Face-Slapping12 min read
I Walked Out, They Called Me Guilty — I Came Back to Break Them
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I opened the prison gate and the sun hit my face like an accusation.
"Emmie Dubois." A driver announced, though my name was already a bruise in my mouth. "Your ride is ready."
I squinted. A Bugatti sat near the gate, black like a secret. A polished shoe swung from the back seat.
"Edison?" I limped forward, the old scar in my leg protesting. "Edison Conley. Long time."
Edison Conley let out a short laugh. "Long? Two years. You should be grateful my friend Felicity held back on you. Otherwise you wouldn't be walking out today."
"Thank you," I whispered.
"Don't thank me. Thank Felicity Gilbert. She begged."
"Yes, thank Felicity," I said, my voice softer than I felt.
"You think leaving the prison means freedom?" Edison said. "I want you to kneel at my club DreamBack as a greeter. Two hours today. Make the men want to come back. You'll earn your keep."
"My keep." I swallowed. "I will do what you say."
"Good." He opened the car door. "And Emmie?"
"Yes?"
"We're only beginning your punishment."
He drove away. I stood in the sunlight and the world turned colder.
"Emmie, you okay?" a guard asked me when I finally reached the bus. I gave him the coin the guard handed me before I left and climbed aboard. The old phone he shoved into my hands mocked me—no contacts, no friends. I called a number I knew by heart.
"Status?" a man's voice said on the other end.
"Not finished yet. Edison Conley met me. He told me to go to DreamBack."
"Edison?" the voice hissed. "Get out, I'll pick you up."
"No. I can't. Not now. Two years is a debt I have to pay."
"Take care. Call me in three months."
"Three months," I lied. I swallowed and deleted the call history.
When I reached the club, my bad leg burning with cold, Edison and the manager Wade Baird were waiting.
"You are one minute late," Edison said, glancing at his watch.
"Sorry," I whispered.
"Wade, take her to change. Summer uniform. No excuses," Edison ordered. "And teach her how to smile for strangers. She was someone else's prize once. Make her become ours."
"Yes, sir." Wade's voice was flat.
"I will," I said, but my nails bit my palms.
Inside, Wade showed me how to hold my posture, how to deliver "Welcome" with practice warmth.
"You know your job," he said. "Smile and show them in. Even if the guest is someone who remembers you as the South family heiress, you will smile. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Wade," I forced out.
At the door a small girl waited, bright and trusting. "Hi, I'm Kennedi," she said.
"I'm Emmie," I replied. Her smile cut through the cold for a second.
A group entered. "Wei…?" a voice said in the crowd and a man stepped forward. "Is that the famous Emmie Dubois? What are you doing here?"
As if on cue, my cousin Camilo Bates reached for my wrist and tried to drag me away.
"Emmie, you should be at home. Don't embarrass the family," he hissed.
"Camilo, I'm not going anywhere," I said.
"He's my cousin," Camilo shouted at Edison. "You don't have the right to keep her."
Edison's two bodyguards seized Camilo gently but firmly.
"You think I don't know what you're up to?" Edison said. "Get him inside. Free drinks on the house."
Camilo started shouting. "You bastard! You broke her! You—"
"Shut up!" Edison snapped. "Kneel."
I sank to my knees on the cold stone, snow starting to fall, the thin uniform clinging to me. My leg burned. I felt the last of my illusions crack.
"Don't hope for mercy," Edison said to me. "Your penance is only beginning."
They carried me away when I fainted.
When I woke in the dorm, my head a drumbeat, the leg agonized, Kennedi sat next to me with a thermos.
"You have a fever," she fussed. "I told the leader you needed rest."
"No," I lied. "I'll work."
"Don't push yourself," she said. "You were someone else once. You don't have to be that now."
"Thanks, Kennedi," I said. She was no one but a small light.
The club was a maze of people who had once cheered me, who now cheered when I served them. I smiled as taught. I bowed. I handed drinks.
"Look," a man said loudly, "isn't that the South heiress?"
I tilted my head and said, "Welcome. Please come in," as if my smile could armor me from their stares.
A hand grabbed my face and forced my eyes up. When I pulled back, I felt dirty.
