Face-Slapping17 min read
The Glass Garden and the Little Liars
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I remember the glass garden like a wound that never heals.
"It was six years ago," someone would say, but for me time collapsed into two brutal points: the night of the glass garden and the night before that garden. I was the youngest leader they ever trained in AS, the shadowed organization that taught me how to make a body move like a weapon. I was Alayna Chang, and I had rehearsed my silence and my smiles until they were indistinguishable.
"Why did you have to chase me?" I asked once in the dark before everything burned and broke.
Greyson Mitchell looked like a man carved from marble by someone who had never learned pity. He leaned back in the high-backed chair, thin sweat at his temple, and he smiled that old, distant smile at me.
"You should come closer," he said. "Tell me your last words."
"You poisoned him," I said. "You killed Mateo."
Greyson's breath was thin. "Alayna, don't speak like that."
"Do you know who I was," I said, "when you left me on that auction stage?"
"Yes," he whispered, "and I—"
He silenced himself with the faintest of breaths. Pain painted his mouth a pale red. I touched his hand out of habit, because the scar that ran across the back of his hand matched the one on the man who'd saved me from a knife once in a different life. The bandaged chest told the same story: a bullet taken, for me.
"Why?" I asked.
His hand trembled in mine. "To let you live," he said, with the one softness that had always belonged to me alone.
That was the last thing I heard. A pendant, diamond cut in a peculiar rhombus, flashed on my collarbone. Kennedi Sims laughed, a brittle sound I would never forget.
"You think you deserve him," she said. "You think all revenge can be wrapped in a pretty dress."
The pendant was mine and not mine. I had worn it when I had most of myself left. I had thrown it, the way a poet throws a last line, and the room detonated. Flames stole the petals from the glass dome, snow and ash made a new kind of snowfall, and Greyson let me slip into his arms and die.
I thought of library afternoons—of books, of the way sunlight used to fall on his jawline—and I thought of how quick hatred can answer to the same name as love.
When I opened my eyes again, I was eighteen and the world was only beginning to learn how cruel it could be. I sat upright in a classroom, summer heat humming against the window, and Angela Cardenas' voice cut the air.
"Alayna Chang, can you stop embarrassing us?"
I blinked and saw that my hands were mine, that the girl at the front of the room who had always looked like a judge was pointing a finger at me. Flesh and bone, here. "Where am I?" I thought, and the library—our library—already called me forward like a bell.
"You're lazy," Angela said as I rose, and I smiled in a small curve, because I had been given a rerun, an opportunity. "You can't always behave like a fairy in class and then expect the board to approve it."
"You—" I held her with a look. I let my voice drop to the velvet of the ice I had learned to wear. "Angela, you're wrong about one thing."
"Which is?"
"You can't push me out of a place and expect me to stop existing there."
There was a soft sound, like a camera breathing, from the students around the room. The old Alayna might have looked away. This Alayna straightened a hair and walked back to the washroom to wash last life off her face.
I scrubbed until the cheap makeup sloughed away and what remained was a white face with alert eyes. I learned the geography of my campus with the map of memory: the green of the trees, the way the library stairs led to the reading room, the first day Greyson had brushed past me and left a shadow in my chest. If fate is a cruel sculptor, then this time I was the apprentice who would repurpose the tools.
A rumor that day reached ears like scent: a new transfer, people said, prettier than me, with a face like a photograph. Students gossiped. Jaelynn Chavez—my supposed sister—walked by with a look of genuine worry on her face. She blamed me as if I had been the puppet of a worse man.
"Alayna, where did you spend last night? We were worried," she whispered.
"I'm fine," I said. "Thanks."
"She was in a club last night," another student said. "She never shows up, she…" chatter like broken glass.
I found myself by accident in the path where Greyson sometimes walked to the reception event where the board would come. He was there that day in black, the kind of black that swallowed the rest of the world obediently.
"Excuse me," I heard myself say.
He did not turn at first. Then, all at once, he looked like a man who had misfiled his heartbeat. I tried to hold the moment, to pin it to my chest. His hand brushed my sleeve when he pushed past me. It was almost nothing. It made my heart stumble like some old machine.
"Do you need something?" he asked, with the distant politeness of a man who had been taught to keep hunger far from the table.
"I like you," I heard myself say before the script could be edited by fear or calculation. "I want you to like me back."
He blinked—invisible cracks in his armor—and then his face carefully redrew itself into coolness.
"Alayna," he said, "you must understand that I have a fiancée."
"Not engaged," I said fast. "Not yet."
"That doesn't matter," he replied. "Do not come to me with such things."
"Then let me," I said. "Let me prove you wrong."
