Face-Slapping17 min read
Don’t Touch My Face, Say Sorry First
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I tasted metal when the knife's cold edge brushed my cheek, and for a moment the world narrowed into the thin bright line of pain. The room smelled like old wine and fresh blood, and the voices around me were as careless as gutter water.
"Is she still out?" a woman's voice asked. It was soft but cruel.
"She hasn't woken, Second Miss," another sneered. "Probably won't. Always weak like her mother."
"Useless," the first laughed. "Just a few beatings and she collapses. I only want to ruin that pretty face of hers. If I'm going to be outraged by beauty, I might as well fix it."
They leaned closer. I felt the blade, a promise of ruin, press against my skin.
"You said you'd cut my cheek to be at peace?" I said.
There was a startled little yelp. "Ah! — Amira Watts, you—"
I opened my eyes. I let them see nothing cute, nothing pleading. My pupils fixed on them, and everything in me was a blade.
"How about we make a bargain?" I said, and my voice was low and dry as riverbed stones.
"You..." Leilani Camacho faltered. Her hand dropped, and the dagger clattered to the floor.
"Yes." I rolled, an old habit from nights in worse places, and pushed myself upright though my body was a ruined map of bruises. My white undergarment was painted in the bloom of my wounds like a scandalous flower. I let the light hit my face and then come back; let them see the way the blood frames skin and does not always make it ugly.
"You're supposed to be dead," Leilani breathed.
"Supposed to be," I said. "But I am not. You were going to cut, weren't you? To feel better? To have one fewer rival?"
"She'll be punished," someone hissed behind Leilani—my so-called mother, Helene Porter, voice thick as syrup. "Who is this witch to wake like that? Who would dare—"
"Who would dare?" I echoed, and because I could, I stepped behind Leilani in a motion so quick it looked like a trick. The dagger at her cheek was mine now, pressed to the soft skin under her jaw.
"Amira—" Leilani's voice was a broken thread. She was all rage, but it trembled.
"You begged me to spare you," I said. "You begged for your pretty face to be left alone. Beg again. Tell me why I should let you keep it."
She stiffened, the little pretence of pride like paper. "My—my husband—my family..."
"Beg," I said simply, and I pinched her chin between two fingers. "Beg for me to stop."
Her eyes went wet. Her pride cracked. "Please," she whispered. "Please don't ruin my face."
"Good," I said, and I let her go. "Remember how it felt. Remember that you begged me."
"How dare you—" Helene lunged for me.
I had been ready. I had kept a blade of my own hidden in those raggedsleeves; worse, I had kept the memory of every pain. I had kept the quiet steel of a soul that would not break for those who would break others.
Helene's hand froze half a breath from my face. She saw the change—sudden, clear. I was not the bedraggled toy she had been pounding all her life. I was something else: a living ledger with inked lines for every debt.
"Who are you to pull at my household?" she threatened. Her voice had that cultivated venom. "You are a charity to us, not our equal."
"Am I?" I asked, delighting a little at the cold that spread across the room. "You keep saying I am nothing. You speak as if you could throw me away like a stone. I prefer to be the weather that moves the stone."
Leilani made a noise like someone trying to swallow a scream. "You'll pay, Amira. I'll make sure—"
"You'll try," I said. "But if you ever raise a finger toward my face again, I won't merely scare you. I will rearrange your public life until you are the one who has to beg."
Helene laughed like a curse. "Beg? You, beg—"
"You heard me," I said. I let it sit. The servants stared, mouths like uncooked wounds. They had watched me muzzle myself for years and they did not know what to do when the muzzle unhooked. I had, for so long, been less than another's bad joke; now everyone had to re-calculate.
"Father will punish you," Leilani said, though I could hear the tremor in her voice.
"Maybe," I allowed. "Or perhaps father will listen and change a little. He listens to certain things. He listens to power when it is placed before him in a polite box."
They left me then, the way vultures scatter when the weather changes. I sat on the cold floor, tasting the iron behind my teeth and thinking new plans. Being almost killed tends to make a woman tidy her life.
"Stay quiet now," I told Kelsey Combs, my maid, who had been hovering like a moth. "Mistress will patch me in the guest room. Bring salves. And later—listen. I have things to do."
"Miss..." Kelsey faltered. She had seen me at my worst and now at a different end, and she was trying to fit both sides in her head. "Miss Amira, they—they said you're betrothed to the Third Prince."
"Do they say it with a mixture of hope and fear?" I asked.
