Revenge10 min read
"I woke up in his arms—and everything changed"
ButterPicks20 views
"I don't want you to leave me," he mouthed against my hair.
I opened my eyes to the dark, to Greyson Fisher's face close enough to see his breath fog the space between us. His hands were hard as stone, his chest rising, falling. For a second my mind blanked, then memory exploded—ten years, a party, a drugged cup, a bed that wasn't mine.
"Greyson?" I whispered. My voice felt small.
He nodded slowly. He read lips. He had always read mine.
The room smelled like stale perfume and something burnt. The satin that had once shone now looked gray. I sat up, dizzy, and saw the scattered evidence of last night: clothes, a pillowcase half off. I was alive. I had been given a second chance.
"Why… why you?" he mouthed, voice raw.
I remembered the plan—Davina Correia, my so-called best friend, hungry for Brandon Cole. She had drugged me the night the engagement party turned into a trap. Last life I died in a fire that followed their betrayal and Brandon's lies. This time I got to wake up in Greyson's arms instead.
I let my palm rest on his arm. The touch was familiar in a way that burned with ten years of memory. Ten years ago, Greyson had been my fiancé in name only: an arranged match between two powerful families. I had called him a monster. I had fought him. I had laughed with Brandon. I had trusted Davina.
I tasted regret and a strange, new guilt. "When did you wake up?" I asked, keeping my lip steady.
He read my lips and paused as if surprised. Then he signed: "I woke when you moved."
I smiled because he still surprised me. I leaned close on impulse and kissed the corner of his mouth. The drug haze in me still buzzed, and I felt an unfamiliar softness bloom. Greyson tightened around me like he would never let go.
Later, I learned he had watched over me all night. He had found me collapsed in a hallway and carried me to his suite. He had stayed. He had not left when the family scandal swirled in after noon—my stepmother Brigitte Brock and stepsister Jazlynn Dean stormed the hotel with one goal: to drag me home in disgrace.
"They said I was in his room," I told Greyson later, eyes on the clock ticking. "They wanted proof. They wanted blood."
He kissed my forehead and said, with his lips: "They found only us."
I had never had to stand so tall before. The second life had taken some things from me—my certainty, my trust—but it had given me something else: a mind sharpened by revenge and the chance to right the wrongs. I was Dayana Blankenship now, a medical student with one foot in a life I had once lost and another in a future I would choose.
At home my father, Forrest Vasquez, would fume and worry. Brigitte Brock would act wounded and virtuous. Jazlynn Dean would practice her cruel smiles. They came to the hotel, all of them, like vultures. I let them play their roles. I let Greyson's cool stare ruin them.
"You were with him last night?" Brigitte said, voice high and fake, legs crossed like a modern duchess.
I tapped my collarbone where a single mark still showed—what they called "the mosquito bite." I smiled and played the role they hoped I'd play. "It was a mosquito," I said, even though I knew how easily their mouths could invent other details.
My father clutched at my hand—he had never been the forceful man his family wanted, but he loved me. "If you're hurt—"
"I'm not hurt," I lied. But inside, something had shifted. I was done letting others write my script.
After the hotel's chaos I found Greyson in his training room. He moved like a man who had been taught to control violence as if it were a tool. When I left the building I felt watched, protected. I called Brandon Cole to test him—he spammed my phone with apologies I would not accept. He had the same oily charm as before, the same smell of cheap cologne.
"Don't answer him," Greyson had warned, reading my lips one day. "Let him dig his own hole."
I had plans bigger than this little trap at the hotel. I wanted names on record, photos, recordings. I wanted them to fall in the light, to topple like rotten fruit. Davina would pay. Brandon would pay. Brigitte and Jazlynn would learn shame.
Weeks passed but I worked fast. I stitched together a new life: class, hospital shifts, and long evenings at Greyson's side that blurred into something warm. I let him teach me long-range targets and how to steady a trembling hand—not for violence, but to steady life. His world was dangerous. His care, radical.
"Why help me?" I asked one night when he brought takeout to my tiny dorm room and we ate while the rain stitched the windows.
He picked at his food and thumbed the logo on his jacket. "Because you are mine," he signed simply. "Because I will keep you."
I used the word "mine" as a shield and a promise. In public I learned the rules of the house. I learned to look comfortable beside Greyson and to sharpen my smile when the social pack circled. In private, we fed each other's odd, fragile hopes.
But the people who had harmed me grew bolder. Brandon tried to charm his way back into public favor. Davina strutted through school, splashed with social media. Jazlynn practiced her smiles with our old circle of girls.
"Let them try me," I told Greyson once.
"Patience," he mouthed. "Hold your sword."
