Face-Slapping15 min read
"You Were Never Mine" — The Night I Broke Him
ButterPicks10 views
"I won't do it." I said it loud enough so the whole room could hear.
Valentino Schwarz smiled like a man already in possession of a kingdom. "You will," he said. "You always do what you are told."
I looked at him, at the elegant span of his shoulders, at the slow amusement in his eyes. The chandelier light sliced across his jaw, and for a moment I felt the old, nausea-making trick: he could make me see shadows and call them truth.
"You think this is a performance," I said. "It was never a choice."
He stood in the doorway of his study, hands in his pockets, casual and dangerous. Boden Wilson hovered behind him like a shadow with a tablet. "He must be busy tonight, Maya," Boden said, in that soft way assistants do when they hate what they must report. "The board is waiting."
"I'm not your project," I said.
Valentino's laugh was a small, quiet thing. "You are my proof. You are everything I need to finish what she started."
She. The word hit me like a slap. "Who?" I asked.
He lifted his chin. "Fang. She died. You look like her. You remember her face every time you close your eyes."
My hands went cold. "You don't get to claim her," I whispered.
He moved closer, and his voice dropped: "You will act as if you want me. You will make them believe. You will make my family forget her. In return, you get what your family wants."
"That's a lie." I breathed it, but I knew it wasn't. My mother had called me two months ago in a tone that asked for obedience, and my sister Beatrice Kraus had pressed a file into my hand like a sentence. Gabriella Schwarz—my mother, but not really—had smiled at Valentino at the funeral and said the words I had been taught to say: "Please take care of my daughter." I had packed a suitcase and learned how to smile like someone else.
Valentino's smile didn't reach his eyes. "We start with tonight. Wear what they asked. Come to the gala. Make them want you as proof I can move on. Then I sign the contract."
"Sign the contract?" I said, incredulous. "You want me to be a woman who can buy you a business deal?"
"You know how business works," he said. "You know how people with names move money. Beatrice and Gabriella thought of a plan. You followed it. You will finish it."
"They tied Chen Nichols up in the cellar," I said suddenly.
Valentino's face didn't change. "You still care for that fool's feelings?"
"I care about him being alive," I said. The memory made me sick: Chen Nichols tied to a chair in a damp room, his glasses broken, his hands raw. He had followed me from the first day I'd come back, a friend and a keeper. He had been the only one who was not plotting to use me.
Valentino shrugged. "We needed no witnesses."
"I will not—" Words failed me.
He put a finger over my mouth. "You will," he repeated. "Because your mother made a deal, and your sister wanted a rise. You want them to love you. You will act."
I looked away. "When I act, people die," I said. "Not only lives. Trust. What you're asking is cruelty."
"You are so dramatic." He tugged the sleeve of my coat with a faint laugh. "Wear the dress. Smile in the right places. Pretend to be her. If you do well, the boards will sign. If the boards sign, your mother gets what she wants. You get a soft room and a chance to leave with some dignity."
"You can't buy my dignity," I said.
Valentino cocked his head. "Maybe not. But I can change your future. Accept, and in a year you'll be free."
"Free how?" I asked. "Free while you still own the place that keeps me safe? Free with my name stained? Free with Chen hurt?"
He smiled coldbloodedly. "People make choices. We are not kind because we own kindness. We are kind because we have time to be."
I thought of the nights I had learned to be someone else, of the music sheets in my suitcase, of Chen Nichols' quiet hope. I thought of my mother's eyes when she told me this was the only way. I thought of Beatrice's light, opportunistic grin when she said, "This is how the world works."
I nodded once.
"It begins tonight," I said.
---
"You're beautiful," Valentino told me in the car. "You have her bones."
"Don't talk like that," I snapped. "Don't—"
"Relax." He reached over to straighten the flyer in my hand. "This is for a deal. This is for business. You can do it."
I watched the town slide past and felt like an actor watching the stage roll toward him. My stomach turned; I swallowed bile.
At the gala, the room smelled of expensive perfume and old alliances. A marble floor reflected glittering gowns. Cameras blinked like fish. I moved like a ghost through it all, wrapped in silks borrowed from another life.
Valentino introduced me as his "friend from abroad." Beatrice hovered nearby, eyes sharp, cataloguing reactions. My mother sat at a distance, palms pressed together like a saint.
