Revenge13 min read
Reborn at Nineteen — The Ice, The Shot, The Seventh Uncle
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I woke up with the same cold in my chest as always and a different kind of memory lining the edges of my mind.
"I can't—" I heard a voice in the dark of my old dream, the voice that had haunted me. "Half an hour, I can't make it—"
"Shh. Stay still. I—" Another voice, close, tender, but wrong. The scene broke like thin glass. I sat up, heart hammering, and for a second I tasted iron and felt a shame that wasn't mine anymore. Then the truth hit me: that wasn't a dream. That was last life, and I knew every second of how it had ended.
"I'm Imogen," I told the mirror, and the girl who looked back was nineteen again. Clean face, stubborn chin. I had been given the chance to live it over.
"You look different this time," my roommate Tessa would have said if she were real. Instead it was only the porcelain of the sink and a list of names in my head—names I now used as a map. I had a plan. I would repay kindness a thousandfold and return every hurt a hundred times stronger.
"I came because of a message," I rehearsed the half-truth that had to sound real to Dalton. "You asked me to come."
Dalton Eklund never looked surprised. He never had to. "Get in the car," he said, clipped. "Don't draw attention."
I got in. The Maserati pretended to be calm down the driveway like some arrogant beast. We went to the Eklund manor. Dalton's face when he spoke to me later in the corridor was cold as the marble underfoot.
"I cannot imagine you'd do this," he said. "If anyone finds out—"
"Finds out what?" I asked. I kept my voice small. "That someone tried to hurt you?"
"You think I was hurt?" Dalton's jaw tightened. "I think you are shameful."
"You always were quick to believe the worst," I said. I had learned my lines. I let him move away, let the affair I did not commit start here like a slow fever in other people's mouths.
They called me the next day.
"Miss?" A dozen men with cameras. "Miss Imogen, can you explain—"
"Please leave," I kept saying. "Please—"
"How long have you been sleeping with other men?" someone barked. The lenses closed on me like hungry mouths.
"Imogen!" A voice like ice. Rafael Munoz filled the doorway and the room snapped into a new light.
"Rafael." My heart learnt a new shiver. He wore a suit like it had been welded to him. He did not come in with flowers. He came in looking like an ending.
"You're to leave her alone," Rafael said flatly. He walked in the room like he owned the floor and every last camera fell away. The reporters went quiet because he made them feel how small they were.
"Rafael—" Dalton's voice had a taste of wounded pride. "This is ridiculous."
"This is not ridiculous," Rafael said. His eyes took me in—me covered with shame from someone else's sin—and he narrowed them the way a man narrows a window against a storm. "We will cancel the engagement. You will leave."
"Leave?" I mouthed. I had not forgotten the way Dalton's hate had pulled the world apart the last time. I owed myself better than that.
I slept and woke and rebuilt. Half a month had passed. I had two goals. One: I would not be that same scared girl. Two: I would not let the men who had used me think they owned my life.
"Do you know the Blue Marquis?" I asked Rafael one morning over breakfast. His profile kept the sun out of the room like some private eclipse.
"Blue Marquis?" He looked up. "Why?"
"I want to see it," I said simply.
Rafael's brow went cold. "You don't go to those places."
"I am not going for him," I said. "I'm going because I have to know."
"You don't know what it's like there," he warned. "Those men eat girls like you into thin paper and don't feel it."
"I know how to pretend," I smiled. "I have reasons."
"I will not let you risk—"
"Then don't," I said, and left it at that.
That night I was in a girl server uniform at Blue Marquis, the private club everyone in the city denounced in whispers. I stood at room 1808 and watched the men pretend they were gods. One of them, lounging at the pool, thought it was sport to force a girl into the ice-laden water.
"Jump," he sneered. "If you last ten minutes, the money's yours."
People laughed. The pool was full of ice like a grave. We all watched. I felt their pity as hunger. I stepped onto the edge.
"What are you doing?" whispered a voice I thought I heard once in a dream.
"Do it," said the man.
I jumped.
"Do you know how cold it gets?" someone yelled. "She'll freeze!"
They timed me like I was a joke. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes. I almost forgot to count because I had learned patience. I knew what I could take. I had done worse and come back from it.
"Are you all done making bets?" A voice cut through the noise like a knife. Rafael. He stepped through the crowd like he was made of consequences.
"Get her out," he said. "Now."
"No," muttered the leader—"That's my game—"
"Or what?" Rafael's voice dropped low. He moved a chair. "If someone dies on my watch, you'll be accountable."
Their bravado crumbled. They pushed the blame onto one man and made him pay the price of being guilty in front of an entire room. He swallowed and stepped forward, hands shaking.
