Sweet Romance11 min read
He promised a crown and left me my phoenix robe — then everything fell apart
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I am Sofia Duncan. I was born into the Duncan household with an embroidered name and a measured step. I learned how to make my hands gentle and my face still. I stitched a wedding robe for a year — the phoenix wing cut into silk, each feather a small oath. That robe was the proof of a future no one doubted.
"Why do you stare at that sparrow?" the nanny scolded the day I was halfway through a feather. "Your phoenix will be outside in the palace."
"I like the sparrow," I said. "It flies without orders."
She tutted. "A princess cannot take lessons from sparrows."
I smiled behind my needle. Finn Santos — the prince who grew up at the palace — and I had lived in each other's stories since infancy. He taught me the "钰" character the first time I refused to eat porridge; he laughed like sunshine. Everyone said we made a perfect match: the heir and the heiress, a match that would sit in portraits for generations.
"One day this will be on you," the nanny said. "He will put the phoenix on your shoulders."
I believed her. I believed Finn. I believed in the clever smoothness of fate.
Then the news came.
"Your Highness fell from a cliff," Matteo Corbett said, voice blunt. "They found no body. He was injured. He is missing."
My hand trembled. A single bead of blood fell from my finger onto the unfinished wing. I washed it, but the silk kept the stain, a small, stubborn red.
We waited. We prayed. We walked the house like the old clock that refused to stop.
A month later, the story at the gate changed tone. The prince returned — or someone returned wearing his name. He came wrapped in bandages and court procession and a new face in his eyes. He looked at me and did not know me.
"Who are you?" he asked the first time he saw me in the inner hall.
"Prince," I said, and then: "Finn — it's Sofia. Your betrothed."
He froze the way a man freezes when he finds the sky empty of one star.
"Who is she?" he asked the young woman who fed him from a bowl.
"Her name is Giana," the young woman said, glancing at me and looking confused. "I... I brought the medicine."
He smiled at Giana like a man who had found a hearth. He turned to me and said, carefully, "I have no memory of before. Giana found me. She is the one who stayed. She is the one I will keep."
"Do you know what that sounds like?" I asked nobody, because the world had gone thin and the sound was my own voice.
"His wound took his memory," Matteo told me. "A small town woman found him and brought him back to health. They cared for each other."
"She is a low-born girl," the nanny muttered. "This will not stand."
He kneeled in front of the emperor and asked to break our betrothal. He said that the threads that once held him were gone, that he loved Giana, and that his pledge should be undone. The emperor, who liked the shape of order, looked at me as if I were the difficult guest at a table.
"Do as the prince wishes," they said to me — formal, folded, final.
I knelt. "As the prince wishes," I told the emperor. I did not let my tears fall. The Duncans had taught me how to be still even when the heart burned.
When men carry boxes of gifts back to our house and ask the servants not to look, some things die slow enough to be buried whole. Matteo brought the boxes. He shuffled like a man carrying shame.
"Those are his," he said. "He said it's better you don't have them."
I opened one chest in the courtyard where sun could judge me. The silk, the small worshipful things the prince had once kept for me — I took them and threw them over the cliff.
"Why?" Ayla Robinson, my maid, hissed. "Those were worth treasure."
"They are tied to a promise that is not kept," I said. "Let them go."
We watched them fall like a false history into the river. People stared and whispered. My maid, who loved silver, gathered coins later and poured them, loudly and proudly, into the street for everyone to pick. "Take it," she shouted. "Take the fortune of the house that lost its title."
The crowd who had mocked us before turned their voices. "Look," they said. "The Duncan girl is generous." Human breath will change direction when you push it.
That same season, in the white chill of late snow, I played a cautious trick. I climbed a small stage at a feast and taught myself to play a different instrument, old and strange: the konghou. I plucked it slowly. The notes floated like birds in a clean winter sky. People stopped and watched. The prince, standing separate and lean, looked as if something in him remembered.
After the melody I received the only gift I kept: a single red plum blossom pinched into my hair. The prince's gaze cut through me like ice.
"To my mother, you will always be used for politics," the Empress said later. "Do not be careless."
"Why would I be careless," I said, and put the plum closer to my ear.
He came to the festival later — not because he needed to, but because he could not stop coming to the places I was. He looked as if a torn room had been sewn back badly. One day his memory usage surprised us: he suddenly spoke with a fierceness that didn't fit his pale face. He drew a sword in the hall and called the old physician a liar.
"Am I ill?" he asked Franco Smirnov once, and then, "No. I remember nothing. I thought I had a blank. Did I have a blank?"
Franco, who had known men long enough to read the inside of a palm, would not be shamed by an emperor. He smiled grimly and said, "There are wounds that look like forgetfulness. There are other wounds, worse."
