Rebirth14 min read
"Say My Name — Then Watch Me Kill It"
ButterPicks15 views
"I'll sing it. Right here. Right now."
The words left my throat like a confession. My knees were raw from the pavement. The city lights blurred into halos and people’s faces were just dark shapes and flashes of phone screens. Logan Picard stood under the club canopy, a shadow inside a shadow, watching me as if I were an animal he had trained.
"You will sing it," he said. "And you will beg for mercy while you sing."
"Logan..." My voice cracked. "Please."
He smiled like the verdict had already been written. "Beg? No. You’ll earn it. Ten million. One million at a time. Or die trying."
I started to sing because I had to. Because the only thing left was a voice and a name, and he wanted to turn both into a joke.
"Sing," he ordered.
I sang.
People laughed. A man spat. Someone threw a bottle. I kept singing.
"You're pathetic," a voice sneered from the crowd.
"Look at her," another said. "She used to be somebody."
"She killed her friend," the first replied. "Killer."
My throat burned. My ribs ached. My song—my song that used to be private and bright—came out ragged and small. Logan watched, his jaw tight and distant. The world kept spinning, as cruel as always.
After dusk fell, after the crowd had left and the lights were turned off, Logan stepped forward.
"You did well," he said, like a man approving work. "Enough."
He reached for me, but his hand wasn't soft. He dragged me like a prize across the pavement. "Come with me."
"You're not my husband," I said, though his name felt like acid in my mouth.
"I decide," he said.
"Then decide to leave me alone," I whispered.
He laughed. "Decisions don't get you justice. Actions do."
I remember the radio sound of a car braking, the color of a suit, the rush of the street. I remember the white wash of pain and then nothing.
Weeks later—no, two months later—I woke in a hospital under a fluorescent sun that made the ceiling tiles look like a fake sky.
"You're awake," said a man with tired eyes. His name tag read Faron Lehmann.
"Where—" My mouth tasted like rust.
"Home," he said. He took my hand and I flinched because his fingers smelled of earth and smoke and a kind of tired love. "Lea? Lea, it's me. Your dad."
My heart—my chest—kicked out a rhythm I couldn't name.
"Lea?" he said again, and my reflection in the window did not show the scarred, broken woman who had knelt under the Picard name. It showed another face. It showed the body of a minor actress who had been in a car crash two months ago. Her name was Lea Kozlov. Her father was poor, honest. He had come every night.
The truth hit me like a cold slap: I had jumped, or I had fallen, and I had died. And then—this was impossible and yet it sat in me like stone—I had woken inside someone else's life.
"You're home now," my new father's voice said. "Sleep."
I didn't sleep. I lay in the quiet and rewired my brain. I had a single thing I could do: survive. I had a single new weapon: a new face. Logan Picard had already found me in this life. He had walked into the same club two months earlier and signed a contract that put me in his pocket.
"Sign this," his assistant said once, a paper smelling of cold ink. "A contract. Terms: one year."
"A...year?" I read the line that said 'arrangement' and the word felt like a trap.
"He pays your debts," the assistant said. "He protects your career."
"I don't want protection that comes with chains," I said.
"You don't get to choose," the assistant said. "Mr. Picard does."
When I signed I felt a small part of the old me die. But survival is not about pride. Survival is about making the best trade when the deck is stacked.
"You chose," Logan said later, when he stood across from me in the apartment he had assigned. He had that look—lean, controlled, a man who measured things by currency and consequence.
"I did," I said. "I chose to live."
"Good." He smoothed a silk robe and handed it to a servant. "Then learn to be useful."
The first night in his world was always the same. The bright bathroom tiles. The heavy shampoos. The soft, accusing lights. He watched me change like a doctor reading the lines of a test result.
"Strip," he said once. His voice was casual, a man making an order at a restaurant.
"No," I said.
He laughed. "That's the old habit. Learn. Your value is what I say it is."