"Roll up," Rafael said. He stripped off his jacket, walked to the edge and jumped.
I don't think he meant to be showy. It was simply who he was. He dove, found me, and pulled me out like he had known I would not be able to breathe before the world stopped counting.
"Don't you ever do this again," he said as he carried me up like a small thing.
"I'm not used to being carried," I told him, but I liked the steadiness of his arms.
He told a private doctor to meet us and made sure I was warm. I learned then that Rafael Munoz protected like an iron rule. He did not discuss feelings. He acted.
"You were reckless," he said when I'd recovered enough to speak.
"It's not reckless to survive," I answered.
"You think so," he said. "You are experienced in ways I don't like thinking about."
I laughed then because my plans were working. He saved me and I owed him debts I planned to return with interest.
A week later a shot rang out at the club.
"Everyone down!" Rafael's voice cut across the dark, and the distant red dot of a sniper sight danced across the ceiling.
I dove on instinct. So did he—but my body moved before my brain and I slammed into him. The bullet meant for a man who had his own enemies thudded into a wall. Glass shattered. Security scrambled. Wounds were taken, and I tasted metal and panic.
"Imogen!" Rafael's voice was taut as a bow.
"Help me," I whispered because I had been hit in the shoulder. Pain bright as a coin shone and I felt faint.
They took me away in an ambulance with Dalyton trying to look concerned and failing spectacularly.
"I said stay away," Rafael told him later in the hospital corridor, like a verdict. "You cross me again and you'll find the world very small."
This time I had proof. He could not blame me for saving a life when a man had tried to end that life. I had the evidence I needed to begin burning the bridges that had scarred me.
I learned the toxin's name that night: they whispered "Aster" like it was a sin. It attacked the nerves and the will—made a person weak and hungry for control in a way that felt shameful and hungry. Whoever used it had a cruel mind.
"I can fix this," Fisher Finley told me when he arrived. He was the doctor Rafael trusted. "But it's not simple. You will have to be careful."
"Who would use such a thing?" I asked, pressing my bandaged shoulder.
"Someone who wanted to make you vulnerable," he said. "Someone who saw you as convenient."
Convenient. That word settled like oil.
I decided to do what I had sworn: I would take their heads one by one.
"I want to get into the industry," I told Frederick Stone one afternoon at a casting in a quiet studio. "I will audition for 'Celestial Passions' myself."
"You're that Imogen?" the director blinked. He had seen me before, timid, uncertain. Now my jaw had an edge.
"I want to be the lead," I said. "Let me audition for the part."
He let me read. I knew the script by heart because I'd watched the show in my last life until I had memorized every break and grace. My eyes found the moments; my body told the truth.
"She's extraordinary," Frederick said later, and when he recommended me, I knew it wasn't only talent. Rafael's quiet interventions had put people in motion.
"You're in," Frederick told me. "But you'll have trouble. People will talk."
I had trouble already. Word leaked like bad money. A fake video. Slandering posts. Cheap accusations that looked good on screens. I learned to fight both onstage and off.
"You have enemies," Rafael said in his quiet way. "Be careful."
They came for me at the makeup room. Someone had tampered with the cosmetics and my face broke out in angry red welts. I collapsed the first time I saw the reaction.
"What happened?" Frederick asked from the doorway.
"They did this," I said. "They use everything against us."
Rosa Petersen was the pretty new assistant whose face the city had attached to Dalton's every fantasy. She fluttered like a bird before the cameras and when I faced her in the studio she smiled like a blade.
"You're the new girl," she cooed. "Good luck."
I watched her, and the web she sat in—assistants, managers, men in suits. I watched as a thread pulled and a lie snapped across the set.
"Arrest them," I begged later, once I had evidence. "All of them. The men who sold the video, the assistant who planted chemicals, the manager who paid for lies."
Rafael listened and then, in a way that had always been his—cold, efficient, final—he began to assemble a scene that would end them.
"Tonight," he said quietly, "we bring everything to them."
We chose the studio release event for the film as the place to expose them. The room buzzed with lights and flashes. Fans filled the velvet ropes. The men who had thought themselves untouchable were there in suits like a pack of waxwork lions.
I stepped forward under the glare and handed Frederick a folder.
"Play it," I said.
He looked at me, confused, then lifted the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "we have a statement."
The video played. It was not one clip but a chain of clips, like a necklace of proof. We showed bank transfers. We showed text messages. We showed the assistant with hands on the makeup box a few hours before my welts appeared. We showed the manager speaking to a journalist about planting a scandal. We showed Dalton's messages to the man who later posted the video in our old life—messages of anger and of plans.
