Revenge14 min read
You put me on the ledge — you chose how I fell
ButterPicks14 views
They made me kneel on a rooftop because a man called Azriel Burns wanted me to die a public, slow death.
"I will say it," I told him. "I am the murderer. I deserve this."
He smiled like a judge and a pyromaniac at once. "Say it louder."
So I shouted until my throat was raw, until the words were shards. I said them with the same voice I used to use for applause.
"I am the murderer. I deserve this."
"Good," Azriel said. "One hundred times, Leonor. One hundred times you jump, and maybe—just maybe—I will consider letting your family live."
He used my real name like a brand. He liked the way it burned.
"I will do it," I said. I had already decided. "I will jump. One hundred times." My knees were dust and splinters beneath me, but I stood because I had to.
They put a tag around my neck—thick, ugly, cardboard—letters stamped in black: I AM A MURDERER.
"Bring her up," Azriel told Liam.
"Yes, sir." Liam Rinaldi's voice was flat, like someone reading an order that will not be questioned.
I remember the first fall as an eternity. I remember the city shrinking into a circle of light, the sound of my own scream blending with the wind. I remember the rope yanking me back and the taste of copper when I spat hot blood into my mouth.
When they hauled me back up, I opened my eyes and had nothing left of myself but the thinnest thread. My legs had been rebuilt into memory and scar, and now they were a record of every cruelty he had chosen for me.
"One more," Azriel said. He always said it like mercy. He never seemed to notice the way his voice sounded like a verdict.
I apologized. I lied. "It was my fault," I told the crowd that had gathered on the rooftop—men in suits, faces lit by their phones, eager for a spectacle. "I killed Jade. I am a murderer. I deserve this."
Jade Franke had been the soft woman in his life—soft until she wasn't, until she was dangerous in a way she hadn't let us see. Jade's face had haunted newspapers as Azriel's lost love for months. That story made the first fire they set for me burn hotter. They wanted thorns to match the crown they'd ripped from my head.
"Don't forget to add theatrics," Jack Buck had said earlier in the night as he fixed his cufflinks. "People like confession boxed in ribbon."
I kept jumping. They kept filming. I kept apologizing until my voice broke and then edged back on a thin hinge of stubbornness.
One hundred times, as he demanded. For my family's safety, for the lie I carried, for the wound Azriel had never let heal.
After the ninety-ninth pull and before the one hundredth, the rooftop fell away from everything I thought I knew. My stomach dropped like a coin. My head filled with night. I opened my eyes because I still had to obey the stage directions that Azriel had written for me—to die convincingly.
When I blinked, he was there, not on a balcony or behind a camera but right in front of me, thinner and somehow even colder than the air we were breathing.
"You look tired, Leonor," he said.
"You wanted the final act," I whispered back. "You wanted me to fall. Say goodbye."
His smile was a razor. "You owe me more than your life."
And then he spoke the thing I had hoped would never come: "Your parents—watch." He bent and tapped his phone.
I saw my father's face on the screen in my hand. Kenneth Alston—my father's face, pale and breaking. He had not slept for days. I had not wanted hairline cracks to become avalanches. I had stood at the edge of everything and given away the only thing that mattered—my father and the idea that he might one day be allowed to live without my sins on his record.
"Azriel," I said, numb. "Please."
He looked at me with a hunger that could not be satisfied. "They watched you every time. They begged. They begged while you jumped. They—"
He stopped. The smile peeled from his face. "They jumped today," Azriel said, flat as a knell.
The rooftop went black for a moment. I felt my knees find nothing. "What—" My voice cracked like glass.
"You want me to consider it?" he asked. "Consider that you might keep breathing after a hundred jumps? I wanted to give you a choice."
My father, Kenneth Alston—the man who had taught me how to count time between rehearsals—was dead because Azriel wanted a final theatrical note. He had chosen the exact hour.
In my chest a small calm arrived. It was not peace. It was verdict. "Azriel Burns," I said slowly, "I curse you."
I remember the words like a small, hard stone. "I curse you to lose what you love. To die alone. To never be forgiven."
He blinked. "You think curses work?"
"I think they do," I said.
That day I stepped off the ledge.
But I did not die.
Later, when my body came back together in cast and bandage and hospital smell, I was a different creature. The world had carved itself into pieces of hunger and pettiness and light where it wanted to be cruel. Emery Schmitz found me then.
"You're alive," Emery said softly the first time I woke up. His hands were steady. His voice had not known me for ten years, but something in the way he said my childhood nickname made a door open I thought Azriel had nailed shut.
"Why?" I asked him.
"Because I could save you," Emery said. "Because you deserve better than what he gave you."