And I learned. I learned to obey enough to buy one more day. I learned to play mute when he wanted silence and to smile when it hurt his pride. The contract was a leash; he was the hand at the other end. But I also learned something else: he was a man who remembered.
"You look like her sometimes," he admitted one night in front of the fireplace. He must have burned a dozen cigarettes that week. "When you sing it—when you ride, when you laugh like you don't care—you look like her."
"Who?" I asked, and my hand closed around nothing.
"Her," he said. "Laila Orlov."
The name was a razor. I felt it cut real-life from memory.
"You loved her, didn't you?" I said.
He didn't answer. He walked away.
In my new life, my new face, I began to rebuild. I went to auditions. I took roles and learned lines until they were part of my bones. I let people think I was fragile. I let them think that I had nothing. I collected small victories: a commercial here, a scene there. I learned to let the world label me.
"They call you 'Little Laila,'" a director said with a smile that smelled of opportunity. "Good for marketing."
"Marketing," I said. "Yes."
One night on set, a girl with a strong backbone and a weaker face—an actress named Meng Jingya—called me a billiard of curses and shoved me. She wanted my job, or she wanted to humiliate me to make her side of the camera more glamorous.
"Say it again," I told her, and I slapped the voice right out of her.
There are moments in life when the old flames inside you—anger, hunger, pride—flare. I hit her because hitting was truth: some people only listen when pain is language. The room went quiet. Her assistant tried to push me. My assistant, a bright and nervous girl called Kelsey Burton, stepped forward and put herself like a small shield between us.
"Don't," Kelsey said, voice steady as a heartbeat.
"She's not worth it," I heard the director mutter, and then the world moved on. The act became a rumor. My name climbed a bit higher.
Logan watched all this like a man watching a game he could not quite predict. He started to ask questions. He came when he shouldn't. He left when he did. His visits were like the weather—unreliable and dangerous.
Then came the change. The newscycle. My father's name in the headlines.
"Faron Lehmann jumped," the anchors said. "A scandal at his company, inability to pay debts. He was found..."
I saw the video. I saw the left hand—my father's left hand—still wearing a wedding band. I saw the paper covering the face.
I called Logan and begged. "You promised," I said.
He was quiet. "I told you," he said. "You do what you agreed."
"I kept my side. Why didn't you keep yours?"
He hung up.
I ran. I ran up the skyscraper stairs to the roof. I stood at the edge and I screamed until the wind took my voice.
"Lea!" Logan called from behind. "Get down!"
"You said—" I began.
"I said nothing would happen without my say so," he corrected. "You think you have any bargaining chips? You signed. You are mine under contract."
"Then I will jump," I said.
"You won't," he said.
"I will jump!" I closed my eyes and opened my arms.
He lunged and missed. I felt air under my feet, and then I felt the cold breath of falling.
This time there was no second life. There was a hospital bed and a woman called "Lea" and a father who cried. There was grief and there was a strange new chance. I took it.
After I healed—after the bones mended and the papers settled and my so-called manager demanded I attend a gala for exposure—Logan did two things that shook the ground beneath me.
First, he arranged my comeback.
"You're going to sing where you used to sing," he said. "Top floor. Main stage. Make it look like your failure was a mistake. Make it a comeback."
Second, he began to actually look at me in a way that went beyond ownership. He started to test me—not with anger, not with cruelty, but with curiosity.
"Do you remember the first time you sang for me?" he asked one night in the car.
"I remember you," I said. "You remember Laila."
He didn't answer.
The truth is, he started to crumble in small ways. Sometimes when he watched me with a glass of whiskey, his knuckles white, he said something that sounded like memory.
"She used to hum when she brushed her hair," he would say. Or, "She used to call me Logan like it was a name she had made up for me."
Those moments were tiny. They were also dangerous.
I had a plan. If I had been pushed into darkness once, I would drag the person who pushed me down after me. But I would not sink. Revenge is a patient thing. It eats time and grows sharp.