"They do," she whispered. "They say the Third Prince is..." Her voice dropped and she didn't finish. The Third Prince—Greyson Legrand—was the rumor that had warmed like a coal in the city's talk: a prince with a ruined leg who did not hide from his throne. He rode his own storms. He had come once to my stall, as they said—he had been watching things with eyes like knives. He had protected me in a small way when the family tried to arrange the worst. That small protection had been worth more than a hundred polite speeches.
"Good," I said. "If he is involved, then our days of being politely hurt are over."
Half a month passed, and conveniently for those who loved spectacle, the house changed its tune. Where there had been scorn at me, there was now a softness—too soft, like velvet over nails. My father—Kenneth Simon—spoke to me with a new deliberation, a new weight, and in private I learned why.
"You will go," he said, one evening, "to the palace party. The Third Prince will attend. Do not be shy."
"Do not instruct me like I am a child," I said. "If you are thinking of taking my life and calling it destiny, speak plainly."
"Amira," he said, ashamed. "We—"
He had reasons of his own. Families have voids they attempt to fill with marriages like currency. Fancy words and royal decrees rattled the household. Back rooms were bargaining tables. Helene was furious that the household attention turned from her daughter to me; Leilani pressed the matter with a desperation that smelled like spoiled wine.
"You will be graceful," Helene told me once, all the honey of a serpent. "We will make your trousseau worthy of a prince."
"You mean you will steal what's mine and call it charity," I said. "I will take my mother’s things and leave you what little you deserve."
Helene's smile was brittle. "You dare speak that way in my house? Insolent—"
I had learned young that a woman's voice can hide a mountain of iron. I learned to fold my fury into words that felt like silk but cut like glass.
"Fine," I said, and the decision came like frost. "We will see whether the prince likes silk or iron."
A day later, the Third Prince arrived at our gate as if the story had been written for his gait. He was as the rumors said: pale, crystalline, brows like a sword's edge—Greyson Legrand sat in his carriage with his legs folded, and when he watched me there was a curiosity that was not entirely courtly.
"You are the one they're calling Amira Watts?" he said with a voice like wind in a quiet wood.
"I am," I replied. "And you are the rumor who declines easy pity."
He smiled, which was a small theft. "I decline much, but I suppose I accept the company of interesting people."
We spoke then like two people throwing rope across a river. I told him of my plans in half-phrases—enough that he understood I was no brittle thing.
"So you paint weapons?" he asked later in the manufacturing workshop, where I had finally pushed my designs.
"Draw," I corrected. "I draw the intentions of weapons. Men with hammers can make them; women like me draw their hearts."
He examined my designs, and where others had only scratched head and blinked, he made a rare motion. "A thousand gold," he said, without consulting anyone. "Give me first refusal on more."
"Done," I said. "And the rest we will decide—over time."
That "over time" was a promise that carried both of us into the same space of risk. He did not claim me loudly in front of everyone, but he did something quieter: he placed a protection in the world. When the family tried to turn me into a charity case again—when Helene plotted to send me away unprepared, to take my trousseau and keep quiet—Greyson's casual presence changed the ledger. He told them that when their household needed a queen for their prince, he would come himself to collect his bride duly and loudly.
"You will be generous to her," Greyson told my father once at the gate in a tone that was both an order and a gentler cunning. "If she is mistreated now, I will correct it when I collect her."
My father bowed. Pride and fear do this neat tango in men's souls. He had a choice and he chose broad survival.
In the days that followed, palace rumors turned the house into a place people watched. Leilani's servants whispered like weather-vanes. My life became a stream of small performances: draw a weapon, hide a letter, smile with a hurt I meant to wear as armor. I had, in truth, another part that none of them suspected: at night I would go out and learn the city’s markets, the craftsmen who forged steel and the gamblers who tested luck for coin. The money I earned, the contacts I made—these were my reserve, should the palace and its protections become brittle.
"You're going gambling?" Kelsey asked one night, always the moral compass that could not be bent.
"Not for fun," I said. "For money. And for a lesson."
"But the men—"
"I will not be a lesson," I said. "Remember, Kelsey: people always underestimate a woman who smiles. They give you their faces while keeping their secrets."
In the smoky heat of a backroom gambling house, I met Alejandro Cole—called Flower by everyone because his laugh came like petals falling. He was dangerous in the prettiest way; and he would be useful.
"Miss Amira," he said when he realized who I was, as if he had always suspected the city would bring me to his doors. "You play well. You should be wearing the palace, not this smoke."
"Possibly," I answered. "I am also here to see the weather. People show their true faces when they gamble."
He held out a chair and a hand, and the room, expecting some girl from the square to be an easy mark, ate the floor with their arrogance. They all lost at my first table. I let Flower grin and place his silver beside mine; then I made sure the bets took the shape I wanted. The room's laughter tasted small after the first rake in.