He frowned—an almost fragile thing. Then his assistant, Raj Burns, came up, his jacket crisp, eyes measuring. "Mr. Mitchell, are we keeping—"
"Take off your jacket," Greyson said without looking. "Give it to Ms. Chang."
Raj stared. "Sir?"
"Now."
When Raj took off his jacket hesitantly, I saw the faintest hint of a smile in Greyson's mouth. "Wear it," he said. The shirt smelled faintly of wood, bark, old paper. I slipped it on. The line of it covered the worst things. We were both too old for pretenses, but neither of us had learned to stop pretending.
"I will help where I can," he said later, "with a card. You cannot keep exposing yourself to risk."
"I am not selling my body," I said. "I am making a life."
He sighed. "You will break something," he warned, then softened. "I don't want you to."
A trap was set against me that same week. Kennedi Sims, the woman I had once protected like a younger sister, smiled with poison. She had the kind of friendliness that arrives wet and slick, like a slug. She brought with her men whose faces were made for poor apartments and loud laughter.
"You were naive to keep her," she said to the men as they watched me. "Look at this one. She'll do anything for a few coins."
"They will pay twenty times," one of them said. "This will be easy."
"It's not about money," Kennedi whispered to me once at night when we were alone. "It's about making sure the ones who humiliated you could never humiliate you again by being the one on top."
I should have known then that what she meant by 'on top' was ruin.
On a horrible night in a club called KING, there were faces everywhere—Mauricio Cruz presiding over deals, Greyson's silhouette somewhere in the crowd. I accepted the job because Daniel Kim—my old contact, the man who had promised to help my brother—said it was the only way to get Mateo's operation funds.
"Are you sure?" I asked Daniel.
"It's a safe room," he said. "Mauricio is clean. You'll be fine."
I have a list of people who lied to me. Daniel is on it.
That night, a man called Cairo Lewis put something in my drink. I almost drank it. I was halfway there when Greyson, arriving late, snapped his fingers and stopped me.
"Alayna," he said between his teeth, "don't do this."
It should have been simple. I should have smiled and sat on his kindness like a child would sit on a lap. Instead, desire and old strategy tangled, and the logician in me thought: if I could get him alone, I could learn the truth he died with, or at least claim the payment that would save Mateo. The price was my dignity.
I woke in his bed with the taste of cheap perfume in my mouth and a bruise on my hip. The city loved a scandal. A photographer had gotten hold of the images and leaked them to the press. The screens on the high towers blazed with them. Greyson held a press conference that night, and I watched him on that screen, immaculate, explaining the whole thing away.
"We are all damaged," he said. "It was a mistake, a mistake we will address." There was a mercy in his tone that cut me, but also a coldness that became my razor.
I left town to disappear for a night and think. I wanted to burn everything down like I had once tried to do with the pendant—except this time I could not reach the fuse.
When I returned, they welcomed me with the slow knives of my stepmother, Emerson Burgess, and the smug pity of Jaelynn Chavez. Byron Carter, the man who had signed as my 'guardian' more than father, had the look of a man who ate a secret and found it flavorless.
"You are back," Emerson said. "You should be grateful. We could be punished for harboring you."
"Where is Mateo?" I asked.
"He's fine," Jaelynn lied.
The room smelled of the cheap cologne of a family that had learned to arrange misery into a display. I slung my past near enough to them to watch what they'd do.
"Do you want money?" Byron said, eyes glittering with the very thing I'd been denied growing up. "We can help pull things together if you want."
I laughed in his face. "Take it then," I said, and I did. I watched them pry into the small iron box Emerson had once given me because the woman had sold the good things long ago. They all changed color when I said the words lawyers told me to use about a Swiss account—words turned to light at their edges.
"Your mother's necklace?" Emerson asked, an answer in her throat like a knife she hadn't bothered to sharpen.
"It's missing," I said. "Wouldn't you like to see what happens when you tell the world it belongs to someone else?"
They blinked greed. Greed is always more instructive than guilt.
The story widened. Daniel Kim called, offering a 'big job.' Cairo Lewis and his friend Cairo were the worst of the lot—oh, Cairo was a name to remember for its low laugh and lousy morals. He and a friend, worse than he was, came to take me. I almost bit a hole in one of them. I could taste the old years. When everything with the men turned hot and ugly, a familiar heavy hand opened the door and Greyson stepped into the doorway like some terrible tide.
"Leave her alone," he said. He looked like he could snap their shoulders with a flick.
"You're a busy man," one of those other boys said.
"Not now." He moved like someone whose life had been run through a net and who now found that net was filled with the only fish he had chosen.
