Revenge13 min read
I Came Back for the Snakes — and I Took Everything
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I wake in a pool of light. The room smells like flowers that were meant for a funeral. A bright red sheet is spread under me like a stage. Chains bite my wrists and ankles. People count money in voices that smell like rust.
“Tonight’s third lot—Night Lithe,” the auctioneer says, as though this is an ordinary evening.
I remember darkness. I remember how a blind world swallowed me last time. I remember the last beat of my real life, when truth reached through whatever light I had and tore my heart to ash. I remember dying there in Everett Callahan’s castle and thinking I would never open my eyes again.
“Starting bid: ten million. Minimum raise: five hundred thousand.” A man in a silk suit laughs and bids with the ease of someone naming the weather.
“Five million—no, two hundred million,” another voice throws numbers like coins. The rich do that. They buy things with breaths, with names.
I let the light move across my closed lids. I feel the chains the first time as an old memory, cold, familiar. Then something clicks inside my chest—anger, a small bright machine turning. I used to be Song Ning someone, another life that was mostly black, full of silent rooms and whispered threats. Now the name I answer to is Isabel Wells, because names must change in order to remember who we are.
Someone bids two hundred million and smirks.
He owns everything in his small sky. He owns a face people bow to. He owns a mouth that once told me promises like a shield. He is Everett Callahan. He smiles like he knows this will all end well—for him.
I open my eyes.
The room freezes.
The auctioneer keeps moving his hand to his screen. “Two hundred million. Do I have two—two million—”
I laugh.
A sound that does not belong in a room like this. A laugh like glass breaking. The lights catch the edges of me.
“Is she awake?” someone whispers. Men who thought they had everything step back. The red sheet glitters and suddenly my chest is not stitched to dark memory; it is a drum of heat.
I say his name without thinking. “Everett.”
He blinks. For one tremulous second he looks like the quiet boy in class. Then the old look pulls the corners of his mouth into a cat’s smile.
“Isabel Wells,” he says. “You’re—” He laughs. “A joke. Someone warm for rich men to imagine.”
The auctioneer counts. People shout out their numbers. Drinks clink. Then my hands move and something that had lived only in silence since I was seven slides across the floor toward me—a small key on a snake’s black body. The snakes surge like applause.
The room changes into a hungry place.
Snakes are not the only things that obey me. There were things I learned to call; I have customers whose names I never say aloud. I had paid a price for power when I was younger. A price of memory and bone. Gold-silk larvae hatched in my palm. Small eggs I kept like secrets grew under my fingers. They answer only to my blood.
A black snake carries a brass key in its teeth and drops it into my hand. The chain clicks. Metal gives.
I stand.
“You’re awake,” someone says with the sudden, stupid hope of a man who thinks any pain will show him bravery. It doesn’t matter which of them says it. They all smell the same now—fear flavoring their perfume.
I do not come to save the world. I come for a ledger. I come for names that wrote themselves over the flesh of others.
A woman screams. The snakes climb. The lights go hot as teeth.
I laugh until my voice is a blade. “Eat them,” I tell them.
They obey.
I walk through the bright room and serpents part for me like they are making way for a queen. People fall. I watch Everett Callahan’s face change from amusement to calculation to terror and then ruin. He tries to gather five words—apology, explanation—but the snakes move faster than his mouth.
They will remember this night.
After I leave them, after the lights gutter and the last phone goes dark—because afraid people drop their phones as though they are burning—I leave the way a shadow leaves a house: with the memory of heat on my back and the smell of copper in the air.
*
I am a student again for a while. I wear my backpack and study anatomy the way other girls study love. Fionn Morris sits behind me in the big library room and forgetfully asks about medicine. He is a boy whose eyes are honest like a closed door.
“You asked about my weekend,” he says once while he is bending over a page, pretending to do the math. “Did you go somewhere?”
“Just out of town,” I say. “I was working.”
“I saw you on the news,” he says. “They showed the auction. I thought—” He hesitates. “Are you okay?”
I smile a little and tell him nothing. He will learn the way everyone learns: the truth is heavier than it looks.
I buy a cheap room that is only one floor above the dark. I sleep in daylight sometimes. The others—always others—watch me as if I am a picture that will suddenly change. The city believes in its own masks. Dominick Solovyov is a bright name on many phones. He has the smugness of a man who believes in stories he makes.
