Revenge16 min read
A Painted Veil and Two Small Hands
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I woke up to lanterns and screams, to silk and blood and a thousand eyes that had only ever seen me as a joke.
"Help! The bride's dying!" somebody shouted, and the wedding music cut like a snapped string.
Someone lifted me out of the carriage—eight men had carried the palanquin—and I tasted metal and fear. My wrist was a wide, black wound. A knife lay on the boards, slick and cruel.
"Bring her inside! Call the medic!" the steward barked.
They dumped me on the bridal bed and left the canopy to flap like a crumpled banner. The room smelled of incense and iron. My world tilted. My lashes fluttered. Strange memories flooded in, memories that were not supposed to be mine. I had died like that before—drowned in someone else's plot—and yet here I was again. I was reborn, and this body had been sliced open from the inside out.
I tried to breathe, to think, to hold the memory steady: I was a doctor once in another life, a woman named Jayce Dillon who had healed and harmed with equal skill. This body—this "Xiao" everyone gossiped about—had once been a useless noble's daughter. She had been pushed into a marriage she did not want and drugged in her bridal palanquin. The cut at my wrist was not a suicide; it was a bleeding of poison.
"She's trying to die in my sight," someone said. The voice was cold as a blade.
My eyes found him when the doors crashed open. Tall, black-clad, a shadow carved into a man—Giovanni Crowley, the Winged Prince. He filled the doorway like winter. "Out," he demanded. "All of you, out."
"Prince—" the steward stammered.
"Silence," Giovanni said. His eyes landed on me and narrowed like twin moons. He stepped forward, the sort of man you couldn't mistake for anything but dangerous.
He reached for me before anyone else could. One hand closed on my throat. I couldn't draw breath. "You would stain my wedding," he hissed.
My lungs shrieked. I reached blindly, found his shoulder and drove my fingers inward to an ancient pressure point I had learned long ago. Giovanni blinked, and his limbs locked as if someone had pulled invisible threads. I shoved him aside and collapsed into a coughing mess.
"Did you try to kill me?" he coughed when he could move again. "Do you think you can die on my threshold and escape my hands?"
"I wasn't trying to die," I rasped. My voice had a cotton edge. "Someone drugged me. I was bleeding to bleed out the poison."
"You are a liar," he said, black as tar, and then—unexpectedly—he laughed. "You are useful, then."
"Useful?" I managed.
He seized me again, but then I watched the madness in his face fray into something very like desire. His fingers left angry marks on my neck. My hand, trembling, found the hem of his robe and pulled. I met his mouth like a calculation. He was surprised, and that gave me more time.
We did something in the dark that we would both later call necessary, improper, and inevitable. When dawn came, he had gone, the bed a ruined tapestry, and a small folded note lay under a phoenix comb: a resignation.
"My husband," it said in my handwriting that wasn't mine. "I renounce you."
I laughed, a rough sound. Then I left.
I had to run. I had to disappear.
Nine months later, I was running through the mountains with two small lives in my arms.
"Stop!" men called. "Do not run!"
They came in tens, then hundreds. Soldiers spilled through pine and rock like stormwater. I pressed one child to my chest and carried the other the way you carry a secret. My body, still weak from the betrayal and the poison, trembled beneath the weight.
"Who are you?" a voice demanded. The soldiers closed like a cage. At the edge of the cliff, I saw a fire-lighted sea of torches. I did the only thing left to me. I threw one of the babies—newborn and unsuspecting—toward the men below with a prayer on my tongue.
"Catch! Hold him!" I cried, and a long arm shot up and took the child.
A black horseman leapt forward and snatched the baby from the air. Giovanni Crowley—aloof, cruel, and impossibly composed—caught my child like catching a stone. The infant began to wail, and something—compassion, or duty, or something deadlier like possession—wrenched the prince's face into taut concern.
"Do not," I whispered. I turned my face to the stars and leapt.
I did not die. I could not. I crawled from under rocks five hours later, bruised and bleeding, one child clutched to my chest and the other taken. I made a decision then: the world would believe Jayce Dillon—the "Sinner from the Low Fields"—was dead. She would stay dead. I folded her into a shroud and replaced her with a new name.
I learned to be small and invisible in the city. I changed faces, swapped hair, and sold my songs as a healer. The child I had kept—Findlay Oliveira—was my miracle. For five years I fed him herbs for the weakness in his bones and watched him grow cheeky and sharp.
