Revenge13 min read
I Gave Him Everything — Then the City Took Back Its Monsters
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I stood at the university gate with my palms curled around five hundred yuan. I had worked the afternoon shift at the hotpot place, saved the tip, and thought of Giuseppe Shaw as I folded the bills into my palm.
He was there, bent down, voice low and soft. A girl in heels sat on the curb, one ankle twisted, a smear of blood where her heel had rubbed. Her hair hid her face but not the way Giuseppe looked at her — gentle, a tenderness I had never seen reserved for me.
I froze. I tucked the scar on my forearm behind my back without meaning to. It had come from steam at the restaurant; I kept it hidden like a private truth.
“Go,” I whispered to myself. “Give him the money and leave.”
He turned then, saw me, and walked fast. He took my wrist like it was natural. “You came?”
“I came to give you money,” I said, forcing a bright smile. “I— I’ll go now.” I said the word “brother” as if it were a shield. “Brother, I brought money. I’ll go.”
Giuseppe looked into my eyes. “She hurt her foot,” he said carefully. “She’s in pain, that’s all. Nothing else.” His voice named things plainly, like he was building proof.
The girl straightened. She and Giuseppe looked like they matched — soft dress, soft hair, his hand at the small of her back. I felt small. I felt like the cheap canvas bag I carried.
I ran. No one knew he was my boyfriend, my neighbor, the only person who’d really seen how I worked with my hands, who had read poems to me under the sun. No one knew I’d given him everything so he could go to college.
We were children once, both from the same cracked village. We learned how to split corn and plant sweet yam. I worked fast. He read under trees and looked pale, like the sun had no right to touch him.
“You don’t understand,” he said once, holding a bottle of iodine for a cut on my mouth after I’d been beaten by girls who wanted him. “You don’t understand.”
I did not understand then that some things are hunger, some things are choice.
Giuseppe went to university. I stayed by the hotpot door, cutting vegetables, wrapping dumplings. He read; I saved. He promised me marriage after graduation.
“Of course,” he said once, taking my small hand in the half-dark of our cheap dorm room. “When I have a future, I’ll take you.”
He didn’t mean it the way I wanted.
The first time I saw Chiara Stewart at Giuseppe’s side, I felt a cold settle in my ribs. She smiled with teeth that knew better meals. Giuseppe smiled back as if his chest had melted.
Chiara’s brother, Vaughn Riley, found me that summer. He left no room for fear to breathe; he crowded me with violence, humiliation, and control.
“You owe me,” he said the first time he stood in our hotpot shop, leaning like he owned the light. “You gave him money. You belong to him and my sister now.”
His men came often. They sat loud and rough, a flock of vultures with cash. They made me fetch, clean, and bow. Once a soup spilled on a bag — a designer bag worth ten thousand, they said — and I apologized like I deserved to kneel.
“Pay up,” Vaughn demanded. “Or we collect.”
I tried to hide my fear in the constant work. I tried to keep the little dignity of packing leftover fish balls in my apron.
Vaughn’s game was cruel and direct. He came to the restaurant with men and shoved me into trash, slammed me against a dumpster, threw garbage, told stories to strip me of any pride. But when he bored, he returned to me in a strange, possessive tenderness. “You’ll stay with me,” he said once in a villa room with soft lamps. “I’ll fatten you up. I’ll make you respectable.”
He fed me and then he claimed me. He called me his pet, his treasure, and when I pushed away he would press a cigarette to the leather of his sofa like it was my fault.
One night he dragged me to a gambling den. He laughed at me in public, made men watch me peel shrimp at a table like I was a show. His sister Chiara sat on his side and smiled like she had bought the sun.
“Do it,” he told me. “Show them you’re mine.”
Once, he took me to an abandoned factory with hulking men watching. He balanced a stack of bottles and, when I didn’t pay, he made me break my head against them until the taste of iron filled my mouth. He lifted his chin and said, “You’ll remember what you owe.”
The debts built like a dark mountain. He said I owed ninety-seven thousand at one point and punctured me with a laugh. “So thin. Let me feed you. You can be mine and mine alone.”
I learned to speak carefully. I learned to collect the names of men who entered the casino, to write them in a small notebook and hide it in a stuffed toy I kept from Giuseppe. I recorded faces on my mind. I marked time by the sound of bottles and the clink of dice.
There was a girl in the den named Adelyn Rashid. She used to be like me, soft and hopeful; then she told me about a boyfriend who once wanted to be clean and failed. She spoke of how the den chewed people. She spoke of small, stubborn dreams to leave.
