Revenge14 min read
The Pink Stone and the Skull
ButterPicks12 views
My name is Ariya Evans. I had a steady job offer—thirty thousand a month, benefits, a room to stay in—and a boss with a face like a calm sea. I thought that was love, or at least luck paying off.
Then my father's skull was put on a tray and shoved in front of me.
I remember the moment I walked through the glass door of Number Seven Café the way you remember the first cold bite of winter: clear and impossible to ignore.
"Welcome," the receptionist said, bored enough to make a statue look warm. "We're not open yet."
"I'm applying for the accounting position," I said.
"Please come upstairs." Her voice changed in a second. "Mr. Sanchez will see you."
I followed the woman up the stairs, hands a little too steady, the weight of my suitcase more important than the tremor in my throat. When I stepped into the office and saw him—Andrei Sanchez—my heart laced itself with something like relief. He looked polite, tidy, warm in a way that had no barbs.
"And you are?" he asked, low and vermouth-dark.
"Ariya Evans. Accounting, yes." I handed him my resume. "I worked in—"
"And why did you leave?" he asked before I could finish the sentence.
My jaw tightened. I had the answer ready. I had left because I found them in my bed.
"On my birthday," I told him, "I knocked on the door because I was bringing dinner and a cake. I opened it and—" I did not stop to breathe. "—I saw my boyfriend, Raymond Rios, in bed with our colleague, Aurora Vega."
Andrei's eyebrows barely moved. He flipped to my resignation letter and read it with the same evenness I'd watched him do everything. "I see," he said. "We could use someone like you."
"Use me for what?" My laugh startled me. "You know, I half expected cult initiation or ghost-nannying. Is this some weird job?"
He smiled a little. "You'll be finance. You'll be the one who makes sure this place doesn't bleed cash."
When the contract was laid in front of me I stared at the words like they might rearrange themselves into something impossible. Benefits. Room. Meals. "When do I start?" I asked, hungry enough to sound desperate.
"Today," Andrei said. "Move in, and tonight I'll show you the work."
I walked out feeling oddly triumphant. On the street, Aurora called over from our shared flat. "Back already? No job?" she teased.
"I got it," I said, and felt the guilty, sweet tug of surprise in my chest when the delivery man arrived with a small safe.
"Delivery for Ariya," the man said.
"What did you buy?" Aurora crowed.
"Nothing," I said, but the safe had a sticker with Andrei's signature flourish. He'd had me register my fingerprints, he said, for an entry system. I let them scan without thinking.
Inside the safe was a pink diamond the size of a small plum. My throat closed. Someone had spent so much money that the number on the invoice blurred into a cartoon of zeros.
I touched the gem and the world tilted.
I saw blinking red lights and a hatch open. Bullets ricocheted like a storm. A man with his face covered fell, his hands ripping at his chest. The pink diamond rolled into a puddle of something bright.
My childhood came flaring back like a bad sun. I have an odd talent: when I touch certain objects, I see time fragments—quick, horrible little films of other people's lives connected to the thing. My father, a police officer, told me to never, ever tell anyone. "People don't like strange things," he said. "Hide it."
He taught me how to hide.
I put the necklace on and smiled at Andrei like a woman who had learned a useful truth.
"Is everything all right?" he asked.
"Thank you for the gift," I said.
Two days later I moved into the apartment Andrei gave me. It had a living room full of light and a balcony with potted plants. It tasted of money and safety—luxury I could not afford and was not supposed to want. Andrei treated me like someone he had rescued, not an employee. He bought me clothes. He coached me on makeup. He made me into a person who could fit into a ballroom at a moment's notice.
"Do you like it?" he asked one evening, watching me try to make myself look like I belonged.
"I like the attention," I said, trying on a red dress.
"Good," he said, so soft my bones uncurled.
I learned his story in pieces. When I asked him about the pink diamond, he told me, "You can see things when you touch a certain item, right? When I heard there were things you could find that others couldn't, I thought—" His voice tightened. "I owe your family a debt."
"You owe my family?" I blinked.
"When I was a child," Andrei said slowly, "you ran toward the woods and into danger. Your father, Detective Barrett, saved me. Years later, I left, I studied, and I promised him I would do something if ever he needed me. When I heard... when I heard about his death, I wanted to help. I couldn't catch the men with the law. Maybe we can do this other way."
He looked at me the way some men look at fragile glass that will not shatter. He wanted me to be both glass and sword.
"You want me to find a thing?" I asked.
"A drive," he said. "A USB. It might be hidden. But if you touch objects connected to the men who killed him, you might see where they hid it."
It should have been impossible. Instead it felt obvious. Andrei had the money and the belief, I had the odd power and the father-shaped ache. We were an unequal team: I had a heart seared by betrayal; he had a debt he wanted to pay with his whole life.
