Sweet Romance15 min read
He Called Me His, Then Tried to Break Me — I Laughed
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I woke up on my knees to lantern light and the chant of servants.
"Announce the gifts!" a man called from outside. "From the provincial governor: a pair of jade screens for the prince's birthday!"
I pressed my palms to the floor and tried to remember which century I belonged to. The answer came slow and absurd: twenty-first, not this one. I swallowed and the lantern smoke made my eyes water.
"Bring her forward," someone ordered.
I looked up. Black silk, a row of men like sculptures around me, instruments stacked like promises of pain—everything smelled of cold iron. My wet hair clung to my neck. I was supposed to be a mad, water-soaked fool who had crawled into the prince's manor and embarrassed the household. Instead I was thinking about tarot cards and a fortune I had read to myself on the road: a great blessing, a rise. I had told myself to survive this life. I had told myself to hide.
"Drag her. Feed her to the dogs."
The voice cut the room like a blade. He sat before me, as composed as a statue: Blake Collins, the prince people whispered about in anxious tones. He looked carved from snow and ink, his hair a crown, his robe the color of bruised grapes. His eyes were thin and sharp like a hawk's, and when they settled on me they weighed me down as if I were a stone.
I did the only stupid, life-saving thing I could think of.
I flung myself at his feet and clung to his robe. "Master, please," I begged, voice a frog in my throat. "I have an old mother and little brothers. If you kill me, who will feed them? If you spare me, I will — I will sew and sweep and cook. My meat is old and tough—your dogs wouldn't even eat me. Spare me and let me live."
Two guards moved forward. I felt a hand clamp my jaw.
"Your grandmother died three months ago," the hand said. "Your last child caught a chill last month and died. Old and young are dead. You have no one."
I blinked hard. The hand hurt. My mind said a vulgar thing and the prince's face flickered with something unreadable.
He hadn't heard the words I had thought. But then, the strangest thing: an echo—my own private voice—reached him. He looked at me like I was a puzzle, not just a madwoman.
"You're not the mad Yan girl who fell in the river." he said. "You are sharper than you pretend."
"Thank you, Master," I lied, and my heart pounded like a trapped animal.
He considered me, and then, in a motion like a coin flipping, he decided to keep me.
"Take her along to my birthday," he said, and the words were a verdict and a shelter both.
I felt everyone stare. There were whispers. A palace prince taking a ruined general's youngest daughter to his table—scandal, rumor, teeth-bared malice. My sisters' faces passed through my head: Caroline Ellis with her polite smile and Paula Burke with her ribboned hair. My father, General Freeman Escobar, would never forgive a scandal, but he would also not appear. That was the way of things.
They led me out, but not before I heard the knife scrape the floor and my name choked between teeth. "You will not be spared. Not without a price."
At the banquet the air hummed with wine and a thousand forced smiles. I stood behind the prince like a shadow.
"Welcome," he said when he finally bowed. "Drink."
"Master," Emperor Alfredo Herrmann arrived like a sun swallowed by clouds. "Happy birthday, my nephew."
I watched the room lean upon his words. But then — chaos. Girls in pink silk jumped like knives toward the prince. "Assassin!" someone yelled.
Steel flashed. The prince moved as if the blades were air and he plucked a sword mid-flight with a casual motion that made the crowd gasp. He pulled one of the dancers like a broken marionette to the floor and killed her silently.
"Protect the Emperor!" shouted someone. People faltered. I could taste the iron in the air.
One of the attackers fell. Others rose like puppets with tangled strings. They were pale, eyes milky and wrong. The prince drew me into his arms as the room splintered into screams and the Emperor was tucked away.
"Back, back!" he hissed. "This place is trapped. Go!"
"You can't—" I began, then saw it: at the center of the courtyard an ugly, new pear tree had been planted where a peach had stood. A tiny scarecrow lay at its roots with my prince's name in blood across it.
"Cut the root, topple the tree. Burn the straw," I said, because the training I had stolen from mountain hermits—counting lines of fate—surfaced when the moment demanded it. They did as I said. The creatures staggered and fell like puppets with cut strings.
"Who are you?" he asked later when blood was still drying on his sleeve.
"Just a fortune-telling fool," I said. He laughed then, but it wasn't warm.