He fought like something I had once admired. When the men were flat on the ground and his breath came quicker than his outrage, he gathered me up like something fragile. "We leave," he said.
I wanted to tell him a thousand things in the car, held against the leather and the wood scent of his shoulder. He stopped for a moment outside the gated estate and looked at me with a face that the press had once said must be impossible for anything.
"You are unbelievable," he muttered. "I make a mess of everything you touch."
"Because everything I touch burns," I said.
His jaw tightened. "You will not go back there," he ordered. "Not alone. Not ever."
"Why should you care?" I asked between breaths. "Why risk anything again for me?"
He looked at me and the look was a soft kind of suicide. "Because you are what can make me forget my own rules."
He carried me home to a house whose rooms had no memory of a woman like me in them. Day after day he filled my world with choices: gardens to choose, wardrobes to pick, jewels to try on. It was absurd and it was deliberate. He wanted to rearrange a life for me in meticulous, impossible pieces. I kept thinking of the library and the quiet where we had once been equal.
"You don't have to do this," I said once as he offered a necklace.
He smiled and kissed my brow. "I have been taught to guard, not to want," he said. "But I'm tired of the lessons."
As he warmed my bruises and called doctors and sent assistants out to salvage damage at the university, the net around us tightened. I noticed odd things: a name repeated in confessions of the men who had attacked me, Ingrid Michel, a woman with a cool smile that could carve a child's hand from a parent's heart. She was the one who'd hired the men, the one who wanted my ruin made into a spectacle.
I watched Greyson's patience wear into furious plans. He called people in at odd hours. He sat at his desk at night and erased the future he had once written neatly by hand.
"I want them gone," he told Raj. "Not their lives. Their capacity to hurt people like her."
"I will handle it," Raj said, but his face betrayed delight at being useful to a man he admired.
The worst thing Ingrid had done was not to hurt me physically—Cairo had tried that and failed—but to force the city to look at us and laugh. The press fed them fragments. Greyson's stock fell for a heartbeat. The family chorus frowned. The threat of losing everything wrapped around Greyson like cold vines, but he kept acting like a man who would rather burn himself than let someone he loved be burned by others.
"And Kennedi?" I asked one long night as we tried to stitch our lives together with bandages and the odd kindness gray men find strange.
"I will not look kindly on betrayals," he said. "She has wages due elsewhere."
Kennedi had once called me sister. She once had a grave's worth of my trust. Later she confessed with a snake's smile that she had been raised in markets where a person chose the heat over hunger and decided to eat both. She had helped the men. She had taken the Swiss account hints and sold them to the highest bidder.
When the punishment came—if anything can be called such when it is real and public and the worst kind of justice—I decided I would watch.
"Make sure it is over a stage," I told Greyson. "Make sure anyone who cheered for her will see her fall."
He hesitated. "You deserve to be heard, not a show," he said.
I smiled then, the Alayna who had learned to use everything, including scars. "If it is to be heard, let it be heard with people watching," I said. "Let them know the cost of treachery to those who depend on loud opinions."
We set it for a charity gala at the university auditorium—the same board people who came to arbitrate futures would be there. Invitations were sent like nets of polite civility: Emerson and Byron sat like vultures who had been offered fresh carrion. Kennedi came in jewels, the kind that always looked bought and never earned.
The hall filled. The first faces I saw were allies, old shadows who had not forgiven, and new faces, journalists with pens like knives.
Kennedi first wore a smile. "Alayna," she purred when she caught my eye. "You look…surprising."
"You look like someone ready to receive a reckoning," I said. "Would you like it on stage or on the feed?"
She laughed, like someone amused by the idea of entertainment: "On the feed. People prefer spectacle."
"Good," I said.
We arranged it so that the lights dimmed, then roared back. Greyson's voice on the microphone was calm as the sea before it breaks. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "We are here tonight to celebrate scholarship and to address a betrayal."
People leaned forward, deliciously curious. Cameras flickered—satellites of gossip. Kennedi's smile hadn't left her face, even as Raj moved quietly and opened a case of evidence at the center of the stage.
"Kennedi, you were the person who sold a name and a ruin," Raj said plainly to the room. "Here is what you gave them."
On the screens circled the stage: messages, videos, bank transfers—proof of deals with Ingrid and calls to Cairo. People recognized faces. Emerson turned white. Byron squared his jaw. Jaelynn looked away.
"You are lying," Kennedi snapped, voice like glass breaking. "You have no proof!"
"On this platform are receipts," Greyson said. "On this wall are the names of those who colluded." He clicked. The photos rolled. The room made a small collective sound like a person in cold weather.
