Revenge11 min read
I Returned to Rewrite My Life—and Make Him Pay
ButterPicks13 views
I wake up with my forehead pressed to cold porcelain and a hospital-scented panic in my nostrils, and the first thing I hear is a hand on my shoulder and a voice that sounds like the worst echo of my past.
"Lucia," a younger version of a man I once trusted says in my ear, "just put the same school on your form. Who cares about two hundred points? Our love is worth more than any score."
I push my face up from the rim of the tub—no, not a tub now—a hospital bed—and stare at an old university application on a white screen. My body is eighteen again. The date reads 2008.
"You're sure?" I ask before I have a chance to think.
He grins like he owns the world. "Of course. We'll be together. Always."
The voice is Ethan Armenta's. In my last life I followed him like a moth to a careless flame. I answered him, believe him, defended him against my father, lied to myself for months and then years, until my life was a single, ugly long fall. This time the moth is a vulture. I remember everything.
I take a breath and play the same fool.
"Fine," I say aloud, softer. "Tourism management. We'll both put tourism management."
Ethan's face—young, smug, certain—relaxes. "That's my girl," he says. "We're together, nothing can break us."
He finishes speaking as I smile at him, but inside I'm ten years older and much, much meaner.
The first week after I come back, I watch myself choose. I watch my younger self laugh at the thought of leaving home and tell my parents I'm doing it for love. They scowl; my father's face goes stone when I announce my decision.
"You're throwing away your future?" my father says.
"Not throwing away," my younger voice replies, bright and stupid. "Choosing differently."
"You're choosing a dead end," my father says, but his anger and worry are softened because for the first time I see him younger, softer. I hug my mother and feel heat like sunlight on a winter morning. They don't know everything. They don't know what my ignorance will cost me.
That night, my father calls someone—calm, low-voiced. "Mr. Bradley? Yes. My daughter is going to school in your city. Can you look after her?"
The name Julian Bradley slips into the scene like a cool breeze. Later I will understand why my older self remembers that name with a strange kind of gratitude. For now, I just smile at my parents because this time, I say, this time I will not fall apart.
Julian Bradley meets me at the station. He is not warm; he is not cold in a dramatic way. He is precise, efficient, and immovable in a way that makes me feel safer than any lover's promise ever did.
"I'm Julian," he says, handing me a small paper card with my name on it. "You look like you could use help with your luggage."
He lifts my three ridiculous suitcases as if they are feathers. My mother spends like a woman who has discovered a hidden vault in the basement; my bags are heavier than I look. I am sixteen inside and twenty-eight in memory. The knot in my chest tightens.
A moment later my phone lights up. Ethan's voice, sharp and possessive: "Lucia, come to my dorm to help me set up—bring sheets. Don't be late."
Julian doesn't comment. He drives calmly. The car scent is leather and a book I haven't read yet. "If you ever need anything," he says, "remember to take care of yourself first."
His words land like a small stone into a still pond. Ripples.
I laugh. "Take care of myself? Julian, you have no idea."
He glances at me. "Try me."
"People like him," I say, meaning Ethan, "need to fall higher before they break."
Julian doesn't smile; he simply says, "Just don't break."
I drop my voice when I tell Ethan we will be in the same city. I make sure my face is soft when I say, "I will come visit, I promise."
Inside, I'm filing the memory away: the way he laughed at my excuses in the old life, the way he led me slowly into dependency with praise and small rewards, the way he broke me like twigs.
Ethan believes me immediately. He has always believed in his power over me.
"Really?" he asks, like a man who has been handed a key. "You'll be here often? You know, we could save on travel. Think of the shoes, Lucia. Think of the—"
"AJ," I finish for him. "Yes. You can have all the AJ you want."
Money is the one thing that reels him in. In my past life, when my mother secretly slid cash to my hand, he took it and ran—literally went to show off. This time, I will use his greed like a leash.