"You saved me," he said, and something like a tether clicked between us.
*
They called it a wedlock the Emperor decreed: a match in the open court, an edict like a hammer. I rode back to my father's home in a carriage that felt too large for my thin body. When the gate opened I expected trouble. I expected lies spun to justify me being taken. What I got instead was a living small war of cruelty. My sisters' smiles were knives.
"Your ladyship," sneered Paula. "Back so soon from the prince's house? You look dreadful. The dogs would have had better taste."
Caroline clucked and arranged her hair. "Such a spectacle for our family. Imagine—our little mad girl as a prince's choice."
"Call me mad one more time," I said.
They laughed and the household laughed with them.
"Keep quiet, child," said my mother Ami Jenkins. "Your father is proud, but a scandal will ruin the house."
"Scandal?" I echoed. "Is being alive a scandal?"
They listened, but not like they had ears. I had been counted dead the moment the river took me years ago, and now the river had returned a stranger. The old ways of the house did not accept me.
"Let me look at the records," I told them, and the words were a spark.
"Why?" my mother asked.
"Because I've been starving on five mouthfuls of porridge a day and the kitchen's book can't be rewritten by pity."
"Don't be ridiculous," Caroline said.
"Bring the ledgers," I said. "Let us see."
My mother agreed to the inspection with a tightness about her lips I had seen when a general commands on the field. Men and women from the household shuffled papers as if they were explosives.
"Here," I said. "Two bowls of porridge with five grains each? For ten years?"
It was there. The mark of theft. The ledger could not lie. My mother's color changed, and her hands trembled.
"Forgive me," she said to the assembled staff, and for the first time the house leaned.
They punished the maid who had stolen from me—not with a wet towel and obscenities, but with a clean ledger entry and a heavier hand. The merchant's ledger cannot be bribe-smeared. Paper remains stubborn.
"Compensation will be paid," my mother promised, and the cupboard rumbling in my belly felt less like an empty cave.
I needled the maid before she left.
"Eat," I told her, shoving at the thin bowl she had used on me all those years. "Enjoy it. Let your mouth remember what it felt like when you took from me."
She choked and fled. The house was rearranged by an invisible axis of truth. Justice doesn't always roar; sometimes it is the quiet accounting of things. That night I slept without the thread of hunger dragging me awake.
*
Days were strange and tight, stitched to the prince's garment in public and to my thin meals in private. The servants called me "the prince's bride" and then sheepishly added "for now." I saw the prince more and less than before. He watched me as one watches a dangerous instrument and avoided touching me unless he wanted to measure some cost.
One morning a parrot—my sister's lavish gift—mocked me as it always had. It called me names I had been called my whole life.
"Fool! Useless! Mad!" it shrieked.
I stared at it. I didn't see wrong. I saw an animal living better than I had been. I took the bird, roasted it by the courtyard grill, and ate until my throat ached and my feet tingled. My mouth was full of warmth and shame both.
"You ate my bird!" Paula screamed at me.
"It was noisy," I said. "It was cruel. Now it's quiet." I smiled, the edges sharp as knives.
She came at me with her attendants and I ran. I ran and ran until the courtyard was a blur and my ribs felt brittle. I misstepped and almost fell into the lily pond. I expected cold water and hands and curses.
Instead someone caught me.
"She tried to escape again," someone hissed into my ear.
"I am not an escapee," I snapped, but the hands that steadied me were not cruel. Blake pulled me close, his arm locking around my waist like an iron band. The crowd hush fell heavy. He held me like a claim.
"What do we do? Catch her!" Paula ordered.
He laughed softly then, quietly.
"Who is she to you?" my sister demanded.
"She belongs to me now," he said.
My sisters' faces flamed with fury. They could not imagine a world where their petty cruelties ended with someone high and terrible deciding my value.
"Let her go," my father bellowed, but he was a distant thunder, and there was no thunder to match the prince's quiet.
"Take responsibility," the prince said to my father in a voice like frost. "If you accept the match, you accept the terms. If you refuse, then—" he smiled, and a dark line cut across that smile—"then you will bring shame."
My father bowed his head. The house bowed. The chapter closed.
