Revenge12 min read
My First Kiss Stolen, My Life Turned Over
ButterPicks13 views
I still remember the red dress.
"I have an appointment," I told the hostess at the door.
She took my card and her eyes widened. "Mr. Grayson has arranged a room. Please follow me, Miss."
I followed, clutching a black card like a fragile prize. My hands were shaking.
"Are you okay, Miss?" the manager asked when he helped me change my shoes.
"I'm fine," I whispered. "Thank you."
My phone vibrated behind my palm. I answered with my heart in my throat.
"Katharine, Grayson is in room 888. Will StarField accept the batch?" a voice asked.
"I don't know," I choked. "I only have the QC report. They have no reason to refuse."
"You're strong. You can do it."
I tried to breathe steady. My makeup would hide nothing if tears came. Tonight the biggest client — StarField — might take our batch. If they took it, my father's factory might live.
The room was dark and smoky. Men and women tossed dice and drinks. The air was heavy and reckless. A man with a fat face made a motion to a pretty girl with lacquered hair.
"Grayson, play with us," the fat man urged.
"Not now," Grayson said, and a cold line closed his voice.
Someone suggested a bottle game. The bottle spun and landed on the fat man. He kissed a girl loudly, and everyone cheered.
"When it lands on an outsider," the spinner announced, "the outsider must kiss for three minutes. Any gender."
Everyone stared at the door.
I opened the door, prepared to walk in and hand my documents to reception. The bottle turned. A man reached out and fixed my head, and then suddenly his mouth was on mine.
"Hey!" I shoved. "Get off me!"
My fingers scratched the stranger's chest. My strength felt like a child's. He only tightened his grip and dragged me backward.
"Who is she?" someone laughed.
"Is she one of you?" the fat man taunted.
A familiar voice cut through. "Let go."
Grayson stepped between me and the room like a blade. He pushed the man aside without flair. "Let's go," he said, steady and cool.
Someone in the room huffed. "He got lucky."
"Move," Grayson said. He guided me out into the rain without looking back.
Outside, I ran barefoot in the drizzle. My heels were in the room; my feet were raw against the wet street. The leather tasted of failure and shame as my dress darkened with rain. I fell. Papers scattered and water streaked my QC report black.
"I can't let this go," I told him when he climbed out of his car and leaned over me with an umbrella.
"You shouldn't run in the street," he said. "Are you trying to die?"
"I'm trying to save my father's factory."
He stared at me a long beat, then opened his car door. "Get in."
Inside his car, he didn't smile. "Where do you live?" he asked.
"Outside the dorm gate," I lied. "Please don't make a fuss."
He did not answer me. He simply told his driver, "Call Anders. Tell him to prepare the guest room."
"You're not going to leave me here?" I asked.
"Stay in the guest room. Then get out by morning."
I forced myself to sleep, but the nights I had were not for rest. At some point he handed me a bowl and said, "Drink this."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Post-coital medication," he said with bluntness as clean as cut glass.
I swallowed. I didn't need the condescension. I needed the deal. "About the Lingyun factory order—"
"Bring the report to the company tomorrow," he said, then turned his back. "I'll be there."
I left his villa with a wallet heavier in my hands than my dignity. He had wired money to my account that night. I told myself I had refused. I told myself I had not needed it. But the pain in my father's face when he learned what happened to him made me do things I swore I never would.
"Katharine, you look terrible," Jaycee said when she saw me the next day. "What happened at Ice Isle?"
"I spilled a drink," I lied again. "I'm fine."
The truth kept unwinding in the quiet hours: my father Ernesto Reyes had lost his temper, gotten drunk, and the car had hit someone. He lost his leg. The hospital said his kidney was failing. The surgery had been a disaster. I signed the consent forms like a sleepwalker. The debt collectors circled. Demands came.
"Your father did what?" Jaycee cried. "He drove drunk?"
"They want twenty thousand as immediate compensation," I said. I held the figure like a stone in my mouth.
"Where will you get it?" she asked.
I had three thousand in the purse my father gave me. I had no spare money. I had a factory full of stopped looms and unpaid workers. I had a father's suffering and a mother who left for a place far away and a brother with his own life.
"Call Grayson," Jaycee whispered.
"Are you kidding? He stirs trouble."