In the quiet after the surgeries, Emery whispered things that built me back. He sewed my raggedness into new seams. He found a way into my world's scattered pieces and started to set them on a shelf. He taught me that memory could be sharpened, and that scars could be rearranged into something that did not announce me as broken.
"Will you stay?" I would ask when the pain let me ask anything at all.
He would smile in a way that made some small sun feel like it could reappear. "Always," Emery said.
I lied to him. I needed to. For months I pretended I could forget what I had lost and what I still carried.
They called me Mariana Dixon now. New name, quieter face, an ugly patch where a life had been. Emery said it would be safer. He said people here would not see me and then tell Azriel.
He was right for a while. I taught children at a small school—kids with hands that moved like music, children who could not hear and learned to feel rhythm with their feet. I learned to take the lightness they offered and stash it inside like contraband.
Then, inevitably, I saw him again.
"Leonor Solovyov?" he said from a third-row seat at a school recital, as if he were confused rather than certain.
I had called myself Mariana for months, and yet his voice dropped me back into the world that had broken me. He had been the storm before. He was the storm again, only now he had a different face: a man who had lost his lover and thought himself a widower, a man who had spent five years building a fortress out of everything he could command. He called himself by the name of the man whose heart he thought he had been given.
At the first public sighting the shape of things shifted. Azriel Burns had kept a corpse in a cold house and whispered to it the words he could not say in life. He had been wrong about me and about Jade and about everything else his rage had built into a judgment.
What he did not know was that Jade Franke—Azriel's "dead" beloved—had not been the gentle truth everyone had been told. Jade had engineered. Jade had smiled in the right places and struck in the dark. She and Alejandro Avila, and a handful of men with nice jackets like Jack Buck, had planted the narrative that destroyed me. They had rehearsed it until the cameras could not tell the lie from the truth.
I watched them move in the world like men saving themselves at other people's expense and the poison in me hardened into a plan. Not for revenge the way a child imagines revenge—loud and messy and animal—but a plan that would make their lies visible to everyone at once.
A public punishment, yes. But not the one Azriel had chosen for me.
The first scene of the public undoing was not the courthouse but the annual shareholders' gala of Burns Holdings. He loved being on stage. He loved the lights. He loved the audience that swallowed anything he told them because he looked like a god in a suit.
"Azriel," I said the night I walked into the gala, my hair up and my face a different map. Emmalynn Burke, who worked in public relations, had given me a borrowed dress. "Hello."
He looked for a sign to tell him who I was. "You shouldn't be here," he said.
"Neither should you," I said quietly. "Tonight is for the world to see something it deserves to see."
"Don't do anything stupid," he whispered. His voice had the color of fear that comes late.
"Everything I'm going to do is painfully, abundantly public," I said.
We were not alone. Jack Buck and Alejandro Avila were at the edge of the stage laughing with the sort of cruelty that can be tuned to make others smaller. Nearby Jade Franke stood with poised hands—hands that had once been sold as innocence. There were cameras. There were investors. There were men who would cheer Azriel's next acquisition the same way they'd hiss at a scandal over lunch.
I had a plan that fit the room. Emery had stitched my body back but I had spent nights sewing together threads of evidence. There were ledger prints—money shifting, anonymous calls, receipts for staged witnesses. There were messages between Jade and Alejandro. There were files Azriel thought were shredded that proved the cold transactions in his name, the night he decided to ruin a family in front of the world.
"Azriel," I said into the microphone that was handed to me like a relay baton. "Listen."
A hush struck the room like a blade. People turned. Some phones were already up, ready to record a new spectacle.
"You made me jump a hundred times. You used my parents as a bargaining chip. You broke bones and futures. You destroyed my body and my family's last small rights to peace."
Azriel's jaw clenched. He thought I would beg. He thought I would collapse. He did not know me.
I set a small device on the podium. Everyone leaned. The screen behind Azriel flickered.
The first clip was Jade's voice, calm and smug, recorded in a private message to Alejandro. "Make sure the camera angles show her hesitation," she said. "We can't have any sympathy for her on the night of her surprise. People need to shout."
Gasps ran the room. A woman near the front stood up, her palms pressed to her mouth.
"That's not proof," Azriel said instantly. "Forgery."
"Play the bank transfers," I said.
Someone in the crowd shouted for the manager. Jack Buck cursed and reached for his phone. Alejandro Avila's face went thin as he watched his name bloom red across the projector.
Numbers scrolled. Transfers to shell accounts, then to "event expenses" disguised as "security." Receipts showed phone calls, hotels, a van rented on the morning of the staged incident. In the corner of one receipt, a name: Jade Franke. In the corner of another, Alejandro Avila's signature.
"You're lying," Jade hissed. "This is a trick."
"Is it?" I asked. "What about the witnesses who said they saw me push Jade? Do they want to say how much they were paid?"
