Sweet Romance13 min read
He Called Me Wife, Then Tried to Keep the World for Me
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I remember the wind that night as if it were a living thing, clawing through cracked glass, shredding sound into screaming ribbons.
"You can't die, Alicia," he kept yelling at me. "You promised—stay with me!"
"I can't," I whispered, even as the world thinned, even as my skin felt like tissue and then nothing. "Rafael, live. Take my piece of this world and live."
He didn't let go. The boy I had warmed for eight years clung to me like a drowning thing. I had spent a decade being an actor across lives; this was the last assignment. Eight years in this one had been the long haul. I had softened him, taught him manners and stubbornness and how to laugh, and when the threat came, I did what felt like the only honest thing: I took the bullet.
"Open the gate, Aoi," I ordered at the end, to the little voice inside my head, the one who had held me through thousands of missions.
"Opening," Aoi replied, voice calm as if nothing in the cathedral were on fire, as if I didn't feel my own bones falling away.
I stepped through the golden door, because a job must be finished. I left Rafael with wet eyes and a roaring wreck of a heart. I left with twenty billion credits wired into a ghost account and a body that knew how to die clean.
Then I slept. On purpose. My systems told me to rest; the call back to reality would be quick and neat. Except life is not code—someone somewhere had tightened a knot.
I woke with a sneeze and a groggy, irritating sense that the world had rearranged itself. Aoi was gone silent.
"Aoi?" I shouted in my head.
"Contact lost," came the hollow reply. Then a series of voices—my family's voices—swam into my mind. They cried my name. They blamed Rafael for taking me, for keeping me away. They called him a monster. They talked about funerals that didn't happen. They talked about a "冥婚"—a marriage of the dead—and the words slashed at me like wind.
"Give me back my—" Rafael's voice cut through the chaos. It was deeper, harsher, shaped into a new edge. "Give me my Alicia."
I wasn't supposed to be back here. A system glitch, Aoi said finally, like a bureaucrat apologizing at an accident. "Accidental rebound," she offered. "Data unsynced. You may be physically present."
"Present?" I tried to move. My body fumbled with the return. I was lying cold, still, catalogued as something between plant and person. "Rafael," I rasped. He answered, then.
"You are—" he breathed, voice low and reverent. "You are alive."
And then I was married.
"Are you mine?" he asked the officiant like it was ritual and law.
"She is," he answered for me. "She is my wife."
I did not like the sound of that.
"Rafael," I tried again, and the room tilted when my hand pierced someone's cheek like a sheet of glass. I could move, barely, then. For a breath, I was a shadow inside skin.
"You should have seen him," I told Aoi later, once I learned to hoard thoughts. "Like a wolf that had been taught to be a pet. Devastated. Then sharpened."
"Mission completed," Aoi said, hopelessly bureaucratic. "But are you aware that black level for target is eighty percent?"
"Eighty?" I said. I didn't mean to say it aloud, but the number hit like ice. He had been softened to five percent after eight years, and then something had happened—something after I left. He had become jagged again. My eight years of warmth had turned into a brittle, dangerous hunger.
I did not get my twenty billion and quiet retirement. I got a fortress and a ring I had not expected.
"Don't look at me like that," Rafael said the night he carried me into the so-called bridal chamber. "You are mine and I will not let you go."
"You are not allowed to call me 'Alicia' in a room of strangers," I said then, joking because I had to. He kissed my forehead and answered, "I will call you wife in public and my idiot in private."
"Little liar," I muttered, but we both knew the names had already taken root.
The first real test came before the night had braided itself into a week. Someone tried to cut my heart out with a kitchen knife.
"Die, slut!" a voice hissed.
I snapped awake fast enough to surprise the woman. She hadn't expected movement. She had expected a corpse. When I grabbed her wrist she gasped the exact words of disbelief I loved hearing for once: "You're alive?"
"I am," I said, and took the blade from her. She spun into a ridiculous run, but truth is, she had embroidered dynamite into the waistline.
"Aoi—" I snarled inside my head. "Not now."
"It is a time-delay," Aoi replied. "Heavy device. You must not let her leave."
Rafael shut the doorway behind him like a match struck. He smelled like night and iron. He took in the woman in one look and his face became slate.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"She tried to sell a story once and failed," I said out loud. "I think she meant to make him hurt."
"Leave the room," Rafael told her.