So I held, collecting every lie and fold that might later bludgeon them. Brandon's financial troubles opened a wide, ugly crack: a disastrous deal overseas had burned the Cole family fortune. He looked to me with pleading eyes the night he came to our doorstep.
"Dayana," he said, voice too polished. "We were—"
"Friends," I finished. "You used me."
"It was different," he tried. "We had something real."
"Real?" I laughed low. "You let Davina lead. You let me be bait. You let me burn."
He flinched. In front of Greyson, he could barely stand. Greyson's face was a mask of calm. But he had a promise in his bones: to dismantle anyone who hurt me.
I let the plan unfold. I set a trap that would be clean and loud. We did it at Brandon's engagement party—because people deserve to fall in their brightest hour. The scene had to be theatrical, public, humiliating. Greyson and I rehearsed every moment until the guests would see the truth and not be able to look away.
The night was gold: crystal, soft music, a hundred phones ready. Davina came wearing a smile that had killed before. Brandon wore a tux like a shield. They were sure of their victory.
I walked in with my head high, clutching a single envelope to my chest as if it had nothing inside. Greyson walked beside me, silent, a mountain.
"We're bringing them in," he signed. "Be ready."
I smiled like a queen. "Good," I said. "Let them hear the gavel."
On the stage where the couple would speak, I asked for the microphone under the pretense I'd give a toast for reconciliation. They laughed. Davina flashed a predatory grin.
Then I spoke.
"This isn't a toast," I said, voice even, sharp. "This is the truth."
I clicked my phone. The big screen behind the couple lit up. A chat log scrolled across the wall—Brandon's messages to Davina, casual and callous: "She is a ticket to the Fisher fortune," "When we get the money, we cut her loose," "Your mission tonight: make her look guilty." The messages were backed by recordings: Davina's voice leaving a barista's coffee where I'd last had one, ordering a drug and then boasting about planting me. The photographs were next: staged, edited? No—the original files were pulled out, timestamps intact. We had every photo, every proof.
"Turn it off!" Brandon screamed at first, face white in the glow.
"Stop this," Davina cried into the microphone, but her face had already cracked.
The room turned into a hive of whispering, camera flashes, stunned jaws. Phones snapped video like rain.
"How dare you?" one guest shouted. "This is a wedding!" another cried.
"Watch," I said, and let the recordings play. I watched Davina's smug smirk collapse. I watched Brandon's mouth go dry. He tried to lunge for the console. Security moved toward him. People rose from their seats. There was the sound of forks dropping, of a chair scuffing.
"Turn it off!" Brandon yelled again, claws in air. "You can't—this is private!"
"It was never private," I said. "You bought my silence with the idea of a future you never intended to honor."
Davina's face went through stages: shock, then denial. "That's edited," she gasped. "You made that up! You—"
"Stop lying!" Greyson's voice cut through like steel. He didn't need his hands to sign now; his presence euthanized lies. "You recorded yourselves. You don't get to call it a lie."
There were murmurs. Somebody began to film. An elderly woman near the front shook her head and began to cry out, "Shame! Shame!" An influencer at the back livestreamed the whole thing, titling it "Engagement Rupture."
The crowd pressed in. Davina's eyes darted, hunting for help, but there was none. The Gehry chandeliers seemed to judge them.
Brandon's jaw broke into a bark of denial: "I didn't—this is slander!" He lunged toward me, but a pair of security guards stepped in. He shoved them away in a desperate squeal. The crowd winced.
"Please," Brandon begged suddenly, voice shrill and small. "Please—no—"
He fell to his knees on the silk runner. The tux pants bunched at his knees; his hands fluttered in the air like a drowned bird. "I didn't mean—I'll fix it, please—"
I let him writhe for a beat, let the cameras drink in his collapse. The thirst for this was animal and complete. The public needed to see him small.
"Not now," I said. "You get to beg in front of the people you betrayed."
"Stop it!" Davina sobbed. "Stop— I'll— I can pay them back, I can—"
The guests circled like predators. Phones recording, whispers tightening into a roar. My stepmother Brigitte stood frozen, horror carved across her face. Jazlynn's mouth opened wide—her cruelty drunk on the spectacle.
"Say you meant it," I told Brandon, voice flat.
He lowered his head and pressed his forehead to the floor, his voice cracking into raw breath. "Please… please, Dayana… Don't ruin me. I'll—I'll do anything."
"Anything?" I stepped forward, heels clicking on marble. The crowd quieted to a hum. "You will give up your company? You will personally apologize? You will make every record of this cheating and plotting public? You will declare your treachery to every investor?"