"Tonight there's an auction," Andrei said. "A big one. It will be full of them—people who hide blood behind ties. I want you beside me."
I could not say no. I put the pink diamond back into its velvet coffin and hung the jade bangle Andrei had bought on my wrist. He kissed my temple in the quiet of my room like a man settling an account. "Don't leave the room," he told me.
At the auction the lights were the kind that make jewels honest and people flattering. There were tables, chandeliers, and men sipping old liquor while counting their bravado. When the jade bangle came up, I watched with the stupid fascination of a poor woman who could live there for the night. The starting bid launched like a spear.
"One million," Andrei said smoothly.
Raymond—my ex—kept bidding, loud and ugly like a man trying to buy what he could not charm. Aurora sat across the floor, laughing like a gull.
"And who is he?" Raymond hissed at me later when he cornered me.
"He's my boss," I said. "He buys things for his employees."
"You don't have to pretend," he spat. He reached for me and the world grew small and then the room collapsed in a single hard crack as my head met someone’s fist. Everything went white and loud.
I woke up tied in a concrete room, the cold on my knuckles like a promise. Two men with pig masks—lurkers from nightmares—loomed. They wanted things from me, and they showed me why their men belonged in the dark.
"Answer, Ariya," the bigger one said, his voice sticky and low. He had a knife that sang when he moved it.
"We have your man's head," the small one said, lifting a tray covered with black cloth. "His skull will cost you."
When the cloth flew back, the skull stared at me with the emptiness only death owns. I pressed my hand to it and images stabbed me: a car slipping off a cliff, flames like a bell, my father struggling with one last breath as they beat him and took something from his hands. The man who finished him was a traitor—someone I knew and had trusted. He had returned the ashes years later with a smile and a lie.
"You see things, right?" the pig-headed man said. "Find the drive. We'll let you go."
He leaned his knife against my throat and told me the name of the man he wanted—Burke Powell. He called him a friend, an old pupil of my father who had gone wrong. When I screamed, Burke's voice thundered in my memory like a betrayal I had never imagined.
I tasted the bitter iron of fear and the green hope of anger. I wasn't the kind of person who could hide behind terror. I was a daughter looking at her father’s skull, and that pull—revenge—was a current.
"You won't get my father back," I told the pig men. "But you will get caught if you think to do worse."
They laughed and went away because they were theatrical and certain. Andrei came through the door at last like a cavalry made of calm people. He had tracked me down with a team. He smashed their front door and rolled the tide of men into place. He held me, and I told him everything I'd seen.
The drive was in a place my visions had hinted at: a crevice filled with stones where my father's car had landed. Andrei found it, but the drive had been copied, and a file on it was worse than proof: it contained the name list, the accounts, the bank codes, and a recording. My father's voice, ragged with final breath, named Burke Powell as the betrayer.
We took the drive to Adam Barrett—my father's old friend and now a retired detective. He listened with a face carved from old hurt.
"This is enough," he said finally. "Enough to bring down half of them."
"Then bring them down," I felt myself say.
We did. With Andrei's resources and my sightings, we started to stitch the net.
But the villains do not go gentle. Burke Powell and Raymond Rios had networks and reputations. They thought themselves kings; men who bought loyalty with cash and dismissed the rest. They slept with my roommate. They used me.
I prepared a plan that made use of the thing they valued more than law: their image. I walked into the center of their life—the gala where Burke would be honored by the city's elites—and I turned it into their theater.
"Are you certain?" Andrei asked, his hand on my shoulder.
"I'm certain," I told him. "They will be too proud to leave."
We planted seeds: a quiet journalist friend, Petra Matthews, a woman with a journalist's stubborn heart and a camera that didn't blink. She was on my side because of what my father had done for her when she was younger—things that had nothing to do with law and everything to do with human decency.
The night of Burke Powell's exposure was a kind of slow unthreading.
The banquet room smelled of expensive perfume and cheap courage. Burke stood on a stage, being praised by men who liked their sins with their wine. He smiled like a man who had never been wrong.
"Mr. Powell," the master of ceremonies crowed. "A philanthropist, a guardian of heritage."
"You deserve the honor," Burke said, and his voice was all smoothness.
I stood in the back, the pink diamond hiding under my collar like a secret. Petra stood at my side holding a camera that hummed with impatience.
"And now," said Burke, "a tribute." People clapped as if applause could fold around them and hide them.
"Excuse me," I said, and the room quieted. "I would like to show something."
They thought a woman would not speak. They thought I was a pretty accessory Andrei fancied. Burke's smile edged. "Who is this?" he muttered.
"Ariya Evans," Andrei said, gentle but iron. "A woman your men kidnapped and brought to a warehouse."
"What?" Burke's face tightened. "What nonsense—"
"Shut up," I said, and held up the skull. The murmur turned into a gasp. "This is your art, Mr. Powell. Or do you call it trophy?"
