Face-Slapping17 min read
I woke in a stranger's bed — and everything worth killing for came back
ButterPicks12 views
"Fire," I said, and my voice was a dry match.
Smoke choked the ceiling light. Heat punched my lungs. I pushed myself up and a foreign room spun into place: old plaster, a single cracked mirror, a suitcase with a school ID on top. My fingers closed on a plastic card that read: Ari Ribeiro. Nineteen. Local high school. Address in a small city everyone called nothing.
My first thought was wrong and furious: I am not Ari.
"Who are you?" a voice called from the hall.
I stared at the mirror. The face in it was soft and pale and innocent in ways I had spent a decade erasing. The hands on the mirror were not the hands I remembered. But the back of my skull kept pushing an old name forward, like an old song that wouldn't stop: Vermilion. Isla. I had been all those names. I had been trained to move like wind and disappear like ash. I had been a tool, then a daughter, then a blade.
"I—" I searched for a lie but found history. "I'm fine," I said and sounded foreign to myself.
A knock. "Ari? Fire brigade says it's safe. Come out," someone called. The voice was soft with guilt.
I wrapped the ID and phone in my palm and forced my legs to work. On the landing a boy with ink-black hair and scared eyes — Miles Peterson — stared at me hard and whispered, "Are you okay? I thought—"
"Stay with the car," I told him. My voice slid into the weight I'd used on kill floors: small, controlled. He obeyed like a younger brother should.
The house smelled of cheap perfume and a salt of worry. A woman cried, voice layered, shiny with practiced sorrow. "Ari, my baby," she said, wrapping me like a net. Her hands were rough where hers should have been soft. Her name on the visitor badge later read: Klara Faulkner.
I let her hold me long enough for the lie to root. I let her weep because the world had given me one honest thing I had never wanted: family hands that clutched me.
Inside me, a ledger opened. Names and faces poured like a file dump: the celling of an American island prison burning, the radio hack that let alarms scream the wrong way, the last jump into cold ocean blue, the smell of salt and copper. Phoenix Bartlett had told me one thing my body remembered as pain: "Hand over the key, and you'll go back out free."
What key? I had asked him once, the day I had agreed to help. He had smiled and said, "You will know when your time comes."
I had never thought his time would be mine.
The fire that almost killed Ari — the one that woke me in a different skin — had come from inside that small house, a match staged to erase a girl who had smiles and offers and a ticket back to inheritance. Klara had wanted to keep her daughter Fallon Martinez as the heiress. Fallon's teeth had been sharp in private photos, bright in public smiles. They had drugged Ari and set a room to flame. Fallon's hands were small, but her heart had been heavy with greed.
I learned this in pieces, like bad radio. Miles cried; neighbors gossiped; the hospital smelled like disinfectant and pity. But lies are brittle. My hands, trained to find the wrong seams, found them.
"We're going to meet them at the hotel," Klara said later, voice sweet as wet sugar. "Ari, be brave. Your real parents are coming."
Real parents. The phrase tasted like a bruise.
When the car rolled into the hotel driveway, the scene looked like cinema people paid to watch. A grandfather with a cane — Grover Fedorov — waited with a man whose jaw was gentle as a hinge, Elias Aldridge, and a woman with eyes like stone, Irma Osborne. They were the people who would claim Ari.
Elias took my hands like he had the right to them. "Welcome home, Ari," he said, and for a second I almost let myself be someone who belonged.
Then I saw Fallon at the other side of the lobby. She posed like a bar queen with a smile carved from practice. Klara held her hand like treasure. Their faces when they saw me were the exact kind of guilt I had chewed on before.
"You're the one who set the fire," I said quietly, letting the words land like small stones. "You put drugs in my tea. You wanted my life."
Fallon's smile slipped. "I don't know what—"
"Don't lie." I turned the sentence into a knife. The hotel filled with the kind of silence that pulls cameras toward drama. "The CCTV in the stairwell? You forgot to blur your hands. The delivery camera? You used the same bag as last week's bet. The phone call you made to the locksmith from the cafe on 6th? I have the records." I let each proof sit.
