Face-Slapping20 min read
"Don't Touch My Phone" — and Other Things I Almost Lost
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"I stole his phone and found a call labeled 'Raquel.'"
I remember how my hands shook when I saw the name flash on Apollo's screen. I remember the rush of anger and something colder under it: the feeling that I was finally done pretending.
"Who is Raquel?" I asked Apollo that night, holding his phone like evidence.
He didn't look at me. He looked at the living room floor and answered, "A long story." Then he walked away.
He had been walking away from me for four years.
"You think you can walk away from me and still keep me as a trophy?" I said, voice small and sharp at once.
He stopped at the stairs and turned. "You misunderstand a lot of things."
That was the beginning. That was the night my life became a fight.
"Stop. Just stop," my grandmother—Henry Ford's sister-in-law, but I called him Grandpa—said from the sofa. "This is a family house. No yelling."
"Family," I spat. "They called me a traitor and a slut." I laughed once, too loud.
"Quiet!" my step-aunt, Raquel Mueller, said from the other side of the room, sweet as poison. "Jazlyn, why make trouble? Apollo is a soldier. He should be respected."
"It wasn't even my phone," Apollo said finally, colder than ice. "It was mine."
"Then why was it calling 'Raquel' at midnight?"
Apollo walked away. He always walked away.
Later that week my world exploded. Someone took a video of me asleep in my own bed and planted it online with a stranger photoshopped into the frame. The whole house watched the clip. The house that raised me, the house where Grandpa sheltered me when my father died. The house that called me his "little girl" and made me Mrs. Briggs.
"You were caught in bed," the family whispered. "Everyone saw." They looked at me like I was a broken thing.
"I didn't do this," I said again and again.
"Call the doctor," my aunt commanded. "Bring proof."
"So they did," I said. "Two doctors, a check, a report."
"They both said what?" Apollo asked, finally interested in me.
"They said I'm a virgin," I said. "Both reports were blunt."
Apollo blinked. His face didn't change. "Then why were you in that video?" he asked.
"Because someone wanted you to see," I said. "Someone wanted to make sure you'd come home and watch me be torn apart."
He studied me for a long second. "Who?"
I smiled like I had a blade hidden beneath my ribs. "Someone close."
"Who?"
I turned the TV on. "Watch."
I played the security camera: the small screen jumped, the hallway of our house at four in the morning, a car backing away. The camera zooms. The passenger seat. A head, the long hair, the eyes I had seen a thousand times in magazines and mall posters. Raquel—my husband's old girlfriend—gliding like a viper into the night with a man I had never seen before.
"Raquel," I said softly.
Her face froze, and the air in the room changed.
"What is this?" Grandpa said, voice thick.
"My husband wants to know if his wife is honest," Raquel said, in that soft tone.
"You set me up," I told her.
She flinched like she'd been slapped. "We were testing—"
"Save it." I smiled. "Let's be clever. You want me to be punished for a shame you staged? Fine. You want revenge? I will give you the mirror."
Grandpa looked at me with something like pride. "How do you want her punished?"
"A job in the Africa branch for six months," I said. "Full transfer. She can do her spa routines in eight-hour time differences and buy herself sandless sun. She can enjoy the lack of sunscreen insurance she purchases here."
Raquel went pale. There was a second of stunned silence. Then Raquel began to sob.
"Please," she cried. "I can't go."
Grandpa lifted a finger. "You framed Jazlyn. You broke our family's trust."
"You want prison?" I asked.
Raquel collapsed to her knees and begged. Grandpa didn't come down to talk to her. He didn't need to. He looked at me with that slow old-man smile and nodded once. "Six months," he said.
I didn't shout. I held my ground as the family watched. That was my face-slapping: I made the one who tried to make me small move away from the light.
But my victory felt small. Apollo still watched me the way a storm watches a shore—not touching, not changing, only eroding slowly.
"You're not my wife," he said that night, when my rage finally ran out. "You are a problem."
"I will not leave you," I said. "Not because you tell me to stay. Because I want to."
