Face-Slapping17 min read
I Woke Up Angry — Let Them Burn, Let Them Fall
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"I felt the blade go in."
I remember the cold metal, the hot line of blood, and Jasper Jacobs's mouth curving into a smile that did not belong to any husband I once trusted.
"Why?" I could barely force the word out.
"You were boring," he said like it was a fact. "You cost me chances. Only when you're gone will the company finally be mine and Kamryn will stand by my side as my real wife."
His laugh sounded small in the huge room. I tasted iron and thought that would be the end.
Then everything went black.
They told me later that I had died for a few minutes. They said the world paused for me, and then the medics pushed me back into life. I do not care which one of those lines is true. What matters is this: I woke up cold and very, very ready.
"Get up," I told the ceiling when I could breathe again. "Get up, Indigo."
I am Indigo Mori. I used to be the good daughter, the easy smile, the naive bride who handed the family company and her heart to a man who later tried to end both.
"I will not be small anymore," I whispered, and the words landed like stones.
"You look different," Kamryn Rahman said to me later at the masked ball. "Be careful, cousin — today is important. Don't mess it up."
She handed me a white mask with false sweetness. Her eyes flicked. Her smile tightened. I took the mask and put it on.
"You always were dramatic," I told her. "Isn't this your chance to shine?"
She laughed and watched me go.
People think the ball that night was a party. For me it was a chessboard.
"You're late," I told him when I found the man in the corner — Giovanni Carpenter — who wore the black mask and the kind of silence that filled rooms.
He glanced at me like I was a fly. "You are not on the guest list," he said.
"Your sleeve button is missing," I replied, casually.
He showed me his wrist. The place where a sapphire cufflink should be was bare.
"Close your eyes," I said, and I began a ridiculous countdown. "Ten, nine—"
He shut his eyes, bored. I ran away with his black mask, and he stared after me, stunned, then irritated. He found the white mask on a table by the flowers, the sapphire sewn to it. He wore it and left.
I wore the black that belonged to him, and everyone assumed I belonged to fortune instead of plan.
"Indigo, you're running off," Jasper complained and hugged me like a pet. "Do you ever worry about me?"
"I worry about you enough to let other people handle you," I answered. "Put on your mask. The ball starts."
He complied like a child and opened his mouth to say things he had practiced a hundred times.
"Tonight will be special," he crooned when the music started. "After the dance, I'll make it official."
"Official?" I smiled. "You mean humiliating?"
He ignored the tone. He adored public light. He lived for applause.
The stage glowed with bubbles as the orchestra played and men and women moved like bright moths. Jasper's grin grew as people stared. He had always wanted the center.
"Marry me, Indigo," he said when the music stopped. He knelt with a ring and a theatrically sincere face. Cameras flashed. The crowd leaned forward.
I was calm. I did not give him the night he wanted.
"Wait," I said. "I think something is wrong."
Bubbles floated down like soap. They glided across Jasper’s suit. He yelped as the bubbles touched his sleeve and flared into flame.
"Fire!" someone screamed. "Is that—"
Panic. Men ripped at their sleeves. Men screamed. I snapped photos like a machine. I recorded his panic until his pants caught and he was sobbing and thrashing and trying to swim in a fountain that only fed the heat.
People scattered. Someone knocked a vase. Someone hurried for fire extinguishers, and someone slipped a hand out of a pocket and recorded everything on a phone.
Jasper rolled in the water. He screamed. He screamed louder than he ever loved me.
"Help!" Kamryn cried from the water, until he grabbed her by the ankle and shoved her out, leaving her drenched. She had a trained face for being victimized.
I let them scramble. I called to the crowd: "Step forward. Step forward to stomp it out!" I led the very footsteps that put him out. I saw his face when the photos spread. I felt a heavy, slow pleasure at the sight of humiliation wearing him like a thin coat.
After the chaos, guards escorted me into a moonlit garden. A white mask glinted there on a marble bench. Giovanni looked at me with that dangerous stillness.