But I had no choice. I went to StarField with the report. I stood in the lobby while my stomach bowed with fear.
"Grayson, I have the QC report," I said, handing it to Ezra, his assistant.
He glanced at me as if I were a guest from a weathered life.
"You came late," Grayson said. "We will review it."
"Will you take it?" I whispered.
"We'll talk," he said. Then his assistant looked at me with concern that the boss did not show. "Miss Benjamin, please leave your number."
"No," I said. "I'll wait."
He paused, then said, "Come to the banquet tonight."
"I can't," I said. "My dorm—door locks at ten."
He fixed me with a look that made air hurt. "You will come."
I almost ran.
That night I wrapped myself and tried to be a woman who knew how to be acceptable. Jaycee stuffed a blue dress into my hand and put make-up over my face until I was someone else's shadow. We went to Ice Isle.
"I don't think I can do this," I told Jaycee. "I don't belong here."
"That's the point," she said. "You look like a goddess in that dress."
I walked into the room. Men whistled and a big man tried to force a cup into my lips. I pushed away.
"Leave her alone," said Grayson in a low voice, then suddenly struck the fat man across the head with a bottle. Glass and blood sang and the room fell silent.
"You—" the fat man gasped, and then one by one the men around us realized what had happened. Grayson turned and looked at me like a thing newly discovered.
"Are you unhurt?" he asked.
"I'm fine," I lied. My throat burned with indignation and salt. I wanted to leave.
He made me sit with him afterward. "You shouldn't be there," he said.
"You're the one who brought me," I whispered.
He smiled, just a corner of his mouth. "You should keep your head down."
I wanted to slap him. Instead, I drew the cost sheets from my bag and spread them across his knees. "These are the actual costs. If StarField won't accept the order, who will compensate our factory for the materials and labor?"
He read quietly, his hand on the papers like a man holding a map of someone else's life. Then he asked, "How much do you need?"
My heart slammed. "Two hundred and thirty-five thousand."
"Two hundred and thirty-five thousand?" he repeated, as if it was a strange bird's name. Then he added, "I'll transfer the amount."
I laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "No."
"Would you rather beg?" he asked.
"I would rather beg my father," I said.
He leaned close, his voice a rasp that warmed the air. "Then accept it. I will not have you humiliate yourself."
He wired the money the next day. He had also already told his assistant to refuse to take the batch, which meant trouble, but it also let me cash out and pay our workers their back wages. For the first time in a month, men stopped yelling outside the factory. The looms hummed. I felt the weight lift a little.
But nothing is free. My mother, Magdalena Martinez, showed up the night the money arrived and took both cards I had. "Give me two hundred thousand," she said with an easy smile. "We'll be clean."
"Mother," I said. "If you take it—"
"I know how to use money," she cut in. "You keep the rest."
She left with a smile that smelled like old debts. I watched her go and my hands shook.
"You can't trust blood," Ernesto murmured from the bed and his voice was raw. "Take care of yourself."
I tried. I returned to the hospital with the papers and the newly paid wages. Grayson came sometimes, as if coincidence had learned to track me. Sometimes he watched me with an odd tenderness that made me feel both safe and ashamed. He had hard edges made of silk.
"Why are you helping?" I asked once.
He took my hand and held it, an action gentle enough to make me dizzy. "You remind me of someone I knew long ago. I don't like to see people broken."
"Then stop," I replied. "Don't look at me. I am not—"
"You're not what?" he demanded, feigning annoyance.
"Not for you."
He laughed softly. "I'll do as I like."
But beneath his gentleness, a different Grayson roiled. When the men who had humiliated me at Ice Isle were not punished by the bar, he made sure they would be.
The punishment was public.
"I want them here," Grayson told Ezra the assistant. "At my annual shareholders' gala."
"Sir?" Ezra blinked. "That's months away."
"Bring them sooner," Grayson said. "Publicly. Expose them."
When the night came, the grand hall glittered with lights. People drank out of crystal. The men from Ice Isle arrived with bravado on their shoulders, thinking they were invited as favors of the fat man. Grayson walked onstage, took the microphone, and the room quieted.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he began. "I will waste no time on pleasantries. I want to speak about dignity."
He named names.