He tilted his head like someone considering a broken bird. "You are a mess."
"You're the one who left," I answered. "You walked out four years ago to train in the north, and you haven't come home. I married you because Grandpa wanted me safe. I married an empty name and a uniform, Apollo. What did you expect?"
He didn't reply.
Two months later, the school sent me to the special training base for one week—our mandatory military training at the Wolfpack Special Forces base. I walked into the base and realized—people were not prepared for what they would see.
Men in combat pants, bodies like bronzed sculptures—my classmates whispered. Then I saw him.
Apollo in green, a commanding shape in the herd of beasts. When his gaze landed on me, something cold slid into the space between my ribs.
He did not smile. He counted me with a look that could measure me down to the marrow.
"Stand straight, Jazlyn," he said.
"Yes, sir," I answered. "You don't get to call me that."
He did something he always did—he punished silently. He took away my points for a minor uniform mistake.
"Eight points," he said. "Take them."
"That's impossible," I said. "The whole exercise is ten points!"
"Then get lost," he said.
"You're treating me like a criminal for something I didn't do," I said.
"You did everything wrong," he replied.
He leaned closer, close enough that I could smell the cold, clean scent of his soap. He said something that made me wish I had an iron fist.
"You look like witchcraft in that uniform," he said. "And you should be graded."
"You can't talk about me like that," I said. "You're my husband."
He made a sound like a small stone in his throat. "Not in my mind."
Because he wanted me out of the house and out of his life, he hurt me where the world would see. He put me on public display, lowering my training score until I had negative points.
I ran in the rain. "I won't admit what I didn't do," I told him, each breath like knives.
"Then do five thousand meters until you believe you are small enough," he said.
I ran. I fell. I did not ask for help. I refused to cry. The rain and his cold voice mixed into one long punishment.
When I collapsed, his hand—big and sure—carried me to the medic tent. He argued with the medic in a voice I had never heard him use before—sharp and loud.
"Don't touch her like that," he snapped when a medic tried to unbutton my shirt to listen to my heart.
"What?" the medic said. "I'm a doctor."
Apollo's hand closed on the medic's wrist like a vice. "I will do it."
He undid the buttons himself. His fingers were clumsy at first and then too warm. When he brushed against the soft skin at my chest, I felt a heat that did not belong to the cold soldier.
"You're ridiculous," he grumbled, the kind of thing he would have said in the old times, back when he woke me with sleepy jokes and left small notes in my book bag.
"Do it like a doctor," the medic muttered.
He leaned back and let the medic do his job.
That changed nothing. He was still Apollo Briggs: knight and blade, distant and sharp. But the soldier's hand on my wrist was the first honest thing he'd shown me in months.
"Don't touch my things," he told me once in his car that day. "Don't touch my phone. Don't touch my notes."
"I stole his phone," I reminded myself. "I saw Raquel call his name. I didn't do anything wrong."
We argued. He said things that made me feel small. I called him a monster and he called me a liar. We both said worse.
That night he left me in the house and I sat on the bed staring at my phone. I picked up an old photo of Apollo when he was younger, back before the war had sharpened every line in his face.
A call popped up on his phone: "Raquel."
I kept it. I learned how she used men. I learned how close she and my own step-aunt moved to take everything I'd been given. I learned about control: how wealthy families move pieces on a life like chess figures.
When the corpses began, the world sharpened into cold glass.
Marcella Sutton's body was found the next day—murdered. Both breasts cut away, a wound on the back of her head, blood everywhere. The campus lost its light. People whispered we were cursed. I kept hearing "you saw it earlier" and "she is different" and "the new girl is not clean."
I had seen the fake body twice. The first time, it had been a plastic prop, left to scare me. The second time, Marcella lay dead and I could not forget the smell of metal and the flood of red.
"You saw something earlier," Apollo said, in his office. "Tell me everything."
So I did. I told him the fake-body scene, the scream, the feeling of walking into a horror that vanished, and then the later discovery of real blood.
He listened without a tremble. "You were a target," he said. "Someone wants you broken."
"Who?" I asked.
