Face-Slapping14 min read
Snow Outside the Gate
ButterPicks13 views
The day I walked out of the prison, two men were waiting in the snow.
One had signed the papers that sent me in. One had stood at the prosecutor’s table and watched me sentenced.
They looked like two pale snowmen in black coats. I ignored them both.
"Take care of yourself once you get out," the guard said as he opened the gate.
"I will," I said. I didn't feel like promising anything to anyone.
Through the iron bars I could see two black cars idling in the flurries. A dark Mercedes, a sleek sedan, two men rigid like statues at the curb.
Gideon Gray was checking his watch, every tick a small accusation. Hunter Reid held an umbrella, unmoving, like someone waiting to be worshipped.
Gideon had been the one on the other side of the courtroom that day five years ago, arguing legal lines until the judge knocked his gavel and sent me away.
Hunter had been the one whose name I said in my screaming—when everything had gone wrong, when the world tilted and broke under my feet.
"They're here," the guard murmured. "They wanted to see you."
I shook my head. "No."
I took the back exit. I didn't want… I didn't want to look at them. Not now. Not ever.
My life had been hollowed out in five years.
1.
"Come on, Livia, step out," Gideon said later that day as though we were meeting in school, not outside a locked metal thing that had been my entire world.
"Why are you here?" I asked. Snowflakes landed on my lashes and melted.
"You need a job. Get on your feet. I can help." Gideon’s voice was steady, practiced. "You should let me look after you."
"You put me in prison." I said it like a fact.
"That was the law," he said. "You hurt Antonia."
"She called my grandfather a worthless man." I spat the memory out like a stone. "She said my granddad's life was worth nothing. She lifted her chin and said it, Gideon."
He didn't look away. "You still did the crime."
"I was pregnant. My grandfather was in the hospital. She laughed at him. She laughed at me."
"Self-defense," Gideon said once in a voice that could have saved me. But that answer had never come on the day I needed it. He chose another role then—he took his place on Antonia’s side.
"I watched them hold me down," I told him. "I remember the court. You said, 'This is the punishment you deserve.' You said I should be taught."
Gideon’s thumb grazed my knuckle. "I had to do what the evidence demanded," he said. "And I tried to get you help inside."
I didn't believe him. The inside had been a hard place. There were corners with no cameras, hands that wanted to break someone, whispers that counted months like teeth marks.
"You told people to teach me a lesson, didn't you?" I asked, quieter.
Gideon didn't answer.
2.
Inside, the nameless things they did to me taught me something too: how to listen, how to wait, how to make a small mercy feel like a festival.
I learned to be useful. I scrubbed other women's laundry and smoothed hair of the leader girl, and in exchange I received fewer kicks in the ribs.
"Why do you help her?" the leader asked me once when the bucket of wash water splashed my ankles.
"Because she is small," I said. "Because someone needs to be small for once."
She laughed and told me stories of payoffs, of a man in a big house who loved his sister like a god. "He will make sure you learn," she said, with a kind of motherly cruelty.
The man was Hunter.
"You hurt Antonia," the leader said as if stating the weather. "He won't forget."
3.
When I climbed down the steps the world spun cold and sharp. My grandfather had died. The little life inside me had gone. I had nothing to go back to but an empty room of memories and shame.
I walked for hours until my legs felt like they didn't belong to me. At a bus stop, a mother scolded a child, the child cried, and the woman shouted at me, "Better watch yourself, pretty." The slapping hand stung like old debt.
A man tried to shield me—someone I recognized.
"Gideon?" I asked.
"You came out," he said. His expression was like legal paper—folded carefully, no margin for warmth. "You should not be on your own."
"Why are you following me?" I asked.
"Because you hurt Antonia," he said. "But you are out now. I can help you."
"You sent me here, Gideon." I kept my voice even. "Why should I trust you now?"
"Because I will make it right." He sounded like a lawyer promising a client. "Go with me."
4.
He followed me because it was easy. He had been following me since we were children: pushing a pencil my way across classroom desks, leaving notes under my homework, changing his route to match mine.
