Face-Slapping15 min read
The Eyes I Loved: A Dangerous Game of Promises and Exposure
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"I love Karter," I said in the empty room, watching my hand hold the wine glass like it was a mirror.
"You always say that," Karter Rahman answered without looking up from his drink.
"Because I do," I said. "Because he has the same eyes."
Karter's laugh was small. "Same eyes as who?"
"You know."
He put his wine down and touched the faint marks on his neck. "Someone got carried away."
"You were the one who wanted variety," I told him, smiling and pouring my wine over his face. "Try a new flavor."
He blinked as the dark red ran down his jaw. "Chana—"
"Good night, husband." I stood, leaving the glass to drip on his shirt.
"You really mean that?" he asked, following me to the door. "Why did you marry me?"
"Because I love you," I said, and it tasted like cold steel when I said it.
"You love his eyes," he said, low.
"I love his eyes," I repeated. "They were the only light I had."
Outside the soft lights of the penthouse, the city breathed. I had rehearsed the answer for three years. When men like Karter broke rules, I cleaned up the moves. When he left marks on his neck, it did something to my chest I couldn't name. It made me willing to let the world burn for a breath of the only light that had ever kept me alive.
---
"Chana, you are sure about the timing?" Curtis Kuenz asked quietly across the table at the private restaurant.
"Absolutely," I said, cutting my steak slowly. "I want you on standby. Twenty-four hours."
Curtis smiled the calm smile of someone who could hold a dying man's hand and not tremble. "I don't do funerals at dawn."
"You won't need to," I said. "Just be ready for everything."
He watched the way I moved my knife and fork and then glanced at the chip in my ring. "You still wear that."
"It matches the story," I said. "And stories are what keep us warm."
"That story will cost you," Curtis warned.
"I can afford it," I said. "My brother agreed."
"Your brother?" Curtis leaned forward. "Arjun Bowers?"
"Yes," I said, letting the name sit heavy on the table. "He knows how this plays out."
"Chana, you're playing very dangerous."
"I'm always playing dangerous," I replied. "You said you'd be ready?"
"I will be ready," he said.
He didn't know the full score. He never would. He was good at patching wounds. He wasn't meant to understand why I wanted wounds opened.
---
"I asked him why I married him," I told my father later at the hospital, sitting on the edge of his bed while the machines blinked like tired stars.
"Why?" he rasped.
"Because I loved him," I said, fingers on the cold ring. "Because the one I loved had those eyes."
His breath hitched. "You shouldn't think like that."
"Six years ago you asked me to pick," I said. "You put a gun to my brother's head and told me: choose. If I didn't shoot, you would shoot him. If I did, you would kill someone else. You taught me what a choice could be."
"Chana—"
"Do you remember that night?" I asked. "Do you remember the smell of gun oil? Do you remember telling me my only value was that I would be useful?"
He said nothing. I slid off my seat and took his hand. "Then let's finish the play."
When they wheeled in the nurse, I didn't look away. "End it," I said. "Turn it off."
My brother Arjun stood by my shoulder like a shadow that had learned to smile.
"You want to do this yourself?" he asked softly.
"Yes. Some debts need a hand."
They gave my father a quiet goodbye. Outside, in the hall, a small camera on the news desk hissed like an insect. I thought, briefly, that the world would call me monstrous. I thought, for a second, that it would not matter. I pressed my palm and felt the machine still beat. That was the sound of what remained.
---
"You make it sound like a routine," Curtis said later, smoothing a bandage around my finger where a slip had cut me. "You invited him to dinner and then you poured wine on his face."
"It was part of the play," I said. "Karter needed to be humiliated before he could be disarmed."
"Humiliated how?" he asked.
"By someone he thought he controlled," I said. "By me."
I loved Karter because of those eyes. Crosby only had them in the memory I carried. I had fired one bullet and thought the light had gone out. When I realized Crosby still breathed somewhere, I swallowed the world and kept living.
---
The gala glittered like a trap. I came arm-in-arm with Karter Rahman because the cameras liked a picture of the perfect couple. My brother Arjun stood across the room, smiling a smile like a carefully folded blade. Other men smiled like they were on the edge of the city, waiting to be invited.
