*
They planned to silence me. Gemma, frantic and dangerous, sent men who thought quick hands could end what words could not. They waited until I left my routine, caught me in a side street near my hairdresser.
I remembered the sharp smell of diesel, the stench of fear. Then darkness.
When I woke, the sky was a ceiling of glass and the sea was another noise. The room was a cliff house that looked out to the ocean, and Elliot—no. His name now, in my life, was Ellis Carver. I learned it later. For the first day I called him "Night" because his messages had been "Night" for years.
"Again," Gemma snarled, slapping my cheek the way someone slaps a crust off an old wound. "You think you can ruin my life and live?"
I lay still. Kicking would announce that I had breath and panic would make them eager.
Ellis's livestream flickered into my vision. The message was simple: "Aoi's location confirmed."
Where "Night" had been a ghost in my contacts, Ellis was a man who stepped forward. He opened a micro-camera that had been sewn into a button years ago and the world watched.
"Stop this," I hissed. "You're making it worse."
Ellis shrugged. "You asked for cameras," he said, voice soft. "I gave you the stage."
They bound me, but they didn't check the streaming devices. Gemma circled like a hawk, revealing what she thought of as her victory.
"Do it," she said, and took a little knife out to play an old scare. Live viewers poured into the stream, thousands at first, then millions as the click count exploded.
"Who is this?" someone posted.
"Is this real?" someone else asked.
"She's the bride who jumped," a commentator wrote.
Gemma smiled like someone watching a play that had finally begun. "Now, we'll be together forever."
"Not on your screen," I said.
She slashed at my cheek and my blood glowed hot in the camera. The stream went wild; people typed in horror and invited friends. A rush of "Report user" messages was drowned by those who wanted a show.
"What do you want?" I asked her, calmly, because calmness in a frame reads like courage.
Gemma's eyes were small and vengeful. "I want you out. I want your bones at my feet."
Ellis watched the chat. He was doing two things at once—tracking location for the police, and giving the city a show. The stream flattened Gemma's small triumph into a global spectacle.
"My sister is a monster," I said. "Don't you see? She killed my mother. She killed my child."
"You're lying," Gemma screamed. "You always made stories."
Zander arrived out of breath, but he had not come to save the sister whose hand had been in his since the wedding. He came because the world was watching.
"Stop this," he told Gemma. "Drop the knife."
"You left her," she hissed at him. "You threw her away when you could have had me."
Zander's face crumpled—again smug to shocked to denial to collapse—but this time he had an audience of his employees and of the city. He stood at the edge of the balcony as if he could hold onto both worlds. The wave below was a moral echo.
"Call the police," he said.
The police were on their way not only because viewers demanded law, but because Ellis had quietly sent coordinates and legal documentation. He had made sure the moment would be public, that Gemma would not be in a private room with me and a blade.
Ellis opened another feed into the stream—a set of messages between Gemma and accomplices. There was the plan to silence me, the money, the cold text: "One million, her life."
Gemma faltered when she realized the chat had turned. "No," she muttered.
"Yes," Ellis said, voice level. "You tried to buy your way out of the world."
She realized then that every protest would be recorded: her arrogance, then shock, then the frantic denial, then the begging. She tried to lie—"I didn't plan to kill her"—but her voice shook like an exposed wire.
People in the chat switched from "Report her" to "She's a psycho." They argued whether web passes justice or slows it. They streamed clips to forums and uploaded screen grabs.
When the police finally arrived, the building looked as if a theater had been raided mid-play. The officers cuffed bodies and took statements. Gemma's expression finally crumpled entirely.
"I didn't mean for this to happen," she wailed. "I didn't—"
The camera caught each syllable. The world watched her pleading—the five-stage collapse crystallized into a terrible sequence. They filmed, incensed voices shouted, someone began to clap with the nervous rhythm of people relieved they had found the villain.
Later, when tributes for my mother were placed in the stream's comment section and my picture glowed in a way that felt wrong, I closed my eyes. The live crowd did not comfort me. It only confirmed that my life had been stolen back and forth like some artifact.
Ellis released the stream when the officers walked away with Gemma. He sent me, privately, a single message:
"I never wanted you hurt."
"Why?" I asked. "Why help? Why live on the other side of my pain?"
"Because," he said, "some things are not for other people to own."
He had been my ghost for years. He had held corners of my life I did not know how to protect.
*
They could not silence me again. I would not be a ghost placed in a coffin of other people's lies.
But nights afterward, as the city scrolled with my headlines and their apologies and Gemma's arrest, I wanted to stop the hunger of vengeance that had been fed by grief.
I had the button-camera. I had Ellis. I had a plan.
The men Gemma had hired came in the dark. I felt hands. I felt ropes. I felt the cold bow of a blade.
I wore the vest Ellis sent me—thick, absurd, ridiculous, and real. I wore the vest because death as theater is sometimes the only safe way to write a new life.
I let them drag me to the cliffside villa where the ocean split the night.
"You're going to die," one of them laughed. "Her sister will pay ten mil."
"Don't worry," the leader said. "No one will ever see this."
He was wrong.
"Rolling," the tiny live indicator blinked. Ellis had hacked the streaming platform earlier and paid a little to ensure our feed would be prioritized. The world watched.
"You're pathetic," Gemma said as she drew the blade across my arm, a shallow red that stole my breath and spread on camera.
"Watch," I said to the phone all over the world. "Watch."
Her face changed on the tiny screen: triumph, then confusion. She looked down at the live comments munging into the feed like a swarm.
"What's that?" she asked.
"It's the truth," I said.
The police burst in that moment, acting as if summoned by the collective pressure of viewers and a guilt that had friendless origins. Gemma rocked on her heels as the officers handcuffed her and the men.