"I remember when your grandfather bought you that little butterfly pin outside the boutique," he said one night as we sat on the curb. "You cried because it was the prettiest thing you had. He walked three blocks circling the shop like he was stealing something."
"I remember," I said. It pinched my chest, but I used the memory like a key. "You left the butterfly in my school bag. I had to give it back."
He smiled, small and private. "You were so stubborn. You always were."
5.
He had been changed by five years. Once a shy boy with stubborn devotion, now a man with sharp clothes and a sharper plan. "Come live with me," he said. "I have a place. I have work for you as a clerk at my new office. I'll protect you."
I wanted to throw his coat off him and see the boy I remembered blur into nothing.
"I don't need your pity," I said, but I let him fold a down jacket over my shoulders when he left me shivering. I let him lead me home.
At his house I found a room tidied with a care like a case file—folded shirts, a nightstand lamp, a jacket hung as if it had never known a day of haphazard use. Gideon booked flights, opened bank accounts, and arranged meetings with lawyers.
He was moving his life to fit me in, or he was making a home for a version of me he could control.
"You're changing, Gideon," I said one night when he came back from a call. "You used to like blue."
He touched his collar, black now. "Blue is childish."
"Does it make you feel anything?" I asked.
"It makes me feel necessary," he said. "Come with me abroad. We'll go where no one can hurt you."
6.
I needed him to feel necessary. I needed to test that necessity and break it open.
So I started to build a version of me he could fall into—soft, grateful, small enough to be held. I played the part until sometimes I believed it.
"Say you love me," I whispered to myself at dawn while I practiced my smile. "Say you won't let them take me."
And he did change. He learned to drink black coffee because Hunter drank it. He left curtains drawn in the day because Hunter liked shadow. He learned to walk with the same measured patience Hunter wore like armor.
I watched this change like a surgeon watching a body learn to breathe different.
7.
The first deliberate crack came on Valentine's Day.
"I have to go to the office," Gideon told me, kissing my forehead with a controlled tenderness. "I'll be late."
"Alone?" I asked.
"Work," he said. "Go on, get ready. I'll be back."
He wasn't going to the office. He went to the jeweler with Antonia.
I followed them to the luxury mall. From behind the glass I watched Antonia step out of a champagne-colored car and loop her arm through Gideon's. She held a shopping bag and a perfect face.
I walked to the glass and smudged a heart on the other side. He pressed his hand to it. For a second the same boy from school bent down and looked at me through the window.
He left Antonia and walked like a man trying to cross an ocean. He found me among the crowd and held me in the street, suddenly violent with need not to lose me.
"Come home," he said into my hair. "Come home with me."
Later, in his study, he slipped a ring on my wrong hand—an embossed butterfly, diamonds like shards that glittered.
"I thought of that little thing your grandfather bought for you," he said. "I thought I'd fix what was broken."
I let his hand rest on my cheek as if acceptance could be bought with a ring.
8.
I could have let it be the end. I could have said yes and flown with him, traded the memory of my grandfather for a polished life.
But Antonia had not stopped. I had learned she had not only spat words. She had set people on me inside. She had bankrolled the cruelty. She had called me worthless in a hospital hallway and then laughed.
And she would not leave me be. She would pick at the wound until infection. She would not rest.
So I did what I had practiced—contort my face into gratitude, then pull.
"Go abroad with me," I told Gideon. "I want to leave before she finds me again."
He promised the moon, made plans, wired accounts.
9.
Antonia did not wait. One night, men—Cadence Moreno's crew, people I'd half-known in prison as protectors and punks—grabbed me from the curb and dragged me to a car.
"Relax," Cadence said, smiling like a woman who had nicked something from the household. "You're going to have a grand time abroad."
Antonia came to the cliff by the shore to gloat. "You think you can hide, Livia?" she asked. "You stole his attention, and now we will make sure you disappear."