"You see that woman," Arjun whispered when he leaned close. "She's pretending to be yours."
A small stubble of a man passed and tipped his hat.
"She is playing her role," Karter said, steadying his fingers on my waist. "Don't forget your part."
"That woman is mine," I said into his ear. "My cat came to the party."
He flinched like someone learning new heat.
Then the guest moved: Crosby Winter stepped forward. His face walked into the room and my heart did a thing it hadn't done in years—stopped and remembered.
"Crosby," I said.
We spoke like two people who had rehearsed grief. He called me Chana, not "Mrs. Rahman." His hand was hungry and gentle and when I touched his scarred forearm, the world corrected itself.
"You know," Crosby said in the corner where the music dimmed, "you look like someone I used to pray for."
"Who?"
"You," he said. "You, in another life."
"You are alive," I whispered. "I thought—"
"Look at me." He moved close enough to breathe. "I'm still here."
My husband tried to keep up the picture. "Good evening," he said. "Isn't the champagne lovely?"
"He taught me how to make fire," I told Crosby. "How to survive the cold."
Karter's hand tightened, then went slack. He was a man who had learned to be angry at things he could not hold. He had the luxury of rage.
We left the room together, hands clasped like conspirators.
---
"You have a strange way of saving someone," Crosby said when we finally stood in the quiet corridor. "By almost killing him."
"I loved the idea of you being dead," I said. "It was cleaner."
"Clean isn't a word for this." He looked at me like a man who keeps a map in his head. "You are tired, Chana."
"I am exhausted," I admitted. "But the play is not over."
He removed a cigarette from his pocket and lit it with the slow care of someone blessing himself. "Tell me something true."
"I shot for you," I said.
He took another drag and then dropped the cigarette in the ashtray, taking my hand. "Then don't be the one to carry that bullet forever."
---
"He comes around when it rains," I told Karter once, when we were alone and his face was like a thing I could no longer read. "He was always a constant in my mind."
"I know," Karter replied. "You married me for a reason."
"Yes," I said. "Because I could make him safe."
He pressed his lips to my neck, the marks still fresh, and said, "Why do you keep playing this?"
"Because he saved me," I said.
Karter laughed, short. "Saved you? From what?"
"From wanting to die," I said. "From having nothing."
He smelled like smoke and leather that night. "If you want him, take him."
I let him say those words so I could fold them up and use them later.
---
Three nights later, Karter's grip on me became violent. He dragged me into the room that he'd kept closed for years—a room of props and shadows. His mouth moved and called names like weapons. He wanted me to be a dutiful thing. I answered with a laugh and a cold tongue.
"You said his eyes," he hissed. "You said you married me for his eyes."
"I married you for his eyes," I said. "Because eyes are honest."
His hand found my throat and squeezed until I couldn't breathe. I felt a foolish amusedness twig into me like a small fire. He wanted me to plead. He wanted me to beg.
"Beg," he said. "Beg for mercy."
I lifted my chin. "You won't get blood on your hands," I said.
He swung.
When my brother Arjun burst in like a bull and took Karter down with two fists, the apartment shook. Arjun's face was a bruise. "You did this!" he shouted. "You think you can hurt her?"
Karter crumpled like a man who had learned too late how fragile his image had become.
"Get out," Arjun told him, voice like a house that could split.
Karter left in a mess of coat and grime, and that night I smiled like a conspirator. "You were on time," I told Arjun later when he was trying to get his breath back.
"Of course," he said. "I'm always on time."
---
I had a file in my bag that Karter didn't know about: footage I had collected over the years—photos, messages, the little evidence of his games. I put it down on the coffee table where he would trip over it when he came home.
"I want you to sign this," I told him, sliding the divorce papers and a flash drive in front of him.
He stared like someone had told him the moon would fall.
"You know what that disk contains," I said. "The girl in your bed, the gifts you tried to hide, the threats you made."
"Turn it over," he said. "You can't blackmail me."
"I can," I said. "For the right price."
He snorted and reached for his gun in a drawer. "Open the drawer."
"Do it," I said. "Do what you always say you'll do."
He did. The gun felt cold and honest in his hand. It had always been easier for others to pull triggers.