“Did you see the video?” Keily Price asks me one afternoon, mascara already fading like she’d been crying. “They say the two girls—”
“Not my business,” I say.
She looks at me like I should care. “But—our faces—my face—”
“We will speak to each other in time,” I tell her. “For now, you get better. You heal. Keep your phone off.”
She nods and walks away like someone being pushed back into the storm.
Things begin to move in patterns I know like the lines on the hand. Adrian Clayton, the man who owns a bar called The Small Hour, watches me the way an owner watches his goods. He asks me for favors and I ask back in coins of a different sort. I let him think he holds the map when in fact the map is sewn into my skin.
I do not tell Fionn about the small eggs tucked in my pocket. I do not tell Keily about the little black beetles that climb to my shoulder when my skin is wet. I keep things so secret that sometimes I am afraid even to think.
There is a plan and plans are tools. I sharpen mine in the nights I do not sleep.
*
Weeks turn. My studies continue and the city spins its usual kind of cruelty. Dominick Solovyov and his friends—Dennis Cervantes and Hugo Gilbert—play like boys with a live grenade. They make a video sick enough to be greedy. They make it viral because someone wants to own the image of another person’s ruin.
They think they are powerful.
They are not.
I wait. I learn. I put the gold-silk larvae into safe vaults; I let the thin snakes slither and carry messages on their tongues. I give a few of my small ones to Gustav Wright, the man who runs errands, because loyalty is a trade and Gustav remembers his own debts.
The night I will make them remember is the night the city thinks a party will fix its fear.
Adrian Clayton throws his big dinner, full of white linen and polished wine, a show of new deals and old smiles. Everett Callahan comes because men like him cannot sit still with success when there is gossip. Georg Turner, his brother, comes because loyalty smells safer in crowds. Many of the guests wear the right faces to everything.
I come too, wounded at the edges but upright. I wrap scars into a white dress and I let them think it is softness.
“Isabel,” Everett says with a practiced warmth as though he could cure the world by smiling wide enough. “Come, stay by me. Cameras do love us tonight.”
“Everett,” I say. “It’s a big night for you.” I let the words be small and sharp at once.
They sit me behind a polite table, near enough to see but not to touch. Dominick’s hand brushes against the stem of the glass and it sings like a warning.
I watch. I wait.
When the signal comes, it is small—a cough on the other side of the building, a waitress dropping a tray on purpose. Snakes are patient. My gold-silk larvae have grown. They slither into the server’s bag, into the pockets of men who never look where their spiced ice goes. A subtle mist fills the room, the kind you notice only because someone else points to it and says the word “perfume.”
A voice calls for applause and the band moves to the front. The big screen at the wall lights up to show pictures of burning money and small, flattered faces. The room applauds, somewhere between devotion and muscle memory.
On the screen appears a clip—stolen, ugly—of two girls in a different room, the video slick with champagne and cruelty. Dominick smiles, thinking the video will be a thrill for his men. He is wrong.
My small snakes crawl along the buffet table, into shoes, into pockets. They are not all snakes. Some look like mice, some like beetles, but they are my children. They find the thread, the key that ties a man to his worse self, and they pull.
Dominick is the first to change.
He stands up to speak about business and, halfway through his speech, his face flushes. He gestures, and his sleeve feels heavy; a small, black thing appears, clings to his wrist. He slaps at it with a grin because he thinks it is a possibility for a joke. Then more appear. They climb his legs. The room stares.
“Is this part of your act?” someone laughs nervously.
Dominick tries profanity. The black things crawl into his collar, under his shirt. He fights, but his hands are not his own. He looks like a man trying to swim with a stone in his mouth.
“Get them off! Somebody—” He screams, and the scream is a sound like a knot being cut.
He moves toward the door and then a dozen small rodents, sharp-toothed and tiny, pour out from the base of the stage. They are my smallest ones; they were trained to creep, to bite, to expose.
The crowd rises as if an invisible conductor has pulled cords. People lean back. Wine sloshes. A woman drops a plate. Someone phones for security.
Dominick’s face goes white. He darts for a waiter, then for the kitchen. He runs into Georg Turner and knocks him aside. Georg does not move fast enough.
“What is this—” Georg starts.
The small creatures squeeze through shoes. My gold-silk larvae slither to collars and find warmth. They are not meant to kill, not at first. They are meant to wake the smell of truth.
Dominick’s smile falls off like a mask. He looks around at the faces he loved to use and realizes there are phones in every hand, faces in every light. The men who once high-five him now part like reeds.