I felt the rope tighten, felt the sea breathe. I would not let them take me without forcing the fight to widen and break. I slipped out of my bonds, diving into the dark water with the kind of breath I used to hold under punishment.
I swam under the rock and watched them argue on the sand. Gideon arrived in a black flurry, a man reborn into the blue I had teased from his memory.
Antonia and Gideon faced one another like a judge and a defendant—one sure of a verdict, one leaning on hope.
I let them fight. I was a puppet pulling strings from under the stage. I wanted Gideon to see Antonia's face one more time. I wanted Gideon to choose.
10.
The explosion came later than I expected. I walked to Hunter's villa. The door opened because the security system still remembered me.
He lay on the sofa, head tipped back like a man who forgot whether the day belonged to him. I stood in the doorway holding a Swiss army knife.
"Don't," he said when he saw me. His voice was a little raw, as if lungs had been used and not rested.
I planted the knife on his chest but held the handle in a mock threat. I wanted him to see my scars, to see the child I had carried and lost.
"Look at me," I said. "Do you know what you did?"
He grabbed my wrist like a man who had been waiting a lifetime for this touch. "Livia," he whispered. "I looked for you every day."
"You kept them on me," I said, pointing to my ribs. "You let them teach me how a woman breaks. You signed papers. You watched me go."
Hunter's hands trembled. He tucked the knife under a cushion. "I thought—" He couldn't finish. "I thought I was protecting everyone."
"Protected Antonia?" I asked.
"I was protecting the family," he said. There was a warped kind of righteousness in him. "I made choices."
That night he stayed at my side, paler and more fragile than the man I had loved. He confessed a million small failures, and I let him talk because the voice of his guilt sounded like music.
"Help me revenge—help me get her to feel what I felt," I told him in the glow. "Help me make them pay."
He agreed in a tremor: "Anything."
11.
And then the day of blood came.
When police finally sorted out the night at the old family house, they found Antonia dead. She had been struck down where she used to rule a corridor like a queen. Hunter was there, hands covered in red. So was I. So was Gideon.
The tabloids screamed the rest. "Tragedy."
The truth is a messy thing. Antonia had been violent. She had inflicted cruelty on others and on herself, on those she loved the most. Hunter, frayed and medicated badly at a time, had gone too far. He said the words "I couldn't stop" over and over in interrogation.
Gideon, who had once prosecuted me, had stepped in between two broken people and then lost himself in fury. He had taken a knife, fought, and later, they said, stabbed Hunter in a single frantic spasm.
12.
They brought Gideon to court. The courtroom filled like a stadium; curiosity is always hungry.
I sat in the gallery as everyone found seats. Cameras were outside on platforms, lenses pointed like sharp tongues.
When the charge read "excessive defense — grievous bodily harm," I looked at Gideon and saw every version of him layered small and thin and curled.
"Mr. Gray," the prosecutor said, "your actions went beyond defense. You inflicted wounds beyond necessity."
Gideon's face never lost that paper-cool look, but inside, the muscles shifted like a caught animal. He had once argued legalities with the ferocity of an ocean and now sat boxed in by the same rules he used to wield.
I stood up when the judge called the sentence.
"Five years," the judge said.
What followed was not the sterile official note of punishment. The court—the people who had watched me through my worst days—decided this would be a morning of unmasked truth.
13. (Public Punishment Scene — 800+ words)
The hallway outside the courthouse was a crowd dragged to a magnet. Press lights hissed like a summer storm, and people pressed their faces to one another trying to see him. When Gideon stepped out, handcuffed in a blue jacket that was once the color he loved and had abandoned, the public had already decided the narrative.
"Traitor!" someone spat. "You sent her away and now you cry?"
"Look at him," a woman cheered, wagging a finger like a judge. "He wore law to hide his heart."
Gideon's face went through a flicker of expressions—surprise, then a rigid calm, then a small, fatal crack when he saw me waiting.
He tried to say something formal. "I—"
A camera shoved forward and a reporter demanded, "Why, Mr. Gray? Why did you do it? Why did you switch sides and then come to this?"
