Revenge16 min read
He Kept Saying "Forgive Me" — I Watched Him Kill Our World
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I remember the way the chamber smelled of new linens and iron. I remember how small the baby was, no bigger than my palm, how it cried a thin, puzzled cry as if the world had startled it awake too early. I remember the doctor’s hands—so steady—and the way Leonardo Dawson’s face was like winter: handsome and utterly cold.
“My lord,” the doctor said softly, holding the child as if it were porcelain. “Fresh as it is, the blood will be purer. The ancient notes say a newborn from a Nine-Yin line—”
“Is it certain?” Leonardo’s voice was quiet enough to be mistaken for concern. “If it fails, we have only wasted time.”
“It will not fail. The formula calls for it.”
They argued like men discussing weather. I had just given birth. My body felt like a map someone had drawn and then folded too many times. Every fold hurt. I tasted iron on my tongue and somehow thought of the orchard where Leonardo first found me years ago—a memory that had been a promise then, and something else now.
“No,” I said before I thought, a raw noise. “Please—no. That is my child.”
Leonardo regarded me as if I were a faded painting he no longer wished to hang in his hall. “I want Lu,” he said simply. “Only Lu.”
“Lu?” I repeated, though I knew the name belonged to the woman always watched over in his chambers. “You promised—”
“My promise was to the present,” he cut in. “Take the child.”
Hands moved like a tide. The doctor hesitated and then obeyed. One moment the baby was in my arms, pink and absurdly perfect; the next, he was lifted away and carried like cargo. I leapt up, every new stitch, every open seam of me protesting. I ran despite my limbs’ traitorous weakness.
“Stop!” I screamed. “Don’t touch my baby!”
“You will calm yourself,” Leonardo said, voice as controlled as a guillotine. “Or I will have you bound.”
“Don’t!” I lunged. They shoved me back. The courtyard tiles were cold under my palms as I crawled after them. Men seized me. A servant tore at the fabric at my mouth to stop my voice from reaching Lu.
“You mustn’t alarm her,” Leonardo said, and his words were the worst violence of all: practiced, planned, patient.
“Lu needs this,” the doctor whispered, knife shining. “She will live.”
“Then do it,” Leonardo told him. “Do it now.”
I felt the world collapse into that single man and a single bowl. I knew then—what had been kind, what had been tenderness—had been a lie tailored for a purpose. He wanted Lu well because he chose Lu, and everyone else was just instrument and fuel.
“Please.” I spat blood and pleading both. “Take my blood. I will give the rest. Spare my child.”
“Hearts mend,” Leonardo said, not unkind. “You will have more children.”
“More children?” The words were a knife. “That was not your promise.”
He looked at me, a look so empty I thought I would crack, and then he said, cold as a verdict: “If not, birth again.”
They took the child. They took his blood. They left me with the hollowed sound of a cradle that would never rock again.
Afterward, in the dim room with my hands bandaged and my breasts tight, I watched my wrists line by line become more scarred. The doctor warned me the extrication from my blood would leave me thin, like paper. Leonardo left messages—gifts, food, small comforts—and then would go away for days, sometimes for weeks. People called the manor a house of mourning and whispered about my pale hands.
“You should not let him make you kneel,” my maid Molly Jackson said once, clutching my sleeve. Tears ran down her face the way rain runs down glass.
“He made me kneel,” I said, and I meant it both ways. Once in our bedroom when it snowed outside in a ridiculous, fresh way, he told me he would keep me safe and that my life would be soft. I had drunk his sweetness like honey.
“You must rest,” she begged. “Please, let me—”
But when my child came too soon that terrible night, they were ready. The doctor admitted to leaning into ancient prescriptions and to Leonardo’s insistence. He said those words in a tone that made me taste rust: the newborn’s blood would be more effective now, purer, less tainted by months of life. Leonardo had decided the child’s worth by the ledger of a cure. He had courted me to sew me rounds of comfort only to draw blood later. I was a fountain he planned to bungle. I had given him a heart and he had traded it as if at market.
“They can’t! Not while I—” I tried to move between them.
“Get her mouth,” Leonardo ordered, and the servants obliged, their cloth stuffed into my lips like a promise.
I remember the moment the blade touched the baby. A small keening sound faltered and then faded.
“Do it,” Leonardo urged. “More.”
The child’s cry thinned like a thread cut. I felt it—my child’s warm life seeding out into a bowl. When they finally set the tiny body down before me, there was nothing to say to it. I held the weight of my loss like an accusation against my own foolish heart.