Adelyn was sent to watch me, but she grew to be my closest friend. She told me about her boyfriend Brandon Vogel last breath, about how his relapse turned into rage, and how he became someone else — and then, after a woman he loved died, he was reborn into a single long-purpose: to bring down the men who had destroyed her.
“Run with me when I say,” Adelyn whispered the night we planned. “We will go together. I’ll make sure they watch me and not you.”
I trusted her.
Giuseppe gathered bits of power. He cultivated people in official places and whispered names into ears that could topple houses. When men like Vaughn rise, they are always higher than the houses they crush; they have ropes into cops, into judges, into shadowed money.
Giuseppe came and stood at the edge of my cage, voice small. “Wait,” he said. “Wait for me. I have a way.”
I believed him because I had given him everything.
And yet when the chance came — the chance to hand in the thick notebook, the recorded nights, the dealers, the license plates — the chance I had dreamed about while cutting dumplings, I found my proof switched. Names had disappeared from print. Video files were gone.
I realized then that Giuseppe was no savior. He had been moving pieces of the same chessboard. He had told Vaughn part of the plan sometimes, left out other parts, and shaped a net that would catch some men and spare others.
“I had to do it,” he said one night when I ran into him behind a municipal building. “I had to keep my hands clean. If I break everything now, they will burn everything. Trust me.”
His hands were shaking. He had that fevered look of a man who has read too many judicial files and learned to love the sound of his own logic.
I did not trust him. I believed only that he loved me in a way, and that he was as willing as anyone to use my pain as mortar for a higher wall.
Then came the night at the ferry terminal. I thought Giuseppe would take me out of the city, to safety in a small foreign room with no men knocking on doors. I thought his pockets had cash and maps of escape.
Instead, I stood on the quay, belly swollen with a child I had not been allowed to keep, and watched a staged chaos. Men screamed. A gun roared. Bodies thudded into the sea. The ship's horn screamed, white and pitiless.
Vaughn stepped off the boat like a winter storm. He clasped me by the arm, smiling as if he had purchased sunlight. “You tried to leave,” he said. “You tried to take what is mine.”
Giuseppe lunged and clung to me. “Take her,” he begged, voice raw and thin.
I saw then that Giuseppe had been playing a dangerous game — a game that traded my life for leverage. The sea swallowed two shadows tossed from the deck. Sirens wailed. Men in dark suits pushed Giuseppe back and dragged him onto the ferry. Vaughn stayed ashore and let the chaos do his work.
“Let them fight it out,” he said, low to me. “One less obstacle.”
When the dust settled, I learned who had been on which side. The city’s investigators, led by Everett Guerin, found videotapes hidden in places only a desperate girl could. They found messages Giuseppe had left himself, pieces of his plan. Giuseppe’s name moved from admired advisor to suspect in a web much larger than mine.
I worked the way I had always worked: quietly, with hands that remembered every wound. I handed my notebook to Everett’s team. I told them about the men in masks, about the girl in the corner who had been forced into a room, about the signals passengers used when a woman needed help.
“It will be dangerous,” Everett said. “But we’ll get them.”
Adelyn told me to wait on the third floor of the municipal guest house while the team made their move.
The arrest of Vaughn Riley happened in public, and the punishment that followed was the kind of unspooling every town wants to witness.
It was a bright morning. The square outside the courthouse filled quickly — neighbors, victims, cameras, petty gawkers, and serious people with notebooked faces. I stood with my jacket buttoned tight, Adelyn by my side, while Everett placed a hand briefly on my shoulder.
Then Vaughn stepped out of the car. He was the same man — tall, commanding, the kind of person a room listened to even when no one should have. He wore sunglasses at first, and a suit that cost money. Men clicked cameras at him like capture-buttons of a hunting party.
“He thinks he owns the sun,” someone behind me muttered.
Vaughn smiled. The smile was at once arrogant and bored. He passed the courthouse threshold with the kind of swagger that mocked legality.
When they read the charges — trafficking, forced confinement, assault, racketeering — the crowd shifted. Some people cheered. Some gasped. I watched his face the whole time.
At first he was calm. “The government is wrong,” he said to cameras. “They cannot handle a city of my scale.” He spoke like a man reciting lines he had rehearsed.
Then the room filled with testimony. Survivors came forward, their voices cracked but honest. They told about rooms where masks were worn, about cameras hidden in chandeliers, about bottles and threats. They named men, dates, faces.
As each name fell from their mouths, Vaughn’s eyes tightened. The first change came slow — a tightening of the jaw, a flicker of concern. Then the shock: he listened to a damaging tape played in court, the recording of his own words, his orders. The voice that had barked over rooms, ordering compliance, sounded small and ordinary played back in the hush of the courtroom.
