Sweet Romance13 min read
How I Ended Up “Keeping” an Emperor (and Other Small Disasters)
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I did not expect to wake up in a palace. I definitely did not expect my ex to be sitting on the dragon throne.
"Dashiell," I said the name like a dare the first time I saw him wearing the gold embroideries, "you look ridiculous."
He blinked, and the whole hall seemed to halt. He sat straighter on the throne, and his voice was the same dry, low thing I remembered from late-night talks and bad takeout: "Hadley Andersson, are you sleepwalking?"
"I'm awake," I said, because what else do you do in front of an emperor? I shoved my hands deeper into the sleeves of the coarse maid robes I was wearing and smiled like I had a plan. "I am awake and I need to make a proposal."
He leaned forward, interest flickering. "Make it quick."
I crossed my arms and planted myself at his feet. "I will be blunt. I want you to keep me."
He made a very precise face. "Keep you? Explain."
"Keep me. Take me out of the scrub and the stench of chamber buckets. Feed me. Let me lie in soft quilts. If you insist on giving me a title, I'll take 'Consort'—not the Empress nonsense, I don't want that responsibility. I just want to be kept."
For a long moment he simply watched me like a man appraising a broken but amusing artifact. "Hadley," he said finally, "do you have a sense of shame?"
"Not for sale," I retorted, and then, like a trained actor, I added: "Your Majesty, for the comforts of life I will call you 'Your Majesty' while on duty, and 'Dashiell' when recruiting more cushion for my cushions."
He smiled, which was somehow worse. "You are shameless."
"I am realistic," I said. "The world out there is bad. I want to stay alive and eat three bowls of real rice."
He let out a soft, unexpected laugh. "Very well. Consort then. Which do you prefer—Empress or Consort?"
"Consort," I said too fast, because of course I would. I had watched enough palace dramas in the wrong life to know which battles I wanted to avoid.
"Consort," he repeated. "It will be as you wish."
That was the beginning of the arrangement: me, an ex-girlfriend turned palace maid, living under the “protection” of an emperor who used to borrow my hoodie and leave it on his couch for days.
"Do you remember me?" he asked later, when the candles had guttered low and the servants had been sent away.
"I remember you broke up with me and then disappeared on a plane," I said, because that was the blunt, true thing.
"I went away because I couldn't do what you wanted then," he said. "I had an accident. I thought it would... be easier for you."
"I thought you left because you found someone better," I said.
He lowered his head, fingers steepling. "I left because I was frightened. I could not promise a family when I was not sure I could father one. I left because I thought it would spare you the burden of waiting."
And there it was—the grown-up reason for his cruelty. It made the tremor in my chest that had existed since he shut the door that year worse, but it also melted a little of the old anger. The palace had its own hard rules, but behind his throne the man I had loved was still sitting, in a different uniform.
"Why keep me around then? Not out of pity, I hope," I said.
"Some of that," he admitted. "But also because you were the only person who treated me like a person once. I think I'm still learning to be an emperor, but I remember how you laughed when I was awkward. I remember you told me to stop taking everything so seriously."
He called me strange nicknames again—"Tutu"—and I corrected him. "My name is Hadley," I said. He still laughed and called me "Tutu" that night with a grin that lit the dim room.
We both had traveled into this strange past from our present-day lives. He had somehow taken the throne; I had become a lowly palace maid assigned buckets and the least desirable chores. The differences stung. I had a pair of city apartments back home; he had a throne and, apparently, a talent for ruling.
When he told me he had been investigating the famine and using granaries to feed people, I felt an odd respect. He was efficient in a way I hadn't expected. He was cruel when duty demanded it, but when the famine eased, he brought me out of the palace to see the city and how he inspected the camps.
"You're coming to see how the people live?" he asked me, eyes level with mine, like asking permission to a private thing.
"Only if you promise not to leave me alone with river vendors," I bargained. I had no maps, no idea where I could go without getting lost or robbed.
He smirked and tossed me a small sack of coins. "Try not to spend it all on sweets."
"Who do you think I am?" I said, taking it and pouting like a spoiled cat. "I am frugal."