"Did you set the fire?" he asked.
"I did not," I lied, plain and without apology.
He searched my face. "Who would do this?"
"Who benefits when Jasper is a laughingstock?" I asked. "Who loses when the old order shifts?"
Giovanni's guard stepped in. He did not move with violence. He moved with the certainty of a man who kept secrets in polished boxes. "Say your name," he told me when he was alone.
"Indigo Mori," I answered.
He neither smiled nor softened. He dropped something into his pocket — a thumb-sized data drive — and looked at me.
"There are other ways to be rescued," he said. "You could give me a proper thank you."
"You ask too simply for thank you," I told him. I slid the small drive into his pocket. "Consider it a debt call. If you want the rest of your night to go well, be cautious. I know a few things. I can be useful."
He looked at me like a man considering a good argument. "Useful can be a dangerous thing," he warned.
"I know what useful looks like," I said. "What I don't know is mercy."
He did not walk away.
The next morning my father, Malcolm Atkins, asked me to come in. He sat in his study like a man who had been frightened into clarity.
"You did something last night," he said. "Your cousin says you misbehaved at the ball and—"
"I behaved," I said. I cried in his arms and then stopped. I told him I would run the company and be careful and that I would not let him die worrying. He believed me because he always wanted to.
After he slept, I went to the office. I found Isaiah Yoshida at his desk—the assistant who had always been loyal—and I shook his hand until he knew I was present.
"I want an audit," I told him. "From the top to the bottom. Start with everyone whose shoes squeak the loudest."
He blinked. "Tonight?"
"Tonight," I said. "And put Miguel Wang on a call."
Miguel Wang was the man who had hosted the ball. He was irritated, but he had to listen to me because I now possessed a threat: knowledge and intention.
We began pruning. I learned where the rot had come from. I found the names of people who lived on other people's flows. I found the men whose hands were in too many pockets. I began to move them like chess pieces.
"Who put a powder on Jasper's suit?" I asked Isaiah.
"I don't know," he said. "But we can check logs. Security was sloppy. The guard officer, Chet Schmitz, was drunk during the night shift."
"Remove him now," I ordered.
"He is old, Indigo," Isaiah said. "People will cry."
"Then let them cry," I answered. "Start the paper trail."
He obeyed. I felt something like power tighten in my ribs.
"You're so cold," Kamryn said when she visited the office the next day.
"I'm sharp," I corrected. "And I have plans."
She smiled like sugar and knife. "You won't throw me out, will you?"
"You don't get to ask that," I said.
She did not understand then how the world had shrunk for her. She thought she could charm and lie her way into every situation. She had used me as cover for years. She had sat in my life like a parasite.
"Don't worry," I told her. "I'll be fair."
Two weeks later, the company had a new rhythm. I called a meeting and we purged the worst of the corruption. I fired men who had treated the company like a buffet. When a man came to shout at me, Isaiah stepped forward.
"She is the owner," Isaiah said quietly. "You can storm off or you can sign a transfer and leave quietly."
"You're a child," one of the men spat.
"Then you are old," I said. "And dispensable."
They left. I used the kind of public, quiet humiliation that hurts in the small rationale of the office. A man whose greed had cost our brand was fined, shamed, and stripped of privileges. I made sure every email noted the change. People watched.
"You're not what you were," Kamryn said, later, trying to look the part of offended cousin.
"No, I'm not," I admitted. "I'm someone who keeps her hands clean for the parts that need to be sharp."
Then Giovanni called.
"I want a clearer plan," he said. "We will cooperate. The 'nation trend' line you proposed could work."
We drew up a contract and a public performance: a partnership, staged as a marriage because a ring and a paper are harder to disassemble than a rumor. Giovanni wanted the visibility; I wanted protection. We signed what the world would see as a binding engagement.
"You sure?" he asked, closing the pen like a folding blade.