"Get down," the man said, his voice hot with old grudges. He kicked me. I fell and tasted blood.
"Say 'I will serve you, Mr. Dolan,'" he ordered.
"I refuse," I murmured.
"Watch this," he said, and kicked me again. He kept going until my face split and blood mixed with snow. Later I learned his name was Dolan Evans.
"Stop it!" someone shouted.
"It isn't the staff's fault. Keep her alive," Edison said, voice like ice. "We want to keep her useful."
They took me to the hospital after I collapsed again. My leg needed rest, but I had work. Wade promised lighter duty. A week later I came back as a cleaner, my hands raw from mopping floors the rich seldom see.
Kennedi and a housekeeper taught me how to scrub toilets and polish mirrors. People whispered behind my back, insults like wind.
Camilo came to the employee dorm and begged me to come home.
"I have no home," I said. "You and the others pretended I was guilty. No one believed me. I have to finish this. I must get close to Edison until I can make them pay."
"Don't go," Camilo begged. "I'll help—I'll get you a phone."
He shoved a cheap phone into my hand and left money. "I'll come back," he said.
I called Kennedi. "They are planning something big—liar jokes, a party. Watch Felicity Gilbert. Follow her."
"Got it," Kennedi replied. "I'll have people watch."
Days crawled. Once, at a small shop, I bumped into a man who once tormented me at school: Sergio Calderon. I had known him before his years abroad. He looked surprised.
"You remember me?" he asked.
"You've been gone a long time," I said.
"Sergio Calderon—back for business. Let me buy your dinner. It is an apology for not being in your life."
"It is not necessary."
"Please." He insisted. He had a softness I didn't expect. He offered help and then quietly became my shadow. I was reluctant to accept favors, but hunger and a plan will make you accept.
Later Kennedi whispered that Felicity was organizing a charity gala, where Felicity and Dolan planned to humiliate me officially. They wanted to arrange my death in the pool or push me so I looked ashamed. It was crude and ugly. I could have run, but I had something else in mind.
"Get the recordings," I told Kennedi. "Every lie, every private brag. And find people who will testify."
"We have a man," she said. "But not many."
Sergio's team removed some online posts and quietly fed us information. He said nothing loud, but his protection was steady. "You are not alone," he told me once.
"That is not the point," I said. "This is not about being alone. This is about righting it."
The charity gala came. The hall glowed with chandeliers and fake smiles. Felicity arrived in white, wheel tucked beside her like a prop. Edison came too—he had a new anger in his face I recognized. He wanted control.
Sergio stood beside me like a shield.
"Welcome," I said to the guests, and when the spotlight found us, I felt the old habits of performance. I had perfected the smile that kills.
Felicity's speech opened the gala, and Dolan tried to start business with hostile charm. Instead the crowd turned to gossip.
Sergio stood and cut in with a toast. "To my girlfriend," he announced, making the hall go quiet. "To Emmie." He was audacious. The cameras turned.
"Edison, you look tense," someone called.
Edison glared at Sergio and then at me. The room hummed.
"Who invited the South girl?" someone muttered.
"She is my guest," Sergio said. "If anyone wants trouble, they need to consider me."
The crowd listened. Comments spread. Then, it happened: I stepped up.
"Edison," I said, my voice steady, "I have something to say."
All eyes flicked to me. I had a recording device under my hand, ready.
"You're listening to me now?" Edison snapped.
"Yes. I was set up," I said. "Felicity, you lied about that night at the theater. Dolan, you helped cover it." I pressed play.
My voice—my real voice—filled the hall. The recording captured Felicity's laughter as she plotted to push me, Dolan's mocking approval, and talk of how they'd break me socially.
A hundred faces shifted. Phones rose.
"Is this real?" someone whispered.
Edison went pale. "This is fake," he started.
"Play the second," Sergio snapped. The second recording began: Felicity admitting to hiring people to ruin me and plotting to stage my drowning.
The hall became electric. Cameras flashed. Felicity's smile cracked; Dolan shrank.
"Felicity Gilbert," I said into the microphone, my anger like a hammer now steady with aim. "You lied to me, you lied to him, you lied to everyone. You framed me, and people beat me while you watched. You sat in your chair and earned pity while I bled and died. You wanted my silence."