“Please,” he says suddenly, like a man reciting a sentence he invented for a horror. “I’ll—” He kneels right in front of the bandstand, hands clasped as though he is begging a god. “Please, Isabel—please—”
They all think of me like a girl who broke. They do not know the part of me that learned to make gu work and how every little creature in my pocket answers to my voice. They do not know the precise science of the larvae that eat away at memory unless they are told to keep it. I step forward and speak slowly so that the whisper becomes a blade.
“You made a film of two girls,” I say. “You put it where people bite on it. You thought you could keep laughing. Tell them why.”
Dominick tries to bargain and stammers. “It was—joke—private—nobody—”
“Not private,” I say. “Public. You all played at cruelty together. You showed the world a certain kind of story. Now I will show the world yours.”
From the table behind me a waiter drops a wine bottle. The shatter is a drum, a thunder that wakes everyone’s phones. The screen instead of being a background now shows the full video—which Dominick had thought would hum in the dark corners of the city—streamed live to every screen in the room and then out to the web. The video carries with it names, texts, receipts. It carries the date the men met to transfer the file. It carries Dominique’s receipts for hotel rooms, guest lists. The broadcast pulls back each curtain of privilege and exposes the men like threads.
The first change in Dominick’s face is disbelief. He laughs, a high thin sound. The second is pride—he stands, raises his chin—then an ocean of other feelings hits him. He forgets how to use words the way some forget how to breathe. “I—this is—” he begins and stops.
From the edge of the crowd a young woman whose name I do not say yet stands up and points a trembling camera. She had been one of the pieces in their game. She points and her hands do not shake now. She is not alone. People are standing with phones like torches.
“Tell them it was you,” I say.
Dominick tries to deny. “No—no—this is false—”
A rustle moves through the room like a wind and the small snakes I have given to Gustav find the men who helped him. They climb up their legs and tuck under their collars. They press into their ears and whisper like old friends. The men who had thought themselves invincible now have a new sensation: each breath is a foreign weight. They want to speak but small black larvae tickle the soft skin of their throats, urging the truth out with pain.
They confess.
“Okay—okay—it was me,” Dominick gasps to anyone who will listen, but also to no one at all. The confession cracks like an open shell. He gives the names, the nights, the cruelty, the jokes that were not jokes. He names the hotels, the laughter that was recorded, the exact moment he thought he had conquered someone else.
Dennis Cervantes tries to pull out a phone and delete the record, but his fingers are trembling too much.
Hugo Gilbert begins to scream. “No—this is not—” He had been laughing three weeks ago; he cannot anymore. Blood rises to his face and then another ugly shadow takes the place of color.
I watch the crowd. Some of those who laughed before now grip their phones and start filming not the victims but the men who had so easily made victims of others. The men’s faces move through the stages of shame as if I were a cruel painter switching palettes: from surprise to denial to anger to collapse.
“Please,” Dominick says again, but this time his voice is small. “I can—buy back—money—”
“You sold a part of someone else,” I say. “There is a price.”
They do not die this night. They do not get eaten in the center of the room. Punishment can be many things. Tonight, the law sees the footage in minutes. The web eats the men. The board members who had once laughed at the idea of scandal call their lawyers. Their sponsors phone indictments like prayers.
They kneel in the light and the cameras record each flutter of their eyes. People around them—waiters, guests who had once smirked—grab phones, take pictures, ask questions, push microphones like knives. They are not the same men they were when they walked in. Their hair is still the same, their suits still tailored, but their names will no longer be whispers in private rooms. Their names will be a feed that people swallow all at once.
They go from smug to shocked to pleading. “I’ll do anything,” Dennis says. “Just don’t—” He looks at me with a small, thin hope.
“Anything?” I ask.
“Anything,” he repeats.
The crowd laughs at him because this is the sound of the privileged learning what hunger is. People shout for police. Someone drags a copy of the video across the table and presses it toward a journalist. Cameras flash and the room becomes an arena of recorded shame.
Later, in the cold light of the morning, they will be arrested. They will lose work, friends will delete pictures of them from old albums, families will say they did not know. Their reputations will collapse in ways the men who bought everything had never expected.
The public punishment I deliver that night is not only fear and exposure. It is the unraveling of carefully constructed dignity. The audience is a jury and the world is the courtroom. People shout at them. They try to speak. They cry. They bargain. Admirers turn away. One by one the men drop to the floor like bad puppets whose strings have been cut.
