The Substitute Slashed My Face, So I Stole Her Empire

Everyone said I was the luckiest woman alive when Felix Palmer took me in.

He built a glass greenhouse for me and filled it with rare sunflowers.

He paid my grandmother's medical bills and declared I would be his only wife.

But his love was a suffocating cage, and when I refused to submit to his twisted games, he brought her home.

Darcy had my eyes, my smile, and the same white dresses I used to wear.

He showered her with diamonds, flaunting their passionate kisses right outside my locked bedroom door.

I watched in silence, hiding the secret DNA report under my mattress.

Until today, when Darcy barged into my greenhouse while Felix was away.

She shattered my paint bottles, pinned me to the floor, and slashed my cheek with a rusted utility knife.

She snapped my fingers one by one so I could never paint again.

As I lay bleeding on the shattered glass, the door swung open, and Felix finally walked in.

Instead of calling an ambulance, he pulled Darcy into his arms and wiped a drop of my blood from her shoe.

"Did she scream loud enough for you, darling?" Felix whispered, kissing her neck.

"She cried beautifully, Felix," Darcy giggled, kicking my broken hand. "Now, she's finally useless."

***

I dragged a loaded brush across the plaster wall, pressing cadmium yellow into the dark center of a sunflower taller than I was. The studio smelled of linseed oil, wet paint, and the first clean hour I had managed to steal for myself all week.

Then the front door slammed hard enough to rattle the skylights.

Laughter spilled down the hall before Darcy Sherman appeared in the doorway, flanked by three women with their phones already raised.

She wore a white silk dress.

My white silk dress.

The same narrow straps, the same pearl buttons, even the same uneven hem where I had repaired it by hand. Darcy had copied the dress so precisely that, for one disorienting second, it looked as though my reflection had stepped out of a mirror and learned to hate me.

Her face completed the illusion. The sharp jaw. The small rise at the bridge of the nose. The slight tilt at the outer corners of her eyes. Features that belonged to me first and had somehow become evidence against me.

“Did you really think a locked gate would keep me out?” she asked.

“This is a private studio.” I set the brush on the tray without taking my eyes off her. “Leave.”

“Your studio?” Darcy crossed the room in three quick strides and slapped me.

My head snapped sideways. Pain bloomed across my cheek, and the copper taste of blood spread over my tongue.

Darcy leaned close enough for me to smell champagne on her breath. “Everything on this property belongs to Felix. That means it belongs to me.”

“It belongs to whoever he allows to use it,” I said. “Today, that was me.”

The confidence in her expression cracked.

She hated reminders that Felix Palmer had given me anything, even a room he could take back whenever he pleased.

Darcy’s gaze moved over my face. “How much did the surgeon charge?”

“I have never had surgery.”

“Of course not.” She turned toward her friends. “She just happened to steal my face, my dress, and my fiancé’s favorite flower.”

The blonde at her shoulder zoomed her camera in. “Smile, copycat.”

I reached into my apron pocket for my phone. “Record the police removing you instead.”

Darcy seized my wrist and tore the phone from my hand. She tossed it backward without looking. The blonde caught it and tucked it into her purse.

“Who were you going to call?” Darcy asked. “Felix?”

She pulled out her own phone and held the screen inches from my face. Felix - Private appeared above a photograph of the two of them at a charity dinner, Darcy’s red heart placed beside his name.

“He does not rescue women like you,” she said. “He keeps you around because watching you hope amuses him.”

“I paint for myself.”

“Liar. You painted sunflowers because he likes them.”

“I painted them because my grandmother grew them outside our kitchen window.”

Darcy’s mouth tightened. “Everything has to become one of your little tragedies.”

“If you were secure in your engagement, you would not need an audience.”

Her stiletto struck my hip before I saw her move.

I crashed into the easel. Wood split beneath my weight, and two unfinished canvases slid across the floor. A splinter drove into my palm when I tried to catch myself.

The blonde wandered to my supply table and lifted a five-gallon bucket of crimson primer.

“Put that down,” I warned.

She smiled and tipped it.

Red paint surged over the floorboards and struck the lower half of the mural. Thick streams swallowed the yellow petals and ran down the wall like fresh blood.

For one terrible moment, the studio vanished.

I was twenty-one again, sitting in a hospital bed while Felix dropped a forged five-million-dollar debt agreement onto my blanket. Sign, he had said, or the fraud charges would take your home, your grandmother’s savings, and everything carrying the Sterling name. I had signed because I was young, terrified, and foolish enough to believe surrender could buy safety.

It had bought him ownership.

I lunged toward the mural, trying to block the spreading primer with my body. Wet paint soaked through my sleeves.

“Get up,” Darcy said.

I used both hands to wipe red sludge from the petals. “You have done enough.”

Her heel drove into my stomach.

Air burst from my lungs. I folded around the pain and collapsed against the wall.

Darcy crouched beside me. “You still think looking helpless will make him choose you.”

A silver utility knife appeared in her hand. She pushed the blade forward with her thumb. The click sounded unnaturally loud.

“Let’s find out how much he enjoys looking at you when we no longer match.”

I swung at her knee. She shifted aside and pinned my shoulder to the floor. Her friends stopped laughing, but they did not leave. Two grabbed my legs. The blonde trapped my left arm above my head and pressed her forearm across my throat.

“Hold her still,” Darcy ordered.

I twisted hard enough to tear skin from my wrist, but four bodies outweighed one.

The blade touched my cheek.

Cold came first.

Then fire.

Darcy pulled the knife from beneath my eye toward my jaw. Heat flooded the left side of my face, and blood ran into my ear and down the collar of my dress.

“You are insane,” I gasped.

“I am protecting what is mine.”

She dropped the knife and seized my right hand.

My stomach turned before she even touched my fingers.

“You paint with this one, don’t you?”

“Darcy, stop.”

She bent my index finger backward.

The crack was small, almost delicate. The pain was not.

A scream ripped out of me. The women holding my legs flinched, but Darcy’s expression stayed calm.

“That is for the dress.”

She took my middle finger.

“Please.”

Another snap.

“That is for the face you stole.”

I bucked against the floor. The blonde pressed harder against my throat while Darcy moved to my ring finger.

The third break sent white light across my vision.

“And that,” Darcy whispered, “is for believing you ever had a chance with my fiancé.”

I coughed blood across the toe of her white shoe.

Darcy recoiled with a shriek and released me.

I curled around my ruined hand. My cheek throbbed with every heartbeat. Red primer spread beneath me, mixing with my blood until I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.

The studio door opened.

Every phone lowered.

Felix Palmer stepped over the threshold in a black suit, his polished shoes stopping at the edge of the red pool.

I forced my swollen eyes open.

His gaze passed over Darcy, the knife, and the women who had held me down.

Then it settled on the gash across my face.

For one suspended second, nobody breathed.