Face-Slapping14 min read
The Agreement, The Gift, The Reckoning
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I came home that night like I always did—coat slung over an arm, keys jangling, the apartment hallway humming with the usual city softness.
I pushed open our bedroom door. The bathroom light left a spill of pale gold; Chase Emerson was in the tub when I stepped inside, his broad back briefly outlined by steam. He climbed out, towel at his waist, and slid into bed without a word.
"Chase?" I murmured, as if a name would make him soften.
He kissed my throat. "Hmm," he said, soft and quick, and then we fell under the kind of silence that pretends intimacy.
That silence stayed with me the next morning—until I woke with a hollow in my belly and found only a note on the pillow.
"On the 20th, if I’m not back, gifts will be delivered to the house."
I folded the paper once, then twice. I thought the handwriting was masculine, almost exacting. I told myself things to steady my pulse.
"He loves me," I thought. "Maybe he loves me more than I thought."
I told myself that until I reminded myself of the agreement we had signed three years ago—an arranged marriage, a contract with expiration. I remembered how unromantic it had been then, how practical. I remembered that he had chosen me at a table full of polite faces and that I had said yes because I wanted stability, because I wanted an anchor.
But my hand found blood on my underwear when I reached for my robe. The blood shook me into motion—into a hospital, into ultrasound rooms and antiseptic fluorescence. A woman in scrubs said, "Intrauterine pregnancy, eight weeks."
I couldn't breathe for a second. Then the doctor added, careful, "Avoid sexual activity for a month. Last night's activity was... intense. Bleeding could be from that."
Tears sprang in my throat. Joy and sudden, awkward fear tangled. I held the paper—a small strip of alien handwriting from the sonographer—and thought of the note on my pillow.
So I did what thousands of women do when they think their whole life might rearrange into something softer: I texted him.
His reply made the room tilt.
"Wait until I get back. We'll go to the hospital."
I laughed at my own gullibility as I read it. "He must know," I thought. "He must know I'm pregnant and is being careful." I allowed my mouth to lift into that small crescent of belief.
The doorbell rang that afternoon. I opened it to a man in a suit with a briefcase. He set a folder on my knee and folded into my living room as if he owned the sofa.
"Mrs. Dunn," he said. "Sign here."
The cover read: DIVORCE AGREEMENT.
I stared at the black, heavy letters until my face went numb.
"Chase sent you?" I asked.
"He requested delivery before he lands," the lawyer—Amir Ferrell—said without emotion.
My stomach hollowed. I leafed through the contract. "Net assets to him," it said. "No custody, remove child from claim."
"Sign here," Amir said again.
I could not make my fingers move. I wanted to call Chase, to ask him why, how, but my phone hung like dead weight in my bag.
"He knows everything you do, ma'am." Amir's voice was businesslike and buried. "According to Mr. Emerson, he is aware of your health visits while he's been away."
A hand reached out of the doorframe. A slim woman in sunglasses walked toward the car. She took the folder back and slipped a check inside. She said, "Tell him he's on the plane. Give this to him."
As if that were an answer.
I signed.
I am not proud of how quickly my hand obeyed. I signed because my chest split and words were too sharp to hold. I signed because he was gone and because the agreement had always been a cliff edge and he had simply shoved me off.
When I left the apartment, the world tilted. I moved through routine as a hollow thing—packed a small bag, left the ring on the nightstand, and took my phone offline. I had an appointment to keep: the fetus, the hush between beats.
I didn't notice the unmarked sedan tailing my taxi. I didn't notice the flash of headlights until the car behind us rammed into the cab so hard the world snapped.
Pain folded me inward like paper. I remember air that tasted of metal and a voice—"The baby—"—and then black.
I came awake with the sterile taste of antiseptic in my mouth, to lights too bright, to monitors blipping in a hurried pattern. A nurse said, "She's had a D&C. She was unconscious; surgery was performed at Mr. Emerson's request."