*
There were other fires that followed me. Men tried to set death between Blake and me. An attempt—hidden in bright petals and rope—came near to killing him. Men with eyes like bone rose from the crowd. I found myself in the middle of a fight not of my doing, cutting the chest of a shadow who moved like somebody drew the strings. The prince's blade spilled blood, and the little altar with my name made it clear that someone wanted him gone.
"Who benefits from his death?" he asked, fingers stained.
"Someone who feeds on grudges," I said. I was beginning to be arrogant with knowledge. "Someone who used the old arts. Someone who binds the living to the dead."
He did not like to be told what he was vulnerable to. Yet he listened.
"Be with me at the palace," he said after. "You will be safer at my side."
I learned quickly that being near him meant nights of brittle silence and days of terrifying attention. He would touch me like a man inspecting a blade. He would press his palm against mine to quiet a tremor, and then he would speak into the silence with a casual cruelty that made me want to spit.
"Do not sell my token," he warned once when I admired the little pendent he'd tossed at me. "If you sell it, I'll bury you."
I laughed then, narrowing my eyes.
"Fine," I said. "But you won't bury me for something that keeps my belly full. I won't be traded like a worn coin."
He watched me and something like amusement flickered. Under it there was a steely cold I did not trust.
*
Then came the day of the seed-baby.
I was in another prince's house—Dylan Becker's—because rumor had it his concubine swelled with an impossible pregnancy. The woman was beautiful in a pale way and lay thrashing as if invisible teeth bit her.
"This is beyond medicine," Dylan said, pale.
"It's not beyond magic," I said. "It's not a baby that grows by blood only. It's a seed put into a womb to be nourished by hate."
"Can you end it?" he said.
"Yes. But the one who planted it will die if the seed is cut, and the soul inside the seed will thrash before it goes. If you hold on you'll be punished in the streets."
"Do it," he begged.
I went to the bed, bit my finger, and drew a line of blood. I painted a sign on the hanging screen and shouted ancient syllables I half-remembered from a library of nightmares. The house shuddered. The belly convulsed. A child's head tried breaking out like a storm cloud.
"Stop her!" the concubine screamed.
"Back!" I shouted. "Get out!"
I covered her with a cloth I'd prepared and spoke the name of the dead child I felt as if the house had tried to swallow.
A scream waned, then dissolved. A black puff of thing burst like smoke windowwards and fled—straight out into the street as if something had been let loose.
At the palace gate a shadow moved. A man with a soft false smile called Penn Tarasov stood on the street. A messenger found him at lunch and the breath went out of his body like a balloon. The house recovered. Dylan stared at me as if I had held a knife to his heart and at the same time saved him.
"You were my wife?" he whispered, as if asking if I had been a message before.
"No," I said. "But I saved your house."
"Danger always follows you," he said, and his voice was a lament. "Who are you?"
"Keilani," I said, and the name felt as if it fit me like a coat. "Keilani Madsen."
From that day rumors spread like spilled wine. The prince watched me with a new attentiveness. I wondered if it was jealousy that sharpened him or a protective instinct as cold as iron. Either way, I had to be careful: close to him meant safety from the street and exposure to his moods.
*
The conspiracy's core broke when we found the paper-cloth effigy and the poisoned charms that had been planted in Blake's court. The man behind it—Penn Tarasov—was a minister's shadow, a man of easy smiles and late meetings. We caught him by trick.
"Release me," Penn begged when the guards dragged him to the central square.
"Why did you try to kill my prince?" I demanded, because I had the audacity of having been spared.
"You're a madwoman," he sneered. "You who eat birds and spin charms."
"Watch your tongue," the prince said quietly. His hand touched my shoulder like a clenched fist.
They made him stand in the great square facing the palace throng. They dragged out the records, the ledgers, the letters. The city was there. People had come to see the spectacle of the powerful being humbled. They had always liked to watch their betters dance with disgrace.
"Tell us," the highest of the magistrates demanded. "Who sent you? Who paid you?"
"If I told you, you'd kill me," Penn said with a grin like a blade.
"Then speak in front of these people," Blade Collins said. His voice carried over the stones like a bell. "Speak, and you may yet have pity."
Penn laughed and spat on the ground.
"The prince is a tyrant," he said. "He takes and kills. The Emperor is a blind man. We will break him and make ourselves rulers."