"You're a miracle," Flower told me later in a voice that could have been a trade or a flirtation. "Who taught you to hear dice?"
"Practice," I said. "And hearing is a useful skill. You have many ears, do you not, Flower? I might need them."
He laughed and promised favors in the currency gamblers keep: secrets.
These little trades changed the house too, because I used what I learned. I had been weak in the way those who were always told they are less learn to be—shy of claiming room. Now I claimed room in small, precise ways.
But the calm before storm is rarely quiet in such houses. Leilani watched me with the thin red of hunger that women get when they believe someone else is eating their share. Helene raged plainly at being denied the only coin she felt she deserved.
"You are dangerous," she hissed into our father's study one night, to which he, tired, replied, "Better dangerous than dead on my floor."
We reached a moment the world likes to do—close to ridiculousness and yet sharp as glass. It was the day the house gathered for the imperial envoy's show of courtesy and our household had to display unity and submission and the correct amount of spinning smiles. Leilani, drunk on a determination that looked like entitlement, tried again to humiliate me by tearing my robe and calling me a wretch in front of the guests.
She raised her hand.
I remember the exact sound—an ugly slap sharpened on years of sore pride. The room inhaled. People who had once looked over me at my worst now saw me at my best: not for the soft things, but for the hard ones.
I did something she had not expected. I caught her wrist, held it, and swung. The slap landed on her own cheek because I moved like a blade that does not blink.
"Leilani!" Helene shrieked.
"You hit me!" Leilani stamped her foot, eyes huge like a child.
"Did you expect less than to feel what you've done?" I asked.
She staggered, and then she cried. The guests murmured like a tide.
"How do you dare?" Helene demanded. She was like a woman who had been sure of a script and now found someone had rewritten it.
"You wrote the script for me," I said. "I learned the words. I learned how to speak them back."
That publicness—that stand—changed things in a way that rippled. But there is a law in a house like ours: slaps become currency, and currency must be cashed in public. They plotted, of course. Seething deals and whispered bribes. Helene and Leilani wanted to break me in a way the world could not patch.
They set a trap of a kind common to such women—they invited me to a grand reception as if to reconcile and gave those same guests slowness to my favor. They planned to hang my head by rumors after that: told stories of my audacity, of my unsuitability. But what they did not know was simple: I had been building more than a patience. I had been building evidence.
On the day of the great hall, three hundred people filled the long tables: merchants, minor ministers, the envoy's scribes, my father's proud acquaintances—all the town’s appetites gathering to watch a marriage that would be announced and to gossip. The hall smelled of roast and perfume. Leilani came in with Helene on her arm and a smile like a show of flags.
"Amira," Helene called when I arrived as invited. "Come forward. Let us put these quarrels behind us."
The candles flared and someone snapped a picture—no camera, but close enough: gossip serves like wind; people keep records with tongues and fingers. Leilani's face was painted with triumph. She had even arranged for a projected screen—an innovation she thought would shame me, for she had been told that shame is the right way to collapse a woman.
"Leilani," I said aloud, "before we make a show of peace, will you show our friends the ledger you use to call me a thief?"
She laughed, a brittle gear. "What ledger?"
"That one," I said, and someone dimmed the lights with a clumsy gesture. The servant I had whispered to earlier stepped forward and engaged the projection. On the wall behind the dais, the first image blinked up: a ledger in Leilani's hand, a list of favors she had promised and payments she had made, with her own neat handwriting: 'Bribe to accuse Amira—50 silver' and beneath it more dates and notes.
The crowd made a little gasp, nothing dramatic yet. I walked forward and met Leilani's eyes. "Do you still think I am nothing?" I asked. "Do you still think a face is the only battleground? I am the woman with proof in my pocket and friends who learned how to turn tiny lies into big lights."
She laughed then, a false, bright sound. "What trick is this? Who are you to—"
"Who am I?" I repeated. "You called me a charity. You said I would be easy prey. I told you I would not beg. I didn't. You asked, you begged, and you promised. This is what you promised."
I pressed a small card into the hand of a man who had been a witness—Flower, a gambler who owed me a favor. His hand shook as he tossed out my term: "These are photos of the ledger, of your orders, of payments to witnesses." He began to read aloud, precise and clear in the echoing hall. People leaned forward.
"She says you planned to have Amira accused and discredited," a merchant said. "This is worse than petty."