"You prosecuted her," a man close to me shouted. "You ruined her life, then pretended to save her. Which was it?"
Gideon took a breath. "I did what I thought was right at every turn."
"Is right handing a woman to beatings?" another voice asked. "Is right telling lies about her in court?"
Gideon blinked as if he had been struck. His composure, which had been lawyer-sharp for years, wavered under the weight of faces that had once looked to him for judgements.
People in the crowd began to recount things they remembered: whispered rumors about his phone calls, a neighbor's tale of a meeting that involved a briefcase, the way Antonia's smile had been rewarded with power. Little accusations stacked like stones.
"Did you see her, Gideon?" a woman with a worn scarf demanded. "Did you feel responsible for the things she did to Livia? Or did you love the power?"
He opened his mouth and closed it. "I—"
The crowd's mood turned like weather. Those who had decided to forgive hesitated, eyes darting. Those who wanted spectacle leaned in.
A man from a charity with whom Gideon had held fundraising dinners stepped forward. "We trusted you. You took our donations to build shelters," he said, voice tired. "People donated believing in your moral steadiness. Where did that steadiness go?"
Gideon's cheeks flamed; he burned under the gaze of people whose money had once bought him trust. The cameras zoomed in on a face that had rarely shown anything beyond collected decisions. Now it registered panic—then defensiveness.
"I did what I had to," he said again. "I acted to stop more harm. I tried to protect—"
"Protect?" someone screamed. "By stabbing a man? By taking the law into your hands?"
The crowd started to chant softly at first, then louder: "Accountability! Accountability!"
Gideon faltered. A woman who had once been on the pro bono cases with Gideon stepped up, removing her glove as if to confront him with her bare hand. "You taught others the law," she said. "You knew how to avoid this. You knew how to counsel. You betrayed your oath."
"I—" he began.
"Don't," I said. The sound of my voice cut through the noise like a knife. "Say your rehearsed lines. You rehearsed them in your head just now, didn't you?"
He looked at me as if I had handed him cold metal. The chain of control he had kept snapped and gave up a small, empty sound.
"You put me in jail," I said, because the court had not been able to understand the small daily cruelties. "You stood in the courtroom and you said I deserved it. You watched men teach me to bleed quietly. You watched and told yourself it was justice."
He didn't speak.
People came closer, inquisitive, hungry for a story they could understand. "How could you let that happen?" someone asked. "How could you watch?"
Gideon swallowed, a sound like a door closing on an empty hall. He lifted his eyes to the sky as if considering a litany of excuses. The first excuse was surprise, the second was defense, the third was regret. Each came and fell flat against the crowd.
"I tried to..." He stopped. His lips trembled and he closed his mouth. The crowd saw a man in a suit unravel, thread by thread.
Someone from Antonia's old circle spat in his direction. "You fed her like a god. You made her sharp and she turned on everyone."
"She hurt people," Gideon whispered. "She—"
"You sat at the table where she ate other people's dignity," a woman countered. "You cut a piece for yourself."
By now Gideon was pale. A teenager shoved a camera in his face and asked, "Are you sorry? Say it."
"I am sorry," he said. It sounded small. It sounded like a legal formula. It sounded like an appeal.
The crowd's reaction shifted; some scoffed, some clapped in a mocking way, some nodded as if closure had been achieved on the surface. But the punishment was not only vocal. The loss was in the things dropped: contracts rescinded, invitations withdrawn, firm partners who had donned his pin fled like stock market values.
His name trended in merciless loops. Clients spoke to journalists. A local charity withdrew a plaque and ordered their donations back. Someone broke a ribbon at a building that had his name etched on a bronze plate and pushed it into a bin in full view of a livestream.
Gideon watched his public life dissolve and for a few terrifying seconds, he showed every stage the rules demanded: surprise, denial, anger, bargaining, and collapse. He tried to bargain with the press, to apologize in the same measured tones he'd used in court, but the words had been used too often. People refused the old cadence.
