Part 1: Two Hundred Lashes and One Phone Call
My husband gave me 200 lashes because of his chatty mistress. I called my billionaire father at once: “Dad, exactly as you instructed, destroy his life.” Five minutes later, he was utterly stunned and collapsed...
The first lash showed me that my husband no longer saw me as a person. By the time he reached two hundred, his mistress was drinking champagne and correcting his number.
“Again,” Vanessa said from the velvet couch. “She rolled her eyes while I was talking.”
My husband, Adrian Vale, clenched the leather riding crop tighter. He had locked every door of our country estate, sent the staff away, and commanded me to kneel on the marble floor under the chandelier we had picked out together three years before.
After the twentieth strike, I stopped screaming. Screaming delighted Vanessa, and I refused to hand her one more thing.
Adrian had once been charming, driven, and hungry. I had loved that hunger because I thought it meant bravery. After our marriage, it turned into entitlement. He sneered at my plain clothes, called my silence provincial, and told everyone my father was a retired accountant living abroad. I allowed him to believe it. My father had insisted.
“Never reveal the size of your shield to a man,” Dad had warned me. “Let him show you what he would do if he believed you had none.”
Vanessa only knew that Adrian desired her and that I was standing in their way. She filled our house with quiet lies. I had offended her. I had taken jewelry. I had threatened her career. Every lie became bolder because Adrian wanted a reason to punish me.
At lash one hundred ninety-nine, my sight began to blur.
At two hundred, Adrian let the crop fall beside my hand.
“There,” he said, breathing heavily. “Maybe now you will understand respect.”
Vanessa crossed her legs and smiled. “Apologize to me.”
I raised my head. My voice was faint, but it did not shake. “May I use my phone?”
Adrian laughed. “Calling the police? They will be told you attacked Vanessa first.”
He had already forced the estate cameras offline. What he did not know was that the diamond pendant around my neck held an encrypted recorder, placed there by my father’s security team after Adrian pushed me down a staircase two months earlier.
That fall had shattered the last illusion I had. Since then, I had copied banking records, photographed fake invoices, and recorded every threat. Dad wanted to pull me out right away, but I asked for more time. Adrian was laundering company funds through Vanessa’s “consulting agency,” and leaving too soon would give them time to bury the evidence.
Tonight, they had buried themselves.
I unlocked my phone and dialed the only number I had known by heart since childhood.
Dad answered on the first ring.
I stared straight at Adrian. “Dad, exactly as you instructed, destroy his life.”
Adrian’s expression shifted, even though he still did not understand the danger coming for him.
For the first time that night, Vanessa’s smile disappeared....