Leilani's smile thinned. Helene's face had the look of a woman who had been suddenly carved out of a cake that was too sweet. "That's a lie!" Helene shouted. "You can't—"
"Who will verify it?" Leilani demanded, voice higher. "You have no proof—"
I reached into my sleeve and produced yet another thing I had acquired: letters—secret messages between Helene and a servant arranging payments. I let the house hear what they said: "Make her leave without trousseau; make it look like she ran." Then a list of dates. Then a small, official-looking note about a "side marriage" they were trying to arrange.
The sound in the hall changed. People stopped being polite furniture. They were human again: curious, hungry, sharp.
"What will you do?" Helene said. "You were given to us. Who are you to—"
"To be my sentence, or to be your mirror," I answered. I stepped into the light, and I made sure every syllable landed like a stone on their windowsill.
"Outrageous," murmured an elderly nobleman.
"Shame," said someone else.
"Look." I lifted my chin. "You tried to make me small. I made myself money. I made friends. I made proof. I came here to say that everyone who planned me down will be known by the names that are spelled in the ledger."
I let the room digest that.
Leilani's face changed. It went through the stages like an animal being hit by a trap: the flash of triumph curdled into confusion; confusion shifted to fury; fury slid into denial.
"No," she said, as if the word could glue the world back together. "This is—fabricated!"
"Denial," I said softly. "It is the first petition of the guilty."
Her hands trembled. Someone in the crowd made the first move to stand up. "Show the letters," he called.
I did. I let them read. The room, which had swallowed me like smoke for years, began to react. People who had been my father's guests now murmured loudly. Some took out small tools—quills and papers—and copied my evidence for their own tongues.
"Take her to the courtyard," Helene shrieked. "She will be taken before the magistrate! Rods will be used, and she will be fined—"
"Stop!" The hall went very quiet. Greyson had risen from where he had been watching, his face unreadable as court ice. He walked to the dais with the slow and deliberate momentum of a man who decides storms.
"This is not how I will have my future consort treated," he said. His voice was a blade wrapped in velvet. "You will not touch her. You have acted against the dignity of your own household."
People gasped. Some mouths formed "what?" Some hands clutched goblets.
"Do you still wish to see what else we have?" I said, and I felt the room tilt.
Helene's shoulders sagged. She moved from anger to frantic denial. "I didn't intend—"
"You did," I said. "You talked about hiding my things, about making me run. The notes are here. The witnesses are here." I looked at the guests who had gathered like moths. "If you want to know why I don't call for the magistrate, it is because this house will answer in front of those who watched it. You will be punished by those you hoped would be indifferent."
The punishment I demanded was simple and public. I asked for three things: first, that Helene stand and list, in front of all present, every time she had ordered my humiliation; second, that she apologize publicly and pay restitution for the trousseau she had intended to steal; third, that Leilani be put before the assembled guests to answer for her attempted assault.
"Impossible!" Helene spat.
"It is not impossible," Greyson said. "You invited them here to watch. Let them watch now."
There was a murmur—an ugly excitement. Someone found a platform, and the magistrate's envoy, sensing a spectacle and an opportunity to log favor, began to mark a ledger of his own. The room filled with the shallow light of people wanting to be involved in the unmasking.
Helene began with denials; then the room's pressure shifted. When the first witness—an older maid—stepped forth and started to read the notes aloud, Helene's shoulders tightened. Her face moved, from pride to face of iron, then to bewilderment as she re-heard her own words.
"That's not how I said it!" she cried.
"You said, 'Make her leave without dowry,'" the maid read. "You said, 'Make it look like a shame.'"
Helene's voice cracked. "No, that's—"
"Denial," someone called.
She stepped back; the audience was already digesting the narrative. "I was trying to protect our daughter's station," she pleaded.
"With plots?" I asked. "You would have ruined me to lift her."
"Please," Leilani sobbed, now unmasked. "I—I was scared that she would take what I deserved. I'm sorry—"
"Shock," I said to the room, because I liked language and the way people move through grief. "First they are shocked. Then they deny. Then they beg. Now she begs." The room tasted like fruit tossed too quickly.
A woman from the servants' side stood, camera—no camera, but a small mirror she used—and she started to record with the technique everyone's hands now have: history in the palm. Others did the same. Someone clapped once, bravely or scornfully. The hall's volume rose as people began to heap scorn onto rich people.
Helene's collapse came like a slow untying. Pride fell out of her like coins. "Please," she wailed. "I will do anything. I will—"
"Beg," I said very plainly. "Kneel."
Her knees hit the cold stone like a struck bell. For a woman who had always had servants to lift her, the kneeling felt like theater. She clasped her hands and begged—her voice like a child.