He watched me walk through the market with a line of palace footmen who had been ordered to keep a respectful distance. I found myself noticing the threaded lines on his gloves, how his sleeve was embroidered with the dragon. He watched me look at a boy selling carved wooden toys, his attention both fatherly and, for a young emperor, astonishingly human.
"You and the city—what did the other life teach you about living?" he asked quietly later, when we were both back in the small private room he allowed me.
"That I can wash dishes with my eyes closed," I said. "And that binging shows are the only comfort some nights. But also, I learned you can't rely on anyone to stay. You learn to keep a spare key in your shoe."
He laughed, then his voice sobered. "You keep too many keys. What do you keep from me?"
"Memories," I said. "Also some bad snacks in my pocket."
Our nights altered between teasing and the rebuilding of trust. He bought me a better bed and a blanket the color of fog. I taught him to hide a small ridiculous snack under his sleeve for midnight. I trained a small coterie of pretty girls to play mah-jong with me, to keep me from loneliness, and he, with a ruler's discretion, picked some of them as gifts to those who had won his favors.
"Why did you send eight of my girls away?" I asked once, furious. "They were my only friends here."
"They were rewarded for faithfulness," he replied evenly. "They are safe with those men. They will not be mistreated."
I wanted to scream that 'reward' meant control, but I had to remind myself that this was not the city I remembered: the rules of reward and survival were complicated. He kept me close because he knew I had little else and because he liked my company. He took my beauty as if it were a small kindness he could permit himself.
"Three days," he told me once, leaning forward like a judge. "Send me five of your girls."
"I am not an empress of a garden of ornaments!" I cried. "They are my friends."
"They are a resource," he countered, with the flat administrative tone he used when he judged petitions. "Your life here should be less lonely. Mine should be less distracted. This is one way."
And because he had that ineffable right to make such decisions, I grumbled and then helped choose the most competent. The anger faded into melodrama and then into a more domestic routine. We bickered like two people who had once been lovers and hadn't quite escaped that orbit.
On a day I barely expected to survive, I fainted.
I had been overeager—too many sleepless nights, an odd spell of weakness—and then I was on the floor of the Sunny Hall, being tumbled over by panicked handmaidens. I remember a rush of faces—pale, clean hands, the eunuch's hurried "Find the physician!" and then Dashiell bursting in.
"Move," he commanded, voice like thunder. "Make space."
He took my pulse, peered into my eyes, and then his face folded with an anxiety that made me see the man more than the emperor. "Is she spinning a fever?" he asked.
"Her pulse is weak," one physician said. "She must stay quiet. Any stimulation could harm the fetus."
"Fetus?" I asked, bewildered.
"You're with child," he answered very simply.
And the world narrowed into a tight, bright line where I had to decide between two lives—the one I had known and the one growing shaky inside me. It was not an easy move. The palace had dangers beyond hunger. But it was also a place where I had found a measure of protection, and Dashiell—my ex—would not allow me to be alone.
"I didn't plan this," I told him, fingers worried around the hem of my robe. "We didn't plan this."
He smiled, furious and tender at once. "We are not good at planning. We are better at surviving. If it is fate, then I will stand in the courtyard and declare any man who harms you dead."
He was very dramatic doing it, and also alarmingly cute.
Pregnancy changed everything in small ways. He fretted over what to eat, insisting I take every ward the physicians demanded while glancing at me like I had become both fragile and precious. He began to talk to the future in names and ridiculous possibilities.
"Names," he said one night, half asleep and half affectionate, "should at least have weight."
We joked about absurd names—ones that belonged to characters in terrible TV shows from the other life—and he announced, like a boy arranging toys, that if a son came he would name him something like… Zaid Watkins.
"Why Zaid?" I asked, amused and suspicious.
"Because I like the sound," he said. "And because you smiled when I said it."
So our son—small and loud and wonderfully stubborn—came into the world named Zaid Watkins. He had his father's flat, stubborn mouth and my greed for sweets.
"He's mine," Dashiell announced when Zaid first opened his little threshold-of-a-mouth to wail. "And he shall like sugar until it is a sin."
"You're the one who fed him my sugar," I reminded him.
"I will not apologize for sugar," he said, and that was an early truth about parenthood.