He tried to grin, to wave his hand as if dismissing it. “That’s cut,” his lawyer insisted. “Selective, edited.”
The judge looked up. “We will consider all evidence.”
The arraignment drew on. At one point a young woman from the den stood and pointed. “He told me,” she said loud enough for everyone to hear, "he said, 'If you don't do as I say, you will die.'"
The crowd murmured; a man in the back began to weep. The woman collapsed into her mother's arms. Vaughn stared as if she had spat in his food.
Then the unforgivable change: he lost control.
He rose from his seat like a puppet with cut strings. “Lies!” he shouted. “Lies! You— you bought them.” His hands shook. He stumbled against his own table. For a moment he was obscene with fury and naked fear.
People who had recorded him laughing at other times now pressed their phones to their faces and filmed the man in collapse. A woman beside me hissed, “Look at him. Look at the tyrant fall.”
Vaughn tried to spin a web of denial. “I helped her,” he said suddenly, meaning me. “I loved a different girl. She’s using this.”
“No more deflection,” Everett said when he rose to speak. Everett’s voice was steady and cold. “You will answer to what you did.”
Then came the public undoing. Lawyers produced bank records. Men whose names filled my notebook stepped forward and described how payments flowed to shell companies Vaughn controlled. A hotel manager testified about rooms that were paid in cash, rooms that housed women who never seemed to leave. The prosecutor painted the pattern in colors too clear to deny.
Vaughn’s face went through stages. First the stunned denial. “No, no, not me.” Then a sputtering of lies. “They made a deal. They threatened me.” Then anger. He mocked witnesses. He sneered. And at last — the collapse. He slumped, palms on knees, breath heaving, the king of a private realm reduced to someone who could not stand under the light of a hundred cameras.
“Please,” he said in a thin voice once he realized the jury believed more than his braggadocio. “Please, I — I can give money. I can— I will do anything.”
People around us had different faces: some spat hate; some snapped photos; some simply turned their faces away. A cluster of young survivors applauded; a chorus of neighbors murmured about justice. A camera man from a national station pushed a microphone toward him.
“Do you accept responsibility?” the reporter asked.
He laughed then, weakly. “I did many things,” he said. “But I—”
“Are you sorry?” another voice called.
He stared at the floor and did not answer right away. The stare was the longest part of his punishment — the court and the cameras and the people who had once believed in him insisted he look at the wreckage he created. When he did, the expression cracked into one of raw remorse, but it was too late for repentance to be comfortable.
Vaughn was sentenced publicly. The judge pronounced years and fines, forfeiture of property, and a public listing of his crimes. The decision was not a simple end; the scene itself became the punishment. Outside, a crowd pressed in. Some victims spat in his direction. A woman I did not know lifted her head and yelled, “You’re nothing!”
He begged then, voice thin and near-broken. “Don’t take my money!” he pleaded. “Don’t— please!” He tried to bargain with trembling hands.
Bystanders reacted like a tide. Some booed. Some filmed. Some wept. A few older men crossed themselves and whispered about karma. Cameras whirred. People made notes, posted live feeds.
“Look at him,” Adelyn said into my ear. “He pretends god.”
I felt nothing clean in watching him fall. I felt hollow and a little lighter, like a house where a rotten beam had finally come down.
Giuseppe, too, had to stand in a public square later. He had been part of the calculations; he had twisted evidence and tried to direct the net to catch only certain fish. He had thought he could spare me while he climbed. He thought he could use shadows for his future.
In his punishment, the exposure was different. It was not just a court judgment; it was the press conference where survivors read messages Giuseppe had sent to Vaughn and to Everett’s team. He stood at a podium and tried to explain.
“I did it for you,” he said to me through the lens of a thousand cameras. “I did it to keep you safe.”
“You used me,” I said into the microphone Adelyn held up for me, voice steady. “You used my life to buy a future for yourself.”
Giuseppe’s face showed something like an animal losing a limb. He tried to deny. “I— I thought the ends justified the means.”
“You thought you could shepherd monsters and not get blood on your hands?” Everett demanded from the side.
Giuseppe’s shoulders trembled. He begged then, stuttered, tried to apologize, to explain, to buy back the trust we had given him.
The crowd circled. People shouted questions. Someone in the press asked the one thing I wanted answered: “Why didn’t you tell her the truth?”
Giuseppe lowered his head. “I was afraid,” he said. “Afraid of losing everything. Afraid of losing power.”
He reached out, as if to touch me, as if contact could erase years.
“You used me,” I said again. “You built your ladder on my back. I carried you. You forgot me.”