The room spun. My hands flew to the sheet but stopped. "My baby," I whispered. "What did he do?"
I saw him in my mind's eye as a man with perfect angles who'd told me once, "You owe me everything," and I heard his voice inside my head saying now, "You signed."
When I was able to stand, I was furious enough to burn.
"I don't love him," I said aloud for the first time. "I didn't, not for the whole year and not now."
Days passed in hard, vivid slices. Chase came back and presented himself with the chill of a man whose life had a temperature set by other people's expectations. He was polite. He was distant. He was cruel.
"You're leaving?" he asked once, when we were in the hospital corridor and the air stung of disinfectant.
"I have to," I said. "You can't decide my child's life."
"Maybe I should," he said. "It’s my money. It’s my name."
I remember thinking of the three years—how he told me who I was allowed to be, who I could see, what I could eat. How he had always known where I was, through background checks, through a tidy army of assistants.
"Surveillance," I said aloud, voice thin.
"It was a contract," he said as if that explained everything.
"We were married. Were we not partners?" I demanded.
"Partners sign off on assets," he said. "We agreed on three years, Livia. That’s all."
The divorce papers were not enough for him. He wanted erasure—my child, my voice, my right to step where his shadow did not stretch. He wanted me to be unseen.
I left his house with more than a signature; I left with a heart that required stitching.
Bianca came and picked me up. She hugged me in a way that said, "I won't let them break you," though I trembled inside anyway. She took me to our father's estate, where I thought sanctuary might exist.
But in home where my father Fitzgerald Graves rules with a hand both calculating and cruel, sanctuary is a ledger. He demanded I kneel and answer for everything I'd done—not because he cared about truth, but because he wanted to control the narrative.
"Tell me what you've done," he barked the night I returned. "Tell me your sins."
"I married," I said. "I divorced. I tried to keep my child."
"And you thought you could return?" he screamed. "You thought the house would forgive? Kneel."
I knelt and felt the long burn of retribution. My back became a map of shame, the memory of a leather strap and a palm made me understand what "accountability" meant at our house.
"I will not be your charity," Bianca whispered later, when the storm passed and my face was swollen. "You should have told me sooner. I shouldn't have let you go."
I do not tell the whole of that punishment now; to narrate each lash would be to replay a private violence. But know this: by the time I left the estate, I had a decision. Suffer no longer.
I returned to work at the company that had sent me home to hide for years. I had to be something more than victim in my father's cold ledger. I dug into meetings, called clients, polished pitches, and slept the way an animal steals slumber between alarms.
At a business luncheon, Chase walked in. He still wore his shadow like a suit. He introduced a pale, impeccably groomed woman as his fiancée.
"This is Kiera Correia," he said smoothly. "My fiancée."
Kiera smiled like a sun calculated to warm only certain rooms.
"Congratulations," I said in a voice that behaved like ice.
Chase's eyes flicked at me—cool, assessing. "Livia," he said, on the edge of a statement. "We should talk about the deal."
I followed him into a conference room like a woman following a smell. He cornered me in an empty meeting room with the calm of a predator.
"You took something from me," he said.
"What?" I demanded.
"You owe me a life," he said. "You owe me a favor. You signed."
"I signed because you made me sign," I said. "You made me sign because you needed a paper bride."
"A paper marriage is still real," he said. "And you owe me everything."
I slapped him then—one sharp, public crack that echoed off the glass. People outside glanced in and pretended not to see. Kiera's face was white with fury. "How dare you—"
"I am tired of being presumed a liar because I am poor in your eyes," I told her. "I am tired of men bargaining over my body. Hands off him."
Kiera lifted a hand—then her expression shifted. She slapped me with the exact river of righteous anger she had rehearsed, an aristocratic slap that said, "Stay in your lane."
So I returned it.
That day we traded slaps like petty coins. They said I was vulgar. They said I was desperate. That day earned me a reputation that would serve me well.
