Digital Revenge

‘Make me unrecognizable,’ Hazel said.

Leon stared at her, motionless. She approached and placed one elegant hand on his cheek.

‘It’s okay. Really,’ she said, ‘I’ll still be me. Your skills with a scalpel are unsurpassed.’ Then smiling, ‘You’ll make me beautiful.’ She kissed him, her lips lingering on his.

‘I know,’ he said eventually, ‘but at what price?’

Hazel absorbed and welcomed every cadence of Leon’s familiar Polish accent and followed him through a door at the far end of his office. Her stride conveyed confidence, but Hazel hesitated, flinching at the stark lights that gilded the instruments laid out on a stainless-steel tray. An odour of strong disinfectant added a bitter irony to her situation.

Earlier that morning she’d woken aboard a luxury yacht and disentangled herself from her boss, also her lover, fiancé, ‘police on payroll baby’. A cigarette stub lay dead in a wineglass. With one final glance at his striking features, Hazel cringed at the imperious slant of his smirk, present even as he slept. She grabbed her phone and checked her notes to ensure she had the codes she needed. Then she stepped out onto the polished deck. As the sun glittered the sea, she thought, Soon.

A gleaming black limo met her at the end of the jetty, she climbed in, sinking into soft vanilla leather, and opened her laptop. After entering various codes, the words Transfer 80 BTC now, flashed up. The ghost of her brother, in blood splattered police uniform, seared her mind. Invigorated by a surge of adrenaline, she pressed.

BIO: Teresa Renton poetry and flash fiction appears in Ink in Thirds, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere, and features in Good Printed Things' new poetry anthology, If Memory Serves. She was also a WOW finalist in 2025.