The tray went around like a small, horrible sun. The skull sat there with the awful dignity of what it was: a human head. Someone in the audience screamed. Silverware chimed like a bell. Burke's mask slipped.
"That's not—" he began.
"And this is a recording." Petra stepped into the light and played a clip no one in that room could ignore. My father's voice came out of a speaker ragged and immediate. "Burke Powell. You spoke with them. You took the money. You beat him."
The guests' faces collapsed into a continent of judgment. Cameras found phones like moths. Someone was already live-streaming. The mayor's aide paled. Men who had counted on loyalty looked sideways.
Burke's reaction moved through a sequence I would later memorize: triumph, confusion, denial, rage, and then sheer naked fear. "This is slander!" he roared. He lunged for the microphone like a man grasping for a rope ending at the sky.
"Call the cameras!" a woman cried. "This is monstrous!"
Petra's camera didn't blink. "Do you have anything to say?" she asked.
Burke tried to laugh. The laughter was brittle. "This is a joke. Someone has a vengeance."
"Does your audience think this is a joke?" I said, walking closer. "Do you think the family of the man you killed will laugh in court?"
He reached for the tray, a foolish move that made everyone edge away like a child reaching toward fire. "You can't—"
A man in a tuxedo stood up and clapped slowly. He enjoyed the spectacle so sincerely I wanted to slap the smile off his face. "Bravo," he said.
Crowds gathered in seconds; phones recorded as if their collective eye alone could convict him. Reporters commented in the corner of the room like sharks circling a cut.
Burke's face flickered. He had a moment—a breath—when the arrogance left his posture and something small hissed inside him: he was seen. "You can't show—" he said.
"Footage?" Petra asked, voice cold. "We have your ledger, sir. We have bank transfers. We have your confessions, all edited into a timeline that makes you look criminally tidy."
"You're lying!" Burke howled. People started filming him as if they were holding him in place with light.
Security tried to escort me out—Andrei's men blocked them. A cousin of Burke's tried to tug his elbow; Burke pushed him away and for the first time pulled no respect from the room, only anxiety.
"Where is Raymond Rios?" I called—no, I didn't call him by name. "Where is the man who used me?"
Raymond was there, slender and cruel in a corner, the kind of man who believes his charm is a steel coat. His eyes met mine and slid away like a dog who'd been caught with his paw in the cookie jar. Men around him whispered, "He's nepotism's child." He mouthed something to a lawyer. He looked suddenly small.
"You're finished," I said.
He tried to push past the crowd. He shoved a waiter; someone pulled his sleeve. In one fluid, ugly move, the waiter tripped and a wine glass shattered across Raymond's jacket. The glass cut his hand and the blood looked theatrical against his expensive suit. Someone shouted that he was unclean, and like gears in a terrible machine, people began to look differently at him.
It was not the same as Burke's exposure. Raymond's punishment was humiliation by social erosion. Men and women I did not know closed ranks around him and then dropped him like a hot coal.
"Who let him in?" a woman hissed. "He shouldn't be here."
"He used her," another whispered.
"A crook's nephew," said a man who used to smile at his jokes. He didn't smile anymore.
Raymond, backed into a corner, tried to throw money to a friend, to buy loyalty, but the cameras kept flashing like a jury. A video clip surfaced of him with Aurora in the flat, laughing and proud, a betrayal set to music. People watched their screens and turned toward him with new eyes—eyes that recognized exploitation when it looked like a suit.
The punishment for Burke and Raymond was different because their crimes were different. Burke had murder and ledgers; his ruin had to be public, legal, and shaming. Raymond's ruin came as social impossible-to-bargain humiliation, his access to status stripped like scales.
Burke's final collapse happened in a cascade. The crowd called for the police when Petra played more files. A man who'd been a silent sponsor hissed and folded his support. Burke tried to command the room, but where he wanted power there was only exposure. He was escorted out, handcuffed, not because I shouted but because too many cameras captured too many details. He tried to shake off the handcuffs and shouted at me through the press: "You lie! You prostitute the truth!"
"You butchered my father," I answered. "You took a life. You must answer."
He was led out to the police vans. Outside, cameras shouted questions in a storm. The live stream had millions watching in minutes. Where he had been a man of dance and philanthropy, he was now only a man under neon.
Raymond's punishment unfolded slower: his sponsors withdrew invites, patrons texted their daughters to avoid him, and his name became a joke on late-night feeds. He tried to make peace with Aurora, bargaining for a return, but she turned away. The man who had used seduction for theft found that seduction has a shelf life when the shelf collapses. He was photographed alone at the edge of the gala, his suit stained with wine, the man's face photographed by hundreds. People posted and reposted. A public that had admired him now shared his fall like a lesson.
After the exposure I went home and, finally, buried my father's skull with his ashes. We performed a small, private ceremony. Andrei stood with me at the grave.