Felicity's face twisted. "You are lying!" she hissed.
"Stop." Edison stood slowly. For the first time he looked afraid of the truth, not of the consequences. He had authority and the truth stripped it like salt.
"Here are witnesses," Sergio said. "People who worked security, actors you hired to lie. Your messages. Your bank transfers."
People murmured. A woman from the event staff stood, hands shaking. "I took money," she confessed. "They told me to keep quiet. I didn't know—it was a lie."
Another man raised his phone. "I recorded a call. She told me to ruin her. I didn't know."
Felicity began to cry, but the sound had only venom, like a child caught stealing candy.
"Do you want us to bring your men in?" someone shouted. A dozen phones recorded the scene.
Edison held his hands up. "Stop," he said, powerless. "Stop this."
"Public punishment," I said softly. "Not by me. By truth."
Someone in the crowd spat, "You liar! You ruined her life!"
"She ruined more than life," another voice cried. "She tried to kill her!"
Felicity stumbled backward. Her face had lost the practiced softness. "I'm sorry," she said. "I—"
"Not sorry," I said. "Confession now won't bring back two years of my life. It won't unbreak my leg. It won't erase the nights in a crowded cell when men thought they could break me for sport."
The press circled like sharks. A reporter shouted, "Felicity Gilbert, why did you hire people to frame Emmie Dubois?"
"Because... because I wanted everything," she cried, voice cracking. "I wanted love. I wanted to be the only one."
"Do you deny Dolan Evans paid your men to attack her?" the reporter pressed.
Dolan stepped forward, the bravado gone. "I... I was drunk. I—"
"Now tell them what you did at DreamBack," I said.
Dolan's face reddened. "I beat her. I kicked her. I bet my friends I could make her scream. I didn't think—"
"Liar," someone hissed.
"Shame!" thundered another voice.
The room erupted into people shaming them. Phones clicked like applause.
Felicity's supporters deserted her. People who used to flatter her now took photos, whispers like daggers. She fell to her knees and pounded the floor.
"Edison," she cried, "you must help me! Forgive me!"
He stood. For a moment his hand trembled as he reached toward her, then he withdrew it. The hall went silent.
"You wanted me to kneel at your club," I said, my voice low and even. "You wanted me to be collateral. You told them to make me disappear so your place looked safer. You wanted me buried. Tonight the crowd became your judge."
Edison's face cracked—not with anger, but with the ache of having been wrong. He looked at me, eyes bright.
"I believed Felicity," Edison admitted. "I—I acted without proof. I pushed. I punished."
The crowd turned.
"You're all right," someone murmured, "you're not the same man now."
Felicity now begged on her knees, her face the color of panic. "Please! Please, I'll give up everything! I'll give money! Please don't ruin me."
"Ruin you?" a woman snapped. "You ruined someone for sport. You made men hurt her for your advantage."
Phones recorded everything. People whispered. A business partner snapped his fingers and called security. The gala organizer, furious, announced she was calling the police to file a report for fraud and assault.
"It won't stop them from business," a guest said. "But people will know the names."
Dolan, who had once strutted, now had no audience. He wanted to run. People pointed cameras, recorded his shivering apologies. Men who had once patted his back now moved away.
Felicity—her face streaked with mascara—stood and screamed, "You can't do this to me! I will sue!"
"Who will stand with you?" someone shouted. "You hired people to beat the woman!"
"Don't let them go," another voice cried. "They must speak in public. Let them feel what we felt."
They did. Felicity's text messages and voice notes played on the big screen. Her lies were raw and clear. Dolan's messages arranging bribes and threats unveiled. The truth poured over the room like floodwater.
People choked. Some covered their children’s eyes. Some applauded. A woman in the front took out a camera and uploaded the clip live. The comments poured. The outrage spread.
Edison's supporters looked at him differently now. He had failed to listen. He had punished in darkness. The room held its breath.
Then someone started clapping—soft at first, then louder. It was applause for the truth. For me.
Felicity's knees hit the polished marble. She crawled toward me, thrusting her hands out, "Please! Please!"