She shoved the bomb toward me and ran. She meant the device to cling to me. She meant a corpse on his chest. She did not expect that I would move. I caught the device, because old reflexes die slow.
"It will blow!" I hissed.
Then Rafael, without a flicker of his previous self, solved it. His hands were very fast. He stripped the casing like a man accustomed to bleeding machines. There was a single bead of sweat at his temple. The countdown stopped. The red light flicked to nothing.
"How did you—" I said.
"I learned to keep my heart beating," he said simply. "I learned to keep things from going boom."
That night he thought he could make up for a lifetime with rice noodles and whispered promises. He sat outside the bathroom and waited while I washed, and when I stepped out, he gave me a stupid, childlike demand.
"Kiss me," he said.
"Like this?" I mocked, and pecked him on the forehead.
He frowned, as if the world paused. "Not like that," he said. "Not just an appetite for food."
We argued. We did not sleep. It was because everything had collapsed once already—because he had once nearly torn the world in half to get me back from God—and neither of us trusted enough to do small things without saying ten thousand words in between.
Days slid into the kind of fragile cadence that means fragile people are trying. My second brother, Hernando Gross, came to check me; he was a surgeon of temper and touch. He scolded Rafael and then scolded me for letting Rafael scold him.
"Your hormones are suppressed," Hernando told me, paper fluttering between his fingers, scowling like he owned the ocean. "Someone medicated you."
"It was for the rescue," Rafael answered, face smooth as moonlight. "I did what I had to."
"You don't get to steal her life and call it rescue," Hernando said sharply.
Rafael only leaned forward, his hands folded like a man who had given up the right to rage and kept a reserve for mercy. "She woke up here," he said. "I will not let her vanish again."
Hernando glared like it was an insult. "You will not be allowed to experiment, Rafael. Not with her."
"When the law is blind, why not close one eye?" Rafael said softly. "But I will listen."
They argued the small things I could live through, and the large things I couldn't. I chose to survive. I chose to stay long enough to finish this.
Then the old scandal arrived in the form of a carriage and a silvered voice—Takeshi Ogawa, the man who had been once promised to me. A polite storm in a tailored suit.
"Alicia," he said with the softest of bows that cut like glass. "You finally woke."
"You came a long way for five minutes?" I asked.
"It's longer than that," he said, then, as if someone had lit a fuse, "You belong with me. Break your bind to him."
Rafael stood and the room angled like it did when a knife finds a joint.
"You will leave," he said.
"You will let her go," Takeshi answered, cool as winter river.
"I will not," Rafael said, and then his patience snapped like a twig.
There is something obscene when power meets ego and both expect the world to bend. Takeshi pulled a gun like a man following an old promise. "You will be gone, Rafael."
The shot was a sound like an animal dying. It entered air and wished for a clean end.
I moved because I had learned to move faster than fear. I shoved him. The bullet went through my arm and not through his spine. It grazed my skin and I tasted iron and laughter at the rawness of it.
"Don't you dare," Rafael cried.
"Call the ambulance!" my mother, Joanna George, shouted, hysterical and fierce.
They took me to Hernando's hospital and wrapped my arm in sterile patience.
Takeshi's handcuffs clicked. He looked at me with genuine bewilderment, the stunned expression of a man who thought himself the hero of his own bullet. He was not. He would not be.
Instead of a quiet legal resolution, something else happened. The gossip engine revved, the feeds lighted, and people who never thought twice about anyone's fate leaned forward because drama is cheap and profitable.
It was at our "return ceremony"—the homecoming where ribbons and cars were more important to the family than breath—that Bella Barrett, the woman who had pretended to be my sister, tried to act pure. She had played her small role with greedy fingers for five years; she had smiled with all the arithmetic of advantage. She had also, it turned out, paid people to whisper things and planted dangerous thoughts. She had wanted me far away because her comfort was the arithmetic of other people's absence.
Rafael intercepted her privately after the ceremony, in the big living room where shadows measured creditors and children. He had the cold composure of someone who had learned the taste of vengeance and stored it like a utensil.
"Bella," he said.
She smiled that staged smile of hers, the kind that learned by counting other people's kindness. "Rafael, here you are," she purred. "You look—"
"Stop," Rafael said. "You're not in the right place for a performance."
"You are so dramatic," she replied. "You think you can threaten me?"
He was so calm that for a second I thought he would make her laugh. Then he untied a small black package and set it on the long table. Inside was a map of texts, a string of bank transfers, and a set of videos.