Then—because fate loves irony—one day in the market I saw the man who had my other child.
Giovanni stood across the square with a little prince—Emmett Bennett—tugging at his sleeve. My heart lurching, I found I did not fear so much as plan. I could play a different part this time. I could get close and keep what I wanted. I was a doctor. I knew poisons. I knew how a string of small lies could become armor.
"We meet again," he said the first time our eyes locked. He did not know me.
"I know you," I said. That convinced no one but myself.
He believed what he wanted: that I was low-born, clever, a slip of a woman who loved to bargain. But Giovanni did not have a monopoly on insight. He grew suspicious. He had a soldier's nose for lies, and he began to order inquiries into my past.
"Who are you?" he asked one night, late, when I had to sit across from him because Emmett had run ahead without warning and was suddenly sobbing on the palace steps.
"I'm nobody," I said. "I'm a doctor who doesn't belong to anyone."
He watched me with that cold intelligence of his and then, to my confusion and secret relief, he smiled once—brief as lightning—and said, "Good. Be nobody. Then you cannot be blamed."
But suspicion never sleeps. Giovanni ordered men to dig into everything. He had resources that could turn a mole into a mountain. Night-guards—Octavio Kelly and Lorenzo Young among them—followed whispers. The truth spread its fingers beneath the bedclothes of my new life. They began to ask if I had any links: old country names, a different accent, a thing that didn't fit the mask.
At the South Gate, I found a spoiled house and a family that would end up in rubble. The Manor of Marcus Francois—the Nanyang House—was brittle with secrets. Lady Lara Liu had a face of pearl and teeth of iron. Her daughter, Dahlia Barnett, was prettier and meaner. They wanted me dead. They had paid men to make me dead.
"They said the girl who returns from the hills is a nuisance," a captured brigand told the court at the Nanyang mansion. "They paid me to bring her across the pass so they'd be rid of her. They wanted her gone quietly."
"Who?" someone demanded.
The brigand's eyes flicked to the dais. "Lady Lara. Lady Dahlia. They thought the old lord would be pleased."
I watched the hall. Wine-stained banners trembled. The old lord, Marcus Francois, looked as if a wind had stripped his leaves bare. People in there smelled the spectacle: a rotten apple, and everyone wanted to see it rot.
"You brought a murderer into my hall?" the old lord rasped, and then all at once the room, which had been pulsing with polite laughter seconds before, turned into a cage. The steward called for the officer from the magistrate, and the city official arrived: stern, unsmiling, the sort who had no love for nobility's stagecraft. He had a golden token of the throne, and he would not be swayed.
"You can't!" Lady Lara wailed. "You can't drag us through—"
"Enough," I said. The voice I used was not small. The hall fell oddly quiet. "You paid men to kill a child and a woman to take her life? You would murder for pride? You used hired wolves to do your dirty work, and then pretend you are the injured party?"
The brigand spat the rest of the truth like a rotten tooth. He named the hours, the coin, the secret meeting in the ruined temple. He said they had asked him to throw me from the cliff and tie the body to rocks. When he was asked who had paid him, he pointed at Lara Liu and Dahlia Barnett and at the side steps where, not five yards away, Marcus Francois looked as if his old heart might stop.
"You aided brigands?" the magistrate asked, cold as the river in winter.
"We did what had to be done to preserve the line," Dahlia hissed. "She brought scandal on us."
"I brought nothing," I answered. "I brought a living witness."
That was when the magistrate did the thing I had not dared hope: he ordered the arrest. "By imperial order," he said—the gold medallion flashing like a moon on his breast—"this house will be sealed. Those involved will be held."
The hall erupted. Pillars rang with shouting. Lady Lara's expression moved from shock to rage to a quiet white panic. Marcus Francois tried to bargain and was struck down by his own father's cane as the old man roared like a hunting dog betrayed.
I stood aside and watched the unmasking happen. It was a purification that would cost me everything—every old tie I still pretended to hold—but I needed the truth in the open. People were watching. The magistrate had the power of the crown behind him; this was not rumor any longer. It was a tableau: the imperial law holding down a corrupt house.
"Seize them," the magistrate ordered.
The bribed brigand collapsed to his knees and pointed without shame at the woman who had hired him. "It was her," he said to the crowd, and the room sucked in the noise.
Lady Lara's face crumpled like leather. "No!" she howled. "I—" She turned pleading toward Marcus Francois. "Tell them! Tell them it's not me!"
