Face-Slapping16 min read
"Milk, Lies, and a Locked Door"
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I remember the clink of chain on stone as if it were a clock that always counted down. "Sister," a childlike voice called from the doorway. "Did you hide?"
"I hid," I whispered between the mattress and the floorboards. I bit my lip until it bled so I wouldn’t make a noise. My breath lived in the gaps between the slats.
"Found you!" The curtain ripped away and the face swung into my world—Emmett Yang's grin upside down, hair falling like a child's. My legs tried to run and didn't. He trapped my ankles before I could crawl away.
"Emmett… please," I said. My voice trembled. He saw the tears and something dark flashed in his eyes for a second. Then he smiled as if the world had nothing more dangerous than a hide-and-seek game.
"Be good," he crooned, softer than the metal chain had been. He carried me to the bathroom and washed me like one washes a broken toy—mechanically, without words. When he finally let me go that night he held me as if I were the only warm thing left.
The next day he hovered at the bedside with a spoon and a bowl like a little soldier tending a queen. "You're up," he said, and smiled that clean smile. I wanted to hate him and sometimes I did, but I learned to make my voice small enough to be accepted.
"I don't want it," I said when he offered porridge.
"You must," he replied, leaning his forehead to mine. "You look thin. Don't be cruel to me."
He watched everything. Once a delivery man handed me a carton of milk and my throat closed. The bruise on my wrist screamed, a souvenir of being tied when they'd first brought me to that house. He loosened the ropes years ago; now he let me walk to the garden as long as he could see me.
It took one small, staged thing—one boy "accidentally" sending me a bubble tea—to set him off again. "He looked at you," Emmett said, and his voice was a blade. "No one else can look."
"One look means nothing," I argued with tears already in my eyes.
"He doesn't get to look," Emmett said, and I felt the walls of my world tighten. I had to learn how to live inside his mania because I had a plan. I had to play the part he wanted until I could buy time. The boy, the tea, the scene—some of it was bait. I needed a way to send out a message. I paid the price by letting him break me that night and by learning how to fold myself into the shape of compliance.
Years later I tasted freedom three fingers at a time: a milk carton in the back of a taxi, a hidden phone, a brief message to a detective with no return address. The world held its back to me when I walked out. My stepmother asked, "Where did you run off to?" My father didn't hug me; he scolded my life choices. "You married nothing, you found nothing," he said, as if my survival were a sin.
I became quiet, useful. I learned the industry, the blunt business of fame and contracts. I became an agent.
"Marina," Douglas Clement said one night in the glossy restaurant at Jingnan 1027, his words slick like his tie. "This is the person in charge of the male lead we were talking about."
Vaughn Byrd smiled across the table and it felt like a knuckle in my chest. I knew him then—his face dredged up like something I thought I left underwater. He sipped wine like a man who paid for the table and the room and everyone in it. "So you're the agent," he said. "We can talk."
"You're Mr. Byrd," someone said.
"Yes, I'm Vaughan—Vaughn," he corrected with the kind of fondness people use when they're used to people apologizing.
My napkin slipped. "Pleased to meet you," I managed, though my pulse plucked a warning string in my throat.
He was charming. He was kind in public like someone who edits his anger out before the cameras catch it. When he talked about casting, his voice softened: men like him sweep a room and the room trembles differently after.
"I want the second lead," he said. "Make it my man."
I nodded. "We can discuss."
What followed pushed the old bruise raw again. The announcement for the boys—Nico Berger as the obvious star, and the second—Emmett Yang. "Emmett Yang? That name looks familiar," Douglas said aloud, like a conductor calling names in an orchestra.
My breath hitched. I saw the two syllables the world had tiled for me six years earlier: Emmett. I tried to tell myself he could not be the same. The photos the production sent me later were like a trap sprung—tall, refined, model-thin in silk pajamas.
At the first read-through, when Emmett lifted his eyes and looked straight at me, something that had been buried where I kept my worst memories began to move. But for now he wore a stranger's sheet. He was colder, more distant; the wildness was braided into a steady calm.
"He's different," Nico complained to me later. "He looks like he'd devour me on sight. I can't perform."
"Do your work," I told Nico. "Acting's not about fear. It's about choosing."