Life settled into domestic rhythms: small fights, stolen naps, a child who thought we both existed to serve him. But the palace had politics, and the politics could not be silenced by lullabies.
I learned, slowly, that Dashiell's biggest problem was the Empress Dowager and her family—Katalina Winkler, who insisted her own clan be rewarded and who had been conspiring for influence. I began to notice the sharp glances, the late-night deliveries of young women, the way ministers flattered under their breath. When evidence of their ambition emerged, Dashiell acted the only way he could.
"Collect everything," he ordered one morning, voice iron. "Testimonies, the ledgers, names of those who received favors."
"Will you go after them?" I asked.
He did.
What followed was a public moment I could never have imagined: the day we had the town square hearing at dawn. It became one of the few times I watched my emperor become a judge in front of his people.
The square filled with people as the sun tried to climb. Stalls fell silent, heads craned, and a hush fell like a hand over the crowd. Katalina Winkler's clan stood on a raised platform, attempting to look composed. Her brother, Lord of a once-powerful house, glowered. There were ministers—Laurent England, Declan Henry, and Cassius Cochran—each with the dignity they had bought at court.
Dashiell walked out with a slow, controlled step. He wore the ceremonial robe but nothing gaudy, a decision that made him look less a king and more a man. He raised his hand.
"Citizens," he said, and his voice carried. "You know hunger. You know want. You know how your voices were whispered into pitiful pockets. Today we render a decision."
"Why hold this in the square?" someone shouted.
"Because truth is not for the private hearth," Dashiell replied. "Truth is for the people it concerns."
Katalina's brother stepped forward, ramrod-straight. "These charges are slander," he declared. "We served this dynasty. We defended it."
"You defended your fortunes," Dashiell said. "You nurtured private troops, took grain meant for the poor, and sold the people's food back to them. These are not small matters."
Katalina's face went pale; she had arranged a thousand smiles, but she had never learned how to brace her mouth for fear. "You twist facts," she cried, voice high-pitched. "You are an emperor in name only!"
"Am I?" Dashiell echoed. He gestured. "Bring the ledgers. Bring the men who bought the grain."
Footmen pushed forward aged stewards, ledger cases, and letters written in hurried hands. The crowd leaned forward like a single organism, hungry for the spectacle. Eyes flashed, coins chimed, the city smelled of sweat and bread.
Laurent England's jaw twitched. "You cannot—"
"A ledger says 'payment,' signed by three names," Dashiell said, not unkindly, and the sound of paper being unfolded snapped like a whip. He read aloud from the ledger entries, and each sentence was a small blow: profits from seeds, lists of "guests" who had eaten at private feasts while the gates outside were guarded. The crowd started to murmur.
"I demand witnesses," Katalina said, but the witnesses had been found. A woman who had sold her jewelry to feed her children walked forward with trembling hands. "They bought my jewelry and promised it would be repaid," she said, voice breaking. "The deputy took it and called it a 'loan.'"
A soldier in the back—one of those who had once been promised land by the clan—spoke up. "We were enlisted to serve the family, given a small grain ration for our loyalty. I fought for them. When the famine came, the grain was sealed in warehouses with iron locks while the town starved. The lord called us 'discipline.'"
Gasps rippled through the crowd. Katalina's face went slack. Laurent England's mouth opened and closed like a trapped fish. Declan Henry paled; Cassius Cochran's eyes darted like trapped rats.
"Everyone could see," the soldier continued. "We were kept fed. The rest were not. We were used to be the beating arm of a selfish man's greed."
"Beatings," murmured someone. "It's true."
Then the men began to crumble. Laurent England's voice faltered and crackled like a dry branch. "We were... told to secure supplies," he said, trying to steady himself. "We thought... we were preventing riots."
"It is the excuse of men who wish to keep wealth," Dashiell said. "You hid grain. You hid troops. You violated the crown. For that, the law is simple and ancient."
He did not raise his voice; he never shouted. He explained the punishment: their lands would be confiscated, their titles stripped, the ringleaders would be publicly shamed and then handed to the legal courts. Those who had committed violent acts would be made to kneel publicly and apologize, those who had stolen people's goods would have to return them publicly and labor in the fields they had once ignored.
"Public," Dashiell emphasized. "Not because I delight in spectacle, but because accountability must be recognized by those who suffered."