Someone in the back lifted his phone. "Did you pay my cousin three thousand? He said you did," he yelled.
The room turned. Investors murmured. Cameras panned to Azriel's face. He had spent a decade weaving his image into the world. Now the threads were fraying.
"Burns Holdings will investigate," Azriel managed, but his voice had the brittle edge of someone who had lost his best lines.
"Investigation?" I laughed then, a sound that surprised me with how clean it seemed. "There are records. The receipts. The calls. The men who took my money and my life. You kept a corpse as a shrine to your bad taste. You thought secrets lived in cold rooms. Secrets live in accounts, in messages, in the mouths of the people you bought."
"Security," Azriel barked. "Remove her."
"Do it," I said. "But you should know—those videos are already streaming."
A murmur rose like a wind. Twenty journalists in the room had phones open, live feeds ready. Emery's piece was in place—he had arranged for a medical affidavit detailing the injuries I'd sustained under Azriel's orders, links tying Burns Holdings to the private security firms that had been used to enforce humiliations.
The first punishment was financial. Stock tickers on the screens dimmed and then flashed. Rumors spread faster than any PR team could spin. Burns Holdings shares dropped. Investors whispered. The Board froze. Azriel's smile, which had once been carved by years of practice, slipped like wet paper.
"You're finished," whispered Alejandro in the corner, but his voice lacked the iron he had shown earlier.
He had not yet learned that a certain kind of truth does not need theatrics to destroy a man. It only needs other men who are tired of being complicit.
Then the worst part for them came: the room itself turned into jury and executioner.
A mother of a child I had taught took a microphone. "My daughter used to be ashamed to speak about being poor. She came home and said the woman in the videos was not a criminal. She said you lied, Mr. Avila. She said she saw you pay people to stage this. My child has nightmares from watching them throw things at her."
She cried. People listened. A man near the front stood up and walked right into the center like a charge. "I was paid to clap and shout that night," he confessed. "They gave me money. It was Alejandro."
One by one, men and women started to stand. Small confessions became a wave. People who had been paid to make the show happen were suddenly unembarrassed and angry. Money bought them a weekend, but the truth bought them their pride back. They wanted it out. They wanted Azriel to know how dirty the stage had been.
I had expected resistance. I had expected lawyers and denials. I had not expected such velocity—that truth would move like an avalanche once it had a push.
Jade's eyes went through stages: first red with anger, then disbelief, then the hollow panic of someone who had moved all her life thinking money could fix any wound. Alejandro's jaw trembled. Jack Buck's laugh dried in his throat.
"People," the lead investor said, his voice like a gavel. "We will call the board. Legal counsel—now. No—call the press."
The cameras remained. Phones recorded. The livestream was shared. Comments exploded. People who had worshipped Azriel now asked for the floor. The CEO, who had once dictated terms to reporters, saw his empire wobble in front of his own crowd.
Azriel stood like a man whose muscles had been anesthetized. He tried to speak but no words could knit the hole that truth had torn. His private life was spilling onto the public stage like bile. The shareholders' forum, once a place for praise, had become a tribunal.
"You're a criminal," someone shouted. "You used the law to hide your mess. You framed a dancer to save your dead lover."
Azriel looked smaller than the day I had known him. He tried for fury and settled for fear.
"Azriel Burns," I said into the room, "you will not find pity here."
He had set the world alight around me and expected to be the only one to hold the match. The public unraveling moved faster than any punishment he might have planned for me. It was suffocating, and that suffocation was justice.
The second punishment came through people. Those who had been bought for the stunt now stood in full view and stripped themselves of that lie. They pointed to Jade Franke. They pointed to Alejandro Avila. They told bank account numbers and dates. They told how the cameras were placed. They told how the nights of my humiliation were choreographed like an obscene ballet.
"You arranged this," one woman said to Jade, voice shaking. "You watched my son's fingers shake as he typed the script. You told us how to shout at her."
Jade's face was white as bone. "I did what I had to," she said, then tried to laugh. "It was business."
"Business?" The room gasped. "You made a woman jump a hundred times for a dollar and a story."
A man threw a glass of water at Alejandro's feet. Phones recorded. Someone called the authorities. A line of reporters formed at the gala's exit like sharks around a bleeding whale.
That night, Jade and Alejandro were confronted not by a judge but by the public's hunger for proof and the greed of men who had been bought and wanted to be clean again. The humiliation came in a thousand small ways: video feeds, shouts, questions about payment, interviews that demanded names and methods, and the merciless light of friends turning away.
By the time Azriel walked out of the building, the live feeds had already churned his empire into a rumor. Investors fled. The Board issued a terse statement. A few of his closest allies left his side with the speed of men abandoning a sinking ship.