"Julio Alvarez," he said. The fat man's face turned from smug to a kind of pale shock. "Gunner Schmitt. Keegan Blackwell. You assaulted a woman hired to deliver goods and you thought you would not face consequences."
Julio's face crumpled. "You can't—this is slander," he said, voice rising.
Grayson smiled as if he was patient with a child. "Julio, you forced her to drink, you called her names, you paraded her like cattle. You have two choices tonight. You can apologize and repay the cost of the damage—both financial and emotional—or you can face the evidence we have."
At Grayson's signal, Ezra wheeled out a screen. Videos from the bar played. Men laughed in dark light. Hands grabbed. A voice—mute and raw—was forced to swallow.
"How did you get those?" Julio stammered.
"Security footage," Grayson answered. "Reported to me by someone who refused to be complicit."
The room changed. People who were once amused now shifted away. Several guests tapped their phones, faces hardening. "Take a look," Grayson instructed. "You see yourselves. You see what you did."
Julio's bravado melted. He tried to shout and the footage underscored every ugly sound with shreds of proof. The fat man denied, then cursed, then attempted to claim it was a joke. Grayson kept the microphone steady.
"You're not a joke," he said. "You're criminals in plain clothes."
The crowd's murmur turned to disgust. A woman snapped pictures. Someone whispered the right words into a phone and within minutes a dozen feeds flickered across screens: "Assault at Ice Isle by Julio Alvarez." The fat man, once wine-dark and loud, found himself recorded and uploaded.
"You will be reported," Grayson said. "And I will personally hand evidence to the district attorney tomorrow."
"You can't," Julio insisted. "You can't do this to me. My family—"
A net of laughter rose, sharp like scissors.
"Look," Grayson said. "You humiliated a young woman for sport. You will refund the damage and submit yourselves to public apology. Or the law will follow."
Julio's face shifted through colors: anger, denial, cunning, panic. He tried to bargain, then stuttered into sobs, then into furious curses. People around him turned their heads; some filmed, some whispered disgust, some applauded Grayson's courage.
"She didn't deserve this," a woman said behind me, voice cracking. "Who does?"
Julio fell apart. He begged, begged for forgiveness. He attempted to shift blame. He vomited excuses. Each plea met with cold eyes and silent condemnation. Others who were complicit in the harassment — Gunner and Keegan — fared worse. One was a man of business pretenses who found his clients walking away as the footage and the room's disdain did the work of isolation. Another reached for his phone, then remembered: his bank lines had already been cut that afternoon. The banquet staff quietly escorted them out, their faces hollow.
"The internet," someone said, voice small and vicious. "They recorded them. The club was embarrassed to keep them."
Grayson watched the fall with a quiet that was almost clinical. When the men were escorted out, the hall breathed like a house exhaling smoke.
"Katharine," he said later, softly, when the storm outside the doors died away, "you deserve better."
"I needed my father's factory to survive," I said.
"You should never have had to pay for that with your body."
"I know," I said. "But it happened."
He tucked a ring of hair behind my ear. "I know."
The fallout was total. The men who made the night hell saw reputations crumble. Some were fired. One had his brand deals pulled. Several wives left. It was not an arrest yet; the police had enough to open an investigation. Public opinion had found them guilty in the court that matters: people.
I watched them leave: their faces a collage of rage, disbelief, and shrinking pride. The crowd's reactions had been a mixture of pity, anger, cameras, and murmurs. People took photos, placed them online, and applauded when Grayson refused to let the insults pass. The scene lasted long enough for the shame to cool into silence.
When the hall was empty, Grayson walked me to the car.
"You didn't have to watch," he said.
I wiped my face. "I wanted to."
He took my hand and held it in a way that made me believe in small mercies.
"I will clean up what's left," he said. "But you have to promise me one thing: you will not throw yourself into danger for other people's mistakes."
"I promise," I said.
As we drove back, the city lights blurred like spilled sugar. The factory wage checks cleared the next day. The next week, StarField agreed to review our batch again when Grayson personally vouched and a third-party lab confirmed quality. The employees returned to work.
But my life did not smooth. My mother had taken her share and disappeared. The surgery left my father with dialysis schedules and new limits. The debt collectors still sent threats. And Grayson—he remained a complicated presence: sometimes tender, sometimes cold as marble.
