Revenge14 min read
The Vine That Would Not Let Go
ButterPicks13 views
I met him five years after my world split in two.
"I thought you were dead," I said the first time I saw him in a meeting room light.
He blinked once, looked at me like I was a small, amusing interruption, and smiled the kind of polite smile that lives in company brochures. "That kind of pick-up is tired, Miss Kenna. Why don't you skip the drama?"
My hand found the hollow behind his ear before I even realized what I was doing. A small bump lived there, a familiar ridge I had traced a thousand times on the man I used to know. When my fingers touched it, he froze like a caught animal.
"How strange," I said, and let a laugh slip out. "Looks like the face, and even the sensitive spots are the same."
He did not answer. He only pressed his hand to my wrist, hard enough that my knees gave and I leaned into him. My head landed against the clean suit and then his voice, low and controlled, was in my ear.
"Are you asking me to be a substitute for a dead man, Miss Kenna?" he murmured. "Is that your plan?"
The man I knew as Joaquin Moore—tall, precise, with a silence that could be a weapon—smelled like the office, a touch of aftershave and a trace of wood smoke. He did not have the mole at the corner of his eye that Cheng had. He did not smile like Cheng did. Yet when he held me, something of that old gravity pulled tight inside me until I could only breathe.
1
The first time I met Cheng Jichuan, I was seven. We were schoolmates who sat side by side, and for a month we spoke no words. Then I lost my pocket money, came home with a split lip, and my mother accused me of theft. I remember being thrown to the pavement until I tasted gravel.
Cheng had stood up. "Aunt," he said quietly to my mother. "Kenna didn't lie. She doesn't have your money."
My mother tore Cheng's pockets out in anger. She walked away and bought more liquor. That night Cheng's mother patched my wounds and kept me until it was safe to go home.
Those small mercies never left me. He made me feel like I mattered.
So when Joaquin—when the man who looked like Cheng—kissed me in the dim kitchen of his villa and I heard him say one word that erased the neat lie, I said it without thinking, "Chuan."
His fingers were in my hair and he hissed, "Don't call me that."
"Why?" I asked, wine softening my tongue. "Are you afraid of remembering?"
He bent over me, and the room smelled of cheap red wine and something else—danger disguised as tenderness. "Kenna, stop naming ghosts."
And so, again, I became the presence he tolerated, the woman at his side. Men at the company whispered. Women at the convenience store rolled their eyes. People had names for what I was because they needed easy stories. I kept quiet.
2
Cheng vanished on an ordinary spring afternoon. He walked with me to the campus library, ate with me at the cafeteria, and then he stood by the dorm and said something like a joke. "We'll run in the evening."
I ran forward. He stayed. Three hours later, his social profile disappeared, his phone was gone, and then the police brought a story wrapped in a neat shape: a climb, a fall, no body, a few items of evidence. The world told me he was dead.
I refused to accept it. I slept at the police station and watched men with badges swap sympathetic words like currency. My roommates dragged me back, saying I had to live.
Months passed. I learned to smoke because grief makes people do odd things; a college senior named Boyd Edwards taught me how to hold a cigarette like it was a small secret. I let him kiss me once on a roof and push me away. I told myself it was practice. I told myself anything.
Then, five years later, I saw Joaquin—perfect suit, blue sapphire cufflinks, that slow, polite mockery—and everything tightened.
"Why didn't you come back?" I demanded in the meeting room, pinning him against the table. "Even a message. Even a lie."
He squeezed my wrist until the pain flared. "That pickup line is tired," he said, and his mouth lifted in a way that made me seethe.
"Are you—" I said, my voice small. "Are you Cheng or are you using his face to mock me?"
He drew back. "Miss Kenna, would you be my substitute? My ghost? Or will you be honest and stop this audience?"
3
There were nights when he would be colder than I had remembered. There were nights when he would break me open with a look and then stitch me back up with the gentlest things. He had the air of someone who controlled storms for a living, someone who had learned how to make other people kneel for a living.
"Do you hate him?" he asked one night, fingers tracing the narrow scars on my shoulder.
"No," I said. "I hate that he taught me to expect a death in view. I am angry he could ever ask me to watch someone die."
We were reckless together in a way that had nothing to do with belonging. He would scold me for my wild drunk calls and then tenderly pick up the pieces when I crashed. I learned his name had power inside his house and in his company. People called him a master of the company, the man who would be married soon. There were rumors—an engagement to Valentina Sims—and yet he was with me in hotel rooms, in the back row of charity evenings, in the small, heavy quiet of his car.
"One day you'll be his wife," someone said once, knowing how to wound with three words.
"Maybe," I told them. "Or maybe I'll be the woman who remembers."
