Revenge11 min read
“Two Clears”: How I Turned My Prison Scar into His Fall
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"Please, please, save my father," I begged, my forehead pressed to the ICU glass.
I could see his hand twitch under the blankets. Machines were loud and red. I felt small and empty.
"Blakely," Xander Black said behind me, his voice flat as steel. "Look at him."
He shoved my head so hard my lips left a smear on the glass.
"He used my mother," Xander spat at the old man on the bed. "He lied. He let her drown and blamed her. You think I won't make them pay?"
My father tried to speak. He could only drool and blink.
"Dad!" I shrieked when he turned his head toward me.
Xander's hand was an iron clamp on the back of my skull. "Your father ruined my life," he told me, loud and cold. "I will make you the price."
I pulled back and hit the glass with the back of my head. Pain flashed, then anger.
"Xander, you can't do this to me," I said. "Please. Anything."
He laughed. "Anything, huh?" His fingers found my jaw like he was ending a file. "You were my lover at eighteen. You were never my future. You were my toy."
I coughed. I had lived ten years believing his touch meant love. I had been his secretary, then his lover, then his shadow. I had built myself for him.
"Why did you lie to me?" I whispered.
"Because your father took my mother," Xander said. "Because I wanted him to feel what I felt. Because this is how you pay."
He let go of my face and walked away. The hospital lights blurred.
—
They accused me of selling company secrets.
I sat on a hard chair in a courtroom and watched evidence slide across the screen, and each file was a nail.
"Ms. Colombo," Xander said from the other side of the room. "You emailed the bid to our rival. The transaction matches. The timestamps match."
I looked at the email headers and felt dizzy. "Xander, I never sent anything to those men," I said. "You know me. I'm your secretary."
"You were my lover," he said in court, eyes empty. "You knew my work."
I hired lawyers. We pleaded. I fought and I lost. My father was ill, my debts raw, and the judge found me guilty.
"How long?" I asked, voice gone small.
"Two years and seven months," my lawyer said.
I thought of my father on the bed and thought of where we would bury him. I didn't cry then. I packed a plastic bag with two old shirts and a notebook and walked into the gray doors.
—
Prison is a loud, mean school.
"You can't be soft," I told myself on my first night. "You won't make it."
They tried to take things. I fought. I learned to use a shoe like a hand. I learned to hold my ground.
One night a thin woman spat at my tray. I slapped her until she howled. The other women learned my face first by that fight. Fear has value in a place like that.
I learned small trades—cleaning, sewing, listening. I slept with one eye always open. I counted mornings like currency.
Once I found out I was pregnant, the world turned narrow and bright.
"Ethan," I said when he came to the glass one visit, "I need you."
Ethan Rogers—my neighbor outside, the man who once protected me by staying away—pressed his palms to the glass. He had thick hands and tired eyes.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked. "Why did you go back to him?"
"I had no choice," I said. "My father. The trial. I had to survive."
"Don't have an abortion?" he said. His face crumpled. "Blakely, why would you be so cruel to yourself?"
"It's my child," I said. "I am done giving up the part of me that loves."
There was a plan in his eyes then—a dangerous, necessary plan. He promised the hospital bills would be covered. He promised the child would be safe. He promised he would not fail me.
When the baby came, the doctor frowned. "She lost a kidney," he said as if saying weather. "She already did this once."
I was dizzy during recovery. Someone carried the baby—small and red—and then a man walked off with her.
"Ethan," I demanded. "You gave her to me. Where is she?"
He closed his eyes. "I couldn't leave her with you while you had no freedom," he said. "I am taking care of her. You will know when you are free."
I had a scar on my belly and a new emptiness of missing parts.
—
I got out.
Sunlight stabbed my eyes when the gate opened. Two years and seven months had stripped me like a tide strips shells.
I went back to Xander's building. The receptionist didn't know me.
"I am Xander's secretary," I told her, all practiced charm. "He said I could come."
They blinked. The name meant nothing like it used to. I walked in like a shadow and up to the glass door.
"Blakely," Xander said when he saw me. He didn't stand. He didn't move much. He stared.
"You sued me," I said. "Drop it?"
"Drop it?" He smiled where smiles didn't exist. "You were the daughter of the man who ruined my mother. Drop it?"
I felt something snap. "Give me money," I said. "I need to work. I can't get hired with this on me."
He threw a check at me and a word like a knife. "Leave," he said.
I stepped out like I had a purpose, holding the check like air in my fist. I bowed slightly as if to him and left.
Outside, I laughed once on the sidewalk until I cried in a taxi. I went to the bank and put the money away. I went to the hospital.
My daughter—my little red thing—had a bald shaved head and a name the nurse said like a prayer. Leukemia. The bills made the number in my chest grow sharp.
I had promised to become the kind of woman who could handle anything. That did not mean I could feel anything.
—
Xander called me.
"You are a gambler now?" he said, voice rough. "You will sell yourself."
I lied. I said yes. I told him I needed money for bills. I told him I would do whatever.