"You are bluffing," he said.
"I am not," I replied, pressing my forehead to the barrel for a breath.
He shook. His hand vibrated. He couldn't make himself make someone else dead. He was a boy trained in comfort. He put the gun down like it had scalded him.
He signed.
Later, when he left the house, he left a trail: whispered calls, a few desperate messages. I saved them. The disk became a small river that would flood him.
---
Then the prosecutor came.
"Tobias Barbier," he said, sliding into the room like a man who smelled law.
"Tobias," I said. "Perfect timing."
He had files of his own. "You are suspected of tax fraud, money laundering," he said to me, eyes steady. "But you can help us. You can tell us what you know about Arjun Bowers and Karter Rahman."
"I helped you," I said. "I gave your men proof."
He smiled a small, hard smile. "You will testify at the shareholders' meeting. There will be cameras."
"Public?" I asked.
"Very public," he replied.
I knew then what I wanted.
---
The shareholders' meeting was held in the glass hall, a place where the city could watch itself in the faces of men and women who sold their names. The hall smelled like polished wood and fear. Cameras sat like black beetles on the rim of the stage. Board members were lined up like soldiers.
I stepped up.
Arjun Bowers sat on the stage, polished and smiling. He wore the suit of a man who had convinced himself he was untouchable. The Hall hummed with whispers.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Tobias began, his voice measured. "We have evidence of corporate malpractice. We have embezzlement. We have collusion."
Arjun's smile didn't waver.
"Chana Nunes," Tobias said. "Please, tell them what you know."
I looked at the audience until the cameras found me. The light was hot.
"You all know him," I said, pointing at Arjun. "You know him as the man who took your trust. He is my brother."
A ripple ran through the crowd. Arjun's jaw tightened. Karter sat to one side, pale as a wound.
"I will tell everything," I said. "And then I want him to sign some papers."
Arjun rose, smooth as a practiced actor. "What are you doing, little sister?"
"Exposing you," I said. "Publicly."
"You are defaming me," he said, voice raised like a storm trying to look grand.
"I have records," I said, and the screens around the hall flashed—emails, transfers, recorded meetings where his voice agreed to deals. The investors leaned forward like wolves. Phones lifted. Cameras adjusted. The murmurs became a rising tide.
"You think this will stop you?" Arjun shouted. "You think you can destroy me with pretty words?"
"I have more than words," I said. "I have ledgers, signed acknowledgements, the names of those who took money and the purpose of it."
A hand went up from the crowd. "Is this for real?"
"Yes," I answered.
Then I felt the building weight of attention. "Arjun," I said. "Do you want to explain the transfers to the offshore accounts?"
He turned pale. "You won't get away with this," he hissed.
"I already have," I said, and released a folder to Tobias. Tobias read it, then looked up. "This is enough to bring immediate civil action and criminal investigation."
The murmurs turned to shouts. Investors called for his removal. Phones recorded him saying things he'd never wanted heard. He started to sweat.
"You asked me to deal with men," I said, looking him in the eyes. "You told me to use what I had. I did. For what it's worth, brother, I used the one thing you cannot steal: truth."
People leaned in. "This is scandalous," one investor cried. "This is treachery."
Arjun's face went through stages. First defiance: "They're manipulated!" he cried. Then anger: "You will regret this!" His mouth twisted. Then a slow, dawning fear.
Someone rose from the back. "Sign it," the voice shouted. "Sign the confession!"
Arjun laughed once, a brittle thing. "I will not," he said.
"People are recording," I said. "Your lawyers will be hearing from every one in this room."
He tried to stride to the podium to retort, but the room was already calling for the board to vote to suspend him. Phones were out; hands waved. The director called for a recess. Reporters crowded the aisles, breathless. The hall was full of people hearing how a man had been living off the shadow of investors and feeding schemes.
Arjun's face collapsed like paper in rain. "You think this—this is justice?" he said, voice breaking.
"It depends on what you call justice," I replied. "To me, this is proof. To them, it's risk. To you, it is the end."
A journalist pushed a microphone forward. "Mr. Bowers, how do you respond?" she asked.