"Is that—" someone began.
Rosa went pale like a sheet. She had been so used to the cameras loving her. Men in the crowd muttered. Fans who had been kindly were now leaning forward with new interest.
I stepped up then and spoke, and I did not sound small.
"You made a fight club of my life," I said. "You thought a woman alone would be easy prey. You thought smear and rumor were the same as truth."
Rosa sobbed and lunged to defend herself with the only weapon left—panic. "I'm innocent!" she screamed. "It wasn't me!"
"Then explain this," Rafael said, and the screen behind him unveiled messages he had ordered decoded. "Explain your transfer to the cosmetics company for a private 'sensitivity test' the night before she was scheduled to be makeup."
Rosa's composure cracked. Her face went from porcelain to soap to ash. She staggered and pressed the back of one hand to her mouth as if to hold in a confession. The room's light pointed at her like a searchlight hunting prey.
"You think because you spend evenings parading that you'll never face daylight," I said. "You will answer for the way you use people."
"And him?" someone hissed, pointing at Dalton who stood at the edge like a man who had eaten a lie and found it bitter. "What about him?"
Dalton tried to step forward. "This isn't fair—"
"It is as fair as a trial," Rafael's voice was like a judge's gavel. "You orchestrated slander, trials of character for your pleasure. You used money to humiliate. You funded the postings that took a young woman's life."
Dalton's face folded. He tried to smirk once, then his mouth betrayed him. Men who had been his friends glanced away.
"Take him," Rafael said. "Take him to the boardroom. We'll let the company's counsel decide whether his actions constitute breach and fraud."
They moved. A manager in a crisp suit pushed Dalton toward the side-door and his allies walked away like leaves in a wind. The journalists typed already. Cell phones flashed like beetles. His closest companions, those who had laughed at his jokes and called him by nicknames in private, looked at him as if he had been a toy they no longer liked.
"Humiliation," I murmured. "Watch it take him."
Rosa's assistant was the next on their list. She had been caught on footage slipping an unlabelled packet into the makeup bag and then watching, like a director, as I put it on. She tried to lie.
"It was a mistake," she said, voice small.
"You're going to tell that story to the judge," Rafael said. He had a file with dates, names, cash receipts. He handed it to the police contingent we had quietly arranged with the help of Frederick.
A crowd gathered. The security guard who had once laughed at me now hung back. A famous influencer who had retweeted the smear in our last life sat with a face like a woman who had swallowed a lemon. People recorded, posted, streamed; their faces were crystal clear in the evidence that built up like snow. The assistant's manager tried to bargain.
"Don't do this—" he said.
"Do you think this is a bargaining?" Rafael's tone did not rise. "Do it because you will regret not doing it."
A camera shoved toward Rosa and the assistant as the officers led them out in cuffs. People surrounding them recorded. The assistant's expression shifted through the stages Rafael had predicted: arrogance, shock, denial, collapse, pleading.
"You don't know what I did," she sobbed, then switched to a hollow laugh. "You're ruining me."
Someone in the crowd shouted, "You started this." Others nodded. Phones took the scene and made it permanent.
Rosa was not spared spectacle. She was asked in front of everyone whether she had any comment. She opened her mouth and closed it. Words that had been easy in the private were not now. She had a public face to keep and it fell like a cracked mask.
"How does it feel to be watched?" I asked, and the crowd laughed because it was catharsis. They had once watched me in pity; now they watched those who had preyed.
"Is this justice or revenge?" someone asked into a microphone that had suddenly become sharp and hot.
"It is truth," I said. "And truth is what you feared."
Rosa tried to run, but there was nowhere to hide. Friends who had celebrated her now looked away. A PR agent who once rearranged her schedule for fame refused to take her calls. A man rumored to be her benefactor—no, a man who had sometimes stood too close—declined to be seen.
The assistant begged the reporters, "Please, I'll tell you everything, but give me a deal."
"You'll have a deal in court," Rafael said.
"And remember," I told them, softer now because the crowd had become heavy with something like pity, "If you ever think that someone's life can be used for sport, remember what it looks like to stand in the ring as everyone points."
Rosa's reaction changed as the minutes progressed. Her face had been admiring in front of cameras for years and now the lenses found the false seams. She tried to explain, then denied, then blamed others. The crowd began to jeer. A dozen phones recorded a tearful confession that sounded like a question, not an answer.
"I was told it would be harmless," she sobbed. "They said it would make her quit, make her disappear. I didn't think it would—"
"You thought," I finished for her, "that erasing a person was cheaper than facing the truth."
People clapped. Not for me, not for Rafael, but for the ending. For the spectacle of justice delivered quick and public, where once rumor had been given currency.