"This," he said, "is how you thought to be a family member."
She blinked once, arrogant and sure. "What is—"
"Videos," he said, and the TV found itself lit like a gavel. "Phones, camera angles you paid for. Look."
The room inhaled. People leaned forward. I stepped back because looking her in the face now felt like looking at glass. The screen played footage: Bella arranging the assassin, a meeting in the garden, a hand pressing a package into a stranger's palm. Her laugh echoed soft and too loud.
"You're lying," she sobbed, but her voice staggered. "You can't—"
"Turn it off!" she shrieked, and the shriek itself became evidence.
Rafael's face was still the same even as his jaw worked, a man who had learned to hold winter in his chest. "Do you remember the night you brought the woman with the blade?" he asked.
She smiled, brittle, and the smile fell. "I—"
"She tried to give her the bomb," Rafael said. "You transferred money. You arranged the false-sister narrative. You enrolled yourself as a tenderness the family didn't need."
People who had not known the quiet cruelty of Bella's long climb began to understand. Their faces shifted from polite curiosity to stomach-sick surprise.
"How could you?" my mother whispered.
"You had the audacity to call yourself family," said Hernando. His voice had the tone of a surgeon laying out a wound. "You used the shape of my sister's life to feed your vanity."
Bella's eyes darted. "You can't—" she began, but there was no breath behind the sentence.
I watched in a strange, underwater silence as her face moved from smug entitlement to the white glare of someone who realizes the stage is gone.
"You will apologize," cried my father, Christopher Bauer, voice thick. "And then you will leave. You will never use this house to pretend you care for us."
"No," she said flatly, and her denial was the first step toward collapse.
Rafael did not want to spill things into the street. He wanted a lesson public enough to remove the poison but private enough to spare the children of gossip an excess of cruelty. So he set the punishment like a careful surgeon setting a splint. He wrote her name in the guest book and declared, softly, that at tomorrow's charity gala he would make decorum his instrument.
"I will not allow my wife's house to be a nest for the false," he said, voice like a steel blade. "Tomorrow, in front of everyone who saw you dance in our drawing rooms, you will answer for this."
She laughed, a rush like a small animal. "You can't ruin me. I have connections."
"Then introduce them tomorrow," he said. "And then we will see."
The world is a stage for people who love theater. Tomorrow came with cameras and champagne, with the town's who-is-who and bright, hungry faces. The ballroom was full. Our name on the guest list glowed like a brand.
"Make way," called the hostess, prettiness climbing the shoulders of her dress. "Mr. Edwards' announcement."
"You have five minutes," Rafael told the maître d'. "Then show them the recordings."
Inside, I sat wrapped in something like silk and wore a necklace Rafael had insisted I keep. My hand was small in his, and people thought we were the power couple who had slain the years of pain for love. They did not know how much of our life had been mine to manage.
When he stood and the room bent to his voice, it was not just a man talking. It was a man who had watched the person he loved become a project for thieves and had collected receipts.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Rafael began. "There are stories that cost life. There are people who take advantage of sorrow. And there are those who covertly arrange an attempt to remove another human being, for gain."
The room inhaled.
"We invited everyone who matters," he continued. "Because I did not want this to be a rumor. I wanted it to be the truth, held up and set in light."
On the big screen, the footage began to play again—the cold transaction, the woman's hand slipping the explosive into a bag, the laugh. Bella leaned back, believing in the redundancy of her protection. Then Rafael walked over and handed the microphone to me.
"Say what you want," he said. "Tell them."
I did not plan a speech. I had been handed a moment that might be used to erase a person who had tried to erase me. Instead, I told the truth: "She pretended to be my sister. She schemed to make me disappear. These videos are only part of the trail."
"Bella," I said. "Do you have anything to say?"
She stood like a plant that had been uprooted. Her eyes flashed—first hurt, then rage, then a brittle attempt at control.
"This is slander!" she cried. "You are turning the crowd!"
"Is it slander?" I asked, voice steady. "Or is it truth?"
She opened her mouth to call me mad or to slide into self-pity. Then her face changed.
"No!" she screamed, the first honest sound she had made. "I didn't—" and then the syllables broke under the weight of the evidence.
There is a stage moment that does not feel staged. Her smile tore off in real time like wallpaper. She reached for her collar as if tearing away a costume and realized she had no costume left.