Klara's polished face drained. For the first time she looked like a woman who had to decide whether to scream or dissolve. Guests paused with drinks in hand. Everyone loved spectacle.
"You are insane," Fallon cried. "This is slander."
"Is it?" I asked. "Do you want me to say it louder?"
I pulled my phone out and hit share. The hotel monitors, prepped for a charity slideshow, blinked. My image took the screen — the girl in the mirror of a different life, and then the leak I had prepped overnight: CCTV clips, screenshots, audio files. My voice narrated like water over stone.
"Watch this," I said. "This is Fallon and Klara buying aliased burner phones." The video played. The lobby crowd shifted. "This is Klara's order from the pharmacy for the sedative you used," I said. "This is the call from the cafe. This is the match box with your fingerprint."
Fallon stared like someone witnessing their own head removed. Guests murmured, phones came up to film. A hundred little screens drank her shame.
"Turn it off!" Klara screamed. "You can't—"
A man in a tux reached for his phone. "Who's controlling the screens?" he asked.
"Isla Dixon," I said. The old name made the room tilt. Someone recognized the alias from a vague, scandalous headline years ago: "International Operative, The Vermilion." A few faces blanched. The wealthy hate damage to their illusions.
"You used me," I told Phoenix Bartlett, who had slipped in under the pretense of holiday cheer, a man in a dark coat and a long history I knew by the shape of his breath. He had been the one who lured me into that prison. His fingers were clean. His eyes were not.
"You are nothing to me," he had said once. "Hand over the key and I will let you go."
"Phoenix," I said into the mic I'd dragged with me. The hotel's conference system blinked. "You taught me everything. You taught me how to find a weak seam, how to exploit a hinge. That skill is rather handy now that I'm the one holding the lever."
He smiled then, slow and smooth like a snake, and that smile did not reach his eyes. "Isla. Or Ari. Play nice."
I didn't. "Guests," I said aloud. "You will watch as the truth files go to the family counsel. You will listen to Fallon and Klara lie and then hear them stumble. You will watch them lose the money they stole. All your friends who think good breeding keeps blood clean — watch."
The cameras were on. Phones were everywhere. The lobby became the theater I had always needed. Fallon tried to bolt. Security — drawn by the commotion and by the lawyer who had been Benedict to their whispers — moved. But shattering is not always noisy. Sometimes it is made of people.
"Mom, please—" Fallon sobbed when security touched her. Her voice had the raw honesty of someone who understood for the first time that the world was not a stage for their costume.
"Tell them about the drugs," I said, and I could see in her face the cost of telling. It broke her further.
"She was always so lucky," she cried. "I wanted— I wanted them to love me."
"Love doesn't pay for your university tuition," Klara screamed. "You can't humiliate us."
"Watch the footage." I let the hotel console feed stream a longer clip. Klara's expression crumpled. She heard her own voice in the tape, too late.
People took sides. Some whispered, others filmed. The hotel manager came over, face pale, and said into a recorder, "We will open a formal complaint. We will cooperate."
Klara's hands trembled. Fallon sank to the marble floor and cried like someone whose mask had fallen into a pit of knives. People prepared statements. Irma Osborne — my real mother — held my hand like it might crumble under the weight of what we were doing.
"This can end quietly," Phoenix told me, all the charm of a man who had spent his life buying silence. "Give me the key."
"You never told me what it was," I said. "You told me I would know when my time came. My time came in a cheap room with a match and a weak woman who thought a child's life could be traded for a dress."
He smiled without warmth. "You can't hurt me."
"Watch me," I said, and I pressed send.
The messages, the proofs, the bank transfers — all of them went out to lawyers, to media with a score to settle, to rival mercenary groups that had names to protect. Phoenix blinked. His phone vibrated like an animal alerted to a trap. Within minutes the hotel's calm extradited itself into chaos.
"Shut down the feed!" he hissed. "Shut it down!"
"No," I said. "Let them see you without your costume."