He looked at me as if calculating my life against a map of threats. "Someone inside, and someone outside."
He made Crew Acosta, his friend and number two, take a look. Crew and I had a strange history—I had teased him on campus about his vanity and he had grinned like a surprised hero every time.
"You're telling me this because you care?" Crew asked me later when he found me in the dorm.
"Because I can fight," I said. "Because we have to."
We started looking. Apollo's team moved faster than the local police. He had resources and the kind of authority that cleared doors. When we searched Marcella's room, we found a torn invitation, a phone number, a small piece of plastic that matched the fake head's color. Marcella had been brutal, but messy.
"Why target Marcella?" I asked that night, sitting in the car beside Apollo.
"Because she knew," Apollo said.
"Knows what?"
He looked away. "There were messages between Marcella and someone... about testing you. Not just testing. Harming you."
I felt sick. All at once everything I had suffered—my humiliation, the set-up—stacked like dominos. There were people who wanted me ruined. They had used Marcella and someone else—Florence Bullock—to setup scares. Florence had been Marcella's friend. She had the soft voice and the flat chest and the eyes that hid storms. She had been the one who drugged me at the old ruins and put the needle in my side.
"Florence?" I said. "Why her?"
"Because someone made her angry first," Apollo said.
He ran data, called old favors, used his contacts. He found out Florence had rented a flat across from Grant Chen's. She had been spying. She had a camera too. He found that her apartment had a telescope aimed at Grant's window.
"Why would she be watching Grant?" I asked.
Apollo opened his mouth, closed it, and said, "Because she loved him. Or she thought she did."
Grant Chen, the quiet news student, had been the center of a petty love war. Marcella coveted him; he had flirted with me in class and not cared. Florence and Marcella had both been small in their own ways and large in their resentments.
The deeper Apollo dug, the stranger the threads. There were notes hidden in Marcella's drawers: mentions of "getting Jazlyn out" and "a plan" and "the clean break." There were even receipts for a taxi to the hospital at the time of the first fake body.
"Who arranged the taxi?" I asked one morning in the car.
"Someone paid cash," Apollo said. "But we have cameras. Someone trailing them. We have a lead."
That lead brought us right back into the house, into the web of family politics.
Raquel had returned "home" with a smile and clouds in her suitcase. She'd given the old lady perfume. She'd called Apollo and asked about "old times." She wanted attention and status copied from a life she believed she deserved.
Apollo set a trap with the police. It was cold and methodical. He had the campus lined, he had check points. Then we saw the taxi again on camera—this one that drove out of the base gate at six in the evening and went straight to the back orchard where the fake head was later thrown. The driver had been bribed. The passenger list was almost perfect: Florence and Marcella.
Florence's handwriting held neat, crossed letters. She was easy to look at: kind eyes, nervous hands. She also had a hatred for the city that grew like mold. Under interrogation, she said things that made me sick.
"They told me I could make him see me," she whispered once in the small interview room. "They told me he loved me. I did it. I did the fake head. I wanted her to be scared. I didn't mean for Marcella to die."
"Who told you?" Apollo asked.
She looked over at me and saw something like fear and pity at once. "Mrs. Mueller," she said.
My step-aunt. Raquel.
The world tilted. I thought I had already spanked her into submission. I had sent her to "Africa"—okay, the company's satellite office in a hot trade city—but this was bigger.
"Why?" I said. "Why would she—"
"Because Raquel wanted a thing I couldn't give," Apollo said. "And she asked someone to fix it."
Apollo's face, lit by the glowing screen of the laptop, was unreadable. "Raquel didn't just want me," he said. "She wanted control. She wanted us to be in pieces. She wanted to push you out and step into the role I made you. She thought if she could tarnish you, she could win."
"She tried to make me leave."
"She tried to make you die."
Crew and Apollo put pressure on the campus. They kept watchers on Grant and all of us. Yet the killer moved freely.
One night, I woke up in a ditch of fog and pain and thought the world wrong. Florence had left my dorm with a lamplight smile. She had invited me to see Marcella's flat. She had put something in my drink at the ruin—then I remembered the shove, a blur of a syringe, a cold prick.