He knelt then, not because a judge told him but because the city had decided to force humility. He begged the people, the victims, and me. The cameras recorded the final humiliation of a man who had claimed himself protector and became predator.
The reactions were a tide of pain and anger. The woman whose daughter had been trafficked spat at him. A man who had been beaten by Vaughn cursed him. Others stood silent and heavy. The press scribbled.
They took Giuseppe into custody. He appealed, argued, pleaded. A court later found him complicit in obstruction and corruption. He lost his position. He lost the right to work in public office for years. Most of all, he lost what he had built — not as a legal punishment only but as the public shaming that never heals.
I did not clap when Vaughan or Giuseppe fell. I remember standing quiet, feeling my belly move, feeling the life inside that I had decided to keep as a weapon and as a hope. I felt nothing like triumph. I felt like a woman who had been carved out of a hard life and left to piece herself together.
Adelyn left the den with Brandon’s help. He had been a man of shame and addiction who found a purpose in last acts. He testified with hands that shook and told the truth that decades of money could not bury.
Everett and his team worked through months of court. Pieces unfolded: contracts, hotel ledgers, nighttime calls. The city turned its lights on monsters who had thrived in darkness. Men went to jail. Properties were seized. The gambling rooms shuttered. Survivors found shelter and programs. The den’s patrons hung their heads when their names were called in public lists.
Months later, I took the stuffed toy that held my small notebook and stitched a new seam where my secrets had been kept. I sat on the roof of a building that overlooked the river, the place where Vale Road dipped and the city light pooled.
“Are you going to keep it?” Adelyn asked, standing beside me. Her hair was shorter now, honest.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. It reminds me of how small things can hold a whole truth.”
She laughed a little. “You are not small, Gia.”
“I was small when I folded money into my palm and thought love was a promise made with a single hand,” I said. “I was small when I thought giving meant losing nothing.”
She leaned on my shoulder. “You mean you did not lose nothing. You gained the courage to stand.”
The final papers went through. Vaughn was sentenced to death because his crimes were of a severity that the court could not mitigate — the judge’s words were harsh and precise. He wrote a letter to me that smelled of smoke and regret. He left money in an account under my name, clumsy handwriting across ink-smudged paper. It was a grotesque, tender thing: an offer and a plea.
I used the money not for myself but to help those who had nowhere. Shelters, legal fees, programs for addiction, safe homes. I sent help for my father to a place where he could learn work without shame and gave a payment for my mother’s care long before she died. No money could stitch back what was cut, but it bought medical help and a chance to breathe.
Giuseppe served years in jail. He wrote to me once. “I am sorry,” he said simply, in a thin letter. He had nothing to buy back but remorse.
Vaughn’s final day was not a spectacle for me. The public sentencing had been the punishment I needed to see. The rest, the legal requirements, the state’s procedures, closed the chapter.
I kept the red string he had given me when we were children — a token that used to mean promise. I tied it around my wrist and let it fray. Sometimes I trace the scar on my arm and think about the girl who once fed on left-over fish balls and thought nobody would listen.
I learned to love myself the way one learns a handicraft: carefully, with a hundred small stitches.
On the anniversary of the day I first walked to the university gate, I went back and left five hundred yuan in an envelope at the bench where I had first seen Giuseppe with Chiara. The money was not for him. It was for a student who looked hungry on a night with low light.
I wrote nothing. I left no note.
As I walked away, Adelyn called my name. “Gia—”
I stopped, turned, and smiled.
“I’m going to learn to sew,” I told her. “I want to mend things that can still be mended.”
She laughed. “You already did.”
The city had taken its monsters and given them the punishment the law could afford. Justice did not fix everything. It did not unmake the nights or the bruises. But it cleared a space where survivors could make a life.
I kept the stuffed toy in a drawer. Inside, my little notebook lay fat with names. I had given it up to the right people. I had kept the child inside me who used to braid red beads and recite a poem that Giuseppe once read aloud:
"Little bean from the south, spring will come and you will swell,
Gather what you can; the thing we store is longing."
I touched the red thread on my wrist. It had softened and faded. I let the end hang loose.
When they asked me later if I forgave Giuseppe or Vaughn, I told them, quietly, “Forgiveness is not a single word I owe. It’s a process. I’m learning to live after it.”
“And the baby?” someone asked.
I smiled like a small secret. “He will grow up with a life that is mine to decide,” I said.
Outside, a woman who had been to the den years ago walked past with a child on her hip. She glanced at me and nodded. It was the kind of nod that said more than law or sentence. It said, “We survived.”
I walked on.
The End
— Thank you for reading —