I smiled.
"Say something nice," Valentino murmured when the cameras shuffled closer. "Say her name, tell a story."
"You think I owe her my voice," I hissed.
"You owe her everything," he answered.
So I smiled and told them stories. I learned to mimic the way she laughed in the old picture that Valentino kept in his safe. I knew every tilt of the jaw. The room drank it up. Men leaned forward. Women straightened.
Valentino beamed. "See?" he whispered later, when the room had opened like a sea and we were alone on a balcony. "You make my point."
"I didn't make your point," I said. "I told the truth."
He laughed softly. "We both prefer fiction. Easier to control."
The cameras later that evening showed what was expected: a flirt, a laugh, a near-kiss that could be read as accidental. It was all choreography. I played the part as if my hands were someone else's.
---
Weeks passed in that pattern.
I became their image. I learned Valentino's favorite sleep music. I learned the curve of his smile when he was lying. I learned how Boden's phone chimed with messages that were never meant for my eyes. I learned not to notice when my phone buzzed and the name "Chen" appeared with blank messages.
Chen Nichols came once, ragged, to the driveway. He said nothing about the cellar any more; he only looked at me like a man whose faith had been twisted and still somehow kept breathing.
"Leave," he said once. "Run."
"I can't," I told him. "My mother signed my life in ink."
He put his hand over mine and squeezed. "I will get you out."
I wanted to believe him.
Instead, I learned the worst.
---
On the day the contract was to be signed, I felt the ground fall away.
Boden warned me: "There are moves, Maya. Prepare for questions."
Valentino said, "Just sign the public photo. The money moves tonight."
Beatrice smiled like a queen about to receive her crown.
Then the board room filled: investors, lawyers, clients, press. More faces than I had seen in my life. Cameras. Glass. Everyone expected a show and a contract. Villa Luma had never held so many predators in single daylight.
"The document is here," the lawyer said. "We just need a statement from Mr. Schwarz."
Everyone murmured. Valentino stood at the head of the table like a king. He lifted a hand and began, "Tonight, I will close the deal—for the memory of someone I loved. And I'd like to thank—"
I felt the air constrict.
Then Boden's tablet flickered and a message appeared on the large screen: "Public disclosure."
Valentino blinked. His smile wavered.
"No, no," he said. "Boden, what—"
Boden's face was pale. "Valentino, the presentation—"
The lawyer frowned. "What is that?"
On the screen, a video began to play.
At first, it was grainy. The room fell silent.
Then the video cutto: Valentino, in his study, getting up from a chair. His voice, recorded. "She will do what I need. She will be perfect." The camera pans to show a study desk drawer where a sealed envelope is torn, pages scattered. Then came audio of phone messages: his conversations with suppliers, his boasting, his cold tone. Then, worse, the screen flicked and showed my mother, Gabriella, in a recorded meeting with Beatrice and a lawyer. "We will give her," she said, voice steady and cold, "three percent of the profit, enough to leave." Beatrice laughed in the footage. "She will do anything for love."
My stomach dropped. This was playback from a recorder I had thought destroyed. How had it survived? Boden's face tightened with horror.
The next cut showed photographs: Chen Nichols tied, bruised, then my name on a page of a contract. Then the worst—my sister in a private video with an investor, promising favors for the deal to go through, speaking like a mercenary.
"The board will not accept manipulations," said a woman from the legal firm. "This is a serious violation."
Valentino's color changed. His hand curled into a fist. "Who—who did this?"
A voice came from the doorway. "I did."
I turned. Chen Nichols limped in, supported by a man I had never seen. He moved slowly to the projector and took the remote with hands that trembled.
"You took this from my phone," Valentino spat. "You risked your life."
Chen breathed hard. "I risked it for you," he said to me. "For the truth."
Gasps moved like a wind through the room. People whispered. The cameras zoomed. The lawyers started talking about legal liabilities.
Valentino laughed, the sound cracked and deadly. "You think this will matter? They will sign anyway."
"Sign what?" asked an investor, eyes hard. "A contract backed by extortion?"
Valentino's control slipped. He stood, face pale and furious. "This is a set-up. False files. Fake edits."
"Explain," someone demanded.
