Face-Slapping11 min read
I Walked Into His Suite and Found My Past Waiting
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I remember the cold metal of the doorknob under my palm and the small, unreasonable hope that tonight—this night—would be the last night I had to beg the world for mercy.
I breathed in and opened the door.
He stood by the window with his back to me. The city lights cut across his shoulders. Even burned into memory, even in nightmares, I would know that shape.
"Aiden?" I tried to make it a question. My voice came out thin.
He turned. For a second the room reformed itself around him—like a stage and he the only actor. His face folded into amusement, then into that frozen calm I had learned two years ago to fear.
"Two years," he said. "Two years away and you look like you learned how to survive. How quaint."
"Sir, I think I—" I tried to step back. "I think I opened the wrong door."
He laughed, a sharp thing. "You think? Where are your manners, Candace Ballard? The great Candace Ballard, reduced to knocking on rooms in hotels. How low you have fallen."
I swallowed. My nails dug into my palm. "I am not—"
"Stop pretending you do not know me." His hand was a trap when it closed on my wrist. The force pulled me forward. The swing of the room was sudden and terrifying.
"Let go!" I said.
He didn't.
He pressed me to the door. The wood met my back. The light from the city became a thin knife. He tilted my chin up and looked at me like he was reading something old and dull.
"You think you earned anything by disappearing?" Aiden asked. "You think you can waltz back in and call it even?"
"I am not your—" My voice broke. I could not finish.
He hit me—one sharp slap—and then his mouth was on mine before I could think. He kissed like a man who thought of violence and called it affection.
I woke up later in a bed that smelled like him. My body hurt in ways I could not name. I found the small wooden music box on the bedside table and remembered that it had been mine two years ago, that I had given it to him and taken it back.
The house was his. That fact prickled like cold at the back of my neck.
Someone knocked. A woman I recognized, older and earnest, pushed inside.
"Candace, are you all right?" she asked. She wore a plain smile but her eyes were kind.
"Where am I?" I asked. My mouth felt like paper.
"You don't remember? Mister Vang brought you home when you fainted. He insisted." The woman blushed in a way that made my skin crawl. "He's so worried—"
"Stop calling me 'Mrs.' " I said. "Call me Candace."
She hesitated, then left. I dressed and fled.
Walking down the marble halls that morning, I heard Aiden in his office like a blade: "Get me names. Do not leave one alive in that club. If anyone touches my property, burn the club down."
My chest collapsed. He had not changed. He had only found new ways to hurt.
I told him to leave me alone in the office door and walked out.
"You're not going to get money from me. We are divorced." My voice was small. I told myself it was firm.
He slid a check across the desk like a weapon. "This covers what your family owes the bank," he said. "You move back here tonight."
"Move back? No."
"If you want to eat, move back."
He watched me, and I watched him. I was a woman with pride and a family about to lose everything.
I took the paper. I did not want it. I needed it.
"Tonight," he said.
"Tonight."
"Good." He smiled once, thin and disdainful.
Outside, rain began in sheets. I carried what he gave me back to a house that was not mine. In the dark I heard my name in whispers—people talking like vultures.
At the nightclub, I saw something that shivered me to the bone: Aiden and a woman, wrapped in each other, right at his office window. I could have walked away. Instead I opened the door.
"Who is she?" I said, my voice steady because I needed it to be.
He looked at me. "My business keeps me busy," he said, like a joke.
"I am Aiden Vang's wife." I said it out loud because a lie sometimes does the work of the truth.
The woman left, humiliated. People stared. I felt a hollow victory sliding through me.
Days passed in a strange blur of disaster and small mercies. A wine tower came crashing down in a gala and I was buried in shards; he hauled me free with blood on his hands and a curse on his lips. The papers called him a savior. The image of him clawing through glass plastered him into a hero and also into my cage.
When I woke in a hospital bed, Dr. Wyatt Mancini sat at the foot of the bed with a calm that smelled of antiseptic and kindness. "You will heal," he said. "Give it time."
"Who paid the hospital bills?" I asked.
"It was covered," he said. "Someone took care of it."
When I left the hospital, I found an email from our company: Germain Petersen wanted to sign my studio for a diamond ring collaboration. I had talent—real, stubborn, awake talent—and the world wanted it.
That night, as I worked, my phone buzzed. "Candace," came a voice with a mask on it, mechanical and careful. "Check your email."
I did. Tiny images slid open like teeth. The photos were mine—clear, brutal. People watching me during a time I wanted no watching. The blackmailer wanted money. I remember the machine voice saying: "One million. Wire it, or I post them."
I clicked away. I could not breathe.
"Who is it?" Dr. Mancini asked when I told him. He had already slipped me a cup of tea.
"Someone who wants my bones." I said.
"Pay it?" he asked.
"I can't. I have thirty thousand due to the bank in two days. I have my mother's care to pay for. I have Knox—my brother—studying. I have nothing."
"You will not pay an extortioner," Wyatt said. "Give me the emails." He leaned over my shoulder, tapping on my computer with slow fingers. He traced the headers and the IPs with careful patience like he was unpicking a knot.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you're not alone," Wyatt said. "Because this is wrong."