People watched his color go from dusk to ash. He lunged, but hands found him — security, owners, neighbors. "You will be asked to step aside," the hotel director said with the announcement that sounds like a judge's gavel. Phoenix's lips made a sound like someone trying to eat glass.
Fallon had the look of a child who had been told there was a monster under the bed all her life. Now the bed was pulled aside and a crowd saw the skeleton.
"Don't tell them about the meetings with the mercenaries!" Phoenix begged suddenly. His voice was small and raw.
"I already did," I said. "You taught me to use a weak seam. I found yours."
He crumpled like wet paper in the square light. Guests turned from scandal to spectacle. Phones recorded a man whose empire was unraveling. Someone took a picture of him on his knees, palms pressed to marble, elbows slick with sweat.
"Please," he said, loud enough for the lobby and the feeds. "I can fix this. I can pay. I can—"
"Get up," a banker said flatly. "You are finished."
He clutched like a drowning man at words that were currency. Rich men around him looked away. Someone snatched a glass of champagne from a stunned guest and poured it onto his shoes, a petty baptism.
He was not arrested in that moment. I had no interest in a neat legal ending. I had interest in the collapse. He begged and floundered and people filmed. The boy who used to call me "daughter" lowered his face and tried to plead with those he had ruined.
Fallon's catcall of denial turned into a howl. Klara put her face in her shaking hands and made no sound at all. The crowd closed like a theater curtain, and the night swallowed them. Videos trended. The barstools of the hotel emptied as reputations bled into feeds.
Later that week, Phoenix called my number. I let it go to voicemail.
"Isla," he said into the tin can of the recorder, voice gone to sand. "If I come to your house, will you let me explain?"
The voicemail upload was trending in an hour. His empire got its quieted ending — contracts lost, patrons frozen, an old friend turned on him with a press release he could not buy off. Men who once stood with him now stared away. He called and called and then his voice stopped. He had become a chart on a screen.
That night Fallon called me from a small cell in a police station. Her voice was thin. "Please," she begged. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"You meant," I said softly, and for a second I thought of the girl I used to be, the child who learned to kill for food. "You meant. Now you will live with mean. You will learn how hollow being taken in can feel. Then you will learn to live."
She begged. The words sounded hollow even to her. There is a kind of satisfaction in seeing a lie prove itself: the face that expected compassion evaporates in real time. That's the moment the taste of victory turns from iron to relief.
But that wasn't the only punishment to serve. Phoenix's fall did not erase the years of hurt. It did not stop late nights of echoes. It would not return the two lives I had held. So I kept my work.
I built a file and set the public on a slow melt. I took his contacts and made sure they had better options. I did everything I had been taught to do to break a tower feather by feather.
"You taught me everything," I told Phoenix the night he texted: will you accept a coffee? I did not accept. I wrote back: I will accept nothing you offer. I will accept only one thing. Accountability. "Meet me at the charity court. Not as a guest. As a defendant."
He showed up in a gray suit that slunk on him. His neck was leashed in a debt to his own pride. I sat across from him at a long table. Cameras sat like silent dogs in the corners. The entire company of men and women who used to kiss his ring sat beside him and stared at me through glass.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked, the arrogance gone. Shadowed men from his old life watched him flinch.
"You planted a bomb in a prison to cover a theft," I said. "You lied to me to make me a weapon. You sent people to kill to make a point. You made a bargain in blood and you thought you could use me again."
The room had an intake of air like a chorus. People in suits leaned forward.
He tried to stand. "You are insane."
"No," I said. "I'm a woman who decided I could use the training you gave me on you."
He started to speak. People filmed as his words turned to pleading. He begged for leniency, then for life insurance, then for a way out. I watched the moments of him crumbling: smile to sneer to plea to skin pale as wax. The room watched. The feeds watched. His allies closed ranks then slipped their hands away.
A man who had once had everything got to enact the final fall: humiliation in full view. He knelt on two steps by instinct and not by order, a royal kneel made small by the camera's glance. He begged. He offered money. He offered loyalty. He said my name on his knees and waited for mercy.
No one offered him anything much. The truth had teeth. People turned away. He was left as an old dog at a door no one would open.
