Face-Slapping11 min read
The Black-Glass Wedding
ButterPicks15 views
I didn't expect weddings to mean anything to me.
"I do," Cedar Eaton said, sliding the ring toward my finger.
"Wait—" The hall held its breath. My breath stuck halfway.
The chapel doors burst open.
"Dad!" a small voice cried.
Cedar's hand froze. The ring stopped half on my knuckle. I saw him, the perfect groom, turn like someone had pulled a string.
A woman stood in the doorway, immaculate, mascara dark as guilt. She held a small boy by the hand. His hair stuck up like he had been hustled out of a playground and into a ballroom.
The woman blinked, and a single tear escaped down her cheek.
"Cedar—" she said, raw with something like hope.
He dropped my wrist and ran.
"Wait!" I shouted, but his shoes thudded already down the aisle. The ring slipped, hit the red carpet, spun, and landed at the feet of the emcee.
People gasped. A dozen cameras found us all at once.
"They're—" someone whispered.
"Is that—"
Laughter, pity, the scent of gossip. I felt nothing like shame. I felt the thin, bright thing I always felt when someone tried to make me small and failed—already too big for them to crush.
"Cleo—" Cedar called from the doors, then changed it to a name heavy with ownership, "Chloe, wait!"
He didn't come back for me. He followed the woman and the child into a flurry of flashbulbs.
My first wedding, my first public life, collapsed in front of every pair of watchful eyes.
"You okay?" Cedar's father, William Conley, asked downstairs in the family drawing room, face a granite sheet.
"Fine," I said. My voice didn't tremble.
"Security!" William ordered, voice like a gavel. "Bring him back."
"He's gone," I said, as if anything would surprise him. "He left."
"How could he do that?" Giavanna Peters, his wife, said, white-knuckled. "In front of guests?"
"He has a son!" a cousin whispered.
He has a son, they said. The rumor rode across guests like it had been scripted. The internet swallowed thirty seconds of my life and spat it out as a thousand comments.
The night wore on like a wound.
Later, when the house cleared, when my wedding dress was a ragged moon on the floor, Dax Weber found me backstage.
"You look stunned," he said with a smirk. "Want to see a video?"
I should have walked away. I should have thrown him out. But I didn't. I let him open his phone, let the screen light my face.
There I was supposed to be toasting with Cedar; on the screen Cedar was at a mall in City C, holding a laughing little boy in one arm and the woman in the other. Their faces were a secret the world had just been given.
Dax's grin was the best thing he'd learned in ten years—misery served as sport.
"Do you regret it?" he asked, relish in his tone.
I shut the phone, like a trapdoor.
"No," I said. "Do you?"
He leaned close, voice silk with poison. "You should. You should regret not having me."
"Get away from me," I said.
"I could make it easier for you," he offered. "I won't marry you, but I could be a—comfort."
I thought of my father, of hospitals and the way the city had rifled my life like a pocket. I thought of why I had agreed to this marriage in the first place. I said, cold as winter, "I'm not interested."
He hated that. He hated not getting to win.
"Do you know why you were chosen?" he asked. "Do you know what happens when you pretend to be someone else?"
"I know," I said. "I know what I have."
My voice sounded like something carved from iron. I had three names in my life: Chloe Cooper, the little girl picked up from beside a trash bin; Laura Malik, the name I took to better fit the world outside my father's reach; and now Justine Barnes, the woman polished and practiced in silk. Three names like three skins I wore to survive.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Dax asked, suddenly small. "Why didn't you tell me you were playing at something so huge?"
"Because I don't tell anyone," I said. "Not anymore."
I'd been rescued once by a rough pair of hands that never let me know how to ask for anything but bread. His name didn't matter. What mattered was this promise his rough voice tapped into my bones: get taller. Make the world look up.
My father—my real father—had died when I was nine. He had jumped into a dark river, trying to save someone who had tricked him. The man who had called for help that night had laughed while my father gurgled under the water. I had watched the light go out like someone turned off a small lamp.
"Your father—" Dax said.
"Don't." I shut the room on that subject and walked away.
Years of study, nights of obsession, a careful climb into a university that smelled of bleach and ambition, and then, crawling closer to where the Conleys kept their power. William's company had made a drug that killed thirty people, but nothing had stuck. The law is a shape that bends at money and influence. I decided to be a power that could shape it differently.
Jasmine Hoffmann found me in Australia.
"You're blonder," she said when she first hugged me—a strange welcome from someone I would call my confederate.
"You wanted a daughter," I said.
"I did," she whispered. "And now I have you."
She, with her soft hands and slow mouth, claimed me. She touched my wrist and mentioned a pendant—"a thing he once gave me"—and I knew how to play it. From there, the plan split like a stake in water: get inside, learn, wait.
I came back as Laura Malik—her daughter—and was hired as Cedar Eaton's personal secretary. Cedar was elegant in the way dangerous things can be—slim smile, slipper-slash charm.
