Face-Slapping14 min read
My New Husband, the Electric Puppy — and the Night I Refused to Die
ButterPicks11 views
I woke up to the wrong ceiling.
"Where am I?" I muttered, and my hand found cool, unfamiliar sheets. The chandelier was a crystal galaxy. Red banners nodded at the balcony wind like a festival. I blinked and tried to sit up.
"Elden, you awake?" a voice called from somewhere down the hall.
"Elden?" The name sounded like a bell in my head. Elden Weber, the man whose face had haunted half the city and three chapters of the book I had skimmed before sleep stole me. I remembered—no, not my life. I remembered flashes: a wedding night where the bride died, a scandal that swallowed a family, a 'big bad' with a noble face, and a woman who jumped into a car's path to save an old lady. All of it had been someone else's story. Now it thudded in my chest like a second heart.
A thread of memory clenched me: I'd died. I'd blown up, ribboned into smoke in the last war against the plague of the old world. Then—then I woke here, in someone else's bed, in a future that smelled of silicone and cool metal, with a husband I didn't know and a life I had never chosen.
"Elden?" I breathed again. Footsteps like piano keys reached the landing. He came down the stairs—tall, cold-boned, a white suit that made the red banners flare even more. His eyes were dark, reserved. He looked like the photographs I'd memorized, like a painting whose edges cut your hands.
He stopped at the bottom. "You finally woke up," he said. His voice was low and even. "Do you remember your name?"
I froze. My mouth remembered: "Elora." It surprised me how natural it felt to say it.
He frowned. "Elora Collins?" he asked, and there was an odd tilt to his face—half suspicion, half alarm.
"I—yes," I lied. My real life was gone. This body belonged to someone who had died last night on a river of bad luck and worse friends. I had borrowed her name along with her dress.
Elden stepped close. I was sudden, dangerous-breath close. "You shouldn't be here," he whispered.
"Neither should you," I said before I could stop myself. He blinked as if electricity had stung him.
"I—" he began, and then his fingers brushed mine and something zipped through me like winter lightning. He staggered. His eyes widened. A sharp, impossible curl lifted at his hairline, a small, surprised sound fled his lips.
"Elden?" I breathed. Then, absurdly, the room seemed to tilt from amusement to awe. His handsome hair had puffed into soft waves like a puppy's fur, and the scowl that usually lived at rest on his mouth dissolved into something startled and almost childlike.
"Oh my god," I heard myself say. "Did I—did I do that?"
He swatted at his temple as if the electricity had rearranged his bones. "What the—" Elden's voice cracked into a laugh that sounded too high and bright, like a boy discovering rain.
"Lucky me," he said, and sat on the bed like someone very confused about the rules of gravity. "You shocked me."
"I didn't try," I said. "I came with a memory. Someone poisoned you and me last night. I think—" I swallowed. "I think the original bride died."
His eyes flashed to the balcony, then down to me. For a long breath we just stared at each other: me, a woman with war-marks in my soul, and him, an aristocrat who had been carved by hardship into a blade. Except at that moment he looked less like a blade and more like a bewildered pup.
"You poisoned me?" he asked as if it were the only theory.
"Not you," I corrected. "Someone made me drink something. Probably meant to kill me, but I survived. Or didn't. I don't know." I reached out and put my palm on his chest. A warm green bloom unfurled from my fingers—instinctive, botanical. I had been a veteran of the old world's strange energies; my hands still remembered how to heal. The green touched his sternum and he shivered.
"Calm down," he said, which might have been a warning, but his eyes softened. "Don't let anyone else get involved."
"Good luck with that," I said. "Your friends are loud."
We found them in the parlor: Daniel Zhao, who wore the calm of a doctor like armor, and Cassius Cherry, whose fingers danced over screens the way lightning dances through wires. They were both laughing when we arrived, but the laughter slid off when they saw the change in Elden—his hair, the puzzled grin.