Boden, in a voice that at last was steady, said, "We have the originals on a backup. The timestamps show editing, but the content is real. We can trace the call logs. We can trace the payments."
A journalist in the back stood up. "This is huge." Cameras turned in our direction. The room buzzed.
Valentino's mouth opened, then closed. His hands shook.
Beatrice stood up, her face ashen. "This is false," she cried. "We—"
My mother, Gabriella Schwarz, remained frozen, lips pressed together like sealed wounds. She had always traded affection for advantage. Now her eyes darted, searching for a way out.
"This is a serious allegation," the lead investor said. "We will pause the vote. We will demand a full investigation."
Valentino's face, once sculpted and cool, began to crumble. "You can't—" He strode toward the screen and slammed his fist against the table. Papers flew.
"Security!" he barked.
Glass doors opened and men in suits moved in, their badges flashing.
People in the room reached for phones. The live feed had already been turned on by someone in the legal team. A buzz of activity rose like thunder.
Valentino grabbed a mic with shaking fingers. "You are all betrayers!" he shouted. "This is a conspiracy!"
"You bribed them," Boden said quietly. "We have the wire transfers."
Valentino's eyes flicked to Beatrice, to my mother, and then back at me. "Did you do this?" he asked, as if I had a hidden hand in the matter.
I met his eyes. "No," I said. "But I didn't like being used."
That was all I said.
He laughed, but it became a choked sound. "You think you can humiliate me and walk?" he asked.
People in the room whispered. Mobile phones were out. Live feeds trended within minutes.
Valentino's voice rose and fell. "I will sue. I will—"
A lawyer in the front spoke in a low, controlled voice: "We have evidence of coercion. We have photos. We have messages. Mr. Schwarz, if this goes to court, the damages could be catastrophic."
The investors looked at each other. The deal collapsed faster than a card house.
Valentino's face turned from rage to fear.
I stepped forward. "Tell them everything," I said. "Tell them how you kept Chen Nichols in the cellar. Tell them you threatened to stop payments to my mother if I refused."
The room fell silent.
Valentino's mouth opened; for a second he looked like a man who had swallowed glass. "You—"
"You made my family lie," I said. "You made my sister lie. You made my mother hand me a life that was not mine. I will not let you make them lie further."
He staggered as if struck. Then he laughed, the kind of laugh that drips like acid. "You think I will let you go?" he roared. "You think the world will forgive you?"
"Look," Boden said, calm. "The legal team has already sent copies to compliance. These files are now public. Your board will have to answer to this."
Valentino's face crumpled into an expression I had never seen in him: shock, panic, then sheer, open terror.
"Stop this," Beatrice sobbed. "Stop—stop—"
She faltered. The room's attention lasered on her. She had sold us. Her knees buckled.
My mother made a small sound like a bird in a trap. She looked at Valentino like a hunted animal. "No—"
Someone in the front whispered, "Video messages too. The investors will see who received payments."
Valentino's rage was trying to resurface, but it had no fuel now. "You set me up!" he screamed, voice cracking. "You betrayed me!"
"Not us," Chen said quietly. "You betrayed yourself."
Valentino's breath hitched. He took a step back as if the floor had moved. His body trembled. His composure, once an impenetrable cloak, had shredded.
Phones recorded him. People in the room reached for their chairs, their purses, their friends. Someone clapped once, ironic and sharp.
Valentino's knees buckled and he fell into the nearest chair. He put his head in his hands. He was a ruler without an audience.
The lead investor stood slowly. "We will convene a special meeting," she said. "Until then, Mr. Schwarz, you are suspended from any decision-making authority pending investigation."
Valentino's head snapped up. "You can't—"
"You can't decide now," the investor said. "Your name is under scrutiny."
A woman in the back recorded everything on her phone. Her live comment read: "Scandal at Schwarz Holdings. Video evidence surfaces. #exposed"
The room swarmed.
Valentino reached for the table edge and pulled himself to his feet. He looked at me with a wildness I had only seen in nightmares. "Maya," he hissed. "You will regret this."
I stepped close. "Regret is for those with a conscience," I said.
He lost it.
He strode toward me. His hand went like lightning. I felt a hard slap—more force than courtesy—across my cheek. Gasps.
"Enough!" someone yelled.
Security moved in. They grabbed Valentino's arm and pulled him back.
