Perfect Prey

Warning: This story contains themes of revenge some people might find disturbing.

Perfect Prey

Becky assimilated information at lightning speed as her eyes darted between her multiple computer screens, the glow of her five monitors saturating her face with various shades of cobalt, emerald and amber. She never lost focus entering various keystrokes with one hand as she reached for her cup of Chai tea with the other. She was the commander of a formidable army coordinating multiple platoons as the steam from her tea wafted into the air.

Eighteen years. Eighteen years since Reggie Carmichael had eviscerated her with a smirk and a handful of cruel words. He had led her to believe that she was pretty and special. Convinced her young, naïve self that what he wanted to do was “make love” to her.

She remembered the sticky floor of the frat house, the laughter echoing down the hall, the taste of beer still on her lips when he abruptly left her and was soon bragging to his friends about his conquest. He had “nailed” that “chubby, geeky chick.” Three words, delivered like a dagger. Three words that had echoed through her young, fragile mind. And still echoed eighteen years later.

But she wasn’t that girl anymore. That girl had been overweight, yet undeveloped. She was hesitant and awkward in her skin. That girl had braces and eyes that darted anywhere but into another’s gaze. That girl had been disposable. Suitable prey. Or at least Reggie had felt that was so.

But things were very different now. Becky—the woman she had built from scratch over the past eighteen years, rebuilt like lines of perfected code—was none of those things. She was now slim, sculpted, impeccably dressed and very sharp. A woman who spoke fluently in the secret language of systems and firewalls. A woman who could slip into another person’s life and take it apart thread by thread.

And Reggie? Reggie was still the same.

She discovered him by chance, an idle query one night pulling his name from the ether. Two neighborhoods away. A middle manager with a thinning hairline and an expanding waistline. Divorced. Still prowling bars, still hunting, still trying to relive his frat-boy conquests.

As if by reflex, the discovery made her lips curve to utter a simple phrase: Perfect prey.

The first nights she only watched.

Through the tinted windows of her car, she studied him like a specimen. There he was at the bar: leaning too close to women, slapping down his credit card with the bravado of a man desperate to impress, repeating lines he must have used a hundred times before. He carried himself as if he were still twenty-one, irresistible and invincible.

Becky’s fingers itched. She could reduce him to digital ash with a few keystrokes—drain his accounts, expose his browsing history, scatter his data across the internet like confetti. But that would be too easy.

Reggie had humiliated her publicly, with laughter, with mockery. His ruin had to be personal. Intimate.

The plan grew inside her like a virus, replicating, mutating, until it gleamed with perfection.

Step one: infiltration.

She built Marissa. An elegant fiction: AI-generated photos of a woman with smoky eyes and a half-smile, social media seeded with believable fragments of history. This beautiful woman seemed to indicate she wasn’t aware of her beauty and perhaps even lacked self-esteem. She was needy and naïve, very similar to the way Becky had been eighteen years ago. Marissa slid into Reggie’s digital orbit like silk. A like here, a comment there, a presence that became familiar.

Within a week, he noticed her.

Step two: engagement.

Their chats began playful, then edged toward the suggestive. Becky knew precisely how to feed his ego, how to make him believe he was irresistible, how to craft sentences that tugged at his hunger. Soon he was confessing late at night: his work frustrations, his loneliness, his fantasies. Becky logged every word, every keystroke.

Step three: entrapment.

She lured him toward the inevitable. A photo request here, a teasing dare there. When he finally sent the first explicit picture, she cataloged it carefully. Each one that followed was another nail in his coffin.

And still, she wasn’t finished. Becky slipped past his router’s weak defenses and into his home network. From there, his laptop’s camera was hers, his microphone a wiretap. She watched him pace in his underwear, practice lines in the mirror, curse at his unpaid bills. It was intoxicating.

The final step came on a Friday

Reggie was at the bar, working the same tired charm on a brunette who rolled her eyes when he turned his back. He excused himself, pulled out his phone in the restroom, and froze.

On his screen was a video feed—from his own bedroom camera. There he was, naked, flexing his pathetic manhood into a mirror, telling an imaginary woman how he was “going to send you somewhere you could only dream of.” Repulsive!

Beneath it, a line of text:

“Don’t you remember me - the chubby, geeky chick? I remember you, and you haven’t changed a bit.”

Becky watched from across the room, disguised as just another patron nursing a gin and tonic. She saw the blood drain from his face, his hand tremble around the phone.

Becky then sent a cascade of other incriminating texts: emails bragging about sexual conquests, numerous “dick pics,” questionable financial transactions. She then sent a second text message.

“Everyone else can remember too. Unless you do exactly as I say.”

He stumbled back to his table, fumbling for excuses, paying his tab in a daze. Becky sipped her drink, the bitterness of tonic blooming on her tongue.

In the weeks that followed Becky beautifully orchestrated her manipulation of Reggie to her exquisite satisfaction.

She ignored his denials, his anger, his pleadings. She responded with more evidence that people like him never change.

She was a puppeteer making him dance. He had no choice but to comply. Anonymous donations to autism research charities from his accounts. Apology emails sent to women he had belittled or ghosted. His dating profiles deleted. His bravado, once his armor, stripped away piece by piece.

At work, whispers spread about his distracted state. At the bar, he stopped approaching women entirely. He flinched at shadows, jumped at the faintest vibration of his phone.

He attempted to communicate to her through his phone, his computer, his bedroom camera. He alternated between anger, pleading, and apologies. She didn’t respond to any of this.

Sometimes she let him stew in silence for days. Other times she slipped her voice through his smart speaker in the dead of night, a distorted whisper curling through the dark like smoke.

And all the while, he unraveled.

Becky never revealed herself. That wasn’t the point.

The point was control.

This time, she was not the awkward girl on the sidelines, mocked and discarded. She was the architect of a downfall, the conductor of a symphony that only she could fully appreciate.

Eighteen years of pain had sharpened into this: pure, electric satisfaction.

As she sat in her loft, monitors glowing like stained glass in the dark, Becky smiled.

Revenge wasn’t about justice. It was about balance.

She leaned back, fingers resting lightly on her keyboard. Reggie’s digital leash was still coiled in her hands, taut and humming.

At times she wondered if perhaps she had gone far enough. Maybe the balance had shifted enough, and Reggie had learned his lesson. Perhaps she should cut him loose. But then she thought of his words that echoed in her mind over the last eighteen years. She thought of all the women he had used and humiliated in the last eighteen years. So, perhaps she would sleep on it. The way she figured, she had eighteen years to ponder her decision.