“It is done,” Leonardo said. “We have what we need.”
I don’t know how long I sat there, grieving until my throat felt raw enough to hollow out. Molly’s scream against the corridor door echoed like someone tearing a page in half. Later, when she came in, she found me wrapped around the child’s smallness until I nearly dissolved.
“You cannot let this be how they remember you,” she sobbed, pressing her forehead to mine. “You must be something else.”
I did not yet know what she meant. I only knew the hollow inside me had become a room that would never be furnished again.
Months blurred into a cruel routine. I grew thinner; Leonardo’s requests grew bolder. He came and went like a storm tide; sometimes gentleness came with him, a soft voice, a hand that coaxed soup into my mouth. He told me of the medicine he brewed for someone named Lu, murmured its bitterness was necessary. He told me, when I had the energy to look at him, “I will always do what I must.”
“What I must,” I repeated to myself, walking through a house that smelled of prayers and disinfectant. “You will always do what you must.”
In public, people bowed. Merchants praised his command. The court said he was a savior of a sick woman whose family had no favor but for him. Behind closed doors, he took what he wanted and measured my endurance with scales. Once, when I asked why he had married me at the height of my life, he said, “Because making a princess love me made it easier to take from the world what I need.”
“And what did you ever need?” I demanded once, when I could breathe the word.
“Someone who would not flee,” he answered. “Who would remain. Who would give willingly.”
I realized then that I had been chosen for my capacity to remain.
There was a day when everything broke. I had been recovering, for a moment at least, when the doctor told me I should not be drawn again. The doctor was old and tired and believed in both duty and the body. He said plainly, “If you stop, you might have three years. If you continue, you will bleed to dust.”
“Three years,” I echoed like a joke. I had nineteen when I first came as a prisoner of fate; seventeen when a war stole my palace. I had already lived years that felt like a century. Three more would be grace.
But I was not allowed grace.
Leonardo burst into the room, the door slamming like thunder. His stride always made my limbs remember the battlefield that took my family: trained, exact. He had the look of a man racing beyond reason.
“Lu is worse,” he said. “We must go. Now.”
I had been told to stay, to rest. But I could not sit. My hands shook under his grip as he hauled me up; fragments of sensation like broken shells cut into me.
“Please,” Molly knelt. She begged on the tiled floor, forehead bleeding from the force of her pleading. “My lady—she is weak. She has given so much. Spare her—”
“Then give me yours,” Leonardo snapped. “You have worthless blood; only Nine-Yin’s is useful.”
“You don’t understand,” Molly cried, pressing her palms together. “She is your sovereign’s wife—her life matters.”
“She is weak,” Leonardo shot back. “She cannot give enough. You can try.”
“You are a monster,” I said. It was a small thing to say, but it was mine.
“Try?” Leonardo smiled like a man announcing a game. “Try, and you will learn quickly whether it matters. If not, we shall take lottery mend, and your death will have been a kindness.”
Molly roared and banged her head on the floor. She begged. I watched.
In a fit of desperation, I made the choice I thought would save someone else. I knelt voluntarily that day in public, in the courtyard where gossip could gather like birds. Leonardo announced terms: I would perform a penance for a maid who trespassed and then, maybe, he would be lenient. The terms were humiliating. I bowed my forehead against stone until the blood came. The courtyard watched. They took photographs with their minds and returned to their tea.
I remember every stare like knife-pricks. The shame was a costume fit upon me. I wore it, and in its folds I learned how menswear can smell of power.
But that penance did not bribe his conscience. The day the child was taken and bled, I had to watch the last smallness slide and go.
After it, everything altered to a shade of gray. I could not sleep. My hair began to fray at the edges and turn white by inches. I told Molly once that I saw the silk fray like memory. She slapped my hand away and cried again.
“You must leave with me,” she pleaded. “We will go to the country, to the graves of your parents. Live there. Start over.”
I let her plan. It tasted like hope. When night came and the house was a beast asleep, Molly crept to the study and stole Leonardo’s rank paper. She said she would bring it and we would run.
She did not come back.
I opened the door with the last of my courage and found her at the threshold like a photograph gone wrong. Her body was an indictment—torn, her tongue missing, limbs marked by torture. My breath became a thin thing in the chamber. A group of servants stood by and chuckled. One even said aloud that the body had been a “warning.” They had moved her body into my room to remind me of my place.
I felt something inside me split and be hollowed out.
“Who did this?” I whispered to a room that smelled of excrement and fear.
A woman near the hearth answered, “Someone caught a thief last night. The Captain thought it fitting to display the result to frighten you.”