He told me, quietly, what to do. He taught me the small, dangerous things: how to collect headers, where to report, and then he looked at me. "You will not let him own you," he said.
Six days later, my life cracked open. The blackmailer thought he had me. He had the photos. He had threats.
I had something he did not expect—friends and allies who hated injustice as much as I did. I had evidence of his accounts. I had Wyatt's patient care. I had work that refused to be buried. And I had a plan.
"Are you ready?" I asked when I walked into the place where I would tear him down. It was not a courtroom. It was a gala, a company art night, a thousand seated guests, investors, journalists, lights, cameras. Aiden Vang sat on the stage with a smug chair.
"Ready," Dr. Mancini said. Germain Petersen stood beside me and Sterling Dougherty hovered at the edge like a lion ready to pounce.
I had prepared a speech. I had people who believed me. I had a lawyer and a hard drive and more courage than I had ever let myself borrow.
When they dimmed the lights and the band leaned into the last song, I walked to the microphone.
"Good evening," I said.
"You're Candace Ballard," Aiden said behind me, from the stage, like it wasn't possible I would move in his world.
"Yes," I said. "I am Candace Ballard. Two years ago I left this life. Two years ago my family was ruined. Two years ago I woke up to a different world. Tonight I'm not asking for anything. I'm showing you what a man like Aiden Vang thinks is private."
I pressed the remote. The giant screen behind me bloomed to life.
Messages. Photographs. Voicemails. Timestamps. Bank transfers. A recording of the masked voice asking for money. The room sucked in breath as the images bloomed across the wall.
"Is this a joke?" Aiden's voice rang, first amused, then off-balanced.
I read aloud the words from the blackmail email, and then the facts. "Here is the account that received those extortion funds," I said. "Here is a receipt that ties a company of his friends to the same chain. Here is proof that members of his management team knew about the scheme."
The first reaction was confusion. Then shock. Then whispers. Phones came up like tiny cameras rising from the ground at once. People began to record. Someone started shouting questions. The lights felt too bright.
Aiden's face twitching was the first part of the fall.
"Shut this off," he said at first.
"It is already on," I answered. "And everyone is watching."
He smiled like a shark about to strike. "This is slander. This is—"
"Is it?" I cut in. "You demanded this woman's silence. You called my life property. You paid people to humiliate clubs and tried to burn businesses down. You thought you could manage people like me."
"No," he said. "I didn't—this is false."
"Then explain," I said. "Explain the wire transfers. Explain the phone records. Why did you pay accounts connected to a man named Bronson Cox with ties to those cameras? Why did you instruct security to interfere when witnesses tried to leave? Explain why any sane man hides when cameras are on him."
He laughed, high and brittle. "You have no proof."
"Proof is for the people with access to the law," I said. "You make a mistake when you think money buys everything. You bought silence. You bought cameras. Tonight the cameras turned."
"So you're going to ruin me on stage?" He pushed the podium toward me with a manic edge. "You will not—"
"Watch," I said, and I had people to help me call up more. Wyatt read names. Germain read tweets already popping. Sterling had my hand in the wings and refused to let go.
The crowd changed as if oil had spilled across it. First houses of power murmured, then the investors stood, then the journalists leaned in. Phones were up. People exchanged looks like verdicts forming in the air.
Aiden's face moved from arrogance to surprise in three tight steps.
"What is this?" he demanded. He was smiling to keep from showing he was scared.
"You were smug," I said. "You thought the people who saw you as untouchable would stay quiet. You thought you could make my life a secret and then spend it like a commodity. But we have names. We have accounts. We have witnesses."
He laughed, short and brittle. "I didn't—"
"Don't look at him," a woman near the front said loudly. "Look at the receipts!"
Someone in the crowd—an investor—whistled. "That's embezzlement. That's extortion."
Phones recorded every second. Someone whispered the word "arrest." People began to film with purpose. A video would be made within minutes, then uploaded faster than the room could breathe.
"Shut it down," he hissed now, a bare animal.
"No," I said. "Not tonight."
The ripple moved like a storm.
He tried denial. "This is defamation!" he snapped. "This is a setup!"
"Then you will explain yourself to the police like every citizen," Germain said to the microphone, voice steady. "If you have nothing to hide, then open your accounts."
Aiden's eyes bugged. His face turned the color of something sick. "You're dirty," he said. "You're all dirty cows."
"Will you go with us?" I asked quietly. "Will you explain to the people whose lives you tried to break? Will you take responsibility?"
He did the thing I had seen in nightmares: the confident man who promised the world on paper, then collapsed when people turned to watch.
"No," he said, voice thinning. "This is slander."
The crowd took on the shape of a jury. I heard a camera shuttering like a pulse.
Then he changed tack. He smiled falsely, tried to charm like a dog showing a trick. "You will all be sorry. You will see."
Someone near the front—a clerk on a phone—pressed Record and held the device like a judge's gavel. People crowded around. The audience's mood ticked from the curious to the fierce.