"You'll keep my calendar," he said at my first interview. "And you'll make sure I look perfect."
"I already know you'll look perfect," I replied.
He didn't love me. He loved himself, like most men like themselves. He loved the chase more than the catch.
I had help. Giavanna Volkov—formerly Zhang Dai—was one of the quietest storms I'd ever known. She'd been the girl who had gone away, who had reinvented herself as vengeance with lipstick. She had a small face that learned to smile cruelty into someone else's mouth. She carried a child—Leo Benton—who would become the wedge I used against Cedar.
"Do you trust me?" Giavanna asked once, quietly, as we sat in a tiny café planning our moves.
"I trust only the plan," I said.
"That's all we need," she smiled.
We fed evidence to the right places, small files, anonymous calls, pictures of the Conley ledgers when their accountants were too proud of their mistakes.
Meanwhile, Dax—he had secrets. He had been watching me, and then something shifted. He told me things: he had a brother who lived in finance, Finley Alvarado, who could move shares like chess pieces. Finley had a favor ledger to be cleared.
"Why help?" Finley asked me in his office full of framed certificates.
"Because you hate being used," I said. "Because he gave you reasons to be bitter."
He smiled. Men like favors like proofs. They liked the sound of leverage under their tongue.
The downfall had to be theatrical. I had watched them walk like gods for far too long. William Conley had the galaxy of reputation around him; his son Cedar had the reckless thread that loves to burn. The drug scandal had been buried. The murder of parents and silenced witnesses had been smoothed into the floorboards. I wanted to rip the boards out.
"Today," I told Giavanna and Finley and Dax the week of the shareholder meeting, "we show them the missing pages."
We did.
On the day of the annual shareholders' meeting, I walked into the conference room like a bride in a war. Finley had secured enough shares to force the agenda. Reporters sidled in, their phones set like pebbles ready to skip. We sat on the dais: me as the face, Giavanna with her calm patience, Finley with ledger stacks. William Conley sat like a king with hair bleaching around the edges.
"Mrs. Conley," I said into the microphone. "Gentlemen of the board. Shareholders."
I unfolded a folder that smelled like the old offices—paper, cold with ink.
"These documents," I said, "are the missing records. They show profits moved, victims ignored, and a ledger of threats."
Cedar's mouth opened. He couldn't make a sound that looked precise.
"What is this?" William barked.
"An accounting," I said, and let the simplicity land like a guillotine. "An accounting for what you did and what you allowed."
The boardroom erupted.
"You're lying!" William shouted.
"I have copies," I said. "And I have witnesses."
"You're mad," Giavanna's voice was soft as water. "Because you were left. But mad people also remember details. They do the hard, messy remembering."
"How dare you?" William's face went red like raw meat.
And then, like dominoes tipped by a finger, people spoke. Nurses, interns, a bedridden widow who'd been promised compensation and had bent until her back echoed. The reporters leaned in. The slide projector clicked. Names spilled across the screen like a confession.
"You will be prosecuted," a shareholder said. "This is criminal."
Cedar's face dropped into an animal shape. He looked like a boy who had learned that someone else could hurt him back.
That was only the beginning.
The public punishment we arranged was not a single blow; it was a stadium of small humiliations that together made the Conleys feel the earth give way.
The courtroom the next month had rows packed with cameras. The press gallery swarmed like bees. I sat to the left, Giavanna on my right, Finley near the back. William Conley sat in the dock, pallid under the courtroom lights. Cedar sat beside him, thinner, the wine in his cheeks gone.
Giavanna stood.
"You remember me?" she asked, loud enough for the microphones.
"You don't," Cedar tried, voice cracking like thin ice.
"You told us your company cared," Giavanna said. "You told us you'd fix things. You told us our pain was an accident. My father's death wasn't an accident."
A hush. The judge adjusted his glasses.
"You—" William sputtered.
"Yes," Giavanna said. "Yes, I'm the girl you called a troublemaker. I'm the one who vanished for my own safety. I'm the woman you thought you could hush with money and a lie."
She produced photos. Old, faded, proof of threats and invoices. The prosecutor read through contracts that had been laundered through shell companies, read testimony from a nurse who had been paid to keep silence, read an engineer's log that had been destroyed but reconstructed by auditors.
Cedar shook his head. "That's not—"
"Isn't what?" Giavanna asked. "Not true? Not your handwriting on those emails? Not your voice on those voicemails? Not the men you sent to threaten families?"
The courtroom reacted like a theater audience that realized the playwright had betrayed them: murmurs, an intake of breath, the scratch of pens. The prosecutor laid down a final file like a gavel striking wood: a tape from six years ago, from a riverbank night. They had found a witness who'd seen the rough kid who called for help that night. They had located him.