4
Two things I learned quickly: business hides a thousand sins, and people who look like saints can be rotten at the center.
Dominic Baxter—his brother, sharp and loose with money—was loud in ways Joaquin never allowed himself to be. Dominic's hand brushed my arm in corridors and everyone looked away. He had a laugh that tried to sell cruelty as charm.
"Kenna," he said once, close enough that his breath smelled of whiskey. "You and Chuan have a history, right? It's feast or famine with his type. Do you want to feast?"
I smiled like a blade. "No thanks."
Later Dominic brought documents to me—papers that spoke like poisonous friends. He suggested bargains that were never kind. When he leaned in and said, "If you help me, you will be safe," I knew he meant, "If you help me, you will be useful."
5
Dominic's game was revealed by a smell. Not literal smell—a pattern, a way his eyes flicked, a way his hand moved when he thought no cameras watched. He had money stashed in companies under different names. He kept lawyers on retainer to bury things. He had a private villa three train stops out of town with a small, odd pool and a dead rose garden. It looked too neat, like a body hidden under a rug.
"Why would anyone bury a person under a pool?" I asked Joaquin once as thunder rolled to the horizon.
"Because you can fill things with water," he said. "Water hides what it does not want seen."
I did not know how close we were. I did not know how much he already had planned. I only knew that when I touched the hollow behind Joaquin's ear, he reacted like the boy who had held my hand through bruises. That reaction was our small proof that underneath the suit and the corporate script, he still existed.
6
"Do you want to go home?" he asked me one night, after we had kissed until the villa's top floor was dizzy with perfume.
"Where is home now?" I asked.
"With me," he said. "Or at least with the truth."
He began to tell me things in small drops. He told me about a plan to reclaim what was stolen from him in a way that made sense of the lie about his "death." He told me about records and forged wills and about a name—Ervin Martin—who had been the quiet man that bent the law like a piece of wire for a price. He told me that the reason he had left was not cowardice but strategy.
"I used the absence as a proof of life," he said with a face like iron. "If the world thought I was dead, I could move like a ghost. I could see who murdered what."
"Who did?" I asked.
He only looked at me and his eyes were the old ones, the ones that had once made me believe in small safety. "Dominic and his mother. They would do anything to keep the family's estate."
7
I agreed to help. I lied to my boss. I took myself to the villa that had only ever been Dominic's and watched the rose stems bend like old scars. I put the recorder he told me to use in my bag. I told myself not to hope.
Then we found the bones.
"Did you bury her here?" I asked Dominic when I took him by the wrist and dragged him across the villa yard, to the pool. Rain had turned everything to mud and the camera lights from a dozen phones made the sky look like a stage.
He smiled like a small starving animal. "Why would I bury anyone? I am a businessman."
"You lie well," Joaquin said. He did not scream; he controlled his voice like a blade. "But people leave traces."
I walked backward as Detective Hernando Amin lifted the tiles. People were already gathered by then—neighbors who had for years pretended not to see the comings and goings, journalists who smelled a headline, shareholders who cared only once their names might be stained. The pool water, once crystal, shuddered with a new weight.
"Is that...?" someone whispered.
"It is," Ervin Martin said when he was brought in as our legal witness, voice flat and small. "The remains are human."
8
That night in the villa, Dominic tried to grin and pull the usual tricks. He ground his jaw and then, when the police cuffed him, he showed the world what ducks under pressure do not show: panic.
But the real punishment—the public unmaking of him—came later, at the shareholders' meeting.
The room smelled of polished wood and stale coffee. Cameras lined the ballroom like hungry birds. There were more reporters than usual. Everyone I had known at the company sat in neat rows—some with pity, some with alarm, some with the thin curiosity of the comfortable.
"I have something to say," Joaquin announced into the microphone. His voice was calm and iron. He set a clear stack of documents on the table: wills, bank transfers, maps, photos of the villa, and most damning of all, a file of audio from the recorder I had kept in my pocket through every humiliating conversation.
Dominic sat in the front row, dressed like a man who expected grace, not ruin. His mother, Deborah Estrada, sat beside him; she watched with a face that had been taught to meet disaster with disdain.
"For years," Joaquin said, "people have lived names that were not theirs. Money moved like blood. Wills were forged. Families were lied to. My sister—my aunt—was taken from us and buried beneath a pool that you, Dominic Baxter, call 'yours.'"
He turned the speaker on. The recorder filled the room with Dominic's voice, laughing, boasting, ordering. The lawyer Ervin Martin's name came up; the file showed transfers to shell companies. Photos of the pool with fresh soil and the exact spot marked. The room seemed to shrink around Dominic's face as truth gathered like weight.