Booker Cardoso—Booker—came into the story the way hobos walk into a good scene: inconvenient and essential. He had been in and out of my life for years. He had saved me when I was fourteen, when my father's shop was full of thieves and the police had been slow. He'd worked in a warehouse and had an ugly laugh. Four years later he was a businessman with old scars. When he paused in front of the small atoll farm where Florence had been, he looked at her with a slow hunger.
"You hurt her," he said, meaning me.
Florence had been hired, he found, by Raquel's message server: a ghosted account and a transfer. She had been promised money to do "a job." She had never intended to kill Marcella. But someone else had taken over the final part of the scheme.
"Someone else?" I repeated.
"Always someone else," Booker said.
The police, used to normal crimes, moved like molasses against a steel will. Apollo moved like a storm.
"A trap," he told Crew and me in the car. "We will bait the trap."
That night he had me wear a plain sweater and nothing more. He placed me at the edge of the dorm corridor and sat across the hall. He watched every corner. His jaw was a stone; his eyes were wire clamps.
It worked.
They came to scare me—this time, a group of three. They intended to push me out a side door. But instead Apollo sprang. He grabbed the man with the iron-voiced laugh and broke him in a move that was more precise than any fight I'd seen in film. He had a way of acting that wasn't cruel but was cold enough to leave frost in your veins.
The man had a name I had heard before: Dan—no, not Dan, "Crew's other brother." He was a petty smuggler. He spat, "You won't touch Mrs. Briggs. Mrs. Briggs is untouchable."
"She is my wife," Apollo said. "Not untouchable. Mine."
His hands were on the man's shoulders, hard and practiced. He did not break the man. He didn't need to then. He wanted us to watch.
"You didn't answer my question," I said later, in his car. "Why do you still walk away? Why do you still call me a problem?"
He sighed. "Because I think if I stay, I'll kill you. If I leave, you'll be safe."
"Stop protecting me like I'm a glass vase," I said. "I'm a person, Apollo. I can fight."
He looked at me for a long time as if weighing a coin. "You are going to be the reason I'm a better man, or the reason I break," he said. "Now sleep."
That night the police found another body. It was Florence this time, in a different part of the orchard. She had the same signs—stabs and cuts, then left to rot.
"It is like someone is cleaning up after themselves," Crew said. "Killing those who do the dirty work."
"Why kill the plants?" I asked.
"To stop them from talking," Apollo said. "Whoever's behind this wants no witnesses. They will cut anyone loose."
From then on, Apollo didn't walk away anymore. He watched. He opened his phone for me some nights and let me see the graphs he built.
"Someone is arranging these events in patterns," he said.
He took me to the evidence room once. It smelled like bleach and metal. He pointed out small things: the taxi driver's receipts, an old envelope with a stamp that belonged to Raquel's perfume company, a receipt for international shipping to a nearby port, a GPS ping at the time of the first fake-body drop that matched Raquel's car.
"It points to her," I said.
"She made the introductions," Apollo said. "But she didn't do the killing with her own hands—not the final one. She had someone willing to dirty their hands. Someone who could look like a victim and be turned into a hunter."
He shut the case. "We need someone who wants you out. Someone from outside the family who profits if you are gone."
"Who could that be?" I asked.
"You were never mine for business," Apollo said. "But someone wanted you out who had something to gain: control of the family, a clearer path to the company, or revenge."
The next day, Raquel tried to be nice. "Jazlyn," she said. "I came back because I heard about the tragedies. I want to help."
"Help how?" I asked.
She put a hand to my cheek in a fake tenderness. "I'll talk to Apollo. I'll keep his mind away from war talk. I can be on his side."
"You already tried to get in my bed," I said. "And in his life."
Her face flickered. "You are being cruel."
"Why?" I asked. "What did you expect?"
"You are making me this person," she cried.
I did not believe her. Not then. Not when Marcella's funeral came and the reporters pressed their microphones to my face and asked me the same questions again and again.
"Did you do it?" they asked.