But then the on-set coffee came with a name tag, and Emmett's eyes caught mine, softened for a second and slid away. He never said hello to me after that—he pretended like we were strangers. I told myself that if the man had changed, maybe I could live with him being new. Maybe he had been cleaned like a window.
Everything shifted when the bubble-tea photo made the rounds. Tabloid accounts splashed: "Two young stars: chemistry or scandal?" Suddenly, my neat line of argument—protect the image, protect Nico—had to be defended with fire. I traded rumors for rumors and posted my own leak: staged photos of Emmett and Nico in a choreographed, breath-stopping kiss. It burned attention toward our drama and away from a worse, private fire. When I did that I had to feel like a gambler. I told myself I was saving a boy's career.
"That was clever," Vaughn said when the heat had passed. He looked at me like a man who had seen my ledger and liked the balance.
I agreed to a dinner at his place. "Ten minutes," his message read. "Or don't come."
"You're asking like you own me," I replied. I went.
He did more than ask. He opened a manila file in the car and shoved the pages at me. "Your mother's shares," he said. "They're... interesting."
I didn't look at the page at first. "Why are you in my family business?" I asked.
"If I want something, I get it." He smiled slow and soft. "Marriage could solve things, Marina."
"You mean, sell me." I closed the folder like a trap. "You think I'm that kind of woman?"
He shrugged. "You have blood and you have location. I have resources. We could make a tidy arrangement."
The way he said "arrangement" made me taste metal. He flicked his cigarette ash like a man who'd flicked entire lives before. He was not the boy who'd poured a glass for me; he was the man who placed the glass and tipped it with poison to suit his game.
"Vaughn," I said. "Don't make me small in my own life."
"You're not small," he said. "Not any more."
But he lied. He had already begun the paperwork that would turn my mother's shares to my stepsister's name. He had the signatures somewhere I could not reach. He had spent money I couldn't hope to match. He had friends who would nod and smile as they took pieces of a company like taking a slice of cake.
Then, one night that should have been ordinary, I found Emmett in the elevator. He spoke like he had forgotten our history and yet remembered every contour of it. "Which floor?" he asked softly.
"18," I said. The elevator hummed and light washed our faces. He pressed 19 and looked away. "Why do you have to be like this?" I thought, and we both stepped out at our floors like strangers who had slipped an old scar under new skin.
Weeks of filming passed. Emmett was a chameleon. He moved from cold to intimate for the cameras with the kind of practiced grace that made crew sway in delight. I kept my distance but followed the set like a shepherd following a flock of very expensive sheep.
The night Nico disappeared, I found the industry life unbearable. One call after another—"He's at 197", "He's not picking up." I swallowed my fear and drove across a city that spun like a coin.
I found him at 197 in a stupor and carried him like the child he was to his hotel, got him collapsed into the bed, and felt a heat settle in my chest I hadn't invited. Emmett's number flashed on my phone later: a one-word text, "Here."
I went to Emmett's room and knocked. He opened, wrapped in a white robe, hair wet, eyes like storms that could decide to rain or not. "Where is he?" I demanded. He shrugged. "Left. With friends."
"Is he with you?" I asked.
"No." He looked at me like a mirror I didn't like. "But he cried."
"Why would he cry over you?" My voice had too much of a laugh in it.
"Because I refused him," Emmett said simply, and my stomach dipped. He had the unsettling habit of saying things as if I hadn't heard the shout of the world between them. "Are you angry?"
"I'm always angry," I said. He smiled, and the smile was small and terrible.
One night after a press stunt I arranged to bury a gossip piece, I caught him alone in a doorway. He borrowed my cigarette by raising his lips to mine in front of the pack, a petty, intimate theft. He inhaled the smoke like a sacrament and passed it back like a confession. When he gave it back I felt the old tremor again—inside my ribs something remembered that nights ago had been days of terror.
"Don't," I whispered.
He laughed softly. "For whom?"
"For both of us."
He nodded. "I promised," he said.
Months became tide-washed. The drama succeeded. Emmett and Nico became the public's favorite pair. The industry smiled and invited them into variety shows like moths into the light. But the private weather between them darkened. Nico fell in love awkwardly and stupidly; Emmett was a practiced man who could be gentle like a blade. I caught them in a moment of nakedness I hadn't wanted as an adult: Nico with tears, Emmett with a steady calm that could stop a quarrel.