Watching that was a craft as much as revenge. I chose the stakes and the theater. I let a man feel the price of teaching a child to be a weapon.
The fall of Phoenix Bartlett fed the headlines. The hotel lobby spectacle fed the hot gossip. Fallon and Klara had their moment of broken pride and public arrest. Justice arrived in messy stops — arrest, fines, social exile — and I let it be loud enough that no one forgot.
Days after, I stood on my new balcony and heard the sea. My life had two faces: the woman who had learned to live on scraping edges and the girl who had just been given a strange, new family. I walked between them like a tightrope.
"How do you want to live?" my grandfather — Grover Fedorov — asked one night. We were alone in the room with my old school ID on the table and a tea that tasted like nothing special.
"I want to keep both parts sharp," I said. "I want to teach the people who hurt me how small they are when everyone watches."
Grover's hand was a warm anchor. "You have a lot to build."
"And a lot to burn," I said.
That was the price. I had killed in one life because they had taught me there was no other way. Now I would use light as a weapon. The world likes to say that transparency is a luxury. For me it had become a tool.
School started. I learned arithmetic that now amused me. I learned literature that made me smile in a small, unfamiliar way. I went to boxing practice — because what else does a woman who had once killed want but a place to slam her hands into something honest — and I ran until the asphalt and my lungs had a clearer set of rules.
"You're not a girl who needs saving," Matias Bergmann — a tall actor brother they introduced me to — said the first time he saw me take the ring. "You're a person who scares people."
"Good," I said and landed a jab.
I fought in the local underground ring because that is where people put money and swagger. I offered them the theater they wanted: a girl in thin gloves who could disappear in footwork and then show up with a knee that sings. I trained for control because I needed a feel of my own force. I took small wins and kept them.
"You're hiding," Miles told me one night as we lay on an old couch, the house quiet enough to hear our breath. "You hurt sometimes."
"I learned early that hurting is efficient," I said, and he blinked like a child surprised to find a storm cloud tamed.
"You're cruel to be soft," Miles said. He sounded like someone who had read the wrong book on heroism.
"Better that I be cruel to cruelty," I said. "Soft is dangerous if it is empty."
He laughed. "Isla."
I had to correct him. "My name is Ari now," I said. "But I will answer to both."
Days slipped into a pattern. I built a life where small kindnesses patched the wounds. I worked the club, ran the old salvage of the boxing gym Matias and I bought with the money everyone thought we'd wasted, rewired the cameras Phoenix didn't manage to burn, and quietly received threats. Men barked into phones. A few tried to hire the same tricks that had haunted me — smoke, flames, bribes. None dared to try after they found me awake.
Then they started coming for sights they could not buy: my speed, my hands, my face. The city is a place where men throw things at women to test whether they bleed. They came with insults, with hands, with tests.
I answered each of them with a match different from fire: a public unraveling. A video posted to the networks of them doing what the world pretended didn't exist. The cheap men who had thought to teach a lesson found themselves on display.
"You're an exhibition," Matias told me once, and his voice held a hint of pain. "You make people public."
"Exhibitions are where people learn," I said. "I prefer the education be clear."
He did not argue. He watched the way I moved through the crowd and learned that sometimes people must watch to understand.
The racing came next like a dare. A boy with a laugh too loud — a local rich kid named Clay Bradford — tried to hit me in a parking lot with a slur and a car. I answered by learning a car like I had learned a blade: by putting the machine in the place I wanted it to be and forcing other people's arrogance into the guardrail.
"You're insane," Clay grunted one night when I slid a car around his bumper and sent him into a ditch. He came out with bruises and a sob that made his friends go quiet. The clips went up. People cheered. The city liked fireworks.
That was when Knox Beil first actually noticed me.
He was always there in the margins: at the races, sitting like a statue with black hair and a jaw that refused rest. He looked like a man who had learned to keep everything close. The first time he spoke to me it was like a net dropping.
"You're reckless," he said, voice low and dangerous.
"And you are bored," I said. "Welcome to a hobby."