"No," I told them.
"But our family's image—" Raquel said, through a fake smile.
Apollo stood up when Marcella's mother stood in the crowd and pointed at me in a raw shriek. "Her daughter was with you that night," she howled. "You are a witch."
"He didn't talk in the funeral," I whispered to Apollo later. "You didn't defend me. You let them accuse me."
"I tried," he said. "But family pressure—"
"Family pressure?" I said. "You're a soldier. Say two words and Grandpa sets the knives down."
He met my eyes. "I couldn't. Not then."
That night we both lay apart. I thought I had nothing to lose.
I decided to strike back the only way I knew how: with a public knife.
I worked quietly with the campus security team and Apollo's people. At a dinner where Raquel strutted with her new perfumes and soft smiles, I asked for the TV. I asked to show family photos.
"Watch this one," I said, pressing play.
The small clip showed a private conversation: Raquel on the phone arranging a transfer, a call log to a number that matched the taxi receipts found by Apollo. There were snippets of messages between her and a man, a partner in a local shipping company. They laughed about "delivering a scare." Raquel's face was there—smaller than before, less careful.
The room went quiet as the clip played. I sat like a queen at the head of the table and watched faces change. Raquel's color drained. Her voice tried to be composed.
"How dare you," she hissed.
"I dared," I answered. "You set me up and threatened me. You used girls who couldn't defend themselves. You tried to ruin me."
She lunged at me like a wild thing and my hand slapped her face. The room froze. Grandpa stood up slowly. "Enough!" he said.
Raquel fell into that silence like a body into snow. "I am sorry," she said. "I was jealous."
Grandpa's voice was low. "You chose your envy over honor. You go to the branch this week. Six months at the Africa office."
No one protested. Raquel left two weeks later with her suitcases and a face like a dog.
That was my face-slapping. It did not bring Marcella back, but the world had seen who had tried to break me, and I had answered in the only way family circles respect: humiliation.
But the killings continued. Someone wanted every piece of the game burned clean.
Apollo stopped pretending he didn't care. He bought me coffee, walked me across campus, and clipped my wrist with the coolness of a man who would rather the world hurt him than let it touch me.
"Stay with me tonight," he said. "In case."
"You can't own me now," I told him.
"I don't want to own you," he said. "I want you to come back when you need me."
We kept chasing threads. We tracked the IPs that financed Florence's plan. We found a non-descript courier who had moved an evidence box to a shipping container across town. We followed freight routes and found a small locker. Inside the locker: stunt props. Boots. Fiberglass parts. It connected the fake body to the final crime.
"Someone staged it to look like a student prank gone wrong," Apollo said. "But the second time they moved from prank to murder."
We built a timeline: Raquel's calls, Marcella's meeting at eight p.m., Florence's supposed presence with me at eight fifteen, the taxi route, and then a gap. The gap was the killer's time to finish cleaning.
One night, Apollo put his mouth close to mine and said, "I can't make you forgive me. But if someone wants you dead, they won't have me standing by to let it happen."
I kissed him before I thought about it. His lips were firm and warm. He responded the way a soldier does to a command: without question, without hesitation.
"You're not trying to fix what you've broken?" I whispered.
He pulled away. "I will do what needs to be done."
So we did.
We laid a trap. Apollo fed a rumor that we had evidence that Raquel's partner had been the one with the taxi driver. He planted a call. He staged a meeting. The killer took the bait.
It was Brenton Hale—a small- time fixer and the shipping clerk who had been moving props. He thought he could end the job and take the money.
When we caught him, he cried more for himself than for Marcella. "I didn't mean for it to go so far," he said. "But it wasn't me who cleaned them up. I got the props. I didn't do her."
"Who moved the bodies?" Apollo asked.
Brenton looked at the floor. "I left them for Eve," he said. "She said she would take care of it."
"Eve," Apollo repeated. The name had no weight to it. "Who is Eve?"
"A woman with a shuttered hair salon," Brenton said. "She works nights. She cleans things. She has receipts for a motel and a registration under a fake name. She meets people. She pays people."