They change in front of the cameras. They are not simply taken away by law; they are stripped of the one thing they valued most: anonymity and the right to be forgotten. Each confession on their lips is a step closer to being someone who must live with having been seen.
It is long, more than any sentence a judge can pronounce in a single day. It is not clean; it smells like sweat and spilled wine and the cheap perfume of the frightened. But it is public, as I promised myself it would be. The world watches and remembers. The rich men try to hold on to the last pieces of their dignity and fail.
When it ends, they are left in ruins of their own making, crying, coughing, naming old misdeeds into tiny microphones. Anything—they had screamed—anything is their last chant, but there is no more buying back. The price of their cruelty has been set in a ledger that millions can open.
I stand in the doorway. Fionn is nearby. He looks at me as if checking for a wound, ready with a bandage he cannot really give.
“You did it,” he says quietly.
“I did what I had to,” I say.
He offers me a hand. “Will you be okay?”
I look at the place where Everett is sitting like someone watching his house burn. He will not be allowed to be untouched either; the ledger is long. I think of the things I still have to do and the names on the list that wrap like vines.
“I will be,” I say. “But I will not stop.”
*
They call me many things after that night. A monster, a vigilante, a witch. People send messages that glow in the corners of the rooms, many filled with the same two words: thank you, or kill her. Ever since I first tasted the heavy power of gu, I have understood one simple rule: power without purpose breaks things without fixing them.
I have purpose. My purpose is a list. Everett Callahan sits in his expensive house and watches the news and, for the first time, finds that money does not make people forgive him.
Fionn stands with me in the library in the weeks that follow and asks small things, questions with light in them that hurt because light is rare in the places I grew up.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asks one winter afternoon, his palms open like a soft prayer.
“Keep coming,” I tell him. “Bring me the stupid jokes you like. Tell me the proofs you cannot perfect on your own. Be a promise I can keep.”
He smiles, and that becomes a debt I do not mind paying.
But debts are not the only thing. There are other names on the list. There is a brother who thinks he can save a company by selling his soul for a family name. Georg Turner thinks money will fix what has been broken. He does not understand the slow, certain work of a woman who learned at the edge of dying how to keep a ledger balanced.
He will learn.
I have other things to do before I let my heart sit down in any place. There are people I still have to see in the daylight to make sure nothing grows back into their mouths.
Some nights Fionn visits me in the small white room I keep like a lab. Sometimes I show him the careful work of a woman who understands anatomy by the curve of a bone and the breath in a wild animal. He does not ask about the worms; he only asks for coffee.
“Coffee?” I offer, and we laugh like two children who have been allowed to stay up late on a holiday. The laugh has fractures in it but is not broken.
One late summer night I stand on a small balcony above the city. Below, the world goes on with its comfortable cruelty. My hands are empty.
In my pocket a little whistle waits. I had given one to Keily Price, to help her remember she could call when needed. I had given one to others.
I wind the brass key I carry in my fingers. It clicks in my palm like a small drum. The larvae stir, as if remembering a distant hunger.
I do not take joy in what I have made. I take responsibility. I took names from people who thought they could erase other people. I turned their laughter into evidence. I have made a ledger that cannot be burned. I have taught the city the smell of accountability.
I look at the bright place where Everett’s name sits in the sky and I let the snakes sleep.
I will visit other rooms. I will write more names into the book I carry like a haunted map. There are roads that go back to my island and people who still carry my blood and a past with teeth.
But for now I close my eyes and feel Fionn’s hand, small and steady, in mine.
The gold-silk larvae curl like a sleeping thing and a faint sound, like a bell wound in a tiny box, hums inside my pocket. It is the sound of a key turning. It is the sound that means there will be more lists, more balance, more terrible, necessary order.
When morning comes I will send a small message to Keily telling her to be safe, and to Dominick Solovyov’s lawyers that evidence exists in many more places than he thinks.
Outside, someone laughs and a child drops a paper plane. The city keeps living. I will go on living in it, as a woman who knows the price of breaking the world and the cost of making it keep its promises.
I keep the little key in the place closest to my heart. When I wind it, the gold-silk larvae stir and the ledger flips to a new page. The smell of copper rises and I smile because revenge without purpose is only rage and I am something else now.
I am Isabel Wells. I have names to settle and a snake’s quiet patience. The work is not done.
The End
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