He opened his mouth and tried a hundred defenses, but every word had already been recorded: his voice admitting deals with shell companies, promises to launder funds. The room watched him flounder. He swung through fury, then denial, then bargaining.
"These are lies," he spat. "My sister is a liar. She is trying to ruin me."
"Why would I?" I asked. "Because I was always second? Because you sold our family's name? Because you would let me be sacrificed?"
His throat bobbed. "You can't—"
"You can't stop the tape," I said.
The board members began to murmur about emergency measures. Calls were already being made. "We need someone who is clean," one of them said. "We need to stabilize this."
Arjun looked around like a drowning man who suddenly understands the depth. People stared and recorded and wrote and Tweeted. People who had smiled at him yesterday began to look as if they'd been tricked.
He tried to salvage his dignity, standing taller, voice loud, but the light on the screens showed fingers, numbers, dates. The words he had spoken in private had betrayed him.
He stepped down from the stage as the vote to suspend him passed with a near-unanimous clap. The room turned into a cage: people whispered and pointed. Cameras followed him like vultures.
Outside, a small mob had gathered. They'd seen the footage leak. Some wanted blood. Others wanted answers.
He walked out with security on each arm, but not before some stockbroker pushed a phone in his face. "How does it feel to be exposed?" the phone asked.
He looked at the screen and then away at last. He was breathing hard. "You don't understand," he said. "You don't know what you've done."
"I do," I said quietly, standing on the stage where I'd made my case. "I know precisely."
When he reached the last step, the crowd had thickened. A woman I didn't know screamed, "Shame!"
Some people clapped.
Arjun's composure unraveled in front of everyone. His hands twisted. He shouted that I had betrayed our family.
Then, unexpectedly, he reached for his pocket. The security tightened. He took out a folded paper and began to speak in a voice that sounded like a man holding on to a rope.
"This is my confession," he said, voice raw. "I lied. I stole. I lied to keep the company afloat. But I did not—"
"Go on," someone shouted.
"I signed deals you don't understand. I did it to protect us," he said. "I—"
Cameras were on him. He put a hand over his face and then removed it and pulled free a small capsule from his pocket. For a second, he held it up like a child discovering a secret.
People cried out. Security lunged.
"No," I said, stepping forward, though my legs were heavy. "Don't do it in front of them."
He looked at me with an animal part left: pure panic. "You made me do this," he hissed. "You ruined me."
"Arjun—" Tobias said softly.
He swallowed whatever could be swallowed and then, in a precise cruel motion, he swallowed the capsule.
For a suspended breath, silence reigned. Then chaos.
"Call an ambulance!" someone screamed.
Security rushed him. People intruded and shrieked. His hands clawed at his throat. He staggered and fell to his knees in the marble entrance and began to gag. The cameras did not blink. The crowd was a living wall of phones capturing his fall.
Tobias turned to me, his face pale. "This is what you wanted?" he asked. His voice was a mix of horror and accusation.
"I wanted him exposed," I said. "I didn't want him to choose the spectacle for himself."
Outside, a few people shouted, "Let him die!" Others wailed. Arjun's face went red, then white, then grey. His eyes, once certain, widened with a new terror. His expression moved like a film backward—pride, anger, then bargaining and disbelief.
He tried to blame me again, mouthed the words, but the poison did its work. He convulsed. Men tried to administer aid, but the dose was clear and swift.
I stood there in front of the world and felt nothing and everything at once. Cameras recorded my face. Reporters screamed questions. Investors whispered the word "collapse" and "fraud" and "betrayal."
When they took him on a stretcher, the murmurs hardened into a new language: "He killed himself."
Outside, someone recorded and laughed like a child with a cruel toy. "Serves him right," they said.
"You see him now," a woman near me said, wiping tears. "He was like a wolf."
"And now?" I asked.
"And now he is a lesson," she said. "A lesson that even wolves can be hunted."
Arjun's public end would be shown on every screen by nightfall. His terror had been public. The people around him showed every emotion: shock, disgust, quick confessions of loyalty turned into denials.
"They told us he was clean," muttered a director. "We were wrong."
I put my hands in my coat pockets and felt the cool steel of what I had left. Not a gun; a file. I let the cameras find me. Let people judge. Let them see.