"I promised him I would help," he said quietly, hands curled over mine. "And I meant it."
"Did you mean what you said at the grave?" I asked later, when the bouquet petals had long since browned. "When you said you'd call him your father-in-law?"
He laughed—a small, startled laugh—and kissed my forehead. "I meant I'd try," he said. "I think you made me selfish in a way that's not shameful."
Then I turned, and something snagged my eye: a small headstone down the row. My breath punched out of me. The name on the stone was Aurora Vega's, and the picture in its frame—my face.
I screamed then—not with the sound of someone surprised, but with the precise helplessness of someone whose belief in small coincidences had been smashed. "How?" I demanded.
Andrei pressed fingers to my shoulder. "I don't know," he said, and there was a question in his voice I could not swallow.
Who had put my photo on Aurora's grave? Why had Aurora disappeared? Had she been more than a sleeping, smiling traitor? Had she been another of their actors or a victim?
We had roots of proof, blood in ledgers, and men in handcuffs. But the story made a new shade of dark: someone had crept into lives and replaced faces. I stood between the grave and the sky and realized how fragile a life is when people trade them like notes.
"Keep your hand on the stone," Andrei said. "We will find out."
I pressed my palm to the granite, and for the first time since I had started seeing the films, I felt less like a spectator and more like a woman who had to live with the parade of consequence. We had punished them in public, exposed their faces, and I had watched the humiliation fold over them like an unavoidable frost.
Burke Powell went to trial and lost in the court of both law and public opinion. Cameras that had been his decorations became witness. He sat at the defendant's table like a man whose armor had been melted. He screamed, he denied, he called me names. In front of the judge he watched as people he had bought turned their backs. His reaction was a slow, delicious, awful thing: he went through all the stages—confidence, incredulity, fury, pleading, and then a kind of animal panic when the verdict came. Supporters who had once toasted him abandoned him; employees who had sung his praises now whispered and covered their faces. He left court zigzagging, flanked by officers, and the world had watched him become small.
Raymond tried to sue for defamation but the trail of messages, his own video confessions in the uploaded clumsy favors, the paid receipts and his own father's ledger—everything aligned. His family disowned him privately. Patrons who once welcomed him with open arms returned his gifts. "You were always a pawn," someone told him in a whisper that would cut weeks off a life. Public scorn is a slow needle; it's not sharp but it is cutting. He found himself alone in rooms that had once applauded him. Friends refused to answer his calls. When he begged Aurora to return, she walked away and wore shades and a daily face of someone who had been baptized by humiliation and come up cleaner.
At the graveside, when we closed the small wooden box, Andrei leaned close and murmured, "You are the bravest person I know."
"Brave?" I asked.
"Brave," he said. "You could have walked away."
"I couldn't," I said. "He was my father."
"And now?"
"Now I have a name for what they took," I said. "Now I have a ledger and a list and a recording. Now there are people who will not forget."
He rested his forehead against mine. "Then let us walk through the rest."
After that day, the pink stone stayed tucked near my heart. The necklace was a talisman and a trigger; sometimes when I touched it small films would come, and I would learn to navigate them with less terror and more purpose. The world did not suddenly feel safe. Greed is a hydra and cuts deeper than law sometimes.
But when people asked me how I felt—people who only ever met the Ariya with the bright dress and the gentler smile—I would smile and say, "It was necessary."
Later, in the quiet of our apartment, I found a photo tucked inside a book I had left on the balcony months ago. It was my face, yes, but it was also a note: "Forgive me." Aurora's handwriting.
"Did she leave this for me?" I asked Andrei, voice small.
He looked at the scrap and folded his hands. "Only she knows."
The world had given me two things: proof and a hollow. People who had loved me in partial ways now saw the whole. I had wrecked men with glass; I had made the truth local and loud. But there were more holes to stitch. There were names on the drive I had not counted and whispers in rooms I had not been in.
"Will you stay?" I asked Andrei once, under the dim balcony light.
He took my hand, thumb brushing the scarred knuckle from where the pig-headed man had grabbed me. "If you'll have me," he said.
I looked at him, at the man who had wrapped me in careful, honest obsession. He had promised a life, half salvation and half choice. He had come to the field armed with more than money: he had come with the willingness to be small when you needed him to be and vast when it mattered.
"I will," I said. "Because a grave needs company."
We sealed that with a kiss that was more a covenant than a promise. Outside the glass, the city glowed like a scattered paper of stars. Inside, on the table, the pink diamond winked—no longer just a trigger for visions but a reminder that the dead speak in objects, that the living answer with action.
And over on a lower terrace, a small stone with Aurora's name kept its secret like a closed fist. I put my palm over the photograph inside the book, and felt, for the first time in years, that some things could be buried and still ask for the light.
The End
— Thank you for reading —