The sound was louder than I expected – a clean, sharp crack that cut through the music and the string lights and the carefully arranged evening like a knife through silk. His head turned with the force of it. The rose trembled in his hand.
He looked up at me, stunned, his mouth open, his eyes wide with a shock that hadn’t fully processed yet – and before the first slap had finished registering, I slapped him again.
The second one was harder.
The sound hung in the air the way a gunshot hangs – not fading so much as expanding, filling the space, rewriting the silence into something charged and irreversible.
Three servants stood frozen at the edge of the balcony, their trays of carefully prepared food still balanced on their palms like offerings at an altar where something had gone terribly wrong. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. In the entire documented history of working for Caelum – and between them, these three had logged over twenty years – no one had ever raised a hand against him. Not a competitor, not an enemy, not a single soul in the long chain of people who owed him money, favors, or their careers.
And here was this girl. This girl in a red dress and borrowed courage, who’d walked onto a lit balcony and slapped the most powerful man she’d ever met – twice – with the conviction of someone swatting a mosquito.
Caelum remained on his knees. The rose was still in his hand, though his fingers had tightened around the stem hard enough for a thorn to bite into his thumb. A bead of blood appeared, small and precise, and he didn’t notice it. His cheek burned. Both cheeks burned. Not just from the impact – from the humiliation, the public nature of it, the servants’ eyes boring into the back of his skull like drills.
He watched Marlowe turn. He watched her walk away. The hem of her red dress caught the string lights as she moved, and he thought – irrationally, stupidly, in the middle of what was probably the most humiliating moment of his adult life – that she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
She disappeared through the balcony doors without looking back.
He stood slowly. The servants were still staring. He could feel their gazes like physical things, pressing against him from three directions, waiting to see what a man like Caelum does when the cage he built can’t hold its occupant.
He said nothing. He straightened his jacket. He set the rose on the table – gently, as though it had done nothing wrong – and walked away in the opposite direction, his footsteps measured and deliberate, the footsteps of a man reassembling his composure from the outside in.
In the privacy of his own mind, the storm was different.
What did I do? The question looped like a song stuck on repeat. What did I do wrong? He rewound the evening: the note, the setup, the lights, the music, the rose. All of it planned. All of it careful. He’d thought – genuinely thought – that after their conversation earlier, after the handshake and the truce and the almost-smile she’d given him, that this might work. That a romantic gesture might bridge the distance between contract and connection.
Instead, she’d bridged it with her palm. Twice.
His mind snagged on a darker worry, one that sat beneath the humiliation like a reef beneath choppy water: his mother. Celeste was arriving in days. She expected to meet a wife who loved her son, a marriage built on genuine feeling, a daughter-in-law she could introduce to society without flinching. If Marlowe greeted her the way she’d just greeted the balcony proposal – if Celeste sensed even a hairline fracture in the story –
No. He needed to fix this. Needed to find out what had gone wrong and repair it before the crack became a canyon.
He turned around and moved toward Marlowe’s room.
I locked the door. Turned the deadbolt. Considered pushing a dresser against it. Decided that was excessive but kept it as a contingency plan.
Sable was sitting on the bed exactly where I’d left her, looking at me with the expression of someone who’d heard a distant explosion and was waiting for the shockwave to arrive.
“What happened?” she asked.
I sat down next to her. My hand was tingling – the right one, the one that had done the slapping. It felt like it belonged to someone else, someone braver and more reckless and less interested in consequences.
“I might have overreacted,” I said.
“Define ‘overreacted.’”
“He was on the balcony. He’d set up this whole – there were string lights, Sable. Candles. Music. He got down on one knee and held out a rose, and I…” I trailed off.
“You what?”
“I slapped him.”
Sable’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
“You slapped Mr. Caelum.”
“Yes.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.