"Yes," I said simply. Inside my skull I marked his small changes in the contract. He thought he made concessions. I had made edits that allowed us room to crush those who hurt me and to use legal leverage to freeze their assets. I had learned many tricks in a life where I had been burned.
"Tonight you will stand with me at a charity auction," he said. "Two hours."
"Two hours," I confirmed.
We went and I played the mild fool. People assumed I was the soft, foolish heiress. Then we made them wrong.
At the auction Giovanni bid on a faded dress — a qipao that would react to rain and show gold threads. I recognized it instantly.
"It's worth more than a million," I told him on stage. "It's gold-threaded under the silk. Watch."
I misted the dress and let the gold glint. The crowd cooled. They looked at me new.
"You bought me a lesson," I told Giovanni after the applause. "You were testing me."
"You led the show," he said. "You were useful."
We were becoming dangerous together.
That night, someone sent photos of a velvet-robed couple to the tabloids — Jasper and his newest arrangement, a woman named Emilie Fernandes. The photos were intimate, and the world ate them like honey.
"Who leaked them?" Jasper demanded when he came crawling to our gates, wobbly with shame and rage.
I chose to answer in front of everyone.
"Whoever would make your life worse for the grief you gave me," I said, and video-called Miguel Wang — the host — who blustered and tried to explain the incident as a small thing.
Giovanni took the phone and said, plainly, "This is not family business that can be smoothed with apologies, Miguel. He owes a contract penalty."
He hit the right crack in the room. People looked at Jasper like a broken toy. He crumbled.
"Get out!" I told him later on the driveway, and he left with his neck smaller than before.
But I wanted more than a shove. I wanted a burn. I wanted them to fall so far they could not remember which hand they once used to lift a glass.
The next morning, I began a slow, precise campaign.
"Get the files on the Zhangs," I told Youssef Christensen, the tech genius I had kept as a reserve. "And Kenneth Cruz's company. See the flow."
Youssef smiled like a man who could do wonders and said yes. He had a loose loyalty to me from better days. He owed me for being his first kind hand and for never turning him away.
"Good," I said.
I did not reveal the plan. I let the rumor engines rattle.
Jasper and Kamryn had people — publicists, paid friends, men who took the world as a right. We had whispers, leaks, and careful pressure. We had contracts that Giovanni held up like a gavel. We had the truth wrapped in the right timing.
First, I let video clips of Jasper's drunken demands at clubs and business dinners slide across the net like oil. They were not fake. He had many footage, and we found them.
Second, we nudged a hungry reporter with a tip about Kamryn's private messages and evidence of her asking staff to sabotage me. She thought she could get a better title by flipping us a story, but we gave the reporter more: bank transfers, pictures of hidden meetings, names of go-betweens.
Third, I used the company to unload every shady contract we could find that involved Jasper's shell companies. It took a day for investors to start muttering. Kenneth Cruz's board called. The stock price of Kenneth's fabric empire dropped a painful notch.
Then we struck a decisive blow. We planted a cover — a fake tender, a worthless order — in one of Jasper's external accounts. The tender failed spectacularly when the goods didn't ship, an official audit flagged the irregularity, and the news spun into a bright, poisonous arc.
We did not play gentle. We played fierce.
It all centered on one public event: the charity ball I'd once attended. We had a new venue, a new host, a new camera crew, and me as the elegant moderator of the night. I wore the black that had once belonged to Giovanni on purpose.
"Who is responsible for the flames?" a reporter asked in the middle of the event when Jasper attempted to salvage dignity by showing up. He thought he could win back pity. He thought wrong.
We hit the lights. A video screen lit up with a clean, calm voiceover. It played like a short film that did not require explainers. It showed bank transfers and whispered conversations. It showed Kamryn's messages pressuring a junior executive to add a powder to fabric shipments. It showed Jasper's phone going to the burner number that had paid the men who nearly killed me. It showed Kenneth Cruz's partner calling to cancel a meeting after a bribe was offered.