His face had shifted from godlike to disgrace. He struggled, but the public eyes burned. Cameras flashed. Phones recorded the scene that would play everywhere.
Valentino fell to his knees in the middle of the boardroom, his tie askew, his palms pressed on the marble like a supplicant. He looked up at us with a face stripped bare. "Please," he said, voice hoarse. "Please, don't ruin me. I—"
"You wanted me to beg," I said softly. "Beg."
He looked at me, at the sea of faces, at the phones that pressed like lanterns. People whispered, a chorus of astonished murmurs. He began to tremble and then to weep, a sound so raw it made the room flinch.
He crawled, clumsy and desperate, to the front of the room and dropped his head.
"Forgive me," he said. "Forgive me. I love her. I loved her. I couldn't let go."
He looked at my mother. "You promised me—"
My mother turned her face away and began to cry. Beatrice covered her mouth and sobbed. The two of them had to face the cameras that now focused not on an alliance but on complicity.
The lead investor raised a hand. "We will not be blackmailed. We will proceed with legal action. Security will escort Mr. Schwarz from the building. We will hand everything to forensics and the authorities."
Security pulled him up. He stumbled, his knees muddy with humiliation. He fell to his knees again in the hallway as press crowded at the vestibule. People in suits recorded. A security guard snapped photos.
He shouted, "Please! Please!" and grabbed at the air.
Reporters outside shouted questions. Live streams crackled.
Valentino's phone buzzed with messages from family, from colleagues. Each ring was another sound of a life unspooling. He said a single name over and over in the presslight: Fang.
He was escorted out like a criminal. Cameras followed. An elevator closed on him. By the time the doors reopened, his hair was ruffled in a way that made him look small.
The next hours were a blur: conference calls, compliance meetings, lawyers bundling files, headlines exploding across the internet. "Scandal at Schwarz Holdings" trended within an hour. News anchors parsed his every misstep. The image of him on his knees, pleading, circulated like an emblem.
Beatrice's Instagram crashed under the weight of screenshots. My mother's society friends called, then cut connections. A whisk of whispers turned to a gale. The names of all involved were attached to the scandal like weights.
Valentino called the board a dozen times that day. Each call met the same chill. He sent lawyers to negotiate, to salvage, to deny. He appeared on camera only twice: eyes hollow, voice a hollow echo.
At night, a different kind of punishment arrived. There were shareholder votes to remove him from authority, civil suits filed by investors, and messages from old allies deleting mutual photos. The man who had never expected to be cast out now lived the fall live.
He went on his knees more than once in public, pleading, begging in news footage: "Please, I'm sorry." He screamed apologies the way someone screams to stop a hurt. The viral videos piled up.
And when he finally called my mother—sobbing, imploring—her reply was curt: "You made your own bed."
He called Beatrice. She wouldn't pick up. In the days that followed, the media found out about other women he'd manipulated, about private messages wherein he had boasted. More went public. The reckoning spiraled.
The world watched.
I watched.
Chen Nichols—my friend—showed up at the hearing later, his face scarred but his chin steady. He had given the film and the files, and he had the courage to speak in front of a legal panel.
Valentino stood mute, broken, as the investigators read out the evidence.
Later, when the board met to decide on his fate, he begged them in public: "Don't take this from me."
They voted unanimously to remove him from operational control pending investigation. His board seat was frozen. Social life evaporated. Advertisers pulled their support. He became a name and a cautionary tale.
He kept calling my name in messages. He begged me to meet. He offered to pay, to recompense, to kneel. There were videos of him outside my apartment, handing flowers to security then collapsing at a distance, palms to the pavement like a man begging for a god he had lost.
The punishment had weight. It had noise. For weeks, his face was the face of guilt.
---
After the boardroom collapse, my mother and Beatrice were not spared.
They were named in the filings. Beatrice's deals were traced. Gabriella's signatures on contracts made with appalling bluntness—evidence showed she had signed without reading.
At an emergency shareholders meeting the next month, Beatrice stood to speak. Cameras were there. The press had a thousand questions.
"How could you?" one reporter said.
Beatrice's jaw trembled. "I—" she began, voice thin.
"You sold your daughter," said another voice in the crowd—one I recognized. Chen Nichols' voice. He had come to watch the justice unfold, not for revenge but for truth.