"Why are you doing this to him?" Kelsey asked late one night. We sat on the roof of the theater and watched the city breathe.
"Because I want him to feel what I felt," I said. "Because he took my life twice: once he took my family, and once he took my freedom. He will not win."
Kelsey put her hand on mine. "Be careful," she said. "Don't become him."
"I won't," I told her. "I will become more."
The path I chose was crooked. I filed complaints—quiet ones—about Logan's shady deals. I started to talk to reporters who had been unpaid for years when they covered Logan's events. I learned who owed money to whom. I made friends with accountants who hated Logan for his arrogance. I sat long nights in diners with union singers and costume tailors and asked the right questions.
"Why me?" a costume designer asked, handing me a black dress. "Why sabotage your own image?"
"Because if he can take everything by crushing my name, I will take his name and make it bleed," I said.
One by one, I collected proof.
Ledger books that had Gideon numbers and payoff lines. Messages in which Logan instructed a partner to "rip the Lehmann assets so they can't breathe." A taped conversation where Logan's assistant argued about how to best ruin Faron Lehmann's company in the wake of the trial. An invoice with Logan Picard's stamp in a ledger for a debt that Faron Lehmann supposedly owed.
For months, it was like a slow tearing of fabric. Each small pull didn't look like much, but together they revealed a seam.
There were risks. A minor journalist was shoved off a balcony for asking the wrong question. A former aide disappeared for three days. I stopped sleeping alone.
"Do you think he'll kill you?" Kelsey asked me once.
"Maybe," I said. "But he already killed my old life. What is left to lose?"
She didn't like that answer. She wanted me safe. I wanted him seen.
I planned my reveal on the night of my "comeback"—the same stage where five years earlier Laila Orlov had died. Logan had spent a fortune to buy the plaza and turn it into his shrine to her. He always loved memorials.
"You're really going back there?" Kelsey asked. "A public stage. He will be watching from the first row."
"Exactly," I said. "He will be the first to see."
On the night, tens of thousands streamed in. The plaza trembled with light and sound. Logan sat in the center, perfect and immovable, like an accusation.
"Go on," he said quietly, leaning forward.
I stepped onto the stage in the white dress—my wedding dress, the one he'd given me five years ago in my previous life. He had put it on me once when we were legally married. It sat like a memory. I wore it now like armor.
"Tonight is a night about truth," I told the crowd, my voice small into the mic, then steady. "Tonight I am going to sing, and I am going to tell a story."
"What story?" Logan said into my ear.
"The one where the judge was paid," I sang softly, and then louder. "The one where men in suits bought silence."
The audience didn't move. Logan did.
"Lea—" he whispered.
"This is about Laila," I said. "But it's also about me. And about everyone he hurt."
I had a binded folder in my hand. When I opened it, cameras snapped. The media lights whited everything into a blinding truth.
"This is a copy of the transfer to Mr. Logan Picard's shell company," I told the cameras. "This is a wire with his signature. This is a recording of his assistant talking about how to 'break' the Lehmanns. This is the invoice showing the payoffs. Do you know what else it shows?"
The plaza held its breath. Logan's face went colorless.
"It shows how he strangled a company that couldn't pay—then, while they bled, he bought the site of Laila's death and turned it into his temple," I said. "It shows that he used my life as a theater. That he used their deaths as stage props."
"No," Logan said. "You—you can't."
"Watch," I said.
I had arranged a reporter in the crowd with a live feed. The documents rolled on millions of screens. The murmurs surged into shouts. People had phones and lawyers and memories. The truth is a contagious fire.
"Logan Picard set the Lehmann fall in motion," the news anchor declared. "We have documents. We have transfer orders. We have witnesses willing to speak."
Logan stood. For a second he looked like the man I had loved: small, vulnerable, shocked. The next second, his face closed like a vault.
"You can't do this," he said. "These are forgeries."