We found Eve—real name Lila—behind a salon that smelled of alcohol and dying hair. She was small and quick and did not talk at first. But under pressure she broke like thin glass.
"Lila," Apollo said softly. "Who hired you?"
"I took money," she whispered. "I was paid. The man who hired me drove a black SUV. He had a scar on his left hand. He said he worked for the company. He wanted them moved."
"Raquel?" I said.
Lila shook her head. "No. She delivered the props through a courier once, but the man who ordered the killing was different. He used Raquel to pull the first act, but he told Florence and the others to stop if things got messy. He said, 'Cut the witnesses.'"
Slowly the web pulled taut and a name rose from the middle like a hook: "Henry Ford."
I froze.
"Grandpa?" I said.
Apollo's hand on my shoulder was like iron. "We can't just—"
"I saw the signature on some of the documents," Lila said. "It was an old letter. It had a stamp only one place could get. A family address. He paid better than most. He said it was for 'family security.'"
"Family security," Apollo said. He looked at me like the world was a map and he had misread the legend.
I thought of Grandpa—the man who had sheltered me as a child, the one who'd given me a home and told me to marry into security. I thought of the way he had cut off his lip when he laughed. I had trusted him. We all had.
The evidence stacked quietly and then roaringly: old receipts, a crypto transaction traced back to the family's trust, a phone number traced to an account registered to the family office. Motive emerged like a beast: cleaning the family's image, removing obstacles, a desperate hand to save something bigger than love.
I did not want to believe it. I pressed my hand to my mouth and could taste metal.
"Why?" I asked once in a voice torn to pieces.
Grandpa had reasons, he said. "This family holds more than a name now," he said. "The company has a future that depends on reputation. Mistakes cost money—and more than money."
"It's murder," I said.
"Sometimes control requires choices," he replied simply, like reciting a grocery list. "I chose the family."
He looked like he had aged a hundred years but his voice was calm as a zipper.
I felt as if the floor had slid from under me and a new one had appeared.
Apollo's eyes were the same old steel. "You will come with me," he said to Grandpa. "You will not be tried in private."
The police took Grandpa in the morning light. The world watched the man who had raised me go in handcuffs. The tabloids devoured him.
At the station, he did not deny it. He explained it all as a businessman would explain a product launch. "They were a risk," he said. "They would have ruined everything."
"They were people," I said.
He looked at me and his face broke. "I gave you shelter," he said. "But I could not risk the whole house."
"If you're unwell with business," I said, voice hard, "you solved nothing. You killed people."
The courtroom was not kind. The papers were harsher. Raquel's name surfaced as a facilitator. The man who had ordered the killings was a knot of choices and cowardice. He had pressed buttons and called men like Brenton to "move props." He had thought he was cleaning the house.
Marcella's mother wailed when Grandpa was sentenced. She watched where I stood and her eyes were not gentle.
"You did this," she told me. "Your family took my child."
"I didn't," I said. "I tried to stop it."
"Her blood is your blood," she said. "You live under the same roof. You are part of what allowed this."
I could not deny the closeness. I had been sheltered by Henry Ford's kindness. He had also been its brain. I had traded safety for the bill. I had not known the terms.
The court convicted Grandpa and a handful of men who had carried out orders. Raquel pleaded guilty to fraud and accessory and got a lighter sentence for cooperating. She left the country within months.
When it was over, the family house felt like a museum: cold and lit with electric white. People moved through its rooms like strangers.
Apollo and I stood at the terrace one night after the trial.
"You wanted me to leave," he said.
"I didn't," I said. "They wanted me to leave."
He laughed, a little. "Same thing."
"Did you ever love me?" I asked.
He looked at the sky, then at me. "I did and I do," he said. "I loved you enough to try to protect you badly. I love you enough to be better."
"I signed the divorce," I said, a strange lightness in my chest. "I handed the lawyer the paper."
"I know." He took a breath. "The lawyer returned to me that night. He told me something else."
"What?"
"He came in and said, 'Apollo, this was not a normal agreement.' Then he handed me the paper you signed."