"Do you want me to help with the factory?" he asked once, when we sat in his office and he tapped his pen.
"Yes," I said. "I want to keep it alive."
He considered. "I will help on a condition."
"What's that?"
"That you finish your schooling. I won't have you losing your future."
We argued. I insisted the factory could be saved. He insisted school protected me from the world he could not guard me against.
"You're stubborn," he said.
"I'm practical," I answered.
We compromised. I would handle day-to-day operations, with financial oversight he insisted on. He would lend legitimacy and resources but not take control. The workers trusted me. They trusted the checks I handed them. They trusted the way I looked at a problem and refused to blink.
Over time, we sat with each other in moments that were not always comfortable. Once he took off his suit jacket and put it over my shoulders while we hovered under a sudden rainstorm. "Don't catch a cold," he said, and for a moment I allowed warmth to thread through me.
But my heart was not simply his to win. There was another — a man named Anders Berry, a kind friend from the hospital named who had been there when my father needed help, who had once been like a brother. Anders was steady and patient. He gave me practical comfort: he brought soup, drove me when taxis were scarce, paid for small medications without a second thought.
Grayson watched; I knew he watched, and sometimes he spoke with a quiet jealousy that was honest and strange.
"Do you love him?" he asked once about Anders, fierce in his private voice.
"No," I replied. "But Anders is good. He is steady."
He studied me for a long time. "Good doesn't mean everything," he said finally.
"I don't want melodrama," I told him. "I want to survive."
"Then survive properly," he said.
The factory slowly regained its rhythm. We found out who had sabotaged our goods. A whisper of evidence led us to a man named Torsten Chambers, a manager who had been paid to switch rolls of fabric and tamper with orders. He had been bribed to ruin StarField's trust in us and make room for other suppliers. Grayson supplied proof; we had ledgers, deliveries, messages. Torsten had thought he was clever.
He was not.
"I can't believe you'd do this," I said to him once in a meeting where he had to answer to the workers who had lost pay. "You nearly ruined lives."
He tried to defend himself. "I had debts. They said they'd cover me."
"You had choices," I said.
That man was stripped of his title. He was publicly exposed, his name printed beside the phrase "industrial sabotage" in more than one trade paper. He tried to bargain. He begged. The workers who had once admired his position now spat or turned their faces. The factory owners who had taken him in pretended they had never known him.
I learned a bitter economy: people are willing to throw others away when the price is right. But I also learned that a single decisive voice—one that commands resources and will—can turn tides.
Grayson did not wear himself as hero. He acted with effective coldness. But his presence steadied me. I did not love him quickly. Love is not an emergency fix. It crept in like water through a crack: slow, inevitable, and frightening.
"Are you mine?" he asked one night, when the city slept and only the machines hummed.
"I don't know," I said honestly.
He smiled, touched my face with a tenderness that made me forget to think. "Then start by being here."
We survived the storm. We paid the debts. We kept the factory. We punished the men who had hurt me in public. We exposed those who sabotaged us. My mother had taken two million and gone. My father's surgery left him fragile, but alive. My exams were postponed, then studied for in stolen hours.
"Why do you keep helping me?" I asked Grayson once, in a rare moment when he smiled at nothing in particular.
"Because you are not willing to die for someone else's mistake," he said.
"Do you regret the bottle?" I asked, remembering the night.
"No," he said. "I regret what made the bottle necessary."
I listened to his voice. Outside, the factory lights blinked like minor constellations. Inside, the silence between us was no longer void but something warm. I had been kissed without consent, bargained away, shamed and bought back, and yet here I was, still myself, still breath in my chest.
"Promise me," I said suddenly, "that if I fall, you won't let me stay down."
He closed his hand over mine. "I won't."
And that was specific enough for then. For the rest, we'd keep counting wages, checking lab results, and arguing about whether to keep the factory. We had more fights to come. We had more days when the city would test us. But in the middle of it, in the heat of a crisis, I met a man who hit the fat man with a bottle, exposed a conspiracy in a boardroom, and gave me a chance to stand again.
I was still Katharine Benjamin: awkward, stubborn, practical. But I had learned one enormous thing — I could ask for help, and sometimes, people like Grayson Giordano would give it, even if it came wrapped in its own mess.
The End
— Thank you for reading —