"He laughed," the witness said from the witness stand into the fog of memory. "He laughed while the man flailed."
Cedar's jaw snapped. He had always had a boy's cruelty; now it was public. The gallery hissed and took out phones. The judge ordered the tape played. On it was the sound of a young man's chuckle, a call that had sent my father into black water.
"That's not—" Cedar began.
"No," I said, standing. "It is."
He turned to me. "You lied," he spat.
"I told the truth," I said. "You just didn't expect anyone who deserved it to speak."
The punishment scene stretched long and surgical. Reporters shouted over each other as new revelations surfaced. William's old board colleagues, men who had once clasped his back and toasted his brilliance, took the stand and unfastened their necks of loyalty. One by one, the people he had used turned and named him as the architect of silence. Shareholders demanded blood. Patients' families sobbed in the gallery while the ledgers laid their names like stones.
"You're a monster," a widow said, looking at William through a lens.
William tried to stand like a man of standing; his voice cracked. "You have no proof," he lied.
"Proof?" The prosecutor's tone was as cold as a scalpel. "We have paper. We have witnesses. We have email trails. We have invoices. We also have your son, who took the easy cruelty and made it his sport."
Cedar looked like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He lurched forward, attempted to explain, attempted to say he'd been a different person, attempted to apologize. The apology did not land; apologies don't retroactively stitch ruined bones.
"Do you have anything to say to the victims?" the judge asked.
Cedar's eyes darted. "I'm sorry," he mouthed; the word sounded like a mask with the strings cut.
When the verdict came weeks later, it was not the swift blade of old-time justice. It was worse for them: a slow, public dismantling. They were stripped of titles, their shares sold under pressure. The company board meetings became hearings where former allies gave statements and cameras recorded their shame. William Conley, once feted, had the charity plaques taken down and the portrait in the foyer covered with a black cloth until members could decide fate. Cedar was asked to vacate his office and was photographed leaving with a small suitcase and no dignity.
At the hearing where the final civil judgements were read, William stood and looked at me from across the room. His face was pale, skin slack with an old man's fear.
"Justine—" he said, using the name I'd let him think made sense in his life. "You—"
"I did what I had to do," I answered. "You took a life and buried it with lies."
He slumped as if someone had knocked his knees out. The press cheered like a beast. People gathered outside the courthouse and shot video of him, and the comments online were a river of contempt. Friends distanced themselves. Donors cut ties. Men with empty faces stopped shaking his hand in public, and the whispers followed him like a scent.
Cedar came to the courthouse one last time, trying to make a final plea to the press for sympathy. He walked onto the marble steps with a camera thrust in his face.
"Please," he begged. "I didn't—"
"Did you try?" shouted someone from the crowd.
They put him on the back pages of tabloids. They wrote thinkpieces about privilege and cruelty, about what men were allowed to do when nobody watched. They called him a name I actually laughed at when I read it: "a spoiled boy who learned to hurt."
He tried to apologize at the charity gala that followed the verdicts—bad timing, desperate posture—and he was laughed off stage. Volunteers whispered behind their hands. The woman at his side, who once had his laugh in her eyes, left in the night when photographers snapped her exit. He stood under chandelier light but was empty.
The public felt that satisfaction they wanted so badly: not only had the law hammered a nail, but the social varnish had been stripped. They watched the Conleys shrink in headlines and in the eyes of neighbors. Men who had dined with William now said they had simply mistaken the man; they had been fooled.
When the last of their assets were sold and the prison terms began for those convicted in criminal court, the narrative had become clean. I had demanded justice. Giavanna had told the world her story. Finley had watched his ledger click into place. Dax—who had watched me and almost failed me—stood by in the quiet, having become the man who didn't betray.
"Did it hurt?" someone asked me in the press scrum, voice edged with curiosity.
"Yes," I said. "But sometimes things that hurt finish you. Sometimes they save you."
After the trials, visitors came with flowers and weird bouquets like percussion instruments for victory. People who'd fallen through the cracks lit candles. I cried in a cheap motel room with Leo Benton's little hand in mine. He pulled at my sleeve and said, solemn:
"Did we make them go away?"
"We made them face what they did," I answered.
He hugged my leg like a promise.
We left the courtroom holding our dented victory. Giavanna and I walked under a bleak sky and smiled, not because we had won but because our fathers and mothers—our real fathers—had been remembered.
I opened my jewelry box and took out the pendant William had once given to Jasmine. It was not a symbol of his favor; it was a token he had left behind like a rotten seed.
"I could throw it away," Giavanna said.
"No," I said. "I'll keep it. Not for him. For the night I took a thing back."
I slid the pendant into the drawer and shut it.
That night, in a small apartment, with Leo asleep between us and Giavanna humming, Dax knocked on the door.
"I was wrong," he said simply. "You were right."
I opened the door and let him in.
"Welcome," I said.
The End
— Thank you for reading —