He fetched me like an animal into his house, signed a check, and gave me rules.
"Come to my house every night," he said. "Be clean. Be quiet. Remain mine for a month."
I swallowed and put a small white tablet in my mouth—vitamins from my bag. He watched me swallow but never saw my plan.
The month was a contract.
He slept and worked and let me be a commodity. He was cold about it and hot sometimes by mistake. I was colder.
We had an arrangement, both of us. I collected money. I watched him at his worst and his private edges. I watched his hands. I watched the scar in him.
Once, he raised his voice.
"You sold a kidney?" he asked one night, white with an anger that smelled like alarm.
"No," I said. "I sold a part of what I couldn't afford to keep."
He slapped me. "You are mine to control." He shouted until he had no voice law left for cruelty.
The month ended and so did the pretense.
He expected me to beg. I did not. I went back to the world. I took small jobs. I called Ethan to ask about my child.
"You will come get her when you can," he said. "I will not tell him. Not yet."
I wanted to believe him.
—
Once I left Xander's world, I changed my face.
I learned makeup that lines the bone and shadowed the cheek. I learned how to be two people: one who laughed and sold a fantasy, and one who planned.
I took a new name at work—Linda—and I walked into places where power listened to polished heels. I rose fast because I knew how to work men with a pen like a knife. I knew how to sign things they wanted to sign.
Xander saw me as a ghost he could not kill.
He called meetings. He watched me speak. He won us a contract.
That night when he invited me to dinner, he asked about my past.
"Who are you?" he said, when he followed me to the car and the house.
"Someone who needs to work," I said, smiling.
That night he took me and bruised me with pleasures and confessions. He asked me to tell him, again and again, who I was.
I didn't have to tell him. He guessed at the corners. He studied the lines.
"You're not who I thought," he said, after he slept in a debtless stupor of my body. "You're not hers."
"Maybe I'm not," I said. "But I can be."
On the table he left a note with one line: "Last dinner—Linda."
I signed his deals, every one. He scribbled his name without reading. He gave me money by signing and making public decisions. I walked away with signatures and a slow grin.
We bedded often because I used him and he used me. But I used him differently. Each night I collected proof—wired notes, official stamps, approvals.
"You want the project?" he asked, half-breathless. "Name it."
I named it, and he signed.
—
Then the court case we had staged came true.
"Xander Black," I said into the courtroom, voice steady. "You leaked my father's files."
Xander looked thin as bone but he was steady. "I did," he said.
He admitted to the bribe, to the set-up, to the emails. He stood and took responsibility on record in a cold calm I had not expected.
"Why?" I hissed in the hall later. "Why would you give yourself up?"
He smiled like a man who had eaten iron. "Because, Blakely," he said softly, "some debts are mine alone."
He turned, as if to leave, and his back carried the weight of a man who had chosen punishment over the victory he once craved.
The company board was stunned. The papers sang for a while. The city watched with a sport's attention. He had been the unassailable CEO. Now he was in handcuffs.
I felt none of the screaming pleasure I had planned for. I felt air let out of a balloon. The slow release of a plan executed on a heartbeat of paper is less pretty than you think.
But the world had to change for me. The project approvals he'd signed were still real. Contracts exist when names are printed. The signatures were his, but the papers were legal.
I held a stack of papers that made my hand tremble. He had, a year before, quietly signed a transfer of shares: he had made me the main shareholder of the company that had punished me.
I opened the file in my office alone. It said what it needed to say. He had prepared for me to take the reins. He had predicted my thirst for something more than prison and revenge.
"Why did you do this?" I asked the empty room.
Because he thought repayment meant he'd be free to face himself.
—
He went to prison. He had chosen to.
While he sat behind steel, the company that had bound me tightened under my steady steps.
"Make the changes," I told the board. "We will invest in the pediatric ward in private hospitals. We will fund the research I need for my daughter."
They blinked, then signed.
I visited no prisons. I worked.
My child—my daughter, the small fire-star who had almost died—became the center of my calculations. I moved her to specialists in Australia; I fought; I paid. I watched as hematologists cleared another month of remission.
Once, in a foreign hospital corridor, a woman in a white coat smiled and said, "Her counts look better."
I held the little hand and promised myself I would not waste this victory.
Xander wrote letters.
"You must wait," he wrote in one, in a hand that still looped like a rope around my name. "Wait for me."
I laughed at the note and folded it into a folder labeled: EVIDENCE. "Keep going," I told my assistant.
But sometimes, when the night was thin and the world quiet, I read his line and felt something break open: an old wound that nothing could seal. I was not sure if the part that broke was pity or a memory of beer and cheap candy we once shared.
He was a man who had decided to punish and then punished himself as well.
—
I had expected to enjoy his fall.
"Will you be satisfied?" my friend Emiko asked me. We stood in a quiet corridor where the company photos hung like forgotten faces.
"If I am, then it is a small pleasure," I said. "This was never just about prison. It's about making my daughter safe."