We watched their faces as the footage rolled. They grew pale in a way I had only seen in a bad dream.
"You're lying!" Kamryn screamed and threw herself to the floor in a practiced show of hurt.
"This is evidence," I said, and I walked slowly across the stage. "Do you want to explain to everyone why your name appears here, Kamryn?"
The room was heavy with cameras. The crowd could smell blood, or at least the thrill of public disgrace.
She sobbed and denied and then sobbed worse. Jasper's face did an ugly slide from anger to panic. Kenneth Cruz tried to stand like a man, but his hands shook when the bondholders called his line live on air. His shareholders watched their holdings flicker red.
"Confess, Kamryn," I told her. "Or the bank will. Or the law will."
She looked at me like a trapped animal. "Please—"
I lifted the microphone.
"Kamryn Rahman helped plan an attempt on my life," I said. There is a point in public shame where the word shame itself infects the room. "She arranged for my husband to be in the most flames. She arranged my father's hospital visit to be the worst that night, all to secure a deal."
"That's not true!" Kamryn wailed.
"Isn't it?" I asked. "I have messages you sent. I have bank slips. I have video of your hire taking notes and of the men who did the dirty work speaking on a recorded call. Which part isn't true?"
Her face collapsed. She dropped to her knees and then to the floor. She crawled like she had been taught a script.
"No—no—please," she begged, and a dozen phones rose like a field of stakes. Hands with devices recorded every hitch of her voice.
They filmed her panic. They filmed her asking for mercy. She looked small and ridiculous. The cameras loved her for being human, and no one came to help.
"Everyone," I said softly but clearly. "This is not just a family fight. This is criminal."
I had already put the legal pieces in motion. I had documents filed with the corporate board, evidence lodged with prosecutors, and an independent review ready to go public.
"You can't—" Jasper sputtered.
"Yes, I can." I smiled. "You tried to kill me. You left me for dead. You lied to everyone and used this company as your currency. You used people like me and then threw me away."
I watched his hands tremble as his network of allies checked their phones and slid away. I watched Kamryn's face cave in until she looked like a naked child. I watched Kenneth Cruz attempt to call a meeting but have his phone answered by a bank manager who waved a report. The report was not about small thefts. It was a paper tornado of deceit.
The punishment did not involve police men yet. It was worse for them. The social life and the business life collapsed at once.
"Get her out of my sight!" Kenneth roared and then asked a shareholder to have a door held open for him.
We did not break them with blows. We broke them with the public seeing.
Kamryn tried to run. The cameras followed her. They filmed her tearful plea to an old mentor who now waved his hand in disgust. They filmed Kenneth Cruz on every channel as he begged to be heard and was answered with a silent boardroom. They filmed Jasper as his investors demanded an immediate audit and his allies walked the other way.
"It's not over," Jasper told me later, making a last push. "You will pay for this."
"How?" I asked.
"Everything," he whispered. "I'll make it worse than you can imagine."
"Try," I said.
Public humiliation is a slow, pounding stone dropped into water. It spreads and unsettles the bottom. The markets dip. Friends do not pick up calls. A wife throws a shoe and screams.
And then the legal net pulled tight.
"Indigo, we have warrants," Giovanni told me when the prosecutors finally moved. "They will take them in. But their downfall needs to be seen and heard. People need to know why they are gone."
"Make it loud," I said.
They came in the middle of a shareholders' meeting. Cameras were there because this is the modern age and the process is never entirely private. Kamryn was handcuffed amid wailing claims and the camera focused on her mascara running in streaks like small rivers.
She begged for me to stop. "Please, please—" she cried.
"You begged me for kindness once," I said, and my voice was almost gentle. "Remember that. I do."
At the arraignment, Jasper's face was a mask of gray. My old husband, who had tried to stab me, who had kissed me the night before he set fire, who had taken my name and then cut me — he fell apart in the harshest way.
He knelt by the press when they dragged him. He clawed at his shirt, then at the lawyers. He sobbed and hissed.