Later in the interrogation room she screamed. "You set me up!"
"Yes," I said when they brought her near. "And you'd have done it again."
She wanted to plead. She wanted to negotiate. The cameras had already done the work. The city had already seen the progression: the superior smile, the slapping public spectacle, the confession, the attempted murder, the collapse.
"Please," she begged then, in the way that power asks for itself to be returned.
"No," I said. "No more."
*
After the trial, Zander's life unraveled. There was no neat trial where sentences could be offered like receipts; there were headlines and investors and an emptied office chair.
He came to me, often. He carried in his shoulders the weight of a man who had sold everything for convenience and found only the echoes.
"I will do anything," he confessed one narrow evening, voice raw.
"You will kneel," I said.
He did—before cameras and the crowd at three different memorials. He begged. He offered money. He was humiliated and had to endure the staged justice I'd crafted: public, slow, watched by many. The city had its fill.
Still, the wounds in me needed a different salve.
I thought I had nothing left. Then Ellis moved like a tide and pulled me out of the water when the sea thought to take me finally.
"You're alive," he said when I coughed and tasted salt.
"You're a liar," I croaked.
"Maybe," he said, smiling with a softness I had not earned. "But I love you."
I loved him back in smaller ways first—because he kept me warm when my bones were bitter with grief. He kissed me with hands that knew how to code and to comfort. He gave me a name: "Morning."
"Call me Morning," I said. "Call me not-a-bride."
He laughed and called me Morning across continents and code and quiet nights. He became the man who had been the anonymous "Night." We married in the small, honest way that the world loves in quiet: in a civil office with my mother’s ashes beside me in a small box that smelled like lacquer and forgiveness.
We had a child too—slow, luminous, and alive—who made the world simpler in its demands: milk, laughter, naps.
We were a family that didn't need the press. We were quiet.
But names carry weight. Someone had to pay for the dead, and so I asked Zander something impossible and necessary: to find burial for the woman whose body had been floated and mistaken for mine.
He did as I requested because humiliation had broken his will into something pliant.
The funeral for that unknown woman was small. He paid. The city watched the news cycle spin its last of us. I attended in a simple dress and placed down a bouquet.
Three years after the sea and the living nightmare, life kept me from peace. Zander fed me his apologies. He gave money to charity. He worked like a penitent monk, bleaching his life of luxury and rebuilding a façade of virtue.
Then something impossible happened.
One afternoon I walked with my child to the cemetery to place flowers at my mother's grave. There, a man with a child and a woman stood as if from another life. The woman's face arrested me as if a ghost had stepped into the daylight.
I called out, though I knew the words might be folly. "Ellis—"
"Not Ellis," she said softly. She was a stranger carrying my face. "My name is Morning too."
She laughed at his small jokes and kissed his cheek with a warmth that reached my ribs.
"You're back?" a man near the stones asked. He looked at her like someone witnessing an illusion.
"Not for you," she said.
I had to learn the hard things of other people's happiness by watching. The life I wanted—my former life—had been washed on a shore that wasn't mine. Morning and Ellis built a different home out of soft things: a child who laughed like a small bell and a man who loved steady and true.
Finally, the strange mercy arrived that made everything brittle and real: Zander collapsed in his grief and never quite recovered. He died with a dream clutched to his chest—a dream where things were fixed and my face still loved him. The city sobbed in headlines. People said he was tragic. People liked a good tragedy.
I read about his death in the paper and felt a strange measure of compassion. I left fresh flowers on his grave later; I did not weep loudly. My life had become a series of careful choices.
Ellis put our child to bed and watched me with a patience both unremarkable and exacting.
"Do you regret it?" he asked as we stood at the window and looked at the line of lights on the far sea.
"Sometimes," I said. "Regret is easy. Forgiveness is harder."
He took my hand and held it, and the tiny button—the one with a camera that had once been a weapon—sat safe in a small box in the drawer of his desk. It had been the thing that changed everything; it had been the seed of exposure and the tool of rescue.
"Will you ever want it destroyed?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Keep it. So I can remember why I am not who I used to be."
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
We turned off the light. The child's breathing filled the room and the night hummed with ordinary things: the dishwasher in the next block, the elevator in the building below, the distant train that rattled like a promise.
When I closed my eyes, I carried both the scars and the quiet joy. The camera that had once watched me bleed now slept in a drawer like an ugly little talisman.
"Good night," I whispered into the dark, but not to the ghost of my past.
"Good night," Ellis answered. "Good night, Morning."
Outside, the city shone in a way that promised nothing and everything. I slid the tiny button that had started it all into my palm one last time, felt its cold surface, and smiled a small, private smile.
"We went to hell together," I said aloud, though it was not a threat anymore.
"He went to hell in his own way," Ellis whispered.
"And we came back," I said.
"Yes," he said. "You came back."
I placed the button back in the drawer. It would stay there—an ugly, honest token that remembered everything.
"One day," I said, fingers brushing the wood, "someone will ask why we kept it."
"Then we'll tell them," Ellis said. "We will tell them, 'We kept it because it saved us and because it killed what needed killing.'"
"Or we'll say, 'We kept it because it reminded us not to ever let anyone else keep the shutters closed on our lives,'" I murmured.
"That too," he said.
I closed the drawer. The button lay quiet in the dark, like a sleeping eye.
"Good night," I said again, and felt the truth of it: a life patched and loved and guarded by someone who would never trade me for convenience—Ellis, the man who was once Night.
"Good night," he said.
We slept, and the sea wound its long, old way, keeping secrets and remembering nothing.
The End
— Thank you for reading —