"Is this a joke?" Cassius asked, an edge of mockery in his tone. "Elden, you actually look..." He couldn't finish. He kept looking as if the room itself had gone absurd.
"Shut up," Elden snapped, more easily embarrassed than his titles allowed. Then he colored and said, "Elora, tell them what happened."
So I told them. I told them we had both been drugged, that I had woken in a body that had been marked to die that night, and that the little trick—whatever had lived in that bottle—had electric strings in it. Daniel snatched the two bottles Elora's old life had left in the closet and hurried to his lab bench.
"This isn't fertility tonic," Daniel muttered as he ran a scanner. "This is a chemical cocktail that increases... well, it increases sensations and weakens inhibitions. It's designed to be humiliating more than deadly. But there's a contaminant—an odd ion. If someone laced a normal stimulant with it, they could make a scene and then point fingers."
"Who?" Elden breathed. "Who would do that?"
"Someone with access," Cassius said. "Someone who wanted to frame you. Or troll you. Or both."
"Or someone who wants to finish what they began," Daniel added, and his eyes were a different shade now—an earnest, fraternal anger that told me he already had files on enemies.
After the tests they marched me to the kitchen. I was starved; in my former life food had been a rationed prayer. I ordered everything I wanted: five pounds of spicy shrimp, burgers, fries. The house help, stiff with protocol, stared as I ate like a woman who had learned to love the volume of a meal.
"Elden, you can't let her eat that." He was trying to be dignified, but his voice went thin when I dipped into a box of fries.
"Eat," I said, smiling. "You can protect my appetite. Besides, it will make the scene more believable when you pretend to be an outraged husband."
He flushed, and for the first time in days I watched something in him erase the old myths of him being untouchable. He was jealous—not of other men, but of the idea that someone else had the right to injure sight unseen. The tiny domesticity of it—protecting a wife who ate too much—stole my heart before I even had a chance to notice.
Days tumbled like dice. I took stock of what the original Elora had left: a phone, a few photos, a memory half burned. I read the book's summaries, but I reserved judgment. If I had crawled into a story, I would not let the pages decide me. I had values. I had a past. I had things to fix.
"First," I told Elden one afternoon, while Daniel prodded samples at his bench, "we find out who sent the bottles."
"Daniel will talk to the lab," Elden said.
"I'll go see the woman who brought the bottles," I said. "She called herself Camilla Kelly on the guest list. She was 'my' friend."
Camilla Kelly. The name felt small and severe in my mouth.
"There will be witnesses," Cassius said, with the smugness of the man who controls networks. "If Camilla is guilty, she'll slip. People leave digital crumbs."
"Bring proof," I said. "And bring drama. We live in a world of cameras and comments. If someone tried to assassinate me and framed him, they're getting public noise."
"Drama is your department," Elden said, and his hand found mine without thinking.
I listened to their plans and felt my old life's hunger—vigilant, exacting—stir. This body had been designed to be a prop. I would make it the main actor.
A week later I marched into a hospital corridor that smelled like antiseptic and old grief and found Camilla on duty, the same woman who had smiled in my memory that morning. When she saw me her face folded like crepe paper.
"Elora?" Camilla shrieked, then stammered, "I—I thought you were—"
"You thought I was dead," I said. "You planted two vials, didn't you?"
"No! No, I would never—" Her mouth moved like someone trying to speak past a swell of panic. Nurses hovered. The corridor's LED panels blinked. The way she flinched made me certain she wanted to be somewhere else.
"Call your supervisor," I said quietly. "And tell him to bring all access logs for the pharmacy and the security feed from last night."
"Get out," she spat, suddenly defiant. "You have no right."
"Watch me," I said, and when she fled I followed with a patience that smelled of wood smoke and old war plans.
We found the supervisor, and we found the camera feed. It was grainy, a city mattress of midnight, but someone had slipped a small package into the bouquet meant for me. A security badge had been used to enter the catering area. We froze frames, zoomed, layered.