"No," I said. "Not this time. Not when you signed your name with trembling hands to keep a secret."
He lunged for the microphone and tried to snatch it from me. Men tried to keep him back. He wanted violence; he wanted to take. He lived by taking.
"Show them everything," he shouted. "They're lies!"
"Logan," I said. "Look at them."
He looked at the audience. I saw the dampness in his eyes. I saw the realization of the man who had built towers of cards and now watched the wind. He had created monsters: his own fear and his own brittle empire.
"Who helped you?" he asked me suddenly, voice small.
"People you took the least care of," I said. "They owed you nothing. They owe us justice."
Police sirens came from the edge of the plaza. A prosecutor stepped into the light. "We have a warrant for Mr. Picard," she said. "There are charges pending."
"No," Logan said, disbelieving.
"Logan." A man's voice—Faron's old business partner—stood in the crowd, trembling. "You timed them to hit when his company would fail."
Logan looked like a man drowning. Someone shouted his middle name—Logan—like a shaming bell.
The cameras didn't stop. The crowd pressed forward, hungry for the collapse. Logan's face cracked in public the way paint cracks in heat.
"You can't arrest me," he said. "You—"
"We have enough for an investigation," the prosecutor said, cutting cleanly. "You are under caution."
Handcuffs found his wrists with the finality of a stage drop. He tried to look at me, rage and something like a hollow longing in his gaze.
"This isn't over," he spat.
"It is for now," I said.
Logan was charged. His empire quivered. The plaza was full of lights that showed him small and human. People cheered. People jeered. The news cycle consumed him.
At night, after the court appearances and the press statements, I sat on the roof of the theater. Kelsey made tea and we watched the city breathe.
"What now?" she asked.
I thought of two lives. I thought of the scars, the songs, the contracts, the white dress. I thought of the father who had been broken and the man whose name had been on every transfer. I pictured the two deaths he had caused, the first in life and the second in spirit.
"Now," I said, "we clean up."
We worked with victims. We testified. I stood in a courtroom and told the truth, honestly and plainly: "He used his power to get what he wanted. He lied. He destroyed lives." My words were not poetic. They were simple. They were true.
Logan did not become a villain in one day. The court took months. He hired the best lawyers. He argued. He denied. But the ledger lay open like a sunlit wound. More witnesses came forward. The man who had once controlled the city like a chessboard found himself boxed in.
At sentencing, Logan stood before the judge. His face was an empty marble.
"You chose cruelty," the judge said. "You chose to weaponize grief and market it as devotion. You used your wealth to silence. You must pay the price."
The sentence was measured; it was not revenge. Justice rarely is. It was a verdict shaped by law, not by the personal theater we had all lived in. But as he was led away, his eyes found mine. There was no apology, only the echo of a recognition.
"You could have had a real life," I said.
He turned his face to the wall.
Time moved on. The news moved on. My career moved on too—carefully, deliberately. I used the stage for something salvageable. I raised money for survivors. I started a fund to help families like mine and like Faron's. I sang songs not as weapons, but as threads to stitch things back together.
People expected me to take him down publicly and then fade. They expected me to be another spectacle. I wasn't. I chose to be human.
One day, I went back to the plaza where Laila had sung. The stage lights were off. The white dress hung in a glass case beneath the old marquee, as if nothing had happened. I walked to it, and for the first time since I had first worn it, I touched the fabric.
"Do you regret anything?" Kelsey asked. She had been with me through everything.
"I regret the cost," I said. "I regret the people who died while I stayed quiet."
She nodded. "And what about him?"
"What about him?" I echoed.
"We used to be in the same room with him when he decided things," she said. "Do you ever think—" She stopped, because there are things that can't be asked.
"Sometimes," I said. "I remember a man who once could have been saved, before he became a machine."
Kelsey squinted. "Do you want him to suffer?"
"No," I said. "I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to never be that man again. Suffering is easy. Change is hard."