"Have mercy!" he shouted. "I need the company! I—"
"Then why did you try to burn me?" I asked in court.
He could not answer. The cameras had him. The city had him. The shareholders had him. His wife — the arranged, the chosen, the one who had used him — left him with nothing but ash.
The worst moments are those when a man realizes there is nothing left to patronize him. The board voted to strip his titles overnight. Investors sold. His bank accounts were frozen as a part of the legal process. People who had once kissed his cheek now watched him taken out in handcuffs. A few of his friends tried to claim influence to get him out. They were recorded calling for leniency and then called by the prosecutors to explain their silence. Their reputations slipped too.
"Who set this up?" one of his last defenders asked me as he sat in a jail hall, defeated.
"You did," I said. "All of you."
At the corporate party where I had once been nearly killed, the news sites played the footage. Thousands watched the moment Kamryn fell and begged and then the moment the bailiff lifted her into modern disgrace. The city gaped. The feeds looped. Everyone who had seen them had to ask whom they had trusted.
"Is it over?" Giovanni asked, folding his hands.
"No," I said. "Justice does not end with a gavel."
"You want them broken," he said.
"I want them honest," I answered. "And I want my father's name cleared."
We continued. I pushed the lineup of guilty men to the public. I made sure they were investigated not only for fraud but for attempted murder, for conspiracy, for threats. I wanted the full consequences to show what happens when greed eats a life.
The final scene — the one I had waited for as long as I breathed — was staged for the public and ugly.
Jasper's trial took place with half the city watching online. The prosecutor read aloud the messages that proved intent: texts where Kamryn had written, "Make it look accidental," and money transfers that matched men who had been spotted in security footage near the ball. The defense tried to say the evidence was planted. They argued about chain of custody and the complications of stolen phones. But the net was tight.
When the verdict came, the court was full. I sat near the back with Giovanni and Isaiah and Youssef. The gallery held thousands of eyes.
"Guilty," the judge said on all counts. "Guilty of conspiracy, fraud, attempt to murder."
For a moment the world stopped as a breath. Then someone sobbed. Cameras swallowed the sound.
Jasper tried to shout but was dragged away.
Outside, the crowds gathered. Phones lifted like a tide. Strangers cheered. Some screamed in hatred. Others applauded me like a queen.
They would show his fall to their children. They would say never again. Kamryn wept and asked me to forgive her. She begged with a sound I had never heard before, a true animal pleading for mercy.
I took a step forward. The reporters leaned in.
"Do you want me to forgive you?" I asked softly.
She looked like someone out of breath at the bottom of a well. "Please," she said. "I didn't know what I was doing. I—I am sorry."
"Get up," I said.
She looked at me like a child who had been promised the moon and had taken a shovel to the sky. "I can't—"
"Please, then," I said. "Get up and say it."
She crawled to her feet. The cameras caught her eyes. Her lips trembled. She said the words I had asked for.
"I am sorry," she said.
The sentence did not wipe her slate. The court would decide everything. But in that moment the woman who had tried to end my life and destroy my father's legacy had to take the most human step: to plead and see the cameras for what they are — mirrors.
The consequences came fast. Jasper lost everything: his legal licenses, his deals, and his name on the letterhead. Kamryn had her social life scraped away. Her friends unfriended her in public. Her carefully curated photos were replaced with headlines. Kenneth Cruz's company faced shareholder revolt and a cascade of resignations. His partner left him on the night of the biggest fall, and his bank froze a line of credit that had once been his lifeline.
They cried in the square. They knelt. They screamed. Lawyers whispered. The cameras rolled.
A woman I had never met came up to me after the trial. She held out a small plaque.
"Your father would have been proud," she said. "You did right."
"Did I?" I asked.
She nodded. "You saved a company, a craft, and someone else who might have been hurt, and you did it with no blood. Now you must rebuild."
I thought of the qipao and the way the gold threaded itself into view when it met water. It was a miracle of craft and patience. That was how I had built my revenge: patient, hidden, then revealed.