School begins. I pour myself into books the way other women pour themselves into love. I do not want to be the quiet, broken thing I was. I want a map out: knowledge, skill, power. I choose hotel management because now I know what the industry is and isn't. I will not be a hotel waitress. I will own the hotel.
I study marketing theories and finance the way I once studied the small sparks of promise in Ethan's eyes. Julian is in the background—always a paragraph away in my life. He watches me from across lecture halls and later from the hotel front desk. He is a man who reads balance sheets like love letters.
"You're very good," Julian says one afternoon when we take a break in the staff room. "You always raise your hand. You keep your notes neat, and your questions are not idle."
I glance at him. "Do you think determination is attractive?"
He looks at me like a man assessing the weather. "I think determination keeps people alive."
I pretend not to notice the tightening in my chest. Yet the warmth Julian's concern shows feels new, like someone tapping a window to wake me.
Ethan is always there too, like a recurring commercial. He asks for money steadily, and I oblige on a schedule, not out of love but as an investment in his expectations. "If you keep giving," I tell myself, "he will stay. If you lead him, he will believe he rules."
He believes it. He always wanted to believe he deserved the world.
Then, one day, the rumor lands like a stone.
"He's seeing someone new," the girl at the coffee shop says, quietly but with a relish I know far too well.
"Who?" I ask, feeling my heartbeat do the old, stupid drum.
"Amber," she says. "Amber Berger. Cute, fresh-faced. She likes him."
Amber Berger. I have seen that face before, the kind that is soft and knowing and ready to be loved. I think of the hospital room from my earlier life and the small, sharp, vicious things that woman said as I lay vulnerable. My hands go cold.
I watch Ethan change his timing from steady calls to frantic pleas. He needs me sometimes. He needs me when the bills are due and the men at his table make jokes over his losses. He also needs someone to whisper to when he wants cover. I prepare the net.
"Follow him," I tell myself. "Watch. Learn. Then set the stage."
The stage is a hotel lobby where I have privileges and a manager who will play his role well. The hotel's general manager knows me as the owner's daughter now, and his face relaxes at my arrival. He moves with the ease of a man who knows how to make drama land where he wants it.
I plan the scene: a Friday, when men like Ethan are most inclined to be careless. I plant myself behind the main desk with a smile, as if I am still eighteen and naturally graceful. When Ethan appears with Amber, I walk straight up to them.
"You two look cozy," I say, loud enough for the crowd to hear.
Amber freezes like an animal in headlights. Ethan reflexively shifts, putting himself between us like a boy who mistakenly thinks he can still charm the future.
"Lucia—" he starts, breathless, a man's hand trying to find the script he rehearsed in his head.
"Don't," I say, and then I walk up and strike him. The slap lands like the currency I had spent for a decade.
"How dare you," Amber hisses.
"Lucia!" Ethan shouts, his face a bloom of hurt and rage.
"Look at me," I tell him, slow and savage. "You took my life. You took my child. You lied while I mended my body and my heart."
The hotel manager is already at my elbow. "Miss Burton," he says, ultra-polite. "Please—this is our lobby."
"Yes," I reply. "Your lobby. My blood paid for your chandeliers."
The crowd wakes. Phones lift like flowers. I speak loud and plain, because there is no poetry in this moment—only a ledger.
"He promised me the world and gave me gravel. He left me to bleed, and then he bared his teeth at me in a hospital room and called me a worthless woman. You were there, Amber. You watched him leave me broken."
Amber's face falters. Ethan's expression is a movie reel of denial, fury, and then calculation. He tries to seize the narrative.
"She doesn't know what she's saying," he says. "I didn't—"
The hotel manager presses me, "Miss Burton, please—"
"Don't stop me," I say. "Make sure it counts, do you understand? Let them see."
The manager's eyes flick to me, and then, in a move that warms me more than apologies ever did, he lets it happen and positions a security guard so Ethan cannot move without notice.
"You're being dramatic," Ethan says, though his voice wavers. "If you have proof, take it to the police. Don't make a show."