My heart felt like a returned gift. "What did it say?"
"It said that the entire estate and the company shares and all that belonged to the Briggs family would be transferred to you upon the final signature. That he—my dear Pavel Carlson—had made a clause that if I insisted on divorce, the settlement would be so complete that even I would be given to you as a joke. He said it was the only way he could get you to sign."
I looked at him. "Apollo, why?"
"Because I needed a clean break to see if you would really go," he said. "I wanted to know if you would leave for money or fight to stay. I don't like my own games. I asked for something cruel. I didn't want to keep you because I wanted to own you. I wanted you because you were you. I wanted you to pick me, not comfort."
He breathed and then he laughed, a little, like a man who had burned his hands.
"You gave me the house and everything," I said. "You gave me yourself as part of the settlement."
He smiled painfully. "I made you rich and I thought you'd leave."
"I would never leave like that," I said.
He stepped closer. "Stay then. Or go. Either way I'm done asking you to be something you're not."
I took his hand. "Promise?"
"I promise," he said.
"You know how to be honest when it matters." I kissed him then—not a test, not a dare, but a mending.
We did not have a fairy-tale wedding after the court. We had a slow reconciliation. Apollo apologized in gestures: he sat through my college presentations, he attended my classes when he could. I went to his training debriefs and learned how a man could carry both the world and his debts and still be gentle.
As the case closed, I did one last thing: at the company board, where we had our last argument, I stood and told the shareholders that I'd accept the gift of the estate not as property but as a chance to right wrongs.
"People died," I said. "You cannot put a price on that. But you can try to do better."
They flinched. They did not like me demanding anything.
"I vow to change how this house treats employees," I said. "I will fund scholarships. I will end savage partnerships. I will make a rule: we do not trade lives for image."
There was a scene that day that felt like a public comeuppance: the men who had supported Grandpa's plan watched while the board handed their power to me. The press liked it. The people liked it worse. But it was done.
Raquel's return had been a humiliation. Her fall was small but sharp. The real head of the snake had been wearing family face the whole time.
When the dust settled, I did what I should have done from the start.
"I don't need the house to be me," I said to Apollo one night.
"You don't," he agreed.
"But I like fixing things," I said. "Let's fix some."
He laughed, touched by something that was not his old armor. "We will break less now," he said. "No more running. No more joking that we don't care."
We saved two staff members who had been used as pawns. We opened a fund for victims. We gave Marcella's family a voice in the company. These were small and inadequate things, but they felt like the hardest sort of justice.
At the end, Apollo and I sat on the terrace where I had first confronted him. The city spread beneath us like a quiet tide. He took my hand.
"You still want to be married to me?" he asked.
"I want to be married to someone who stands with me," I said.
He laughed. "I'll stand."
He leaned in and kissed me—not a test, not a reach, not something cold, but a simple, final promise.
Later, when the trial had closed and the family had been shaken into something new, I packed a small bag. Raquel had gone. Grandpa was in a quiet prison cell. The company had a new course. My life was mine again.
On the plane to the small seaside city I visited as a farewell—far from home—Apollo surprised me.
"One condition," he said, taking my hand.
"Yes?" I said.
"Don't ever let someone make you small again," he said. "No matter who they are."
"I won't," I said.
"Ever?" he said.
"Ever," I whispered back.
He smiled like a man relieved to have found his map.
We walked into the sunset like two people finally learning to share a single path. It had been a long road through illness and greed and fear.
I still wake sometimes with the taste of rain in my mouth and the memory of the first fake prop. I still see the clip on my old TV. I still hear the shout that started it all.
But I am not small. I learned to speak, to fight, and—most of all—to stand.
"You are mine," Apollo said one night in the quiet of the house, fingers on my wrist like a promise and not a chain.
"I am not yours," I said, smiling. "I am mine. But yes, I will stand with you."
He kissed me then, the kind of kiss that sealed battle lines behind us and a future in front. We had been broken. We put the pieces together. We were not perfect. But we were enough.
The End
— Thank you for reading —