Marcus's face was a red mask. For a moment I feared he would pull the hall down on all of us in his fury. But the old lord—his own father—stood and raised a trembling hand. The cane fell in a wet thud.
"You let it go too far," he said. He did not stop there. He spat words like a guillotine blade: "You, Lara Liu, have betrayed this house. You have prostituted our honor for coin. You tried to spill blood to make room for your own ambition."
That was the first shudder. Betrayal sounded different in a hall filled with witnesses.
The magistrate then pronounced a public humiliation: the accused would be paraded, their crimes read aloud, and then they would be bound to the pillory in the central square, where the city's people—the very ones who had gossiped about rumors for months—would pass judgment. It was not death. It was something worse for a noble: to be laughed, spat upon, and stripped of every pretense in public.
They led them out. The crowd thickened like stormwater. I followed at a distance, my robes reminding me of the old bridal silks and how easily decorations hide fractures. People crowded the square, merchants, pickpockets, housewives with their laundry draped, a child selling roasted chestnuts shouting like a bell. The magistrate himself read the charges with a voice loud enough to split a bell's echo:
"Lady Lara Liu, you conspired to commit murder and hired brigands to carry out your plan. Dahlia Barnett, you abetted and encouraged the attempt. Marcus Francois, you will be tried for suspicious complicity."
The crowd began to hum—a low animal sound of interest, of satisfaction. I had not considered that revenge might feed like a living thing off the faces of others. It did.
"Look," someone whispered behind me. "The woman who beat the nanny! She always had an evil eye."
"She wore too many jewels," another said. "She thought a life could be bought."
They dragged Lady Lara into the pillory. She was too villa-tanned, too lovely, and the city loved spectacle. Someone in the crowd had a writing tablet and started copying the accusations. The magistrate demanded the public restoration of truth: he ordered agents to list every lie she had told, every coin she had paid, every meeting she had held in the ruins. The list grew like a ledger of rain.
"Forgiveness?" a merchant murmured. "There isn't any for such as she."
Lady Lara's expression changed while the magistrate spoke. She passed through fury into fear, then into a dangerous, pleading shame. First she cried, then she pounded the wood, then she begged for mercy. Finally, as the magistrate read the charges that linked her to orphaned children and poison vials, her voice came out like a thing squeezed through a narrow hole: "No—no—I didn't mean—"
She smiled that way people do when trapped by wolves: too wide, too false. The crowd hissed like wind over glass.
Dahlia's eyes were a different color. She had thought herself untouchable, a silk-threaded heiress, and the public revelation was a splinter in that conceit. Sting and then denial, then a brittle attempt to blame servants. The magistrate had witnesses, and he had proof: receipts, the brigand's confession, the servants' testimonies. He had more; he had the old lord's choked anger to burn down any last defense.
The punishment was slow, precise, and theatrical. They dressed them in rags after the pillory—no further jewels to soften the stones—and made them walk through the market. People spat, children flung mud, a widow slapped Lady Lara in the face and laughed. A peddler replaced the ribbons on Dahlia's hair with an old rope. A descendant of a farmer whose brother had once been robbed by Lara's hired men came forward and spat in Marcus's face; the old man was nearly carried away.
They were not slain; they were made impossible to behead socially. Their names would stick like tar. For a noble, that was worse than a blade.
When the magistrate finally turned to me in the square, he said, "Madam, you have done well to bring the truth. I will note your deed. The crown will not forget those who bring false blood to the gates."
The crowd cheered on the magistrate's judgment. When the ritual ended, Lady Lara collapsed with a cry that sounded like every sharp thing in a woman's life breaking—her ambition, her safety, her illusions. Dahlia's pretty face had been smudged by the hands of market women. Marcus Francois stood broken, but his ruin had been public, and that spared him in a way: he had been forced to sacrifice what he loved to save the façade of his house.
They left the square in chains and shouts. The city hummed into its normal clamor, but I stood in the middle of it and felt the small, cold pulse of victory.
Giovanni came up behind me, as quiet as a shadow at noon. "You opened the lid," he said, the corner of his mouth a dangerous line.
"I found the lid," I said.
He looked at me like someone trying to estimate the load a bridge could bear. "You have two children," he said. It was not a question.
"My son," I answered. I did not give him the name he knew for the other child.
He regarded me for a long moment that felt like a single long breath. "You have a skill for storms," he said. "You also have my son's face in your pocket."
"I have found where we can both keep what we love and not die."
Giovanni's laugh was low. "Do you bargain again?"