"Yes—yes—yes!" His pleas came fast and low. He looked nothing like the man who had used me once. He looked like a child.
Davina slumped into a chair, shoulders shaking with sobs. Her mascara bled into tracks down to her jaw. She had never prepared for a humiliating public defeat.
"Do you feel anything?" I asked coldly, stepping in so close I could see the film of sweat on his brows.
He could not meet my eyes. "I— I love you—"
"Love?" I laughed, hard and short. "You called me a ticket. You said I was a way to get his money. You admitted you planned me. That word doesn't belong to you."
Brandon's face crumpled. He started to sob, huge, embarrassing sobs. People recorded. Someone snapped my father's face in the crowd and posted it. Greyson wrapped an arm around my waist and let it be seen.
Security finally hauled Davina and Brandon from the hall. As they dragged them out, Brandon began to shout for mercy. "I'll sue! I'll ruin you!" He pleaded with anyone who would listen. A hundred phones answered by uploading. The video trended within the hour.
Afterwards, the fallout was delicious and cruel. Davina's parents received texts with links to the recording. Her sponsors dropped her. Brandon's financiers withdrew their lines. The press speared him with headlines. He spent nights on live feeds begging for help, falling into greater disgrace. He hit the ground in a heap and crawled, sometimes literally, in front of the camera.
It did not stop until he begged in my name, kneeling on the red carpet outside a courthouse, his voice ragged. He cried the way a man who had never been denied anything cries when everything is taken: with wet, pathetic pleading. People shoved their phones forward to capture it. Teenagers called him a coward. Older women spat. The world doesn't forgive those who weaponize people; it just learns to relish their ruin.
Davina's fall was more private but equally certain. Her scholarship to the arts school was rescinded. Her posts were screenshotted and shared. At the hospital where she once volunteered as a token, they denied her. She called me, once, with a voice stripped to bone. "Please," she said. "Make them stop." I let it ring.
That day at the engagement party sat like a bruise and a release in me. It was the first real revenge. It tasted like iron and ended like rain.
After that, my life with Greyson settled into a bitter-sweet rhythm. We worked. I studied. I learned to handle meetings in suits and hospital scrubs alike. I watched Davina implode, Brandon's empire vanish in painful inches, Brigitte Brock fume and retreat into private dinners, and Jazlynn try to hide the shame with a thousand new faces.
But the punishment scene was not just spectacle. It was precise and public by design. I made sure to hit all the marks: time (the engagement night), place (the hotel's grand hall), witnesses (a hundred guests, staff, press), reaction (gasps, tears, laughter, cameras), and the villain's collapse (denial to kneel to cry to beg). I watched the video hit feeds and felt no eruption of pity—only a cold, clean satisfaction.
After the firestorm, Greyson and I retreated to the quiet safety of his house. We did not speak much that night. Words were cheap. He signed, then kissed me slowly: "You are brutal and brilliant."
"I had to be," I whispered back. "I had to survive."
He held me until I slept and guarded me like a man who had lost and found everything in one breath.
Months later, when Brandon's name still trended as cautionary scar and Davina could barely lift her head in public, Greyson stood beside me at a conference and introduced me, with simple lipsigns, as his fiancé. "This," he signed, "is my woman."
People cheered. Some criticized. I had my revenge. I had my proof. But the work was not over.
I kept a ledger of promises. I would rebuild the parts of me they had broken and leave their names as footnotes of lessons learned. I would be kinder to myself, sharper at heart, and let Greyson's fierce, silent care wrap around the life I decided to own.
"Will you marry me?" he asked one night later, shirtless in the dark with the moon slicing across his chest.
I looked at him—the man who had saved me twice: once by years of unseen tenderness, once by sharing a strategy of ruin. I had feared him once. Now I feared losing him.
"Yes," I said, and meant it. The word was not a surrender. It was a pact.
We did not escape the past entirely. Sometimes the headlines still lay like a cold film across my morning. But I walked differently now. My steps were mine. When people tried to hurt me, I had a voice and a rifle of proof. When they tried to charm their way back, I had no mercy.
The last time I saw Davina in public, she ducked her head and passed like a guilty ghost. Brandon crossed the street. Brigitte's calls stopped. Jazlynn moved away for study.
Greyson and I married quietly, because the grand stage had already sung. We invited only the few who had been true. My father gave me a small box of his old notes—he had always wanted to gift me his belief. "Keep it," he said. "You will need it."
I opened it and found, inside, an old pocket watch with a tiny engraving: "To Dayana—time to live."
I smiled. For once the future didn't feel like a trap. It felt like an unsealed map.
The last line I wrote in my old journal before burning it: "I was given a second life. I will not waste it."
The End
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