“The Captain?” I asked.
Leonardo’s shadow fell through the doorway then—he had come in while I was bending to Molly’s poor body. He had the look of a man who had read his own obituary and found it dull.
“What is this?” He asked, slightly annoyed.
“Just a message,” someone said.
I found no words. That night I vomited and tore at my own skin until the house ran with a different, private red.
For weeks I could not sleep. The doctor told me my body had been consumed and that the final straw would break it. Outside, Leonardo walked the grounds tenderly at times with Lu at his side. He whispered to her about the cure as if inventing a new religion. I watched them with a hatred that simmered into a plan that was not yet fully formed.
I left the house the first time when I was too weak to know the difference between courage and foolishness. I went to Leonardo’s study—a place of maps and ledgers—and found a chest of papers. Inside were letters and charts and, worst of all, a roster of plans with ciphers that spelled our ruin.
“He ordered the attack,” I read aloud to nobody. “He planned the siege, the slaughter of my family in the name of a cure. He planned my nation’s destruction.”
The room seemed to splinter. All the tenderness he’d shown me was a trap. He had used the war as a net: he had sent his troops and taken the palace, kept me alive, cultivated my love, and then fed the love towards a medicine for the woman he called Lu. He had made me a sacrificial shape in a brilliant fool’s devotion.
When I confronted him, he looked at the letters and at me and said, “Everything I did was for Lu.”
“That is not love,” I said. “It’s calculation.”
He paused and then, as if unveiling a relic, he brought forth the little jade pendant I had once given him in a different life—the life when he had been a child saved and I had been foolish enough to care. It had been the first knot of a small friendship between two lost children. He held it and it fit like proof that everything had been planned. It was his excuse and his map.
“You rescued me,” he said. “You gave me blood. If not for you, I would not have lived.”
“If not for you, my family would not have bled,” I said. “If not for you, my people might still live.”
“Is that the same thing?” he demanded. “Which life matters more? Yours or the sick woman’s?”
I had no answer I could stomach. He was asking me to weigh my people against one person. He had already decided. He had a map and a reason and a cause, and I had only a broken heart.
“You want forgiveness?” I asked when I could finally speak. “Then make it public.”
He paused. “Public?”
“Yes,” I said, voice small but precise. “If you claim to be a man of honor, show me honor. Unmask Lu. Show the court what she has done. Show the world you did not lie to me.”
He stared. For the first time since his cruelty began, I saw hesitation. The mask he had worn seemed to loosen.
“You must make her answer,” I went on. “Make her stand in the hall and explain. Make everyone see.”
He seemed to hesitate between saving himself and preserving his prize. “If I do this,” he said, “we both know what will happen.”
“Do it,” I said. “And let the truth be burned.”
He agreed. Whether because of a sliver of contrition or because his receptacles of lies can tolerate only so much, he arranged for an audience—an ugly, bright thing in the main courtyard, with the faces of everyone he could collect. The Chancellor sat like a judge; merchants came clutching their spoons and gossip; soldiers polished their helmets as if they were ornaments to the show.
I stood because I had been made to stand, my wrists still tender. Leonardo stood tall as a king waiting to be crowned. Lu—Eva Ramirez—was brought forward like a criminal on a leash of silk. She looked pale and small but with the cunning of someone who had practiced many faces.
“Tell them,” Leonardo said, voice strong as bell-metal. “Tell them who you are.”
Eva lifted her chin. “I am sick,” she said calmly. “I have been ill for years. When I met the man who fed me and sheltered me, he offered to protect me. He did. I –”
“You lied,” I said, surprising even myself. “You took a child’s claim, took my husband’s pity, and wore it like a brand. You pretended to be his savior.”
She smiled. “And you think I am the only liar?” she asked. “Which is worse: saving a man who saved you or keeping an empire intact?”
“That doesn’t justify murder,” I shot back.
Leonardo spoke then, clear as a sword. “You served me. You pretended. You lied about the child. You maneuvered into my ear and took what you wanted.”
Eva’s face changed then—from feign to real anger. “You accuse me,” she hissed. “You think you can name the sin and walk free after… after ordering the slaughter of thousands? If anyone is guilty, it is you.”
The crowd murmured. Faces turned. A woman in the third row hissed, “How dare she speak like that!”
“Answer one thing,” Leonardo said coldly. “Did you not pretend to be the child who saved me? Did you not wear the token? Did you not lie?”
Eva looked at him with a calm that was almost an insult. “He once told me a story at a hearth. He wanted to believe I was his savior. I did what was needed to live.”