"Always."
"Then bargain you shall," he said. "But remember, I do not forget debts easily."
I met his eyes. His gaze was not gentling; it was calculating, warlike, and—sometimes—starting to become personal.
The city would remember the spectacle for weeks. The magistrate's dispatch would go to the throne. Opportunists would have their teeth set for the rubble. But for the first time, I felt a little safer.
The danger, though, did not end in a cart of shame and a strip of rope. There were more men with secret money, other women with knives behind their fans, and there was a prince who watched me like a hawk.
We bargained. He allowed my son—Findlay—to remain under my care, under a new name in a modest house near the market. He kept his son Emmett in his palace. Sometimes Giovanni would arrive with the prince and watch me from the shadowed edge of the market as if cataloging people. At times his expression would soften when he caught Emmett's giggles. At others, it was a blade.
"You are dangerous," he said one evening while I was tending a fevered child in a cramped room, dim with lantern smoke.
"So are you," I replied.
He agreed. "We will either burn the world or mend it." His hand closed on the warm mug and warmed it. The small gesture—a king touching his teacup—was almost human.
Months passed in a dangerous peace. I kept my face in line, I taught Findlay how to fetch herbs and to be invisible in public, and I kept my ear to the ground for rumors.
There were plans afoot—two men with sold swords who wished to reclaim children, a widow who sought revenge. They were small storms, and none of them mattered until a night in the palace where everything turned on its axis again.
"Who is she?" Giovanni asked when he found me in the palace clinic, tending a fevered boy from a lesser family who had been brought in on a cold cart.
"Jayce Dillon," I said, and watched his face for what that name might mean to him.
He didn't flinch. "You lie like breathing."
"So do you," I said.
He crouched beside me and examined the child's pulse like a man used to examining enemy lines. "You must be clever to survive."
"I am smarter than I look," I replied.
He laughed then, once. "Smartness is not always kindness."
"Nor is cruelty always strength."
A friendship of fire grew between us—sharp, liable to cut. We saved people together and hurt each other on purpose. He made courtly demands and denied them with the same hand. In a world of stakes and sentences, we had carved a small, forbidden truce.
But then came a harder cut: the revelation that my other child had been in his care all along. The two boys—Findlay, with my blood and my stubbornness, and Emmett, with Giovanni's stern shadow—began to move like twin planets in the same orbit. They bickered, they fought, and slowly they fell like magnets toward affection.
Emmett called me "mother" the first time when he was cornered and lonely. He found in me a softness his palace had never given him. Giovanni watched and something in him shifted. He had never been asked for warmth before. He watched his son choose me.
"You indulge him," Giovanni said once in the library, closed doors and marble trapping the light.
"He calls me mother," I said. I did not step back.
He said nothing then, only looked at the child's face in a way that made me think of maps—boundaries, coordinates. "You are not entitled—"
"I am his," I said quietly.
"Do not fool yourself," he countered. "You are a stranger who taught my son to call you mother."
"Are you surprised he might choose the one who sneaks him candied fruit?"
The old pride between us thawed and hardened and thawed again. To live with a man like Giovanni is to be near thunder. He is a storm god who sometimes loves that he can be loved. He is also a man who will not let a slight slide.
Nothing was simple. The magistrate's report had sealed some avenues for me, but opened others. Enemies were patient, and so were I. I moved like a needle in a wrist of thread—tight, precise.
And then came the worst: a plan more cunning than a single knife. Li-mother—Haley Fischer, an old wet-nurse turned servant who had her own axes to grind—saw me as a threat because I had shown the world the ugly truth about Lara Liu. She had friends in corners. One night, she slipped a piece of paper into a box of Findlay's medicines.
"She thinks you can't read her hand," the steward said as we found the note. "Too clever for her."
"Clever is doing," I said.
We traced the ink. It led back to one of the palace's whispered networks.
I found out then that revenge is a circle; you expose one rot and another appears like mold.
So when the final confrontation came—when I stood in the magistrate's hall and dragged out every scrap of evidence until the light ruined a reputation—I was not content to let them be carted to the pillory and left. I wanted every whisper cut out of every corner.
The punishment I demanded would not be a private affair. It would be public, inexorable, and varied—fitting the crime and showing, in the raw glare of the city marketplace, what treachery earned.
They led Lady Lara and her daughter to a raised platform before the city gates. A thousand people watched. Merchants paused their haggling, watchmen dropped their spears, children stopped their games like birds at a sudden quiet.