I learned the truth because Franco could not keep his mouth shut. The child who'd been hidden away at birth, the one the court called a lost thing, was not the man we had known. There had been two: Finn Santos, the heir who smiled politely at me; and the other, who had been raised out of sight. The small boy had been kept safe by a physician and then taken away by a queenly fear. Years of cruelty followed. The younger had been pushed, trained, made into a weapon. He had been pushed into darkness, and he learned there.
"Who told you?" I asked when Franco's words fell at my feet.
He shrugged. "Some things cannot be kept. He pretended to be what the world wanted him to be. He took a name. He learned to be a prince."
And that is how Connor Vogel first met my eyes.
He did not ask for pity. He asked for a chance.
"I don't want your pity," he told me, once, late when snow bent the trees. "I want you to look and not be like the rest."
"Look at what?" I asked. "The man who took a life and a name?"
He flinched when I said it — because he had indeed found the sealed bones of Finn Santos and had dug a shallow grave and put them beneath the reed. He had given the city a prince in place of a prince. He had taken a throne that wasn't his by right. He had pretended to be the son everyone loved.
"I pretended to be him," Connor said. "I did what I had to. But I cannot bear to be him forever. I want to be seen as myself."
"You came back and crushed my future," I said. "You turned my wedding robe into a relic."
He reached for a glove and then stopped. "I know. I will learn to stitch. I will learn to give you a life without pain."
We were not lovers at once. Our small touch was a slow work. He did things in crooked ways — at times possessive and sudden, then gentle and apologetic. He learned my name aloud until the syllables hardened on his tongue: "Sofia." He wrote it in little notes and left them like crumbs. He taught himself to carve jade because the one jade pendant we once had came to pieces and he wanted to make a twin.
"Why do you want to be with me?" I asked him once in the boat house, where the river kept its own small counsels.
"Because I have been hollow a long time," he said. "Because I thought being her — being Finn Santos — would be simpler. But when I tried to be him, you were the one thing I could not bear to lose."
I looked at him. The words that sprang up in my chest were not gentle. They were not kind. They were true.
"You were a man who arranged my ruin," I said. "You used people's lives like chess pieces. How is that appealing?"
He did not protest. He met my eyes and said, soft and fatal, "I can change."
Change is not a quick thing. But the world moved around us. A plot hatched by greedy men — the fat Gerry Campbell and the scheming Ravi Sandoval — erupted. They thought the chaos of a dead prince and a false prince would let them seize rank. They decided to move their pawns: soldiers to the palace gates, whispers to the ministers, a plan to put a pliant man on the throne if the real line could be stamped out.
"Do you think a mask can hold?" Connor asked me on the eve of trouble. "Do you think a crown is just a shape to be worn?"
I had thought so. I no longer believed the shape was empty.
When the palace boiled, Connor did something I never saw in a prince: he exposed them.
"Bring them out," he said, voice steady as an anvil at the center of a storm. "Bring the men who would make the kingdom war."
They paraded the accused into the hall. I stood on the side and watched. The crowd had gathered; guards were more than men — they were the eyes of a nation.
Gerry Campbell stood tall, furious, brazen. Ravi Sandoval tried to hide behind his sleeve. They had expected confessions in private, simple hushes. They had not expected an emperor who knew how to put a mask on a man and then peel it off to the applause of every idle watcher.
"Gerry Campbell," Connor said, voice quiet but not thin. "You brought soldiers to the gate. You conspired to blacken the name of the late Finn Santos. You thought being loud would make you rightful."
Gerry laughed at first. "You think you can punish me? I have many friends." He spat the words more to carry bluster than belief.
Connor did not shout. He merely signaled.
The punishment that followed was public, deliberate, and meant to be remembered.
They made Gerry stand in the center of the plaza where the market used to be. He thought perhaps he would be fined, or he would retire in shame. Instead, Connor had a wheel of accountability turned wider.
"Let them remember," Connor said, and his voice reached even the farthest eaves.
Gerry's men removed his sword and then his right hand. It was quick and clinical. He had not even seen the small blade until it was in place. People gasped; some turned away. But many could not look away. That hand that had fed bribes and clutched offices fell to the ground like a lesson.
Gerry staggered. His face changed from furious to stunned to a raw, pleading thing. He lurched forward and nearly fell to his knees. "You — you cannot do this! I am loyal to the house! I serve the crown!" he cried. It was the slow arc of shame — bravado, disbelief, pleading.
The crowd reacted in the way crowds do: at first a roar of vindication — "Good!" some shouted. Then a scatter of anxious whispers. A mother covered her child's eyes. A small boy nearby, who had never seen blood, started to cry. "He deserved it," an old woman muttered. "He would have slit our tongues."
Ravi, who had thought himself safer, watched the scene collapse his nerve. Connor's eyes moved to him, not with triumph but with a coldness that burned.