“How long?” Leonardo asked. “How long have you been deceiving me?”
“Long enough,” she replied. “Long enough to know the taste of power.”
The crowd’s disapproval softened into fascination; scandal is always a magnet. A man who had once bought our harvests spat and said, “A traitor to your own country!” The chancellor’s eyebrows rose. Leonardo watched Eva as if considering whether to cut for mercy or for spectacle.
“Bring out the evidence,” I demanded. “Let her stand and be judged.”
They produced papers. She had indeed kept a string of letters, false names, small token symbols. Leonardo sounded satisfied. He stepped back to let the hall decide.
They chose shame. They forced Eva to kneel. They forced her to be divested of some ornament, and then they led her to the center where the public executioners worked with carved instruments. Soldiers took torches; they wanted her humiliation staged, the kind that would be photographed into memory.
“Please,” Eva begged, suddenly no longer silver-tongued. “This is unnecessary.”
“You will be made an example of,” Leonardo said, and his voice was flat as a reed.
They slapped her face first, not hard, but meaningful; they denounced her in voices every bit as loud as a sermon. People spat. A child in the crowd cried out, “She killed my uncle!” There were falsehoods and truths braided together by rumor. The official said they were punishing the one who had lied to the lord for selfish reasons.
They did worse. They dragged a mile of shame through the town—made her wear a shift of coarse cloth, paraded her through the bazaar, and forced her to recite the lies she had told. Merchants who had once courted patients and protection came forward to point fingers, tongues red with suppers. A group of soldiers tied her to a post in the square and whipped the back of her hands until they bled in neat little rivers.
“Stop!” a woman cried. “Stop this!”
Another man called, “You deserve it for the children you killed!”
The cracks of leather against flesh were like knuckles rapping on a coffin lid. At every lash, I felt my ribs quake—not because the lashes were on her, but because each one hammered a truth into the crowd: that cruelty begets cruelty. People who once bowed to Leonardo now laughed and clapped at the spectacle, as the world turned its face to the theater of disgrace.
“This is public punishment,” Leonardo announced, measured and proud. “Let the world remember what deception costs.”
Eva screamed and begged and convinced half the crowd of her irrationality; the other half cheered their brand of justice. Molly tried to push through and was beaten back by a soldier. I stood and watched, my hands empty. The whole spectacle lasted long enough for the sun to change its angle and the shadows to look accusatory on the stones.
Afterwards, when the crowd dispersed like wet paper, Leonardo announced he had done justice. Men clapped him on the back. The chancellor called it firm governance. Molly crawled to me and pressed a fingertip to my cheek.
“You looked at me,” I said.
She nodded. “You looked like someone who had watched a slow stone drop and drown a river.”
That day, they punished Eva publicly. Her dignity was stripped. She left with a face that would not be forgiven in courts—marked and hollow. The people had seen their theater of power, and they had enjoyed it like a feast. Leonardo stood tall and hollow. The question hammered out in my mind then: did such public spectacle cleanse anything? Did it absolve him?
No. It only sharpened the hypocrisy. The crowd had seen one liar condemned and missed the bigger truth: the man who had orchestrated the war would never be held before them. He had used the public to wash rust off his conscience.
My grief turned into something else—a cold, patient engine. I could no longer be the woman who begged. I learned to speak quietly, to plan the smallest things. I learned to write names and fold them like knives inside my palm. I paid attention to the men who served him and to the way they shifted when he was angry. I watched like a person trained to avoid pits, and then I watched some more.
When the truth of Leonardo’s role in my people’s slaughter surfaced, as it would—secrets like rot eventually smell—the sequence of justice moved slower but more mercilessly. I watched him lose the things he loved one by one. But the rule of the tale required a punishment in the square as well: not for the woman he had used, who had already been shamed, but for the man who had played at god.
So when a messenger from the capital arrived with a warrant for him—words from a court that had its own reasons to fear and hate him—he was summoned to stand in the same hall that had applauded Eva’s disgrace. The crowd now had different appetites: a taste for spectacle remained, but it had turned into a hunger for fall.
They brought him in with pomp. The chancellor read the list of transgressions: secret correspondence, orders issued without sanction, a campaign he had started that had nullified the Crown’s freedoms. The man who had once bent the city to his will stood there, a figure hollowed by remorse and too late contrition.
They made him kneel.
“You speak now,” the chancellor commanded. “You will say what you did and why.”
Leonardo’s voice shook when he began. “I loved a woman,” he said, and his eyes were capacious with tears. “I was weak. I sought a cure. I sought to trade the world for one life.”