Beatrice's face changed. For a moment she tried to gather the old arrogance, but it had collapsed like a mask.
"My sister wanted security," she whispered. "I thought we could get it. I didn't think—"
"You didn't think you were ruining someone's life," I said. My voice was small, but it carried. "You bartered me."
Beatrice's face contorted. "We were desperate," she said. "We—"
"Desperate doesn't grant cruelty an excuse," I said.
The shareholders walked out on her. They hissed. Social friends dropped calls. A woman at the back filmed her and uploaded the video. Hashtags flamed up.
Gabriella, my mother, was the last to stand. She had arranged dinners, whispered in Valentino's ear, encouraged the plan. When the cameras found her at the garden party the week after, her society friends shunned her. The club revoked invitations. Her charity contacts sent cold notes.
In the end, the punishments were not only legal. They were social and sharp and public. They knifed reputations and closed doors.
Beatrice's business partners left her. Gabriella's name became a whisper in the room. They lost introductions, contracts, favor.
At the city gala three months later—an event I would have once been expected to attend as a trophy—Gabriella tried to walk in. The entrance swarmed with reporters.
They followed her. The camera lights were a prison.
She stopped at the top step and looked down. Beatrice sat in a corner, face wet, no dignity left to salvage.
Valentino, banned from the gala, watched the footage on a small TV in a cab, hands curled into his hair. He wept in a way that left no dignity. The man who had once decided everything now watched everything decide his end.
People who once courted them now posed with a different kind of smile: relief.
I stood in a hallway far from them and felt the stillness after the storm settle like rain. Chen Nichols touched my elbow.
"You did this," he said.
"I didn't," I said. "You did. You put it where it couldn't be denied."
He shook his head. "We all did what we had to. But it is done."
He took my hand and led me outside where the air was clean and tasted of rain.
---
The last message from Valentino came like a sigh. "I will call the lawyers," it read. "I will pay."
I looked at it and answered with one line: "You already paid a high price."
He begged. He asked me to meet. He offered apologies that read like currency.
I deleted the message.
I chose the music room instead.
Two months later, I stood before a small audience in a recording studio. Chen Nichols sat in the corner, his hand finding mine under the dim light. I played a melody I had kept hidden for years, a song that was mine and not Fang's. My bow arced, and the sound poured out like a thing reclaimed.
People cried. Many came up to me afterward and spoke of courage. The studio offered me a contract—not from the Blacklist Board that once signed papers in marble rooms, but from people who wanted music, not stories for sale.
My mother called once and left a message. "Come home," she said. "We can talk."
I listened to it once and didn't go.
Beatrice posted a picture of herself at a charity event weeks later with hashtags about "learning" and "growth." No one congratulated her; people mocked. Gabriella retreated into books and quiet dinners.
Valentino's name floated around for a while. Then it sank.
Sometimes on quiet days I plug in my phone and see headlines: "Former CEO steps down," "Deals Severed," "Family Tainted." I don't gloat. I don't take pleasure. I take a breath and return to the music.
One night, after a small concert, Chen took my hand. "I have one thing to ask," he said.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Do you want to stay?" he asked, simple and brave.
I looked at him—the man who had stood in cellars to keep secrets, the man who had risked everything to show a truth—and I felt a warmth that was not a plan nor a trap.
"I want to be with someone who sees me," I said. "Not with someone who needs me to be someone else."
He squeezed my hand. "Then don't go."
I stayed.
We walked out into the night. The city was quiet and forgiving. A few people gossiped as they always would. But I had something more valuable than cloth or contract. I had a life that was mine.
Valentino's videos still pop up in news searches sometimes. People still ask questions. But the sharpest thing that happened to him was public. He knelt and asked for mercy in front of lights that multiplied the truth. He begged until his voice broke.
That very public ruin, the sort that cannot be reversed with money or charm, is the punishment the world delivered. Not perfect. Not a sentence written by a judge alone. But a retribution that people could watch and understand. He lost the room where he decided to use me. He lost the face he presented to the world.
I did not dance on his failure. I only played.
At the end of the day, I tell myself: I was never meant to be a shadow for someone else. I learned to play the right notes. I chose them.
And when I pass the carved gate of the old family home now, I walk with my head up and my violin case in hand. I don't look back.
The End
— Thank you for reading —