"A show?" I laugh, and my voice is a blade. "This is your show. This is the show you put on for every new girl who thought you promising. This is a highlight reel of your career. I am only the ending."
Someone in the crowd whispers, "Isn't she the hotel owner's daughter?" A man behind them says, "She has the temper. Good for her."
The gossip spreads. Ethan's face goes pale. Amber begins to cry—whether in shame or fear I can't tell. The crowd begins a chorus: shutter clicks, whispers, a few frank gasps.
Then the security guard steps forward and asks Ethan to leave the premise as a disturbance. Ethan wiggles, vicious.
"You're making this personal!" he says. "You set me up!"
"Set you up?" I ask. "You set yourself up by stealing from your own company, by gambling, by taking what isn't yours. You think the court will buy your lies because you have a pretty mouth? Watch what happens when everyone else finally looks at the ledger."
That very week, the ledger will speak. The law will speak. My plan has teeth. I learned the law by night during exams, pulling threads and noting who could be pushed.
Ethan begins to panic. He calls, pleads, bribes. He tries to make the world believe that I am the lying ex who wants revenge, the drama queen. He says I manipulated the hotel's manager, that I wield influence. He does not see that it is his own greed that made him careless.
I keep my face calm while I watch him unravel.
"You will pay for what you took," I tell him quietly later, when there is no audience. "Not with money—though I can pay for a lot. You'll pay in what you fear most: exposure, disgrace, and a life you can't sell back."
He laughs, a wet, ugly sound. "You can't do this to me. I'm—I'm going to ruin you."
"Try," I say.
I make sure everything lines up. I plant suggestion with staff, I discreetly tip off creditors, I feed a journalist a thread about embezzlement, and I follow the money like a hungry hawk.
Months of carefully arranged evidence roll forward like a slow storm. Ethan thinks he can outwait me. He cannot.
When the day of the hearing comes, the public gallery is full. Cameras cluster on the outside of the courthouse. People lean into the courtroom windows. I sit near the front, straight-backed, and I let him look at me when he walks in, handcuffed and stubborn.
"Lucia! Lucia!" he stumbles, his voice cracking. "You promised—"
"Keep your promises," I say, plain. "They mean nothing to a man like you."
Judge and prosecutor and defense trade legal dance steps. But this is not just a trial; it's a theatre where every small untruth Ethan told is exposed. The prosecutor has a dry, quiet voice. "Mr. Armenta," he says, "the records show serial transfers. We have witnesses. We have bank statements. We have signatures."
Ethan's face changes from bravado to confusion to anger—then to whittling panic. "I didn't do it!" he says. "I would never—"
"You did," the lead accountant testifies, calm and clear. "You reclassified funds, you hid transfers, you moved money to personal accounts you controlled."
Ethan points at me, voice high with accusation: "She set me up! She's been sending me messages, promising me a future I couldn't refuse. She wanted to ruin me!"
A murmur goes through the courtroom. "Is that true?" the judge asks me.
I find that I don't need a long speech. I am efficient now; I've learned the economy of truth.
"No," I say. "He ruined himself. He used my money, my family's resources, and then when the debts came due he gambled them away. He lied to everyone, including the people in this courtroom."
The crowd leans forward. A woman near me whispers, "Go on."
I smile. "Do you want the truth? He was careless because he thought I would always fix everything. He thought he could charm the world. He took from his own company, then hid it. This is not a setup. This is arithmetic."
Ethan's respiratory pattern stutters. He slides through the range of emotions fast, like someone flipping channels. At first he is furious, swinging his fists at the idea that his image is being stripped. Next he tries to compose himself, to speak under instruction. "Your Honor, I—this is a misunderstanding."
"Under oath," the prosecutor says, "Mr. Armenta, did you withdraw funds for gambling debts?"
There is a pause that stretches like a drawn curtain. The cameras outside pick up the small sounds: a cough, a pen click. Ethan's brow furrows. For a split second, I see the old boy in his eyes. Then he goes red and lashes out, "This woman is a liar!"