At first there was stunned silence. Then were the murmurs: "So this is how the mighty fall." Phones—no phones, but hands that told others—scribes who loved nothing more than a scandal—began to record, to spread. A dozen people grinned, some in triumph, others in shame for having trusted Helene's smoothed face.
Helene's reaction changed: from the anger of the schemer to the fear of the woman who had been seen.
"Please—" she begged. "Please forgive me, Amira."
Leilani slapped herself across the face hard—such show of self-abuse had not been in her repertoire—but she tried to move. The crowd pressed in.
"Help her up," I said. "But not into your arms, Helene. Not into safety. Help her stand and admit her crimes."
She rose, shaking. Her face was now rawer than any wound I had endured.
"Listen," I said to the assembled hall. "You have watched a household that thought honors could be bought by cruelty. You have watched how fear made them small and dangerous. Let this be the end of such business. Let it be that those who would make monsters out of girls for their petty gain are exposed."
A hundred small mouths repeated my name like a talisman. The crowd's reaction shifted from sudden glee to sober arithmetic; they had tasted spectacle and saw the cost. Some clapped slowly, more like jurors marking a result. A few people recorded the kneeling woman and took to gossip markets, already rewriting the city's rumor into evidence.
"Begging doesn't erase harm," I said. "But the world will now remember your names."
"Please—" Helene begged again. Her voice was paper thin.
The crowd's reaction grew louder. A young woman started to laugh—not cruelly, but with the unsteady high of someone who has been waiting for a wrong to be righted. Others shouted "Shame!" in that old-fashioned way the poor have when the rich lose face. Cameras—small, handy mirrors—recorded it. An official wrote notes for a judicial record.
Leilani's reaction was shorter: she went through denial, then a sudden sputtering attempt to refute, then collapse, then bowing head and finally a small, weeping plea. "I didn't mean—"
"Beg," I said. The word cut some kind of last thread.
Her knees hit the floor. The spectacle was complete; the crowd cheered like a strange thunder, equal parts relief and hunger satisfied.
When it was done, when the hall cleared like a tide shifting, Greyson took my hand in front of everyone and said, "No one will touch you now."
I took his hand with no great ceremony. "You gave them a lesson," I said.
He only smiled in that precise, cool way. "We will teach them to be careful."
The sensation of having them fall was not wholly sweet. Justice, even in the most public of forms, is a complicated remedy. But it made a difference. People change positions like weather vanes, and for the first time since the blade had pressed my cheek, the air around me felt safer.
Days later, the palace accepted me. The Third Prince and I learned to trust each other, in the small acts and the large. He had been patient; I had been deliberate. I told him about the leg, and he told me what it meant to be a prince who would not be humbled by pity. We traded promises that sounded like business and as a result were stronger than either sentiment alone.
"Do you still want to be treated like husk and paper?" Greyson asked me, once, in a quiet room where the sun fell through lattice like judgment.
"No," I said, and we laughed because it was honest. We made plans for a future where I would not be hidden, and he would not be pitied. We had a bargain, proper and steady.
Leilani and Helene lived with the knowledge that they had been seen. Helene tried to speak to me once, half-hearted apology on her lips.
"I am sorry," she said, voice hacked thin with shame.
"You should have been truthful before," I told her.
"I will pay. We will offer you..." She reached for what a rich woman always reaches for when she thinks money can fix a wound.
"Give," I said. "Give and speak nothing and move on. Or give and speak truthfully and try to be better. Bring no more plans that steal."
She left with the ledger wound into her pocket, a little lesser for the rest of her life.
As for Leilani, she changed more slowly. Pride is a stubborn weed. But when the house's servants—once cowed—began to call me by my name with the respect of one who had weathered a storm and did not apologize for surviving it, she realized power could swing the other way. She learned to hold her head more carefully when she looked at me, the way someone learns to look where they used to trip.
So my life settled into new rhythms: drawing weapons and selling to the Prince's circle, gambling for useful favors, listening for danger, laughing when the world expected me to be the opposite. Greyson became not only the man who had offered me gold or protection but a partner in the best sense: he recognized my choices and matched them with his.
"Do you still believe my leg can be healed?" he asked once, while we walked among the palace gardens.
"I do," I said. "I believe in stitches and time. And I believe in your patience, too."
He inclined his head as if that alone made him braver.
I, Amira Watts, whose cheek had almost been cut and whose life had almost been called nothing, had made a bargain with fate: I would not be small anymore. I would not consent to being a story where I was merely acted upon. I would act.
And in the end, when people asked me how I did it, I told them plainly.
"I learned the rules," I say. "Then I broke them when they suited me."
The End
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