He had lost power and gained pain. Yet he had also given me everything of consequence while he still had hands.
"Why?" Emiko asked. "Why would he sign so much away?"
"Because he wanted me to have what I wanted," I said. "He wanted to stop me from burning down the world we shared. He wanted company peace. He wanted...something like that."
She shook her head. "People are strange."
They are. I stayed strange too.
—
In the end, he sat in a small visiting room and looked older.
"You left me a company," I said when I saw him through the bulletproof glass. "Why? You could have kept everything."
He watched my daughter play in the waiting room—she had grown hair, light and stubborn.
"Because," he said slowly, "I wanted what I had done to mean more than revenge. I wanted to clear my debts. I wanted to pay you in a way you could not spend. I wanted to be honest in one place."
"You could have simply told me," I said.
"I needed to feel the cost," he said. "I needed to feel small enough to know what I had taken."
He reached toward the glass and then stopped. We couldn't touch.
"I don't want your pity," I said.
"You don't have to wait for pity," he said. "Just know—"
"Know what?"
"That the shares were my choice," he said. "That I hoped in prison I would learn to be a man who could hold his mistakes. That I knew you'd take the company and use it well."
He looked at me like a man who had checked his list one last time. "And you must promise to give our daughter a future that is clean. Not mine. Not yours. Hers."
I watched his jaw working.
"Fine," I said. "I'll take the company. I'll give her a future. But I will never wait for you."
He nodded like a man given a map he cannot read. He also smiled, a small thing. "Then don't wait."
He closed his eyes. The guard came and a bolt clicked.
Walking back to the car, the sky was a blank inch of cold. I felt hollow and not hollow at the same time.
On the drive home I opened the folder of his signatures. He had transferred enough to make things right, to fund treatments and research, to buy quiet health and a medical team for my daughter.
He had left me his ledger. He had left me his mistake. He had left me the power to change our child's life.
When the little girl fell asleep in my arms that evening, I placed my cheek against her warm head and thought of the glass at the ICU, of the man who had pulled my hair, of the man who had signed his life into a ledger and handed it to me.
I had a company and a child and a scar that would never be pretty.
I had a name that used to be a secret.
I had done what I promised: I had not surrendered my child. I had not begged. I had not broken.
At night, I sometimes write a page and then tear it in two. Some things you want to say and can't. Some things you don't want to say at all.
After a year, the board learned to call me Ms. Colombo, CEO. They learned the rhythm of my speech and the firmness of my hand.
They also learned how I used the funds. "Pediatrics," I said. "Research. Support. No empty apologies."
They signed on.
Xander's letters came less. Once he asked if he could see her. I said no.
"Why?" he wrote. "Is it hate?"
"Not hate," I said. "Protection."
Sometimes I wonder which of us had been the real prisoner all along. He had been trapped in a cage of hate and revenge. I had been trapped by hope and loyalty. We both were learning new things about time.
Years shake a lot out.
One day the phone rang.
"Ms. Colombo," Ethan said on the line, his voice older but kind. "You should come. There's someone who wants to say something."
At the hospital, my daughter's hair had finally grown long enough to twist into a braid. She laughed at a cartoon.
Xander was there, thin and tired and not a criminal in the way the papers made him out to be now, but a man with a heavy ledger on his chest.
He did not try to touch me. He did not ask for her. He handed me a small wooden box.
"It was my mother's," he said. "She used to keep a little stone in it when she feared the sea. She thought a stone could anchor you. I thought of this as a stone."
I opened it. There was nothing special inside. A scrap of paper with a tiny pressed leaf.
"I'm sorry," he said.
I took the leaf out and looked at it. It was ordinary. It had been pressed flat by time.
"My favor to you," he said softly, "is that I will not be part of your life unless you want me to be. Maybe one day you'll choose, but that's not my right."
I looked at my daughter, wide-eyed and chewing on a pencil.
"Will you be left with something?" he asked.
"I have a company, a child, and a scar," I said. "You have your prison. Keep your apologies."
He nodded like a man who finally learned the right time to leave.
When he turned and walked away, I felt nothing like victory. I felt like I had closed a heavy, old door.
But I had closed it on my terms. I had made sure the child I loved would have a future.
Outside the hospital, snow began to fall, thin and steady.
I lifted my daughter's small mittened hand and watched the flakes land on her braid like stars.
"Let's go home," I said.
She smiled. "Home?"
"Yes, home."
I took one more look at the city skyline. The tall glass towers did not mean much to me now. Power was useful. Money was a tool. Revenge had been a fire that consumed. What I wanted most—strangely, simply—was quiet safety for my child.
We walked into the cold and the light, and I kept the wooden box in my pocket like a small, dead weight. It was not a stone of anchors. It was a leaf of seasons.
I had reclaimed my life and I had chosen my own ending. I would make a new kind of ledger now—one written in schoolbooks, hospital receipts, and small bedtime stories. The best revenge, I decided, was a life: stubborn, steady, and warm.
The End
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