The court didn't make him change. The law only made him answer for what he had done. People can be punished and still not understand. But the city moved. The Lehmann name started to come back slowly, with small business deals and with a board of trustees chosen by people who wanted from him what had been taken away: fairness.
Months later, I received a letter from the woman Logan had loved—Laila's mother. She had found my number through old contacts. "You have my thanks," she wrote. "We buried her once, and again you have given some measure of peace."
"I didn't do this for thanks," I answered. "I did it for truth."
She replied, "Truth can be a gentle thing when people are brave enough to tell it."
The last time I saw Logan, it was through a glass window at the trial. He was older in an odd way—smaller somehow. When our eyes met, there was no power. There was apology buried so far down I couldn't be sure it was real. He mouthed something. Maybe "sorry." Maybe nothing.
When it was over, I took the white dress out of the glass case. I held it to my face. The scent of perfume from a life I had worn once—what child you had been—hit me. I walked to the river where my old life had ended and my new one began.
I had one act left. It was not catharsis. It was not spectacle. It was a closing.
I ripped the dress into small pieces and fed them into the river.
Kelsey grabbed my hand. "Are you sure?"
"Yes," I said. "This dress carried a memory of two lives. It kept both of them tied to the same name. I am cutting the thread."
The paper white fragments vanished in the water. The river swallowed them without a sound. A boy on the bank shouted and waved; we laughed.
"What's next?" Kelsey asked.
I looked at the city that had nearly killed me twice and loved me the same. I thought of the stage, of singers and assistants and tailors, of a father who had laughed and wept in the same breath.
"Next," I said, "we build something that cannot be bought."
We founded a small studio where singers learned how to protect their rights. We offered legal help to performers and families who were afraid. We taught young women to say no and to leave. We provided small scholarships to kids whose lives had been stolen by the powerful.
One night, years later, I stood on a tiny stage—no plaza, no floodlights—just a room with chairs and a circle of people who had been where I had been. I sang a song I had written in the quiet of a hospital window. It was not about hate or revenge. It was about waking, and about the small, brave things you do to be alive.
After the final note, a woman in the front row rose—an old woman with a strong jaw—and she walked to me.
"You were Lea?" she asked. "The one from the papers?"
"I was," I said.
She took my hand. "Thank you," she said. "You gave me my son back. You gave him a place that wouldn't be bought."
I thought of all the places where people barter for truth and love and dignity. I thought of Logan's impounded empire, of Faron's small rescued company, of a dress on a river. My face in the mirror had been many things, but my heart kept the same beat.
"Will you ever go back?" Kelsey asked later.
"Back where?" I asked.
"To the life before," she said.
"I can't," I said. "Not all of it. But I can be better than what I was and better than what was done to me." I touched the scar on my throat. It throbbed when I laughed later.
A man who once had everything loses it and we call it justice. A woman who once had nothing gets a second life and we call it luck. But names are only sound. What matters is what you do with them.
I changed my name once more—officially—so no one could pin the old weight to me. I kept the songs. I kept the small, bright things. I kept my father’s laugh in my head when I got tired. I kept Kelsey's steady hands.
In the end, I learned that revenge is not always a shout. Sometimes it's a long, careful work that makes sure no one else gets crushed the way you were.
"Are you happy?" Kelsey asked me one spring morning, when the light made the kitchen look like a movie set.
"I am not whole," I said. "But I am alive. That will have to be enough for now."
She smiled. "Then let's eat, and then we'll teach a class. Today. On contracts."
I laughed. "Always the lesson."
She kissed my cheek. "You survived twice. Think what else you can do."
I looked out the window at the city. There were towers and lights and an empty glass case under a marquee, now filled with new art. There were men like Logan, and men who had a chance to be different. There were daughters and fathers and little girls with big eyes. There were songs.
"Let's teach them," I said.
And we did. We taught them to sing, to hold contracts like armor, and to call their own names loud enough to fill the room.
The End
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