Because a reputation—especially a bad one—gets noticed. And I wanted attention.
I began to move: small, patient, strategic. A meeting with a foreign investor. A new proposal. A late-night call to an editor. I cultivated allies—quietly, resolutely. I made people see me on my own terms.
I also had one thing he had taken from me, and I wanted it back: dignity. The first step was to make him pay where it hurt most.
Weeks of work led me back to the same ballroom that had once been his family’s stage. Chase was due there to endorse a new partnership, to smile for cameras and sign his name on paper that fed other people's pride.
I had my own plan. I sat near the back and watched the room fill with the city's glittering. Executives in suits checked phones, wives smoothed skirts, assistants carried agendas like shields.
"Mr. Emerson!" a host called. Chase stood to applause, to the polite fireworks of a man who has perfected his public face.
I rose.
"May I?" I asked the event coordinator, voice steady.
They expected smoke and show. They expected a small person to be ushered out. They did not expect me.
I walked to the stage. I stood by the podium while the room buzzed, confused.
"Who let her on stage?" someone whispered.
"She's the one who signed the contract," another voice said. The rumor spread like a scent.
I looked at Chase and spoke, loud enough for all those who loved gossip to hear.
"Good evening," I said. "I am Livia Dunn. I was once married to Chase Emerson."
Gasps fluttered like startled birds.
"I am here to say three things," I told them. "First: he ordered my abortion. Second: he monitored me for three years. Third: he tried to erase my child from existence as if a human life were a clause in a contract."
A silence so thick it could be cut stretched across the room.
"That's impossible," Kiera hissed from the first row, face like a wax doll melting.
"No, it's not," I said. "And I can prove it."
I called up the screen behind the stage. The first image was a lawyer's envelope stamped with Chase's signature. The next was a message thread on an assistant's phone ordering the surgery. The third was a surveillance log showing a private car arriving at my building, a man in sunglasses watching me. Behind me, the large projector thumped to life with receipts, timestamps, and a hospital consent form dated on a date he was out of the country.
"I was monitored," I said. "I was betrayed by a husband who called himself a provider. I have not been silent because silence is what they expected from me."
There was a stir. Phones came up—the very thing that had once taken videos of private things; now those cameras were aimed at Chase and not at me.
"That is slander," Daniel Popov—Chase’s elder brother—shouted, face flushed.
"Show evidence," Chase said, his voice distancing itself as if he could walk away from anything that didn't already belong to him.
I had more. I had taken months to gather documents, to subpoena messages, to save every stray email like a shipwrecked survivor. I had spent nights piecing them together.
"Amir Ferrell, the lawyer who delivered my divorce papers?" I asked.
Amir—who had been planted as a small, efficient man in the tapestry of Chase's life—stood like a puppet whose strings had been snapped.
"Say something," Chase whispered.
Amir's mouth opened, closed, opened like a fish on land. "I... I acted on instruction," he said finally. "From Mr. Emerson."
"People who facilitate cruelty are still complicit," I said. "And those who sign it are culpable."
"That's libel," Daniel screamed, bounding to the stage.
"Evidence," I repeated. "You will see it now."
I played a clip. The projector showed messages from Chase's company secretary ordering a hospital to act, signed forms, call logs, an entry where a private vehicle idled outside the clinic with a woman's photograph in its dashboard. There was a timestamped text: "Procedure scheduled. Patient unconscious. Consent by proxy." The room watched their prince framed as an architect of erasure.
Chase's jaw worked. He was losing his composure in a way that cost him currency.
"You can't say that here," he said. "You can't defame me in public with forged documents."
"Forged documents?" I asked, and smiled as if the word were a comet. "Then let me present the original—hand-signed notes taken by the hospital staff at the time, cross-checked with the assistant's text. There is no forgery here."
The murmurs rose like wind. Someone in the crowd gasped, someone else whispered, "I always knew there was something off." A camera lady started filming live. The footage flickered onto phones already streaming the event.