"Order," the bailiff snaps, but the courtroom is on fire.
And then the judge reads the part everyone has been waiting for. "Given the evidence, Mr. Armenta is convicted of embezzlement for funds exceeding the statutory threshold. The court sentences you to ten years' imprisonment."
Ethan's face collapses in a way I remember from the hospital bed a decade ago. "No," he says, "no, you can't—"
He bangs his head against the glass of the defendant's box. "Lucia! Lucia! Please!"
His voice turns from pleading to pleading with a stranger. His defense attorney murmurs snippets of legal jargon about appeals, but the gallery shakes with whispered verdict. People lean back as if the whole story dropped into place like a heavy stone.
The interesting part is the change on the faces around him.
"Serves him right," says the woman next to me, a flash of cold joy in her eyes.
"Who would trust him?" someone else asks.
A few students I recognize from the hotel management school stand, shocked, whispering, "It was him? He was the one we always heard about?"
Ethan's world collapses not because the law crushed him, but because the people who once laughed with him now look away. The bank manager who had once winked at his small bribes watches, face a study of conscience. His roommates at the hotel who once bragged about his invites now avoid his gaze in the corridor.
After sentencing, a camera captures his last glance at me. It is a slow slide from hope to horror to a naked, animal terror. He used to be sure, certain that there would always be someone to clean up his mess. Now there is no one. Judges deliver sentences in monotone; that doesn't stop the public from decorating them with meaning. Ten years is ten years for a man who has no skill at repair.
"Ethan," I say later, during the visiting hour at the prison, "do you remember when you told me I was trash because I couldn't keep a child, because I failed?"
He looks at me with a lip that trembles. He doesn't touch me. He coughs bloodless apologies that land like flies.
"Why?" he asks. "Why did you do this? Why?"
"Because you took my life," I answer. "And because I got the chance to take it back."
He looks smaller than he ever did, a man shrunken by his own choices. He says nothing and focuses on the table between the two of us. I've counted everything, including the cost—337.8 thousand in total, the number cemented in my head—and I would pay it again to take off his smile.
Outside the prison, Julian waits with a letter in his hand. "EHL," he says, and the corners of his mouth curve like a secret. "You got it."
I press the paper into my palm, and the paper is thin, but its weight is like a final ledger entry that counts for something else entirely.
"I'm leaving," I tell him. "For now."
He closes his fingers around mine. "If you go, go with someone who can stand beside you," he says, quietly. "Not someone who will take credit or steal the chairs you build."
I tuck the letter into my notebook and glance at the rotating banquet table in the lobby where I had once carried plates and men had once thought me meek. It spins slowly, carrying glasses and laughter.
"This," I say, soft but fierce, "isn't about a single slap. It's about making sure a man who breaks others never stands on a podium again."
Julian watches me like a man who is learning to be tender in measured ways. "And if you ever need someone," he says, "I'll be here."
I turn, pause, and feel the rest of the light fall on us. I have learned how to take revenge without losing myself. I have learned to study, to plan, to step into rooms where men once thought I belonged only to their appetites. The hotel industry is a world of mirrors and ledgers—and now my ledger reads proof.
Months later, standing in Geneva with the EHL letter folded into my passport, Julian beside me, I am not the same gullible girl who once thought love was an excuse. I have a plan, a degree in mind, and a man who respects my plans without needing to own them.
When the cold of the Swiss morning breathes on my face, I think of the rotating banquet table back home. I think of AJ shoes and the ways a man loves to feel bought. I think of the tiled hospital room where I once lay without help. Those images are knives that have been sharpened into tools.
"This time," I tell Julian, with a small, private smile, "I'm going to stand in the light. And people will come find me there."
He squeezes my hand. "Good," he says. "Let them."
I close my eyes and imagine something sweeter than vengeance—a life built, not stolen. The acceptance letter is warm in my pocket. The spinning tray in my memory turns one last soft rotation.
"Spin," I whisper, and the tray hums in the back of my mind.
The End
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