"You're lying," Dominic shouted. "You fake men—"
He tried to stand, and his hand struck the table spectacles that slid to the carpet. Cameras snapped. People made noise like animals awakened from a dull sleep.
"Do you deny planting the tile?" Joaquin asked. "Do you deny that you ordered the dig at two in the morning? Do you deny bribing the lawyer for silence?"
Dominic's face went white in a way that was almost, horribly childish. "I—" He tried to name people to blame, to spin a web of names that would mask his deeds, but the web was thin. Shareholders leaned forward. "This is slander," his mother said, but her voice trembled.
"Here are the bank transfers," Joaquin said. "Here are the purchase records for the villa that Dominic's name briefly used. Here are photos of Wentworth Law firm receiving payments that correlate with a forged addendum to the original will."
A man in the back stood up and started filming with his phone. "This is new," he muttered. "Good."
"Do you understand what people are waiting for?" Joaquin said, and his voice became ice. "They want to know why he buried a woman."
The murmurs grew. An older woman in the front row made a small sound like a bird. Someone whispered, "She was his tenant, wasn't she? The maid? The woman next door?"
"Silence," Dominic's mother hissed, but her hiss lacked force. She had played a role that night and now that role had been accused of murder, roped and torn from her.
"For years you treated people like weeds to be pulled," Joaquin said. "You set the villa as a place to hide what you could not sell. You murdered to erase risk and you buried what you thought would never be found."
Dominic tried to laugh. "You can't prove—"
But Ervin Martin stood and laid out a series of receipts and emails that linked Dominic to payment schedules and contractors who had worked on the pool late at night. Detective Hernando had a field report that named Dominic as the person who paid cash, and then, in a still greater blow, the discovery of the bones had matched DNA to the woman we had looked for for ten years.
"She was my sister," Joaquin said quietly. "And I lived as dead to go inside and find the truth."
A reporter raised a hand. "Why didn't you bring this to the police sooner?"
"Because a man who buries a woman will also bury witnesses," Joaquin said. "Because the law bends for the men with money. Because I had to be patient."
"Shame," someone called. "Shame, shame!"
The room split between applause and shocked silence. A woman near me sobbed quietly. A man I had once admired stood up and left without a word. Cameras clicked like nervous teeth. Phones recorded every moment. Social media feeds lit with the first clips before the meeting even adjourned.
Dominic's face cracked. He started with anger, then slid to disbelief. He denied, then railed, then the floor seemed to tilt under his feet. He tried to play the victim and failed. His friends in the room showed their true colors—some fled, some took a step back.
"You will lose everything," Joaquin whispered as he folded the file. "You will pay."
9
The punishment was not private. It was public, thorough, and cold, and it was exactly the thing Dominic had feared because he had built his life on people not watching.
At the meeting, his title was removed, and within hours the board voted to freeze his assets. The bank called him. The flagship projects were retracted and re-awarded to a trust. The press had a field day—photos of Dominic cuffed at the villa, the dead garden marked on the map, the small white bones that proved what we all feared.
When the news hit social media, strangers in elevators hissed and pointed. His friends avoided him. His mother's social invitations dwindled to nothing. In his father's old neighborhoods, men spat when they saw him. It was not purely legal ruin; it was social isolation. People told stories about how they had once smiled with him at parties; those tales dissolved into silence.
And at the center of it all was a public day that none of us could forget.
The shareholders had called a press conference at Meridian Hall, the most visible place they could find. The room was filled—reporters, families, shareholders, and strangers who had bought seats online because they wanted a show. Two TV crews set up lights, and the air smelled sharp with electricity. I sat in the third row. Joaquin stood at a little podium beside a table strewn with evidence.
"Mr. Baxter," Joaquin said, "you stand accused of murder, of forging documents, of bribery." The microphones glinted like teeth.
Dominic stood and said, "I am innocent."
Someone laughed. Cameras caught the laugh and the laugh trended on the morning feeds. Dominic's bravado began to peel like old paint. "I have been a man of this city," he said. "I have business friends and supporters. I—"
"Do you deny that you visited the villa at night?" Joaquin asked.
"I—" He stammered. The room hummed. Reporters whispered into earpieces. A woman stood and held up a photograph of the pool taken at dawn—mud-caked and freshly disturbed. Another showed a transfer to Wentworth Law. A third played the recorded voice of Dominic ordering "cover the hole."
His face changed. First there was denial. "It isn't true. You are a liar." Then there was shock as more proofs were laid bare. He tried to redirect to corporate matters. "This is about your revenge!" he shouted, but the shout fell into a chorus of recorders and tweets.
"You murdered a woman and thought you could hide it under the systems you bought," Joaquin said. "That is not business. That is crime."