Azriel's punishment would not be a single act. It would be an erosion. The man who had loved control found himself losing everything he had built: reputation, power, trust. He tried to bargain at a private meeting, but the footage of Jade and Alejandro folded like wet paper against every word he offered. He tried to call lawyers. He tried to stage denials. But the proof had hands.
"What do you want?" Azriel asked me later when the cameras were not focused on him, when the humiliation had gone from gala to reactions across feeds and networks. He said it like he wanted to be spared the sound of it all.
"I want your truth," I said.
That night he learned that power can be public, not private. He learned to feel the slow, grinding loss as his name became a headline of hatred. His empire shrank around him as partners left, as lawsuits piled on, as the city that had once applauded him watched him stumble.
It was not a neat ending. Justice seldom is.
But there was another scene to draw breath in, the one I owed to so many small human avengers.
They had tried to kill my life with a crowd. I gave them a crowd that would not forget.
At the shareholders' hall, Jade Franke's face—once the perfect profile in glossy magazines—stared back from every screen. She had applied makeup to disguise the horrors she'd enacted. The cameras did not care for makeup.
"Look at me," she screamed at one point, trying to gather the audience like a child. "I—"
Her voice broke and the room watched the smile fall off in a public collapse.
Alejandro tried to run. Jack Buck tried to laugh. Their faces were filmed as they were surrounded by reporters who asked about payments, about phone calls, about who had hired whom.
I watched them reveal their faces in a hundred pieces: stunned, then frightened, then pleading, then finally small. Their reactions passed through the full vocabulary of a person losing grip—denial, anger, bargaining, and finally a raw shame made worse by the fact that every step unraveling them was recorded and shared.
Azriel's fall would be a slow public skeleton. Jade's humiliation would be a thousand small deaths: in brand deals lost, in friends who turned away, in the way the city would never let her name be pronounced without pause again. Alejandro's ruin would be similar but quicker; men like him rely on appearances. A single night of exposure and the game is over.
"Do you feel anything at all?" I asked Azriel in a hospital corridor later, when his face was pallid and the cameras were elsewhere, because there were other bodies to tend.
He flinched. "Regret?" he tried to name it.
"I feel what I need to," I said.
A year after that court of public opinion and shareholders' motions, Azriel's empire was a different thing. He retained a company with a different name, lawyers, and very few friends. The city had a new wind. The people who had been paid to make my life a spectacle were now walking with the shame of being part of a thing that had broken someone into pieces.
They found new ways to be unimportant.
As for me, the city taught me small graces. Emery and I returned to a life stitched of fragile joys: a steady morning coffee, a quiet classroom where children made noise by clapping in rhythm, a little apartment with a cracked balcony and a spider plant I tended as if it were a child.
One evening I went back to the rooftop where I had been made to die a hundred times. The city looked the same—still careless and luminous—and I took out the cardboard tag I had been forced to wear. It still had the black letters but its corners had softened with use.
I folded that piece of cardboard once, twice, and then placed it in a book. I put the book on a shelf where the children would sometimes stand to reach for stories. I told them a story about a ballerina who fell and learned to stand. They clapped, and I taught them a step, a small turn.
"Why did he do it?" one child asked one afternoon, the word soft and simple.
"He was afraid," I told her. "He tried to make other people's pain into a fortress so he would not feel his own. It didn't work."
"Does he know he's bad now?" another asked.
"I think he knows," I said. "He knows too late." I kept my voice light because their small faces needed only light.
At night Emery would come home and slide an arm around my waist and ask for the day. "What did you see?" he would ask.
"Something brave," I would say.
I do not know how much of justice can be measured in public humiliation or in the slow decay of a name. I do know this: Azriel Burns lost everything he thought mattered, and Jade Franke and Alejandro Avila lost their comfortable masks. The city remembers. People who had once cheered found new firmness in refusing to be bought again.
Months later, a photograph of Azriel—one where he looked older and small—appeared in the press with the headline: "Azriel Burns Resigns from Public Life." Readers commented and argued and forgot, each in their own way.
I kept teaching. Emery kept healing bodies. Kenneth Alston, my father, became a quiet presence that would laugh at my terrible jokes. The rooftop remained. The cardboard remained. The small ballet in the school grew.
When the last thread of public spectacle had frayed and Azriel's empire had become a memory, I took my students to the place where I had once been asked to die. I taught them a step where you stretch your arms out and hold the world at bay; then you bring them back in. It was a small gesture, private, and absolutely mine.
On that rooftop, with the city breathing below, I said nothing. I simply turned, felt the wind, and danced a small, private step that belonged to me and to no one else.
"That is our move," I told them. "Never let anyone decide when you stop."
The End
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