I looked at her hand and then at Sergio's eyes. He had never left.
"Get up," I said.
She staggered to her feet. "No," she cried.
"Get up," I said again. "And leave."
A security guard escorted her out. Dolan followed. Crowd murmurs followed them—no cheers, only a slow waterfall of disdain. Cameras swarmed the exit. People shouted insults I never heard in my life.
"Do you feel anything?" someone called.
Her jaw trembled. "I am sorry," she whispered, and it sounded small and empty.
Later I learned the punishments took different forms.
Dolan lost his job with the firm that sponsored DreamBack. Business partners severed ties. He begged for work and could not get it. His reputation, bought on bravado, collapsed. Instead of being shielded by money, his name became a warning.
Felicity's public disgrace was worse. Sponsors withdrew support from her charity. The social pages burned images of her smug smile into past tense. Parties no longer invited her. The people who had once called her "graceful" now called her "fraud." She had no allies at the gala to speak for her; the man she wanted had walked away. She tried to sue, but evidence had traveled past statute — recordings, witnesses, bank transfers. She had to answer in public hearings. The papers printed her texts and she could not explain how the carefully constructed story that had stolen my life had unraveled at a microphone in a chandeliered room filled with witnesses.
People took pictures as she left, as her driver refused to come near. Those photos trended. Her social life collapsed. Her father received calls from business partners asking why he raised a daughter who would encourage violence to protect her status. The next day her name trended with words she had never imagined next to it: filed, accused, shamed. She tried to apologize on camera, but her words were smothered by the sound of phones and cameras snapping, the world the judge and jury I could not command.
Dolan’s punishment was a daily humiliation—jobless men crowded a bar and laughed when his name came up. He had to climb back from the edge alone. Felicity’s punishment was a slow dissolve: invitations vanished, contracts canceled. She stood outside buildings once opened for her and watched people pass like she was invisible. Both of them lost the small comforts that had warmed their cruelty.
They changed. Dolan grew thin and bitter. Felicity tried to reconstruct herself with plastic words and fake smiles. People stopped believing the smile.
I watched all this with a careful heart. I did not celebrate the fall. I simply gave them what they had given me: truth. Public.
That night, after the gala, Sergio stayed with me.
"You used me," he teased.
"I did," I said. "And you could have walked away."
"I stayed," he said. "Because you're not the same girl who needed saving. I like being on the right side now."
"Then stay," I said.
"I will," he replied.
Days later, Edison found me.
"Why didn't you just leave?" he asked.
"Why didn't you listen?" I asked back.
He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry." He looked like a man who had lost something and then remembered it was not money he had lost but a person.
"I don't want apologies anymore," I said. "I want this to end. I want my life back. I want to leave."
Edison nodded. "Leave with who you want."
I packed my few things and Sergio drove me out of the city under the noise of a world that wanted to watch me. We left for a small house he owned in a quiet bay.
On the drive, I thought about the recordings, the plan, the nights in prison, the men who laughed. I thought about the bitterness that had coated two years inside me.
"Why did you come back?" Sergio asked suddenly.
"To take my life back," I said honestly. "Not to destroy. To write down the truth."
Sergio squeezed my hand.
We moved slowly. I cleaned the wounds and let the scars breathe. I kept the little recording device in a drawer as a reminder of what happened.
One evening as we sat on the back porch, the sea cold and steady beneath us, I said, "You know what I want?"
"What?"
"To be someone who can sit quietly without being watched."
Sergio laughed softly. "I'll buy you silence."
We both knew silence would come in time, not by money but by the slow closing of other people's mouths.
The last thing I did before sleep settled was open the drawer and take out the small recorder. I had one more message to keep for myself.
"I stood up in front of them," I said into the empty room, the words for me and only me. "I told the truth. If anyone thinks I'm cruel for taking back what is mine, come stand where I stood. Hear the recordings. Look into the eyes of the men and women who lie for power. Then tell me if you would do the same."
I closed the drawer. The recorder fit into the dark.
Later, when I had strength back, I would visit Edison again—not to beg, not to fight, but to hand him evidence of his own mistakes and maybe to watch a better man grow. But that would wait.
For now, I slept.
The End
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