"What's the first thing we do?" Giovanni asked later, in the quiet office we now shared.
"Finish the designs," I answered. "Bring back the artisans. Save a craft."
We turned the company into what I had wanted it to be long ago: a place of craft and honor. We built a brand around the rain qipao and the white-crane line. The new fashion line sold not only garments but stories. We hired women who had been overlooked. We gave raises to loyal people like Isaiah. We supported Youssef's small tech firm. We rebuilt the supply chain with honest people. We kept one eye on the legal work that would take years.
"Do you ever think about forgiveness?" Giovanni asked once, while we were watching the sunrise over the city from his quiet balcony.
"Sometimes," I said. "Forgiveness is expensive. It costs to turn the other cheek when the other hand still holds a knife."
He looked at me with something like pity. "Is killing them with kindness not enough?"
"I want them to know how much they lost by losing their honor," I said. "If they must fall, let them fall in public so others can see and learn."
He reached for my hand. His fingers were warm, steady.
"You did it," he said. "You made them pay."
"I did," I answered. "But I also saved something. My father slept tonight without worry."
He squeezed my hand. "You belong to me."
"I belong to what I choose," I said, and the words were a small truth between us.
He drew me closer. "Then choose me."
I paused. The option was narrower now than in the past. I had built a wall around my heart. Giovanni had scaled it gently, not with force but with patience. He had kept me from the men who tried to kill me. He had stood with me when the cameras were lit.
"Do you promise to help me keep what we built?" I asked.
"I promise," he said.
"Then let's sign the paperwork, husband," I said.
He laughed — a rare sound — and the world felt softer for a second.
We married not for show but for a contract that protected what needed protecting. We married with a plan for a life where neither of us was used by rivals. We restructured the company and made the family name mean something different.
The last time I saw Jasper, he was in the papers. They showed his face and the headline said it all. I walked past the racks of the boutique we had just opened and saw his photo, and I felt nothing more than a quiet wind.
"Do you ever think about what could have happened?" Isaiah asked me one evening as we closed the new workshop.
"Every day," I said. "I think about being weaker. I think about the girl who used to live here and how she would have forgiven too much."
He nodded. "And now?"
"Now I breathe," I said.
Giovanni and I built a home that was not a museum of hurt. We hosted a charity for artisans. The rain qipao became a symbol of fragile things that change when touched by water — a small, strange miracle.
One night, years later, I stood in the studio alone. A bolt of the gold-threaded silk lay across my hands. It glinted when I breathed, like a secret ready to be shown.
I thought of the last person who had tried to hurt me. I thought of the way his knees had followed the floor and how the cameras had loved to watch him fall. I thought of the slow justice we had served that made the city quieter and stronger.
I placed the silk into a box and wrapped a single note around it.
"Let this be a watchword," I wrote. "When the gold shows, you will know how I saved it. When the rain comes, you will see what matters."
I sealed the box and put it on the shelf where my mother kept other small, important things: a pen that had been hers, a paperweight, and a faded photograph of father smiling in a younger, kinder time.
Then I walked to the balcony where Giovanni stood, watching the river.
"Do you regret anything?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I regret only that it took me this long to wake up."
He took my hand and kissed it in the cold night air.
"Good," he said. "I would have hated to fight you and then lose."
We stood there, looking at the city that had been changed. The lights on the buildings made rows and lines like stitches in a great fabric. Somewhere down there, reporters were still talking, and somewhere else, an artisan in a tiny workshop was stitching a small, stubborn line of gold into plain silk.
I thought of my father, of the qipao that revealed itself in rain, and of the blade that had once been aimed at my heart. I felt the shape of my life anchored new.
"I woke up angry," I said softly. "But I woke up with a purpose."
Giovanni's hand tightened. "Then keep waking," he answered.
I laughed then — a clean, surprised sound — and the city took it in like rain.
The End
— Thank you for reading —