"No! You don't understand!" Kennedi's voice edged higher. She took on the rhythms of denial she had learned in broken houses. "I— I only wanted—"
"To save yourself," I said aloud, because the microphones loved me and Greyson let me. "To sell your old sister for a bill that still wouldn't fix the teeth of your debts."
"It was survival," she cried then, claws exposed. "You don't know how it is! I had to—"
The crowd began to murmur. Then murmur turned to question. Then to judgment. A camera found a nearby table of alumnae who had once been chummy with Kennedi; their faces tightened, and someone took out a phone, making a little light like a prayer.
"You told them to make her drink," Greyson said. "You told them to make her leave the room where her name could be weaponized. You told them to sell the pictures."
"No!" Kennedi wheeled, frenzy leaking into her tone. "I never said—"
A projection flicked to a call transcript. Her combative posture broke. "I paid them," a new voice said. A hotel employee had been coaxed into the light and his hat shook. "She offered cash to set the scene."
The delight of the crowd curdled into something heavier. Someone clapped ironically. Another took a video. "They're live, Kennedi," the world said, and it was true: the internet boiled. Phones lifted like obedient birds. The mayor who had once given speeches with Greyson looked uncomfortably at his image on the screen.
Kennedi's denial lasted a full minute. Then the voice pattern of falling apart came: "Please, please, stop—"
"Is this the woman you love?" I asked, quietly.
She laughed—no dignity left in her laugh now. "Love? You speak as if you're pure."
We had come prepared. The council had their lawyers. They demanded the names of clients. They gave the police the proper list. Kennedi listened as every confederate named her in sworn testimony. She tried a thousand strategies: outrage, tears, the old story of necessity. The audience did not care. The people I had thought of as indifferent now tasted of something like pity and something like pleasure.
When the last witness finished, everyone looked like a judge. Kennedi's face had fallen into a mask of white shock. "It wasn't like that!" she cried, voice thinning into a thread. "You can't—"
"You lied to me," I said softly. "You who I fed and clothed and taught."
Her demeanor had been magnificent until the moment cameras found her ledger. Then the world showed her the scale and the woman had to stand on the other side of the mirror. She had been a trained liar—there is an art to that—but the room had measures she had not banked upon.
"Get her to the center," Greyson said.
I had asked the hall to remove the podium so she would have to stand where all could see. There was a legal charade of decorum: a micro hearing, a public reading of the transactions. Her voice changed shape under the weight of exposure. "I didn't mean to—"
"Beg then," said someone in the crowd. A foolish demand, but it bore the industrial note of the public.
At first she was defiant: "I will never beg—"
Then her knees found the stage wood. One hundred faces watched. Someone—brave or cruel—recorded the exact angle of her humiliation. I watched the arc of her pride fall like a curtain. Her face was spectacularly human: shame, followed by bargaining, followed by a last, small, terrible plea.
"Please," she said, voice tearing, "please I—"
The crowd shifted. People who had answered my life with ridicule were now appalled that their entertainment had become mercy. They took phones and posted, whispered, watched the live feed like a sacred exclusion.
"No one will help you," Greyson said quietly at her side. "We will let the law decide, but this city should know whose loyalty costs what."
She was offered a choice. She would be turned over to the authorities. She could either face civil restitution for the payment to the men who had attacked me and the arrangement she had made—or volunteer to stand before the university and admit publicly what she had done, naming names in a kind of salvation made of shards.
She lowered her eyes. The room was deaf. Her voice cracked into a confession that sounded like gravel—names, amounts, messages, money trails. People wept with shame and in some corners laughed with release. A reporter clapped as if announcing the end of a performance. A woman two rows back lifted her phone and wept openly.
The public punishment lasted longer than anyone expected. I had asked for true wounds to be explained so that those who sought to hide behind networks of betrayal would not think it easy again. For nearly a thousand words, perhaps more, Kennedi's voice broke. She went through the phases as the script demanded: arrogance, shock, denial, collapse, and finally pleas. The cameras never left her.
"Stop!" she shouted at one point, the sound too ancient for the hall. "You— you don't know how it is to have no options!"
"You're telling us now," Greyson said. "That is an option."
They recorded her on their phones. They took pictures. Someone snapped a video and a woman in the crowd tweeted the time stamp, and the incident flew across feeds like something fragrant and feverish. People made GIFs, accounts had ten thousand shares an hour, and the university released a statement promising a full inquiry. The spectacle became an educational moment, and it was ugly and precise and entirely necessary.
At last, when her words were exhausted, she looked at me. "Alayna," she said in a voice that had finally grown human, "I'm sorry."