The avalanche began when the board meeting was set to finalize the transfer of my mother's shares. Vaughn polished his speech. He would announce philanthropic plans. He would smile at cameras and return to his wine.
I sat in the back as if someone had carved me into a chair. Document packages lay like little graves on the table. The room was thick with the smell of power: leather, paper, people who believed in their own importance.
"Is this all necessary?" I said quietly to my throat.
"Speak when it's your turn," he said, with a stitched smile that meant he believed he had me.
Nico was on my side but guileless. He didn't understand how to move in such rooms. Emmett did understand; he'd learned there was a difference between being cold and being quietly lethal.
"Marina," Vaughn said to begin, folding his hands like a priest who'd chosen his doctrine. "Before we begin, a statement."
He started to speak about legacy and stewardship, but his words were a lasso aimed at my throat. "I have acted for the family's good," he intoned, "and in doing so I have protected our future. That includes—"
"Stop," Emmett cut in, voice like a dropped stone.
A hundred heads turned. I felt my pulse reach for the ceiling.
"What are you doing?" Vaughn asked, smiling—too slow, too certain.
"Everything," Emmett said. He stood up, and for the first time in years his face was raw. He reached into his coat and took out a slim tablet. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "I have one thing to present."
He plugged it into a screen at the front of the room. Camera phones leaned in like birds. The projection showed a video.
It started with a casual shot of a dinner table months ago—a woman handing Vaughn a glass, Vaughn answering a phone and laughing, his hand—then a cropped clip of the milk I had drunk six years ago in the old house: Vaughn leaning, Vaughn's fingers near the rim of the cup, a phone at his ear. Emmett's voice narrated without theatrics.
"That night," he said softly, "Vaughn Byrd received a call about liabilities. He arranged for a medication to be slipped into Marina's drink to make her appear ill. He then planned to use her 'instability' to push her out of the company and assign the shares to another."
There was a rustle like dry leaves. I felt everyone around me inhale together—my father's face, pale; board members exchanging looks; an aide's hand tremble on a notepad.
"You'll excuse the bluntness," Emmett continued, "but logic without shame is a dangerous project. We have copies of bank transfers, witness statements, the phone logs tying that prescription to the lawyer Vaughn used. We have this—" He pressed a button and the table of the room filled with scanned documents. "—and there is this." Another click: audio, Vaughn's voice arranging details and boasting about 'fixing the girl's problem.' Notifications. Text messages. A handwriting sample on a courier note with the same ink as Vaughn's signature.
Vaughn was still smiling, but the color started to leave his face. "This is ridiculous," he barked, the first real crack in him.
"It is not ridiculous," Emmett said. "It's evidence."
"Fabricated!" Vaughn snapped then, the smile crumbling. "This is fabricated. Who would believe you? Who did you pay?"
"We sent all files to the regulatory body and to the criminal division earlier this morning," Emmett replied mildly. "The officers are on their way and a public broadcast of these documents is legal because the press has been informed."
"You're mad," Vaughn hissed. "This is defamation. I will sue."
"There's a video of you signing a courier verifying transfer notices," Emmett said. The screen filled with Vaughn's hand, his script, his stamp. Media phones chirped as images spooled and streamed. Microphones were threaded like hairpins into the room as cameras leaned in.
"You're lying." Vaughn's eyes slid from one face to another. He tried to call for security. "This is set up. Who are you? Who put you up to this?"
People in the room began to murmur. "He's fabricated it," someone whispered. "Isn't that Byrd?" said another. A woman in pearls took a photo for her feed, fingers trembling.
I stood because movement felt like an anchor. "It isn't fabricated," I said. "My mother's shares were transferred. I found a draft in their safe. I fought for years to find my voice. He tried to buy my silence and my inheritance." I said it slow because my throat was a muscle that had ached—"He arranged the drugging. He tried to destroy me."
Vaughn went white. His expression ran a track: disbelief, anger, disbelief again, then fury. He vindictively sought to shame me. "You," he said, "you—"
"Shut up." Emmett's voice cut like an ax. "For six years you got away with this because you are rich and you had friends. The bank transfers we have are tied to accounts you control. Your driver recorded you telling him to 'take care of it.' The doctor has testified. The courier was paid three times. Face it."
Outside the room, a camera man had already reached for a live feed. Someone whispered, "It's going live."
And so the punishment began.