"How does it feel?" a woman asked finally, soft but fierce.
"Empty," Gideon breathed. He said it with a clarity that cut.
Around us, a handful of people filmed him. He saw himself through their devices, tiny and failing. One of the cameras was aimed at me. The crowd leaned in like a swarm willing to witness the last pages of a man's reputation being burned.
Then Gideon, who had been sovereign in the courtroom, looked toward me. "Livia," he whispered, the name raw.
I met his eyes and for a sliver of a second something like pity trembled across his features, but the crowd had him like weather—no one asked for mercy but everyone felt it would be poetic if he lost everything he used to have.
"It is done," he said to me, and the world swallowed the rest of his sentence.
He was led away in cuffs. People shouted as he passed, some names of mercy, some of condemnation. Cameras chased him, inches from his face, as if the press could extract his worth with a zoom lens.
This was his scaffolding moment. It was public. It was loud. It was not legal formalism alone—it was social unmaking, the slow burn of reputation, of dinners unhosted, foundations disbanded. The material consequences layered atop the sentencing: offices closed, signatures rescinded, sponsorships annulled, people who once ate at his table now forbidding him from the door.
I stood in the press scrum and felt the quiet of my own small victory settle like snow.
14.
After the shock, the court did what the laws demanded: Gideon was sentenced to five years for the excessive act of violence. He wrote letters from his cell—apologies scattered with a kind of forced clarity. People debated if punishment repairs ruin.
Hunter, by then, was in a hospital facility for those who cannot sleep from guilt and who see the past as film loops. He clutched a photograph—one of our three-year anniversary at a pool where he had jumped into the water with me and laughed until our sides ached. He kept that picture like a relic to which he held a confession of tender failure.
Antonia did not live to answer for cruelty in a court of law. Her death made an ugly vacancy where her cruelty once stood. People plotted different meanings over her grave. I had wanted to punish her with a public shaming, with ruin that pleasure would not dilute. Death is not a fitting revenge if you hope to watch a culprit's face change—so I turned my vengeance elsewhere: into the publicness of Gideon’s fall.
15.
The people who had once praised Gideon were now calling for accountability. The ones who had once scorned me now whispered apologies as if apology could mend. "You look different now," someone said to me at the hospital lot once, as I left Hunter's ward.
"So much better," someone else muttered.
I looked at the little butterfly ring on my finger, the one with its diamonds like small hungry stars. Gideon had given it to me to patch a hole. I kept it as a reminder—of my grandfather's sacrifice and of my plan.
In a quiet moment, when the news lights had finally dimmed, Gideon—shrunken by time and the public gaze—formed words that were almost a prayer: "Don't wait for me."
I tilted my head. He mouthed the line he'd once said as a boy—"Wait for me"—and then he signed that I should not.
I walked away. Snow was falling again.
16. (Closing, unique)
I sat later on a bench outside the hospital where Hunter had been treated and watched a child bite a lollipop until his tongue was crowned in sugar. I touched the butterfly ring and felt the rasp of metal and diamonds and memory.
The butterfly my grandfather bought had been small and clumsy, but it had been real. Gideon had polished a new one and set it on my finger, and that was his apology and his trap.
"Are you happy now?" a nurse once asked me, a blunt kindness that carried truth.
I looked at the ring and said, "I am safe."
It wasn't everything. The scars beneath my clothes still hummed. The loss of the child I had carried lived like a quiet echo in my bones. But I had watched a man who once called himself justice be taken down for the things he'd done, and I had watched the man who had hurt me be undone by his own inability to contain pain.
And in the last light, when the snow became silence and the ring felt warm against my skin, I pressed my thumb to the butterfly engraving and remembered my grandfather's hands folding paper boxes, his slow, stubborn love.
If anyone were to ask what I had wanted, I'd lay out a simple list: a clean name, a roof, food to pay a bill, and a life where I could tell my own story.
I turned the ring in my fingers until the little wings caught the pale sky and I whispered, not to anyone in particular, "For you, Grandpa."
The End
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