"That's Camilla's badge," Daniel said.
"Or someone who stole it," Camilla cried. "I told you—I'm innocent!"
"Then who else would benefit?" Cassius asked, already opening his phone to cross-check attendees, messages, bank transfers, and the social feeds.
We found a name threaded through the little lies like a seam: Gabriella Bernard, a celebrity who had been seen flirting with men at the wedding, and who had a private liaison with a man connected to a pharmaceutical minor—Knox Lorenz. Gabriella painted herself as angelic and roused women to envy with a blink. Knox painted himself as a visionary. Both had privileges in a city that prized images more than truth.
"You're sure?" I asked.
"They're connected," Cassius said. "And Knox's chauffeur logged a late-night drop near the hospitality tent."
"Then they will not get to smear Elden," I said.
"What about Camilla?" Elden asked quietly. "Does she deserve—"
"Justice," I said. "Not only for 'me.' For the truth."
We moved like a team. Cassius mapped networks; Daniel made sure evidence chain was solid; Elden called in old favors to pull quiet statements from staff. The more we dug, the heavier the weather grew.
I kept my head down and my palms green. My gift—wood energy—helped in little things: cleaning toxins off cutlery, growing a potted chamomile overnight, coaxing a faint pulse into a frightened gardener. It was humble magic, not the bombast the stories promised. It was enough.
Then came the night when the villains met their reckoning: a gala at the city's opera house—five hundred guests, cameras, sponsors. It was, ironically enough, precisely the stage they had wanted: glossy, public, expensive.
We sent the invitations like we were selling a show.
The hall shimmered with chandeliers that made constellations of rings. The crowd leaned into their devices the way people pray to easy gods. "Gabriella Bernard will open," a reporter whispered, and the crowd hummed.
"Ready?" Elden asked, his voice suddenly very steady. The weeks had carved lines at the corners of his mouth, but he held himself like something made to weather storms.
"Ready," I said. My hand brushed his—there was warmth and a message: this is ours.
The lights dimmed. Gabriella was luminous, a practiced angel in skin-sculpted silk. Knox sat a few rows back, a shadowed captain of industry. Cameras swiveled.
Loud, dramatic music pulsed.
"Good evening," the host trilled. "A moment you will not forget."
Then I stepped forward.
Silence tasted like holidays. Fifty rows of eyes folded over me. The microphones caught the scrape of my shoe. I was not the woman who had died on a red night. I was Elora Collins—alive and glaringly inconvenient.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said into the silence, and the room leaned, hungry.
"Elden Weber was drugged on his wedding night. So was I. Evidence suggests a plot: a sick attempt to make one of us the story and the other the scapegoat. The items used were traced to three people. They are here. They will be named."
Gasps hissed like struck strings. A hundred phones lifted like a swarm of small suns.
"First," I said, and the host's face shifted from practiced surprise to growing fear, "Camilla Kelly. Second, Gabriella Bernard. Third, Knox Lorenz."
The crowd exploded.
"How dare you?" someone barked. Cameras dove. The gala became a livewire. "This is slander!"
"Please," I said. "Watch."
I set a slide to the big screen. Grainy footage rolled: hands, badges, the florist's door. The feed drew a straight line between the bouquet, the badge scan, and Camilla's ID. The hall murmured and then silenced as the image landed on Knox's SUV id tag, a rental traced to Gabriella's agent.
"That's doctored!" Camilla hissed, and she looked strangely composed for the woman whose entire job was consumption of attention. Her mouth was a theater of denial.
"Actually," Cassius said, as he queued text logs across the screen—messages between Gabriella and a media fixer, bank records with small transfers labeled 'hospitality'—"the transfers line up. Gabriella used an agent to funnel funds, Knox's chauffeur made a late-night drop, and Camilla's badge was used to access the catering."