Vaughn's face shifted through the stages I'd come to recognize in nightmares: at first incredulous, then white with anger, then an attempt at denial, then a widening fear as the room closed in like a net. His voice frayed.
"This is slander," he cried. "You—"
"How much did you spend to have my mother's signature faked?" Emmett asked quietly. The sound hung. The stockbroker next to me leaned forward. "How many companies did you bribe? How many phone calls did you buy?"
Vaughn tried to stand tall and swagger, but the air had become thin. "You can't prove—"
"What about the courier receipt with your palm print?" Emmett said. He tapped another file. "What about the call at 2:13 a.m. the night of the incident? The text message to your lawyer: 'Arrange medication, make it look natural'? Those are in line. We have the timestamp, the transfer, the witness names."
People gasped. A junior executive near the front clapped—then realized and stopped as he was stared down by the PR director. Cameras zoomed in; the world outside the room was already feasting.
Vaughn went through the modes like a man being stripped. He tried to laugh. It came out hollow. He tried to accuse us of conspiracy. He pointed at my father, tried to collect the board to his side. "This is impossible," he hissed.
A young intern stood up, pale, and said, "I delivered those papers. He paid me cash." There were others: the driver, the courier—people who had been told to be quiet for money, now unspooling like thread under light. "He threatened me," one said. "He told me to keep quiet. He gave us money."
The room tasted of thunder. Phones lit like stars as employees, board members, the press and security recorded everything. "Look at them," some said. "Look at him."
Then the change I wanted to watch: the smirk fled from Vaughn's face and fury bent into panic. He flailed, "You're lying!" He raised his voice high enough to split the room. I saw the exposure peel him open.
To be loud wasn't enough; he needed an audience to die in. And we gave him one. The cameras recorded his voice changing—there was denial, then anger, then a broken apologetic flurry that slid into bargaining language. "Please," he begged at one point, shocking everyone around him. "We can fix this. I can fix this. I'll give—I'll give you whatever you want."
The crowd around him changed as well: shock to disgust to a bitter enjoyment you can see sometimes when a caged animal is found to be less clever than it thought. Phones came up. Someone whispered, "He killed a girl's career." Another said, "He tried to ruin her life." "Shame on you," one woman spit.
A board member stood and began to lambaste him: "You used your money to terrorize a child. You betrayed this family." A ripple of agreement moved through the room. Some clapped. "I can't be around you," another young executive announced, taking off his tie in a little gesture of contempt. "I resign."
Vaughn's face crumpled through the last acts: feigned composure, fury, denial, a sudden scramble for control, then trembling despair. He pounded the table. "You set me up!" he shouted, then sank into a stack of papers as if he could bury himself. He tried to call the press a smear campaign, then fell silent as a security officer—already on his way, summoned by Emmett an hour earlier—walked in with two others and the calmness of authority. They read him rights with a precision that made his mouth look like it belonged to a child.
The onlookers were merciless, their reactions a chaptered play. Phones recorded the moment: "Isn't he the Byron of business?" someone said earlier; now they filmed his cuffs. Colleagues looked away. Some crossed the room to shake hands with me as if I were the only honest person left.
"Don't touch me!" Vaughn wailed. "You cannot—" It was a child's shriek turned adult. He shifted from haughty to pleading to finally a small wretch as the officers guided him past a row of cameras. He turned to me, and for a split second his eyes made a shape like remorse. Then they were blank.
"Wait," he groaned. "I didn't mean—"
"You're being taken in," said an officer gently. "You will have a chance to speak."
The cameras panned to a sea of reactions: some cried, some covered mouths, several people filmed him for later doom. Someone else—his long-time business partner—walked up, made a short, formal announcement: "We regret these events, and we will cooperate with the authorities."
Outside, a crowd had formed by the building's steps. Reporters called, "Mr. Byrd! Any comment?" People pointed their phones like torches. Someone who had once clinked wine with him now pressed a digital recorder into a cop's hand. "We saw him with the woman's milk," someone whispered. "He deserves what he gets."
I stood very still. For years I had believed in the punishment of ghosts. This was a living punishment: public, recorded, the kind that eats reputations and power in the daytime where lawyers can't patch everything. He was stripped not only of his money but of the comfortable lie he told himself in the mirror.
When Vaughn's image disappeared into the police car, the room exhaled as one. People murmured and cameras hummed. "Brave," someone whispered in my ear. Others called me "hero," like bruises could be trophies.