"Mr. Emerson," I said, voice rising small and steel-like. "You are a man who uses other people's bodies as chess pieces. You claimed our marriage was business; you judged my body as collateral. Tonight you will answer in front of the clients you courted and the people you thought would mute you."
He had a response—pride and fury and something like fear—but the next moment, something I had arranged like a brick in place took effect.
"Director," I said, and the large screen changed. The footage was of him—the very man who struck deals with silver tongues—speaking to an associate on a private call. "You see, Mr. Emerson had other things he'd rather hide."
The call was clean: "We will handle her. Make sure the consent is signed. Use the company to pay. No trace."
Chase's face drained like paint under rain. He looked like a man remembering a crime.
"No," he said. "You can't—"
"Watch," I said.
The clip cut to Daniel Popov meeting with an unnamed fixer—an arrangement broker—which tied both brothers into a web of manipulation. The room smelled of betrayal.
Then I let the room watch the second part of the plan unfold.
I had hired a forensic team on retainer. We went to the hospital, we subpoenaed internal logs and audio. We found that the nurse had recorded a call where consent was discussed and recorded. The nurse had been asked to "mobilize anonymity"—to "put it under company letterhead." We had the nurse's testimony, the assistant's messages, Chase's signature.
"It’s a replay," Daniel shouted. "These are doctored. You can't—"
"They were verified," I said calmly. "Two independent teams. The hospital's own handwriting matched the signature. Financial records show transfers to cover the cost."
A woman in the audience—an independent journalist—stood up and said, "I will publish. I will print names."
"Oh my God," someone whispered. "He's finished."
Chase's eyes slit. He tried to salvage his public image. "This is a private matter," he said. "You seek to ruin my family."
"You ruined my child," I said. "You tried to erase her. Do you not see the difference?"
His brother Daniel lunged, accusing me of entrapment. The board members looked at Chase as if he had a fever and they'd never noticed before.
"Are you calling the police?" Chase demanded of Amir, who was sweating like a man convinced of sudden cold.
Amir's face crumpled. "Mr. Emerson... I signed... I was told to deliver papers. I did not know—"
"You're protecting yourself," Daniel said.
"No," Amir answered quietly. "I followed instructions. I was ashamed afterward."
"You're a lawyer," someone hissed. "You should know better."
The event became a trial. Phones broadcast the scene; whispers became shouts. Chase's old supporters found their faces on the other side of a scandal, interviews crammed with questions. A client stood up—an investor who had arrived with cameras and a future lined in a checkbook—and said, "If this is true, I withdraw my endorsement. We cannot associate with men who would sign away human lives."
You could feel a color leave the faces of those who had smiled on Chase all these years. People who had shaken his hand began to turn away, like moths from a flame that had suddenly burned cold.
Chase tried rhetoric. He called lawyers. He called his father Abel Khalil. He called members of his board. He called for mute rooms and careful statements. But the video, the documents, the nurse's voice—those were not things one could soft-redirect.
Kiera's face crumpled into a thousand pretty shards of despair. Daniel sputtered and was embarrassed in front of the same people who once courted him. Amir's career was in tatters—one misstep, and we all saw him as a lawyer who had delivered things he should never have.
"How dare you," Chase said finally, his voice small now, "how dare you infect this room with such lies."
"It is not my lies," I said. "It is your record."
His rich allies retreated. Even when he tried to look like he was fending off slander, the court of public opinion had already moved.
"A public ritual," a board member muttered to his friend. "He bought us with smiles."
The rest of the night is a blur of flashbulbs and calls. The next morning, headlines screamed. The company's stocks slipped. Investors demanded an emergency meeting. Kiera withdrew into the privacy of a world she'd once considered impervious.
And then, the public reckoning grew teeth.
At the shareholder meeting two weeks later, the room was packed. Clients, rival executives, journalists, and shareholders all squeezed into the hall. I stood at the back and watched as Daniel Popov took the stage to defend the family honor. He started with outraged claims, but the documents we had were thorough and ironclad—financial transactions, witness testimonies, hospital logs. He floundered.