"You used my life to feel important," I said. "Do you understand what you did?"
Her breath came like a child reduced to truth. "I needed—" she started, but the next breaths were small and animal. She had nothing to say, and for once words were empty.
The crowd shifted from spectators to witnesses. They took out phones. Fingers rose like a tide crashing. Someone whispered, "Record." Others murmured, "Shame." Cameras found her face, broadcasted it.
She moved through the stages of loss in quick, ugly succession. She was proud. She was shocked. She was angry. She denied. She collapsed.
"You're ruining me!" she begged, falling to her knees on the polished floor as if that could undo the film. "You can't—I've done nothing! I'm a good daughter, a good—"
People made all the noises a public feels when it watches an unmasking: an intake of breath, a low whistle, a camera click. Someone laughed. Someone called, "Finally." Someone else began to clap because curses sometimes feel satisfying in public.
"You sold me to disappear," Rafael said, cold as a knife. "You chose to hurt us to climb. You will answer in court, and in public truth."
She babbled, fingers splayed, face damp. "Please, I didn't mean—"
"No one will help you," Hernando said quietly, his surgeon's voice bare of mercy. "We have evidence. We have witnesses. The cameras will not forget."
"Please," she repeated, the word crawling in a bad band on her throat.
She begged. She curled on the floor. She tried to bargain. She offered money, offered her sorry, offered names that had no weight. She reached for anything—my father's nod, my mother's pity—but the room remained a tribunal.
"It is over," my mother said. Her voice was thin, but it held the authority of a woman who had been used to balancing a household.
The cameras recorded everything. Phones shone. People filmed the collapse.
"Don't touch me," Bella said suddenly, eyes blazing with the last of her arrogance. "Don't show me!"
But the footage was already everywhere. The town had its clip, the feeds had their story, and the eventual hearings would have a clip: Bella Barrett, on her knees, at a charity ball, with every angle of her crime given light.
She begged like a cornered animal: "Please, please, please—"
No one answered. They stared. They whispered. Someone clapped with savage, polite satisfaction.
She didn't leave that night gracefully. She left with guards and a coat over her shoulders, her head bowed, her expression stripped of all veneer. She had been seen and unmade.
Later, in the quiet, Rafael came back to me.
"You shouldn't have done that," he said, but his eyes were iron-soft.
"I needed to be safe," I told him.
"You are safer," he said. "But remember: truth is a heavy weapon. It can clear the weeds, but it can also scar the soil."
"I know," I said.
The punishment had lasted long enough. It had been public, and it had not been a bloodbath. It had been careful, surgical. The audience had watched entitlement exposed, overheard the fall, filmed it to keep. Bella had gone through the sequence: smugness, shock, denial, collapse, begging. The crowd had reacted as instructed by rawness and hunger: silence, then whispers, then footage, then applause.
That evening the city felt different. People who had not known my name lined up to say, "You are brave," or "How could you—" or simply "I'm glad you're alive."
The rest of the months were tightrope: Rafael trying and failing to stop himself from controlling me; me teaching him respect like a stubborn schoolmaster; Hernando hovering like a hawk; Calder Sun—my famous third brother—arriving like an effusive sun and snatching me away for gaming nights; and Takeshi Ogawa drifting away, political wounds opening in the press.
We learned how to breathe in the same room. He learned to wait for permission. I learned to feed him small comforts so he would not spiral into ruin. We gritted teeth and made bargains. I taught him patience. He taught me how to keep a fortress.
The system, Aoi, eventually clicked back online full-time and sulked with the digital honesty of a bureaucrat. "Black level down to seventy-seven percent," she reported cheerfully one day.
"Good," I said. "We are doing this together now."
Rafael grinned like a ridiculous boy at breakfast and said,"Will you be mine forever?"
I looked at his mouth and the blue in his eyes. I looked at the scars he had earned and the empire he had built. I looked at how he had let me go and tried to fix things by turning the world into a place where I could breathe.
"Not forever," I said, because forever sounded like prison.
"Then for now," he said.
"For now," I answered.
And in the drawing room where the cameras had once watched Bella fall, Rafael lifted a small box onto the coffee table. He did not ask me to kneel. He did not ask me for my life. He offered me an honest heart.
"Will you keep teaching me?" he asked.
We laughed, and the laughter was real, and in that simple, fragile sound there was the sense that something had begun to be mended.
The End
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