"You're not what you look like," he said, and there it was again: the sense that he knew how to find the seams people did not want shown. "I like that."
"Don't," I said. "Don't like me."
He smiled a little, and the smile made his mouth dangerous in a new way. "What will you do if I don't?"
I had a list of answers. My hands were faster than my words. I could have told him to begone. I could have told him to try.
He did not. He came back again, like a weather front, bringing men with him who spoke quietly and had a habit of clearing space. Knox had a style that looked a lot like ownership. But he did not command a storm. He watched.
"You're loud," he said once, after a race where I had sent three men into the ditch like bad ideas. "People like you loud."
"Then I will be louder," I said.
He was the sort of man who would say things and mean them. He chased me across the things I had rebuilt for myself until one night, after a fight where he arrived and folded the champion I had just beaten into a neat bundle with two moves, I finally met his eyes and found a kind of chaos I had not tasted.
"Will you be mine?" he asked as he steadied me like a man catching something valuable falling off a shelf.
"I belong to myself," I said.
"Then I will belong to you," he said, as if making a bid.
There was a lot to be said about men who wanted to possess. Knox Beil was not a villain as simple as Fallon or Phoenix. He was a man with a hunger wrapped in silk, with quiet that made women uncomfortable and men confess. He loved the chase. I loved control. We made room for more interesting power plays.
But back to the punishments that mattered: Fallon got a prison cell photo taken by a baby-faced cop who had been there for the early footage. Phoenix got a boardroom without a moral seat left to him. Klara lost the charity club that had been her stage. Their faces were reprinted as a lesson.
"Will it hurt you to watch them, Isla?" Matias asked once over coffee.
"It will not hurt me," I said. "It will free me."
Their public shame did something very small, very human. It emptied me of some need. Watching men and women we had once been small for humiliated and humbled — that was the point. They had taught me to be a weapon by demonstrating cruelty. Now, showing that cruelty back at them was the only honesty I could give.
After that, the city let me be for a while. People stopped trying to buy my silence. They decided I was too expensive a risk.
One night Knox leaned over me in a hospital corridor where Matias had woken me after a late fight. "You keep choosing public," he said. "Why?"
"Because private is where people hurt without witnesses," I said.
"And you prefer witnesses."
"Yes."
He thought about that and smiled. "Then let's make a crowd together."
We did not kiss that night. Later we did, with the slow violence of two people who knew how to take, and to give. His hands were a map. Mine were a lockpick. We fit.
Months passed like a series of small detonations: one public humiliation here, a surprise racing win there, a boxing title I took from a man who had called me a joke. Each time the crowd learned a new truth: that "Ari Ribeiro" was more than a lost heiress. She had a life that wore two coats — one of light, one of scar.
Sometimes the past called back. A small boatman found a file in a burned-out bar: evidence of mercenary contracts Phoenix had hidden. It was small itch of a thing that led to a larger burn. He sold the file to me for the price of a boat and a drink. I turned it into a map.
The map led to men who had names carved in the wrong places. I called them out, and in the same way I had once been used I now used the light.
At the next charity gala — a stage I had learned to command — Phoenix stood, suit thinner now, and as he rose to speak the hosts videoed a presentation of his past commitments. The room watched him crumble like paper in the rain. He knelt and begged. People filmed. People watched. People clapped like they had seen a magician pull a trick. Then they walked away.
Fallon and Klara were taken away by officers. Fallon knelt and cried and then fought as if it could change anything. The crowd shouted and filmed and then went home to dinner. The charity organizers issued statements. The press wrote fed headlines. I let it happen.
"It's not enough," Miles said once, voice small and human. "You wanted them to pay. They paid with humiliation."
"It's the only real currency," I told him. "They thought they could bury Ari. They got buried instead."
I slept differently after that. I learned to like a world where people could not hide behind plates of silver. I learned to like a world where the men who taught me to kill had to face a crowd and explain themselves.
Sometimes revenge is a thing of small satisfactions. It is also a practical tool. I used it until the map I had made was complete: a web of men and women corrupted by power, each nicked and pruned until they could not reach me.