Dominic's mask slipped. He moved from anger to furious unbelief. "You will rot! You will see—" He pointed at Joaquin, hands shaking.
"No," Joaquin said softly. "I will not rot. You will. Because you buried not only a woman but your honor."
Dominic's breathing became uneven. His hands went from fists to open palms. "I didn't mean—" he tried to bargain.
Around him, the room reacted: a dock of hands lifted phones; a shareholder stood and said "Shame on you," with the strength of an old hurt finally spoken out; a young intern stood up and threw up her hands: "You killed someone. How do you sleep?" A man near us began to clap slowly, then more joined. It was not applause of praise; it was the dangerous applause of a crowd saying finally: this is done.
Dominic sagged. He tried to speak, then dropped to his knees as the press circled. The cameras filmed his face in close-ups—sweat and the first genuine fear he'd ever shown. People who had once laughed with him filmed him now and shouted for the police. The building security moved in as detectives approached to handcuff him. Someone hissed as the cuffs clicked.
He begged for the witnesses to be wrong. He begged for redemption. He begged, and the people in the room took photographs and posted them and took the footage to their feeds. Friends turned their faces away. His mother had the grace to look away but no grace to help.
This was his public shaming. It was not theatrical blood but it was worse: it was trusted life ripped away piece by piece. It was seeing the people who sheltered him cough and step back. It was the cameras and the phones and seeing your name turned into a hashtag you cannot scrub clean.
Dominic's reaction went from fury, to slick defiant laughter, to denial, to trembling pleas, and finally to quiet brokenness. The people who had once courted him now pointed him out like a pest. There were front-row gasps, reporters shouting into microphones, a chorus of "why" and "how could you." Someone recorded the entire scene and in less than an hour it had millions of views.
He was stripped of titles, barred from the company floor, and we watched as his social life died on camera. He slunk from the building under a blanket of cameras, his mouth making small silent pleas that would never be answered.
10
After the press, the story did not stop. The police took over and the legal system moved like it does when the public eye is on it. Dominic's assets were frozen. Contracts were reassigned. Friends who had once been eager to be seen with him parted like a crowd at a parade. He went from being a man who scared people with money to a man who frightened them with his empty hands.
But the best part for me was not revenge. It was a kind of clearing.
"Did you want them to suffer like this?" Joaquin asked me one night, watching the news feeds glow on our small living room wall.
"I wanted the truth," I said simply. "And once truth is out, people will judge him. That is punishment enough."
He folded his hands and kissed the top of my head. "You grew into something fierce," he whispered. "I am glad you stayed."
11
The days after were raw. I went with Cheng—Joaquin who would once again be called Cheng Moore, who pulled his surname back like a flag—through police stations, through interviews, through the small tedious business of proving what had been obvious. The bones matched the woman we had loved and lost. The case lay in evidence boxes waiting for trials.
But there was one small, private thing we did that felt like a promise.
"We have been apart five years," he said that night, in the car while rain smudged the city into watercolor. "I don't want another five."
"Then don't disappear again," I told him.
"I won't," he said, and then he did a very foolish thing he had done when we were children. He traced the hollow behind his ear with the same finger I had once used. "I will put that mole back," he joked lightly, and I laughed because it was something mad and small and human.
12
Valentina Sims, the woman who had been whispered about as his fiancée, left to marry someone else abroad the following spring, a rumor about alliances dissolving because of truth. People who had thought money and position were the all-powerful things learned a more careful lesson. Our names changed in the papers. Then the world moved on.
I married him quietly. He asked me in a way that made no sense for the cameras, in a small park with a single bench and a ring he had carved into a simple band. "Do you remember that bench?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "You once taught me to sit still while a storm passed."
He smiled. "Then stay."
We planted a small vine near the bench, one that would climb the trellis slowly and stubbornly. I watched him sometimes, tracing the scar along his ribs when he slept. I tasted the smoke of his cheap cigarettes and hated it a little, and yet I stayed.
13
The things people do to each other are recorded in bills and audio files and in the shape of petals. The thing that rescued me was that I had found the people who could fight back, and I had found my own restless courage. I had learned how to take an ugly truth and make it public.
The biggest punishment for Dominic was not that he was taken away. It was not only the legal consequences. It was everyone seeing the man who had buried a woman and realizing he had been disguised by suits and brutality. It was the careful public stripping of a life built on other people's fear. He begged, he raged, he broke.
And we watched him break under the bright lights so that no one else could hide behind polite smiles.
On my wedding night, as we sat on that small bench, Joaquin—my Cheng—took my hand. "You are still the vine," he said softly.
"I am stronger than vines," I replied.
He laughed and kissed my palm. "Good. You should be."
The vine climbed.
The End
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