“You gave orders that killed many,” the chancellor snapped. “Explain.”
“I thought I could bargain with fate,” Leonardo said, each syllable like a confession that could not be called back. “I thought love made me right.”
“You thought?” a soldier shouted. “You killed men!”
And then it was my role to speak. I stood and walked to the center of the hall. My voice did not tremble.
“You have all seen the spectacle of a woman’s disgrace,” I told them. “You cheered for what you called justice. How many of you demanded the truth about the campaign that killed an entire nation? How many of you asked who ordered that the palace fall while soldiers wore the name of our lord?”
Heads turned. Men cursed. Leonardo looked at me as if the words themselves were knives.
“I loved him once,” I said quietly. “He used that love to make a war. He used his title to take away my father, my mother, my home. Does the pain you clap at matter any less?”
People shifted. Some threw down their goblets. One man called, “We followed orders.”
“Orders?” I answered. “Orders are moral choices. He chose war for a woman of his own making and called it a cure.”
The chancellor listened like a judge and then did what courts often do: he shifted blame like a coin to be spent. Leonardo was stripped of his title in a ritual that would be recited in baleful taverns for years. His land was seized, his soldiers reassigned. He was paraded through the city as a fallen man, the same way I had been paraded as a penitent. People who had called him savior now hungered to see him tremble.
“Do not make the same mistake,” he whispered to me when we crossed paths on the procession route. “I beg you.”
I looked at him. The man who had taken a nation in exchange for a cure was suddenly a beggar. “You should have thought of begging before you made a kingdom a bargain,” I said. “Beg does not bring those already buried back.”
They forced him to make apologies, detail them in ink that would be read aloud to mines and markets. The humiliation was long. It was not enough. It never could be enough. The public scene, the corded rope of ritual apology—those things cleansed for the crowd, but they could not wash the hollowness from the houses where children had once played.
I watched as the man who had once taken my child and born our ruin hobbled through a life with the edges broken off. He lost name and rank; he lost the trust of men; he lost the face of himself he had shown. He was punished in the square where once Eva had been made to stand. The crowd cheered again, though this time their voices were laced with a different flavor—relief, pity, cruelty. The oracle of spectacle had no conscience. It demanded dramas, and it gave both mercy and nails.
But punishment—public, private, ritualized—did little for the dead. They remained as they were: gone. I could collect no more than ash and memory. The only thing left to me was to decide what to do with the remnant of my life.
When at last I left the hall, my hands empty, my hair streaked with what had become its inevitable silver, I did not look back. Leonardo’s public fall had satisfied the crowd, but it did not fix the deep fissures running through me. I had been crushed, used, and offered as a resource. No spectacle could restore that.
“What now?” Molly asked me as we walked in the dusk.
“What now?” I repeated. “We live. We teach. We remember. I will stitch our story into fabric. I will teach a young girl how to stitch moonlight into satin. I will keep the memory of those we lost alive.”
Molly nodded slowly, drying her eyes. “You will not seek him again?”
I thought about Leonardo, about his private tears, his public fall. “I will not pursue vengeance,” I said. “I will let whatever reckoning is left be with time.”
“And Lu?” she asked.
“She lives with the weight of what she did,” I said. “Public shame fell on her, and public shame fell on him too. But the world is not healed.”
We went home to the quiet among the gardens, to the work of mending—both the fabric of a ruined life and the little pieces of a people’s culture. I opened my hands to a different kind of giving. I took up a needle again and stitched small things: a guardian’s cloth for a boy who needed warmth, a sash for a woman with a baby. I tried to be useful in a way that would not cost another child.
Once, years later, I stood at a small grave beside the orchard where my family had once walked. The world had repaired itself with slow hands. Men had made new houses; children had new songs. My brother had become a leader in a place no longer the place it once was. He had married, had a child. I watched his son run like a sunbeam across the courtyard and felt something like forgiveness in my chest.
I do not say I forgave Leonardo. I do not say I could. Some things wound too deep for that. But time does its own work, perhaps not justice, but settlement. The crowd that once demanded spectacle forgot pieces as they always will. Eva and Leonardo became examples, footnotes in a noisy history. The real work remained in kitchens and in beds, in the quiet sewing rooms where we kept our dead alive by naming them and by refusing to let their story be swallowed.
At night, sometimes, I dream of the child I held and lost. I wake and my hands are still warm from sewing. I look down at the stitch I am making, a small perfect loop, strong enough to hold two pieces together. It is enough for now.
The End
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