There was a ripple of response—a low murmur, then a rising cry. People started to record. Phones had not yet been invented; now in this century it was only hands and eyes and tongues, but they filmed with their little boxes of light and spread them like fire later. For that day they were witnesses, not jurors.
"Where are the proof?" someone asked.
Penn opened his mouth and then closed it. Pride had been his armor. He thought he was untouchable. He had written in letters, the kind he could not destroy cleanly: receipts, transfers, men who had been bribed. We had found them. Blake unfurled them like flags.
"You thought we would not notice," he said quietly. "You thought the dead were silent, the living predictable. You were wrong."
Penn's face lost color. The crowd leaned in.
"Who hired you?" a woman cried. "Who would buy blood?"
"I—" Penn faltered. "I was paid by several houses. Money for protection, money for chaos. I did not know—"
"You did," said a voice from the crowd. "You smiled and took the coin."
"Silence!" Blake said. "You wanted the prince dead. You bought traitors' hands."
"He has always been cruel to the people," Penn croaked. "He took land. He took harvests. We—"
"He took a harvest because you robbed ours!" someone answered.
Blake sized him up. He had the court's moral right now. He had the crowd's eyes upon him. He could do with a whisper what others needed an army to do.
"Take him," the magistrate said. "Bring him to the scaffold."
Penn's knees went soft. The crowd swarmed; someone in the front lines began to shout, "Hang him. Hang him!"
We led him to the public square. The magistrate read charges. The crowd pressed in, faces hot with judgement. They filmed. Voices cried. The man who had sat in velvet now faced a rope for the first time. Penn was led to a wooden platform in the center where the city laid out its rituals.
"Let him speak," the magistrate called.
We had made sure the proofs were there. Letters folded with the ink of his betrayal. Eyewitnesses stepped forward: men who had negotiated the dark corpses; a servant who had planted the scarecrow; a healer who had matched the ritual components. Penn's mouth twitched; defiance, then fear, then an animal confusion.
"I did what I had to," he said at first. "The prince is a tyrant." He tried to sound noble. People hissed.
"You're a coward," someone spat. "You sold lives."
"Tell us his name!" cried a woman with clay-streaked hands. "Who paid you?"
Penn hesitated. The square leaned. The cameras clicked. Blake's face didn't move. A single bead of sweat ran down his temple and flickered in the light.
"You're going to name names now?" Blake asked softly.
Penn's jaw clenched. He threw his voice at Blake. "You have an empire you shattered," he said. "You will die."
At that the magistrate read out the most damning of Penn's letters. The crowd shifted from curious to furious. They loved spectacle, but they loved hate more when it had a target.
"This man has hurt our people," said a farmer at the front. "He sold our sons to death, our daughters to disgrace. Hang him."
"Not yet," Blake said, and the command froze the crowd. "He will pay in a way people will remember."
He ordered the prisoner bound and then, in front of everyone, the Prince reached down and ripped Penn's silk collar from his throat. He took his pocket knife and slit Penn's sleeve. The crowd inhaled. Penn's face went white.
"Now the names," Blake said.
Penn tried to smile, tried to hide his fear in words. "You can't— you can't—"
The magistrate read the first list. It was burning down houses: men of wealth, a name from three houses, names the Emperor pretended not to know. Gasps layered through the crowd. Penn's eyes bulged. He saw his life collapse in ink and linen and someone else tore it away.
"Do you deny this?" Blake asked.
Penn's defiance crumbled into a new tone, small, terrified. "I—no—"
"Then confess," Blake said.
Penn fell apart. He named them. Each name was a punch. The crowd roared with each revelation. Penn moved through the stages everyone expected: arrogance, stunned silence, frantic denial, a last pathetic plea.
"Please—no—" he whimpered. "I was paid. I was paid!"
"Your ledger proves you," Blake said, and with the lean of a judge he added, "You will be punished for your crimes."
The magistrate pulled the bell of public humiliation. They stripped Penn of rank and title, they shaved his ornate hair and left him bare before the city. People came forward. Some beat him with sticks. Some spat. Others recorded and howled with the witch-hunt delight of a populace tasting revenge. The magistrate ordered him paraded through the markets for all to jeer, then bound in chains to stand at the city's crossroads for an hour. People came with signs and small offerings and curses.
"This is justice," the baker yelled. "This is what we have been waiting for."