Gabriella's perfect smile crumpled like wet paper. "No—no, I would never—"
"You changed position," Daniel said, showing the lab's chemical analysis of the vial found in the bouquet. "The active irritant in the stimulant is bound to a rare ion only supplied by a company with Knox's distributor license. Someone created a commission chain to make it anonymous. We traced shipments."
The crowd's hum hardened into roar. Phones recorded. People whispered. A few laughed in the way crowds laugh at the fall of a person once gilded.
Knox stood then, the calm gone from his face. He was used to being untouchable in rooms like this. He had been called the city's disruptor; those who called him that now recorded him sweating.
"You're lying," Knox spat. "I had business to defend here!"
"Then answer for your chauffeur's log," I said. "And for the transfers."
He staggered like someone who had been expecting a different script. His eyes darted to Gabriella. Her fingers clawed at her throat.
"This is slander! A set-up! Who benefits if we ruin my reputation?" Gabriella shrieked, a perfect soprano fractured by fear. Her voice wavered into a refusal to believe she was visible in the theater of truth.
"Everyone has motives," Elden said, and his voice is the kind that spreads like iron-clad law. "But we have evidence. Security footage, payment trails, and messages. Camilla, what did you mean when you told the caterer to 'ensure the bride wouldn't stand long'? You told them 'it was better for everyone.'"
Camilla's face blanched. Her earlier bravado condensed into a soft, raw panic. "I—it's not what it looks like," she sobbed. "I was told to do it. I was told it would be just a prank. I didn't know—"
The first stage—complacency—fell away from her. She became smaller. Around her, guests who had once smiled graciously at her now snapped photographs. Someone in the third balcony had already started a live feed. Numbers climbed.
"So you were hired?" a journalist barked. "By whom?"
"I can't—" She swallowed. "They paid me. A man—he said 'make it unforgettable, but clean.' I didn't want anyone hurt! I thought it would be just a slap, a shock to mess up his reputation. I didn't—"
Shock spread across the faces in the room. A woman with a gold clutch recorded her speech, lips white with fury.
Knox's hands tried to find his composure, but the evidence lanterned him. He reached, with a king's reflex, for denial.
"This is a conspiracy," Knox bellowed. "I have no reason—"
"Your contract logs say otherwise," Cassius interrupted. The data unfolded in a cascade: payments, transfers to shell accounts, booking of a late-night courier. The room watched the sequence like an execution of unreality.
Knox's expression shifted through the stages I'd been ordered to write for villains: smug, then baffled, then a fragile denial. He moved to the edge of collapse as witnesses shifted from shock to accusation.
"No! You can't—this is manipulation! We built companies. We created jobs!" Knox seethed. "This is—"
The failure made him animal. His shoulders dropped. He reached for an exit that was already closed.
"Please," Camilla begged—began at first with a tremor and then all the rest. She dropped to her knees on that marble floor as the press flash stuttered. "Please don't—please."
People around us took videos with flicking thumbs, whispers rising like waves. A few guests applauded—at justice, at spectacle. Phones clinked like coins. Someone laughed and then checked themselves as dignity and disgust collided. A camera at the back made Knox into a public villain in the span of thirty seconds.
"Elden!" a reporter shouted. "How much did you know?"
"I knew enough," Elden said. "Enough to keep her alive."
"Keep who alive?" another asked.
"Elora," he said, and when he put his hand over mine the press could not miss the private act at the center of a public purge. The gesture was a ledger: loyalty, affection, life.
Knox's final denial dissolved into collapse. He sagged in a chair—eyes wide, lips peeling into the shape of a plea. "Please," he whispered, once proud, now exposed. "Please, don't let them take everything."
The crowd closed like a trap. People circled, some yelling, "Lock them up!" Some tutting, "How low." Dozens streamed the whole scene. Comments bloomed online in real time. A cameraman behind me clicked open a live broadcast—he had that passenger's thrill you get when you watch a private fall confessed to the public square. Someone in the balcony clapped in the wrong rhythm and then understood and stopped.