"Ravi Sandoval," Connor said, and the sound of his name made even the guards stand straighter. "You sent masked men into open houses to kill those who would remember truth. You would castrate a line to make room for your seed."
Ravi's face went white. He had not imagined such cruelty returned to him in public.
The punishment for Ravi was different; it was crafted to fit his sins. They dragged him down the center of the avenue, every step a record. Stones were placed at his knees. The people around him — those whose fathers had lost land, those who had starved because of policies he backed — spat. The guards read out the ledger of Ravi's crimes while his hair was pulled; he looked for allies and found none. Girls who had been promised dowries watched with narrowed eyes. Men who had been cheated reached for the ropes but kept hands back; they wanted justice, not savagery.
Ravi's face whiplashed through denial, anger, bargaining, small hope, and the final collapse. "I did what my lord commanded," he sobbed. "I did it for rank."
"Rank built on other people's bones," Connor said.
When it was finished, the city's noise had grown into a new thing: a hard respect. People handed Connor coins and bread in the days after, not out of love, but out of relief. They told him they had always known the court stank but could not bring themselves to throw out the rotten fruit. Now they had someone who had thrown it out.
Gerry and Ravi were carried away. They were broken in different ways: one missing a hand, one with blood and a lost place. Both were public lessons — cruelty met by cruelty, misdeeds matched by punishment meant to be seen. Their faces had been different at the end: one humbled, one defeated. The difference was that both had been shown to the city.
It was a reckoning. It was also a test.
After the purge, Connor did the dangerous thing: he let the truth come out that he had once borne another name. He told the world he had been a hidden son, trained like a blade, hollowed out by secret training. He told the story with a calm that struck people as either madness or courage. The emperor — Gunnar Pfeiffer — stood and listened like a man hearing a difficult song.
"I won't let you be a false heir forever," Gunnar said softly. "But power and truth are not the same thing. We will have justice."
The court shifted. The Empress watched, and her face was like weather. Some laughed. Some plotted. Some knelt to Connor with tears. I watched and kept myself.
Later, when the crowd had thinned and Connor and I stood by the river where I had once thrown silk and hope, he took my hand.
"Will you stay?" he asked. "Will you be by my side as I fix the ruins?"
"I will not be a prop," I said. "I will not be a stitched dress you wear to make your image whole."
"I don't ask you to be a prop," he said. "I ask you to let me try."
He was not an easy man. He could be a tiger hidden behind a gentleman's face. He demanded loyalty, yes; but he also made himself visible, and that was more than many men could do.
We never owed one another an easy story. The years after were the slow politics of mending a house. He learned to carve jade again. He tried to coax me into accepting a repaired pendant he had made from the broken jade — a dragon on one side, a phoenix on the other — but when the pendant broke in his hands, he did not curse. He picked each shard and placed them in his palm, eyes bright with a fevered tenderness.
"One day," he whispered. "I will make it whole, and you will wear it, if you want."
I watched him. He bent to the river and let the pieces slip away. "Some things live better in the dark," I said. "But the memory of them will always be part of us."
When I left the capital with my family — because I could not bear the stage our lives had become and because his time as a ruler demanded different sacrifices — he gathered my things and gave me the last thing: a small box with a note. He did not follow. He did not hold me so I could not go. He locked his hands around mine for a moment at the gate and said, very quietly, "Go forward. If I can learn to love you properly, I will not haunt you. If I cannot, I will have earned nothing."
I left. I did not look back — except once, when the coach rattled free from the gates. High on a distant roof a figure stood and watched. For a breath, the sunlight skirted him, and the man was a silhouette of a ruler who had learned to choose himself and to hurt others to this end.
Years later I was given a small box. Inside were fragments of a white jade pendant and a burned paper where a word had been written with a red hand. The word was strange and terrible and human: it spelled out "妄." Someone had wanted me to remember the madness.
I folded the paper and placed it into my own chest. I will not forget Finn Santos — the prince who once was, nor the man who took him and then took a crown. I will not forget the phoenix robe and the single bloodstain. I will not forget Connor Vogel's paper petals that once spelled a name and the river where I once let go.
When the last parcel of old things arrived, I took the little dragon-fish pendant Connor had tried to make and walked to the river where I had thrown silk before. The water did not care whether a promise had been kept. I slipped the pendant into the current.
"It is yours now," I said. "Or no one’s. Let the river carry it."
The pendant disappeared into the long flow. The sound of water is not loud, but it is steady.
I had been the girl who stitched a phoenix. I am the woman who learned to let things fall and to choose which to pick up again. I can still hear the konghou's ring in the winter, and sometimes, in a dream, I hear a man say my name like it's a vow. That is enough for some nights. That is not enough for all.
The End
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