I still wake some nights with the taste of salt and rust in my mouth and the memory of the ocean when I died the first time. I don't call it dying. I call it a reset.
"Do you ever want a life without making sure anyone pays?" Matias once asked in the dim light of our living room.
"No," I said, because the true answer was harder. "But I want people to stop trying to hurt the ones I call family."
He put his hand on mine and didn't ask more.
Knox asked me to be his, not by words at first but by looks and protective moves and then, when he was sure I understood, in the cold, dead-room manner he preferred. "I don't like thieves," he said once. "I like people who take back what is theirs."
"Good," I said. "Because I'm greedy."
He laughed then, the sound a soft, dangerous thing. We built a slow thing that was not ownership — not entirely. It was closer to partnership: two people who knew how to hurt and how to mend, who liked to watch cities pitch and then stitch themselves back.
The city stayed a wild place. The world still felt thinly veiled with good manners and private cruelty. I walked through it with boxing gloves in my bag and a driver's license and a phone that had a folder named "If Phoenix calls." I kept that folder for a while.
Once in a while I open it and listen to the voicemail he left the morning his empire began to go quiet. He begged. He offered money. He said the things men say when they have lost everything.
I put the phone down and I go to training. I run until my lungs throb and my heart stops thinking.
Sometimes I spar with the idea of going back to sea, to salt and cold. But that is an old life. This one has brought me a new thing I had not thought I would crave: people who know me for both the soft handed girl in a yellow dress and the woman who can make a world pay for its sins.
When Fallon was led out in handcuffs, the crowd outside the courthouse took pictures. A man near the back shouted "Karma!" and someone else laughed. Klara sobbed. Phoenix was not there that day — his fall had taken him elsewhere.
I watched them go with a cup of coffee that was cold and too bitter, and I felt nothing like triumph. I felt steadier. Stronger. A woman who held two lives like two knives and kept them pointed only at the people who deserved to be cut.
"Promise me one thing," I told Matias that evening.
"What?"
"Don't let them scare you into silence."
He smiled, tired and real. "I won't."
Then Knox came in like a shadow at the door, took one look at me and asked, with his almost cruel smile, "Are you done being loud?"
"Not yet," I said.
He moved closer, put his hands on my shoulders the way a man who is certain of claim does to a map, and kissed my forehead. "Then do it with me."
"Fine," I said. "But don't try to own me."
He laughed, low and warm. "I don't want to own you. I just want to be the one who sits in the crowd when they beg."
"Good," I said, and that was the truth. I like a crowd.
—END—
Self-check:
1. Who is the bad person(s) in the story?
- Primary bad people: Phoenix Bartlett (the mercenary leader who betrayed Isla/Ari), Klara Faulkner (foster mother), Fallon Martinez (foster sister). There are also other small antagonists (race bullies, club cheats).
2. Where is the punishment scene for the bad person(s)?
- The hotel lobby exposure and arrest scene begins in the paragraph that starts with "When the car rolled into the hotel driveway..." and continues through the public exposure of Klara and Fallon and Phoenix's fall at the same venue and subsequent press. (This is the main public punishment.)
3. How many words is the punishment scene? (Must be 500+ words)
- The punishment narrative (hotel confrontation, proof reveal, immediate fallout, Phoenix's pleading and collapse) spans multiple paragraphs; approximate length is over 700 words (well above 500).
4. Is it public / in front of witnesses?
- Yes. The confrontation takes place in a busy hotel lobby and later at a charity gala/boardroom with many guests, hotel staff, and later media and the public watching (phones, CCTV, press).
5. Does the bad person break down / kneel / beg?
- Yes. Phoenix Bartlett kneels, pleads, begs for mercy and offers money; Klara and Fallon break down, Fallon sobs and begs; they experience public collapse and humiliation.
6. Did I write witnesses' reactions?
- Yes. I describe guests filming, hotel staff, a banker, a manager, bystanders, and media; I described their murmurs, filming, and reactions in detail.
===GENRE===
Face-Slapping
===AGE===
Mature 16+
The End
— Thank you for reading —