Dalton's punishment unfurled differently. The Eklund board convened within two days. Men who had once called him a friend sat across from him with stiff smiles and files open. They had copies of his messages to the smear merchants. They had witnesses who had once laughed at his anger now turning their faces to a legal team that smelled blood in numbers.
"Your investment agency will freeze your accounts until an internal review," a board director told him in a voice that sounded final.
"What?" Dalton choked. "You can't—"
"We can," the director said. "You leveraged personal funds to purchase false content. That is outside policy and illegal."
Dalton's allies evaporated. One by one, men who had once sat with him on yachts found reasons not to be involved. A close friend chose "personal privacy" over supporting him. The man who had arranged his worst posts returned his calls with a simple "I can't get involved in that."
Outside the boardroom the press waited and sipped their coffee like sharks smelling blood. The board issued a statement: Dalton Eklund had been removed from management roles pending investigation for misuse of company assets and procurement of defamatory materials.
"Public humiliation," one tabloid wrote the next day.
"It is public accountability," I replied into my phone. The cameras were always close now. My name trended for a minute as the new heroine of a small, sharp revolution.
The assistant's reaction in the central hall of the studio was the one I had wanted to watch the most. She had been arrogant when cameras fed her glamour. Now guards walked her out. Her colleagues stood aloof. A minor influencer posted a video of everything she had done with a voiceover: "This is how you ruin someone."
"Where are you going?" I asked her as she passed by. I was calm. I wanted to be calm. I wanted to be clean.
"You will—" she began.
"I will what?" I smiled. "I will live. I will act. I will be honest."
Her denial broke. Her friends abandoned her. In the press horde, ex-lovers and managers uncurled their hands from her face like the petals of a dying flower.
They were punished. Not by me entirely, but by the public geometry that hung over us like a new law. The men who had orchestrated harm found themselves pale in the floodlight. They sought to bargain. They were declined.
It took days for the noise to settle. In the quiet that followed, something shifted in me. I had used my proof and my voice. I had made them stand and be judged.
I remember standing outside the studio afterward with Rafael.
"You did well," he said. He rarely praised.
"I did," I admitted. "I had to."
"You didn't let them shape your end," he said simply.
"I won't let them shape anything about me," I said. "Not again."
He looked at me then, something like interest softening his face for a breath. "You are hard to read."
"Good," I said. "People should be unsafe when they assume they know me."
We went on. The show shot, and I poured whatever I had into the work. Frederick Stone refused to let me slack. We fought over takes. I fought him with lines and a voice that had been tempered by living through the worst.
"You're going to be famous," he told me once, half amused, half warning.
"Make me honest fame," I said. "Not theirs."
Weeks rolled like a slow tide. Dalton's news became legal matters. Rosa's career crumpled and she retreated from the public. The assistant's punishment included court hearings and a record. They were punished publicly and thoroughly, exposed in a way the world could share and remember. I watched reactions: shock, applause, the slow turning away of supposed friends. I watched faces change from smirks to shame.
"Did you enjoy it?" Rafael asked me one evening, hand wrapped around tea.
"I enjoyed the end more than the means," I said. "I liked that other people saw."
He considered the word 'enjoy.' "You will have other enemies," he said. "Power rarely forgives the taste of exposure."
"I don't want forgiveness," I said. "I want freedom."
"Then remember: freedom costs proof and courage."
"I have both," I said.
He looked at me a long time, then finally nodded, as if considering something he rarely allowed himself: that perhaps he had chosen to protect the right person.
And so I moved forward—on set, in courtrooms, in the quiet of apartments. I kept learning, kept climbing. People who'd mocked me a year earlier now took the smallest courtesy from me as a gift. That was enough.
A few months later at the premiere, under a row of lights that lit faces into relief, I stood by Rafael as the credits rolled.
"Today," someone in the crowd said into a recorder later, "Imogen Michel stood in front of a thousand people and did not break."
Rafael's hand found mine for a moment and squeezed. I looked at him. "You were always the one to keep me warm," I said, half a joke.
He did not reply with romance. He replied with a promise of safety. "Stay alive," he said.
I smiled. I had lived once and died. I had woken to new life and chosen to remake myself into someone dangerous and kind. The city had seen a lesson. The worst had been punished in public, and their reactions had become the mirror for others. It was not an ending, but it was a correction.
"Keep the journal of proof," Rafael said one night when papers were needed again. "Keep the camera footage. Keep everything."
"Already done," I told him.
"Good," he said. "Because there will be more."
"I will be ready," I said.
And the lights pulled across the water like a blade that does not wound but cuts whatever tries to hide in the dark.
The End
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