Camilla's face went from judgment to disbelief to frantic begging. "I didn't mean—" she said, and the words unspooled in a change the room drank like strong tea: smugness in the planning, shock at exposure, hysterical denial, then collapse, then pleading.
"It was for the money," she said, the honesty burning away the remainder of her pretense. "They said they'd ruin me if I didn't help. I— I'm sorry."
Knox, betrayed and stripped, voiced things like regret with a man's bitterness: "I didn't know they would go that far."
"People watched you plot," Daniel said, steady as a surgeon. "You will answer to the law."
"What about Camilla? She was paid." Someone in the crowd demanded the optics of cruelty.
"She's cooperating," Cassius said. "We have her statements and the bank logs. She will be charged, but that does not excuse the chain above her. This is not just one small betrayal; it's a network."
Voices rose. Cameras clicked. The fireworks of scandal bloomed online. Someone recorded Camilla's knees, Knox's shaking hands, Gabriella's face—quiet, conquered, as her agents fumbled to salvage her image.
Knox tried one last gambit: "It's a frame! Someone is planting things to hurt me!"
"Then who?" a reporter pressed.
"Someone closer to your enemies," Elden said. "But tonight is not about excuses. Tonight is about accountability."
Knox's eyes darted; the armor of influence was peeled. He was suddenly a man who could be broken by pitted facts. He looked smaller than Camilla, smaller than Gabriella. He looked humanly naked. He fell into denial and then into pleading.
"Please—" Knox said, the final act of a man used to buying silence. "Please don't—"
No one let him finish. The crowd's judgment—brutal, quick, and digital—settled on them like a net. Phones recorded every wet syllable. The host cleared his throat and announced the police were on their way. Security escorted them, not with brutality but with a firm, almost ceremonial efficiency. The flashes continued as if to brand them for history.
When the procession to the street began, I saw people copying notes, opening live feeds, uploading segments. Comments rolled in by the thousands. The opera house's marble steps became a stage of accountability. Cameras recorded Knox's collapsed face as he blinked at a sky he'd always bought time under.
"Did you feel that?" Elden asked softly as the crowd thinned behind the cordons, the adrenaline letting out of the night like air from a balloon.
"Yes." My voice was small and reverent. "Did you see how quick the world is to believe and then to punish?"
"It saw the truth," he said. "And acted."
We walked through the press scrum hand in hand. Reporters asked questions. We answered what we had to. The night ended with police statements and trending reports.
When we came home, I sank onto the bed where the red sheets had been replaced by fresh linens. Elden sat beside me and put his head on my shoulder the way a tired animal does when it finally has a safe place.
"You were brave tonight," he murmured.
"So were you," I said.
He breathed in and said, "Your hands smelled like earth. You healed people and you burned away a lie."
"You sound like you mean that."
"I do." His voice was thick with something like worship and something like apology. He took my hands and kissed them—gentle, almost shy. "I don't want anyone to take you from me."
"Then don't let them," I said, and meant it.
We had uncovered the conspiracy, unmasked the architects, and watched the public punishment unfurl like a slow, inevitable storm. The villains were exposed, humiliated, and taken away in front of witnesses—exactly the justice a noisy city loves. Camilla knelt and begged; Knox crumbled, then begged; Gabriella's smile could not survive the footage. The crowd's reactions had been a chorus: disbelief, anger, laughter, and then—somewhere between—the satisfaction of a long-held grievance answered.
When I fell asleep that night, Elden's chest rose and fell against mine like a promise.
A week later, when the cameras had moved on and new scandals had flickered to life, Elden pressed a small, carved flute into my palm—the long, thin instrument I'd used in the game that first night I logged in.
"Keep it," he said. "If anyone asks, tell them the flute is mine. It's how I remember the night you wouldn't die."
I smiled and played a note that was half laugh, half oath. The sound threaded through the windows, past the red banners, and into a city that had just learned to watch.
The End
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