Penn's expression was a study: first arrogance, then shock, then denial, then pure collapse. He begged. He grabbed at the magistrate's knees.
"Please! My family! I have a child!"
"No one blames a child for an adult's greed," the crowd sang. Phones clicked. Someone began to mutter a condemnation from a balcony that would later be a headline.
Penn cried, "I was only doing what I was told!" He tried to look big again. "It was because of greed! The prince is cruel—"
The crowd turned on him with a sound like a door slamming. A child in the front threw a tomato and a woman with a shawl reached out and slapped him. The sound of the slap unfolded into a ripple. Penn's voice turned to the wobble of a broken string. His knees folded under him. The magistrate's men dragged him to the council and took him away to be stripped of wealth and to be led as a spectacle. He kept pleading, "I didn't mean—" but no one listened.
The punishment lasted the better part of an afternoon. People came with their cameras and their wagging tongues, they bellied out what they had been stitching in secret. Penn's face moved from stunned to desperate to pleading to flat-eyed emptiness. He tried to claim he was set up, that others had told him to do the deeds, that the Emperor himself had known nothing. Each claim was met with boos.
"Shame!" the crowd cried.
"Let this be a lesson," the magistrate declaimed. "To betray the realm is to betray yourself."
The scene fed the city for days. Videos of Penn's collapse looped through alleys and teahouses. He begged, then he refused, then he bowed, then he broke. Somewhere near the end, he fell to his knees and clawed at the stone with a ragged hand.
"Please!" he cried. "Have mercy!"
No one gave him mercy. If anything, the public moved on. People need a villain to hate and then a little later they need someone new. Penn was wreckage in the street—cried, beaten, recorded. He had been proud and now he was an object lesson: arrogance meets crowd.
It was, in its savage way, satisfying to me. I had been on the receiving end of other people's cruelty all my life, and to watch the man responsible for so much conspiracy crumble in front of the city tasted like sweet bread after famine.
I looked at the prince then. He had ordered the punishment and it had been carried out with a cold hand. He looked tired, as if the weight of being feared and admired had cost him something.
"You watched him unravel," he said softly.
"I did," I said.
"You did not gloat."
"I could have," I answered. "But what good would gloating do?"
He stepped close. For the first time his smile was almost soft.
"You did well," he said. "You protected what was mine."
"I did what I could," I said.
He took my hand in public as if to mark me with ownership. I felt the press of his fingers as a chain and a shield both. It made me bristle. It made me quiet.
*
The city kept spinning. There were other threats—letters that smelled of powder, whisperers who came to me with favors that cost my silence. I kept counting, keeping the books, keeping my eyes. I learned how to stand while people tried to push me down. I learned how to use the little knowledge I'd stolen to change the ledger in ways that could not be argued.
When the day of our wedding came, the Emperor himself attended. People were there who had seen the square where Penn had been humiliated. They watched me as if I were a rare statue in a dusty hall. I wore a red that made my cheeks burn. Blake Collins walked me forward like a man moving his own banner.
"You will be his," the Emperor announced. "You will bring the prince an heir."
"I will do my best," I said, and an untruth landed like a soft coin. Marriage was a place where truth and lies met and decided to be polite.
He kissed my forehead then, in a way that made the world tilt. He is cruel and he is gentle in fragments that frighten me. He is also, without question, my shield in the street.
That night I lay awake and thought of small things: ledgers, roasted bird, the parable of the scarecrow and the pear tree. I thought of the crowd and of Penn's collapse. I thought of my father and the way he looked when he bowed to the prince and of my sisters' faces as they had been peeled away like old paint.
"Are you afraid?" he asked in the dark.
"A little," I said, honest.
"Good," he said. "Fear keeps you alive."
"Then we should fear less together," I murmured.
He looked at me and the look was almost softer than before, but not gentle enough to break him.
"In the spreadsheets of destiny," I thought, "I had hoped for a kinder number."
"Whatever comes," he said—and then he did not say the rest. He squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.
We both knew what it meant to be owned and to be wanted. We both bore marks of long winters. We both could be cruel and kind as needed. If I had to be part of his story, I would write small margins of rebellion in it. I would keep my books balanced, my belly full, and my tongue sharp.
If I had to stand beside him in the square where men broke, I would stand there, too, and be counted.
The End
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