---
After the meeting, Karter's fall was small compared to my brother's implosion. The disk and footage had made his world crack. Board members sued. Magazines printed the photographs. His social accounts were deleted by angry PR teams trying to save something of him.
One evening he stood on the balcony of the high-rise where he'd built his ego.
"You ruined me," he told me, voice thin as wire.
"You destroyed me once by teaching me how to be cruel," I said. "I returned the favor."
He tried to make me feel guilty. "I loved you." He stabbed the room with the claim.
"You loved your image," I said. "Not me."
He pressed a hand to his temple, staggering. "I have nothing now."
"You have your conscience," I said. "Use it."
He laughed, then sobbed. He walked back into the penthouse and pulled a scarf over his head. He put a gun to his temple in the middle of the night. He did it in private. Later, people would say he tried to leave with dignity. I would say that a man who used women as props never died with dignity. The truth is he failed at even that.
---
After the public punishment, the world rearranged itself. The company had a new board, investors chewed on their losses, and my name was in stories with words that slid like knives. "Manipulator," some called me. "Survivor," wrote another.
I stood by Crosby on the balcony of his small apartment, looking at the city like a wound.
"You could have walked away," he said. "You didn't have to burn it all."
"I couldn't," I said. "He asked me to choose. He told me I had to be useful. I chose."
"You used people badly."
"I used people like they used me," I replied.
His thumb found mine and squeezed. "Then let me undo what I can."
"You can't undo everything," I said. "But you can be with me while I try."
He kissed my forehead, gentle and sure. "I love you," he said.
"It isn't the same," I told him. "But we'll learn."
---
There were trials. There were cameras. There were nights when I screamed alone into pillows that smelled of other people's cologne. There were promises I broke and compacts I made. There were people I couldn't save.
Once, at a press conference the city crowding the square, a woman who had once loved Arjun came up to me with a trembling voice.
"You took my life," she said. "You took his face from me."
"Then take this," I said, and I handed her the papers showing the companies Arjun had been using to hide money. "He took your life too. You deserve to know."
She looked at the documents and then at me, and in that moment I realized the truth: punishment is never clean, even when deserved.
---
A year after that night of glass and cameras, Chauncey Woods came to the seaside where I had once gone to smoke away nights when I thought I had no tomorrow.
"You look like someone who forgave herself," he said.
"I look like someone with a ledger," I said.
He laughed. "You are impossible."
"I wanted you to know I owe you," I said. "You were the first to pull me away from the edge."
We lay on the sand and watched the sky turn the color of old coins.
"I did what I had to," he said. "I always would."
"I know," I said. "And yet, I had to do what I did."
He reached for my hand. "Do we get to choose a different life now?"
"Maybe," I said. "But choices have costs."
He looked at me like a man who had spent his life learning how to offer peace. "Then let's start with a clean table. No secrets."
"I can't promise a clean table," I said. "But I can promise truth."
He nodded. "Then tell me everything."
So I did. I told him about the bullet that missed him, the nights I prayed, the decisions I had to make. He listened like a man mending paper—gentle, patient.
At the end, when the sky was nearly dark, he said, "You didn't kill me. You tried to survive. I know who you are."
"Who is that?" I asked.
"A survivor who will learn to be kind to herself," he said.
I laughed then, a thin sound that tasted like wine and iron. "I hope you're right."
---
There are nights I still dream of faces and rooms and a father who put a gun to a brother. There are nights I wake and find Crosby's hand in the dark and feel less alone. There are mornings when I'll pass a billboard about the trial and remember the cold marble of the hall where Arjun chose his exit publicly.
My life is a ledger of choices. I wrote down each one in ink and burned whatever I couldn't bear to look at.
"You did what you thought you had to do," Crosby told me once.
"Did I kill hearts to save mine?" I asked him.
"You kept someone alive," he said. "Which, in your world, is enough."
And sometimes, in quiet hours when the city is soft and the wine glass gleams like a little red sun, I look at Karter's old photo I keep in a drawer and say, "You were only ever a phase. Thank you for teaching me how to act."
The eyes that saved me—those eyes belonged to Crosby, to someone who should have been dead and wasn't. The rest was a dangerous play I had to win.
The End
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