Chase was called to speak. He walked to the podium like a man approaching a gallows. Cameras focused on him. His practiced smile failed and slid off his jaw.
"Yes," he said, voice too tight. "Yes, I... signed for a medical procedure."
"You admitted it," I said in a public whisper into my microphone; the crowd was a sea of faces. "You admitted you used your name and money to make someone disappear."
"That is not the whole story," Chase tried. He reached for control and lost it.
Then we dropped the second bomb: at the meeting I revealed the surveillance logs proving he'd tracked my movements for months. I played the footage of his aides discussing surveillance as if it were a financial asset—"Keep tabs on her," a voice said. "We need to know where she goes."
The crowd gasped. Phones showed comments like "entitled monster" and "disgusting." Board members who once nodded at Chase stopped nodding.
"Mr. Emerson," the chairman boomed, "this is a legal and moral catastrophe. You have compromised the company. You used company funds and contacts for personal, criminal acts."
It was not only a corporate death. The room's rumble was the sound of a man losing his future. People who had praised him now avoided his gaze.
One by one, the men who had once sheltered him stepped away. Daniel's excuse became a line in a news brief. Kiera announced an immediate postponement of the wedding and released a statement of "deep disappointment," as if that could cover the moral hole.
The punishment I had demanded was public and exacting. It was not physical—revenge is not always about fists—but it was more devastating because it was exposure, the kind that strips negotiation away. It forced him to stand in a place where everyone he thought he could command watched him falter.
He broke down in ways I had never seen. The man who had signed agreements with such crisp indifference now had to answer to people he could not buy.
"Demeanor changed from arrogance to pleading," a reporter wrote later. "His public face cracked in front of his peers."
Chase's reaction moved through stages: smugness, denial, attempts to shift blame, rage, and finally, collapse. He kept pleading with his father Abel and his brother Daniel, but the board demanded concrete remediations. Shareholders wanted legal action against him. Kiera's family demanded she withdraw. The city chewed on the narrative like a dog with a bone.
Around him, the people I had once envied—the polished clients, the socialites—leaned away. Cameras fell upon him like winter snow. He tried to regain dignity through formal statements; the words mumbled like excuses.
Nearby, Daniel's own fall was different. He was not prosecuted for medical abuse but for the manipulation of contracts and misdirection. He had tried to save his own skin for too long. The crowd's verdict was swift and public ridicule heavy. He was humiliated before the very men he had once charmed.
"You're all monsters," Chase said the night the press conference ended, his voice thin. "You cannot understand what I had to do to survive."
"Survive?" I asked. "You survived by erasing a life?"
He had nothing left to say.
The moment that was most satisfying was not violence; it was their faces in the mirror of the public. The scorn of the crowd, the cameras, the whispered condemnations—those things unmade them in view. They were reduced to the measure of their own actions. It was justice, loud and electric.
After that storm, life tilted.
I stood in the quiet aftermath, bruised but walking. The city had seen my pain; the world had seen his cruelty. I had forced a reckoning without stooping to his level. I had reclaimed what had been taken by naming it and calling witnesses.
I never wanted revenge to be gory. I wanted it to be proportionate: truth in the light. To be seen, finally.
Months later, at a small café far from the glass towers, Finn Patterson—my old bodyguard and the man who had once risked his job for me—sat opposite me.
"You did it," Finn said.
"I told the truth," I corrected him. "And the truth did its work."
Bianca called often now—more gentle, less command. Fitzgerald, our father, had been forced to balance his own ledger and found that power has a price if you miscalculate.
"What will you do next?" Finn asked.
I looked out at the street where people moved with lives of their own, where no contract could touch the human, messy parts of living.
"I'm going to make something that's mine," I said. "Not a contract. A life."
That was the real bargain.
The End
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