Emmett came to stand by me then, not smiling. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I thought I wanted it."
"Did it help?"
"It helps that he's gone," I said. "It helps that no one can do this again with his money."
He took my hand, and for the first time I did not pull away. Around us, people walked out to think of their own small survivals, their own debts. The press filed past, asking for comments; my father, who'd been silent, stood near the door like a man who'd seen a ghost and couldn't tell if it was mercy or judgement.
Emmett's voice dropped. "You were brave," he said. "You never needed to be brave alone."
Someone near the door said, "See? Justice is slow but it finds you."
"And public," I replied, watching the scene thin into post-opinion. "Very public."
The aftermath was a week of headlines that made my head spin. Vaughn Byrd's empire began to wobble. Board members resigned. Regulators opened inquiries. The photos I had used to shield my boy's career had instead become evidence for the justice I wanted.
When the storm settled a little, Emmett found me alone. We were back where all our worst things had started: the quiet that comes after the noise.
"You should stop calling me 'sister' now," I said with a brittle sort of humor. "You've said it enough to wreck any other word."
He smiled. "Then call me what you will," he said. "But I won't go."
"Why do you stay?" I asked.
"Because," he said, and the single word held more than I expected. He searched my face like he was reading the map of an old country, as if he still had a route that might one day lead back to gentleness.
Months later, the legal process moved on. Vaughn's public humiliation turned into indictments; his guilty face in court became the finale to months of media cycles. The board restructured. I watched as men in suits who had attended the banquet wrote letters of apology, or tried to. I watched them sign settlements and shuffle away. People who had been glad to stand by him suddenly pretended they had always been principled.
There were small satisfactions. The courier who had taken his cash took me aside and said, "I couldn't sleep. I told the truth." The driver who had been paid and told to keep his mouth shut handed over his text logs and then left the city for a new life. "I couldn't carry it any more," he said. Each one was a relief like a stitch taken out.
In the end, the punishment I’d desired was not a public spectacle for its own sake. It was to see the man who had planned to erase my mother's life and mine become small enough to be subject to ordinary law: interrogations, arrest, court arraignments where he learned that not every ledger can be balanced with a bribe. The shredding of his public self was not vengeance as I had imagined; it was restoration—my life returned to the world.
"Do you ever think of the milk?" Emmett asked me one night months later, when we sat on the roof of the agency after the cameras had gone. The city breathed in neon.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "It tastes like fear when I remember."
He laughed softly. "I hate milk," he said. "But I'll drink it if you ask me to."
I turned to him. His hand found mine without ceremony. "Don't promise me anything," I said. "Just stay."
He squeezed my fingers. "I will. I don't know what I'll be, but I will be here."
On my desk was a plastic lid from a bubble tea—one I had kept under a stack of contracts. When the case went public, someone joked that a lid had become evidence. I kept it anyway. It was absurd and small and real, like the life I was building from pieces of paper and scars.
The lid is battered and stained, and every time I press it against my palm I feel something: a loop cut through time that goes from a milk cup to a public hearing to a hospital infusion. It reminds me—of escape, of the men who hurt me, of the man who saved me whether he had been the monster I thought he was or not.
At the shareholder meeting I had stood up thinly dressed with legal papers like armor, and watched the man who had tried to bury me cry in front of the cameras. People filmed him. They whispered. They took his face and kept it like a lesson.
Later, when the world cooled and our drama receded into new headlines, I kept my lid on my desk.
One night Emmett leaned over and said, "You kept it."
"Why would I throw away proof?" I replied.
He smiled at the absurdity of it. "You keep small things that mean big things," he said. "That's how you measure your life."
"Are you afraid?" I asked.
"Of what?" he said.
"Of being like them," I answered.
He looked at me with a seriousness that made the air still. "I'm afraid I will fail you," he said. "But I'm more afraid of losing you to memory and to men who think money polishes sin. I can't promise you'll be safe always, but I'll keep trying."
A breeze moved the paper on the desk. The lid caught the light in a dull way. I kissed his knuckles and felt something like unwrapping happen inside me—a careful untying of what had once been bound up in fear.
I keep the lid still. It is not a talisman. It is a record: the seed of our story that began with milk and ended with a boardroom humiliating a man who thought himself above law. It tells me who I was and who I have the right to be now.
The End
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