"I heard you," I said. "You didn't need to say it for me."
She fell silent like a thing emptied. A few people hissed like cats in the dark. Someone stood up and left. Others applauded, badly, like people clapping for a play that had not yet realized it was real.
Afterwards, the news cycles churned. Kennedi's name was on trending lists for days. She tried to reconstruct her life afterward—no easy task. She tried to sue, to silence, to buy new faces. But the public had watched the moment the world turned on her and it had chosen a team.
Greyson stood by me through it. He took my hand and, in the private dark that followed, said, "You did this without wanting blood. You made it possible for a city to know betrayal when it was given to them."
"I wanted shame," I said. "I wanted them to feel it."
He tightened his fingers around mine. "We will work the right way. Justice, not wrath."
I forgave the world a little. I forgave him a lot. We were both surviving the messy economy of dangerous hearts.
I learned things then again that seemed obvious: that people will make bargains with their souls when hunger is loud; that some people sell first and ask questions later; that rescue is a complicated thing, often arriving with consequences; and that a man as cold as Greyson could sometimes be warm enough to hold a life and keep it.
Months came. We settled into a pattern. I went to class and Greyson handled the fallout of his name being blurred by scandal. The wedding talk with Esperanza Krause, the woman that he had once been aligned with, thinned into silence. She could not wrest the man who began to smile for me with a private gravity. We had nights where he would lie awake and whisper, "You are terrible for my rules."
"And you are terrible for mine," I would say back.
One evening I found the rhombus pendant, hidden away in a drawer at the house Greyson had lent me—he had found it on the night of the explosion. I held it and remembered ashes, snow, and that impossible tenderness.
"I would like you to keep it," he said, coming up behind me. "You were foolish to throw it then and smart to find it now."
"I would like to keep all the things you give me," I admitted.
He kissed my temple, exactly like a promise. "Then keep them. But keep me too. I am tired of losing things."
The night the city warmed under a soft rain, I walked to the university roof, and watched the glass garden's likeness on the high tower screens—forever a frozen fantasy of a place that had stolen almost everything. I ran my thumb over the pendant.
"If I had changed nothing," I said to the pendant, to the night, "would you have loved me still?"
Greyson came up beside me without a sound. He put his hand over mine on the pendant. "It doesn't matter what would happen," he said. "We have now."
"Now is all right then," I said.
He breathed in and smiled. "Now is yours and mine."
I had tried once to end everything in that exploding glass garden out of anger and grief. I had thought that revenge could write closure. The world is more complicated than explosions or funeral speeches. It is smaller and more careful: a shoulder when you cannot stand, a hand to steady the stomach when you cannot breathe, a person who will keep you in a house that smells of books.
And yet—on quiet nights I remember the burnt glass and the snow that soothed the smell of smoke. I remember that pendant. I remember Mateo's handwriting in a small letter he had left: "Don't let me be your reason to hurt yourself." I pressed that letter to my chest and felt foolish and sanctified.
"Alayna," Greyson would say in the dark sometimes, like a confession. "Promise me you will be happy."
"I promise," I lied gently until the words became true.
He held that word like fire and did not let it go.
We have come far from the auction stage and the black-table deals. We have tamed some of the chaos into plans and strategies. We know the names of those who hurt. We know the costs of betrayal. We know, at the end of the day, the shape of a safe hand.
I keep the diamond pendant in a small leather box. Sometimes in the morning I hear the tick of small things moving as Greyson goes to the desk—papers, pen, quiet commands. The pendant is small and pretends nothing. It is my map of that old ruin and an emblem of a vow. When I move it under the light its edges flare, and I think of how dangerous prettiness can be, and how much I prefer the truth.
"Keep your pendant," Greyson told me once, softly. "Keep it as a memory and a warning."
I slipped it on under my collar and went to class, and when I walked past Angela or Emerson, I walked like someone who had been pulled through fire and lived to learn new ways to tend the burn.
Because I am bad at grand sentences that serve for funerals and novels. I am good at the thin, sharp things: a look, a word, a joined hand. I had wanted to take everything in a single flame. I learned, painfully, that keeping someone near can be a better revenge and a better kind of love.
The pendant cools against my skin sometimes. It is a little weight. It remembers the glass garden for me. I like that it remembers. I like that we moved the pieces.
So, when people ask me if I regret anything, I smile and say, "I keep the pendant. I keep the man who saved and saved me more than once. That is enough."
And on some nights, when snow and rain come together and the city smells of wet iron and possibility, I open the leather box and listen for the faint click in the pendant, the memory of a glass dome falling into flame.
It remembers the sound. I remember him. We both keep each other.
The End
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