"By imperial decrees and the magistrate's hearing," the official announced, "we pronounce the guilt of those who attempted murder for private glory."
They read the charges slowly, each word falling like an iron coin: conspiracy, attempted murder, hiring brigands, endangering infants, corruption with city officials. As they read, the crowd's faces tightened. We had staged the truth with proofs—ledgers, sworn testimonies, the brigand's confession—so that there was no whisper left to breathe for them.
First, Lady Lara's jewels were removed and dropped into a bowl that a city maid held open. Then a town crier stepped forward and read aloud every line of the evidence, with names, dates, and coin. People pelted them with rotten fruit and the talk turned to shouts. Some cursed; others spat. Someone took a scrap of Lara's hair and set it on a ledge to dry. Children threw clay at them, and women spat. A small girl slapped Dahlia, who stumbled like a puppet with cut strings. Where nobles once had had soft hands to wipe tears, no one bothered to be discrete.
"See how the mighty strip," the magistrate intoned.
Then came the public unmasking for Marcus Francois. He was ordered before his old man—his father's cane laid across his shoulders—and the old lord's face was an open wound. Publicly, his humiliation was staged as his repentance. He knelt and begged for forgiveness, and the old man struck him until his son's face was a map of bruises. It was ugly and relentless and the better part of the city's appetite.
Lara screamed. "You can't—the money! The jewels—"
"A court cannot tolerate death bargains in the name of convenience," the magistrate said.
The magistrate then pronounced a sentence that was both practical and savage: they were to be publicly labeled—strings of placards to be hung around their necks listing their crimes; the bribe money would be seized and used to repair roads; the brigand's gang denounced; and they would be banned from court life forever. Marcus Francois would be fined heavily, his holdings reduced, his family name scrubbed from certain registers. And Lady Lara, by the explicit wish of the magistrate, was to have her position dissolved publicly: her appointed roles would be stripped, her servants reassigned, and she would be forced to serve three days in the city hospital cleaning the very wounded she once considered beneath her notice.
As the magistrate spoke, faces in the crowd changed. Early mockery curdled into a real, satisfied sense of justice. Some thought it too soft. Some thought it too harsh. But the key was this: all of it was done in public. That public would watch, and remember, and the rumor mills would sharpen the truth into something people could name.
Lady Lara's reaction moved through stages in front of everyone. First she tried to deny. "You—it's a lie—"
Then she shook, and her perfect cheekbone crumpled. "Please—" she tried to laugh; the sound left an echo and nothing else. Then denial buckled into bargaining. "I'll pay," she said. "Take my jewels—take—"
"No," the magistrate said. "You bought death once. Now you will serve life."
Finally there was the terrible ungluing: she tried to collapse into tears, then to scream, and then to blame everyone and everything. The crowd heckled. Somebody spat again. A woman who had once been threatened by Lady Lara's men came forward and spat into her hand, placed it over Lara's mouth, and hissed, "You wanted blood. Now lick it like the dog you are."
Dahlia's fall was different. The market girls took her hair and braided it into an ugly crown, and then gave it back to her in mockery. She tried to keep standing tall. Her cheeks were white as curd. She screamed for mercy and was answered by laughter. A young man, whose father had lost property to Marcus Francois's greed, stepped up and slapped Dahlia twice. She flinched as if struck by truth. Then the city guard dragged them off to the magistrate's wagons.
For a long time after, the marketplace stank of rotten fruit and victory. People went back to their stalls and to their bread. The magistrate filed his report. The crown would decide some final measure—land for the poor, a new guard unit perhaps—but the essential point was done. The crowd had seen justice done in a way that gave them voice.
I left the square feeling hollow and steady at once. A piece of me wanted more righteousness; another piece wanted quiet. Giovanni met me at the threshold of the magistrate's hall, his expression closed-off like a clasped knife.
"You could have left it to law earlier," he said.
"I prefer people's memory," I said. "A law can be bribed. The city remembers what it sees."
He looked at me long. "You are dangerous," he repeated, but this time the words had a shape that almost sounded like respect.
We were not friends. We were not lovers in any peaceful sense. We were two people who had tried each other on like armor and, in places, found the fit exact. There would be more storms. There would be more knives. But for now, the city's noise folded into a ragged lullaby and I took Findlay home, and Giovanni took Emmett upstairs and cradled him like a mean god has to hold beauty.
The city, and I with it, would never be the same again.
The End
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