"You're doing this wrong, Aiden," a man from the floor shouted. "You use people and think they don't speak. Learn you can be named."
The change was not instant. It was a slow, accumulating pressure like water on a glass. The whispers rose; then hands went up; then voices.
He looked around at their faces—investors who had once praised his name, club owners who had feared him, staff who had once flinched—and for the first time, I saw him tremble.
"You can't—" he tried, and his mouth made the words fall apart.
He reached for the nearest face as if to reclaim control. "No—this is a—" His voice cut to a thin keening. He bent like someone reciting a script.
He had been the man who told me I was not fit for his children. He had been the man who called himself the law. Now he was a small animal in the center of a big room.
"Get him offstage," someone commanded.
He started to plead. "Please," he said. "Please—"
"Stop," I said. I had never wanted to watch a man beg. But this was not private cruelty anymore. This was public accountability. He had wanted a life of power without responsibility. He would see what it meant to be watched.
He fell apart. It happened in stages: the clinical smile slipping, his voice rising, denial, then an ugly, raw sound I had never heard from him before.
"It wasn't me," he protested. "It wasn't—"
A woman in the crowd laughed. It sounded like a breaking glass.
"You're sick," she said, and people recorded her laughter. Children in the room pointed. Men who used to follow his orders looked ashamed to be near him.
He stumbled from stage to floor, hands clawing at the air as if it would hold him up. He realized his lawyers were being swamped, his PR team collapsing like people finally in the open.
He pressed both knees to his chest and lurched forward, and then, because that is what men who build empires do when the empire trembles, he did the last thing: he fell on his knees.
"Please," he said, eyes squeezing shut. "Please—"
Tables clattered. Someone made a video; someone else yelled "shame." People moved away. Phones pointed like small witnesses.
He tried to laugh it off. "This isn't over," he said in a cold voice then softening into pleads. First surprise. Then anger. Then pleading. "I didn't mean—"
Someone—an old friend who had seen him at his worst—took a phone and started reading out bank transactions aloud while the crowd listened. Voices circled the room. A hush.
"You're a coward," a woman near me said. "You thought you were safe."
He dropped to his hands, palms against the carpet, and then bowed his head. "Please—" he whispered, "Please stop."
"No," said another voice. "No."
We watched as the man who had a kingdom of money and silence became a man who had nothing but his voice to beg with.
Cameras recorded the whole arc: the smile, the denial, the shaking, the collapse, the plea. People put it on their feeds; clips went up; the room hummed with a thousand small verdicts.
He crawled, a caricature of a king unseated. He cried, he spat, he begged—all of it a part of the thing he had given other people for years.
He sought faces, and faces looked back at him. He wanted forgiveness, and the crowd gave him instead the sound of judgment.
"Why?" he asked at last, to me.
"You will answer to the law," I said. "But here, let everyone watch what it costs to take a life piece by piece."
He scraped on his knees and looked like a man on a lower rung, smaller by every person who filmed him. Some recorded with righteous anger; others with the sick curiosity of a crowd that had watched a creature drop.
He moved through shades: arrogance, shock, denial, pleading, collapse. Finally he settled into the last shape: asking, "Please."
Phones clicked. People whispered. Someone clapped once, hard and shockingly. A shiver rolled through the room.
He tried to crawl away. Men shook their heads. Women muttered. People filmed. The video spread beyond the room like spilled mercury.
When the police called his name two days later, the clip of him on his knees at the gala was already a thousand times over.
"Why did it matter?" someone asked me later, quietly, when the lights had cooled.
"It mattered because silence makes monsters," I said. "And tonight what I did was simple: I let people see him as he was."
A week later, with charges framed and his reputation sliding like ice, Aiden sat in an office with no lights. He called names. He begged. He promised half-truths. He offered money. He asked for me to stop.
"You want me to stop?" I asked on the phone.
"Please—" he said, voice thick.
"No," I told him. "You will answer like anyone else."
After the storm, life kept making me small and large at the same time. I went back to work. I finished the ring designs. Sterling took me to Paris to see a world that smelled of better things and of glass windows and hard light.
Wyatt called from time to time. He checked on my mother. Knox's letters came thicker and thinner with exam updates. Germain kept his faith in my work. Sterling—complicated, fierce Sterling—smiled at me softly and watched.
One evening, alone in my old apartment that was slowly being repaired from ruin, I wound up the tiny wooden music box that had once been his and once mine.
I turned the key. The melody rose: small, stubborn, a slow tin lullaby that had kept me company when nights were worse than ordinary.
"I promised I'd fix this," I said to the music and to myself, because language is the first tool of repair.
Outside, Aiden's name still rode a few headlines, but now with a different cadence. He was not only the man with the money; he was the man who had been made to kneel.
I set the music box on the table and let it play twice, then three times.
"Keep the sound," I told myself. "It marks things, but it doesn't own them."
Above all, I kept the key. It fit in my palm like proof. The song wound down into silence, and the last note shook the small room like a promise.
"Tick," I said to the empty walls. "Tick."
The End
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