Katalina's brother started to yell, then to argue, then to deny. The cycle was the same he had repeated before: denial, bluster, a thin plea that he had been misled, then the knowledge that documents and witnesses would not let him go. The crowd turned from curiosity to anger; planted faces that had once bowed to the clan now spat. There was a sharp, human satisfaction in the square: those who had been dismissed suddenly had names again.
"Do it in the square," someone said, and a ripple of approval made Dashiell's jaw clamp.
"Bring the offenders," Dashiell ordered.
The lords were made to step down from the platform and to stand at the foot of the steps that led to the throne. As they stood there, between the common folk and the vaulted arches, everyone could see the change. The ministers—Laurent, Declan, Cassius—had gone from lofty robes to humble ones; their ministrations scrubbed in front of the crowd, their faces no longer immaculate.
"Do you repent?" Dashiell asked Katalina's brother.
He shook his head, then stuttered, then finally bowed so low his forehead touched the stone. "I repent," he whispered, voice broken.
"Repentance is the start," Dashiell said. "Return what you took. Beg those you hurt for forgiveness. Labor for those you starved. Publicly restore."
Katalina's eyes filled with tears and then with a raw, animal fear as the people around her began to cheer for what they called justice. Some in the crowd spat. Others held up the piece of bread that had once been saved; they snapped the bread like a small symbol of regained dignity.
The ministers' reactions were a procession of human collapse: the bluster turned to denial, denial to fury, fury to pleading, pleading to crumpled acceptance. "It was for stability," Laurent cried. "We frightened you to keep the realm from chaos." Declan wailed that his name had been smeared. Cassius, who had been the most tight-lipped, began to tremble and ask for leniency.
I stood beside the throne and watched the faces change. I felt the city's pulse—angry, relieved, vindicated. I felt a strange, sober pride for the man I had once left and had now chosen to stand beside again.
When the humiliation was done, when the names were called and the ledgers returned to the lowest of the people, when the disgraced were led away to work in the fields and to repay their debt, the square breathed.
"Do it right," the woman who had brought her jewelry told Dashiell before she left. "Do it so we remember."
He nodded, and the eye in his gaze had something like iron and something like warmth. "We will not forget," he said softly.
After that day, whispers of the Empress Dowager's power dwindled. Katalina Winkler's influence was cut down to smaller rings. The ministers who survived had learned lessons about greed and spectacle. The people spoke of justice, and I watched from the steps as Dashiell's hand found mine, and he squeezed it like a private vow.
That public punishment had been a spectacle of moral restoration, and for a long while after I found myself thinking of what the square had taught me: a ruler could be cruel to wrongdoers and kind to the wronged, that justice seen is healing. I also learned that men who wore crowns could be terrified and tender in a single breath.
The rest of the years went on with small, sweet mercies: late-night snacks shared on palace stairs, whispered jokes in lullaby hours, a child who thought he was sovereign of the world. Dashiell's way of loving was small and steady—he made me tea when I couldn't sleep, answered ridiculous questions from Zaid at three in the morning, and brought me pastries he had no right to like so much.
There were moments of jealous heat—Ansel Sutton, the bright young calligrapher whose presence in a tea house once made me blush and Dashiell ask, casually and dangerously, "Who is prettier, me or him?"—and I lied well, because lying the right lie can save you a long speech.
"I was always yours," I said once, when the argument settled like dust. "Terribly, foolishly—ultimately."
"Good," he answered. "Then help me be a better emperor and I will help you be a less bored woman."
So I did the best I could. I learned the rhythms of palace etiquette. I learned petty rules for where to step and how to tilt my head. I kept my mouth sharp when necessary and soft when needed. I was a dangerous consort who could also fall asleep in an elegant robe and snooze like a baby.
Years later, on a birthday that was quiet and unexpected, he took me to the Lan Viewing Platform, the one with the best view of the city and the jasmine-scented breeze. He led me blindfolded up the steps; the servants had strewn white magnolia petals along the way. When he let me see, the sky was paler than usual and the city lights blinked like a constellation. I had been foolish once, and I was foolish again as I let the petals fall on my hair and in my lap.
"You are my chief comfort, Hadley," he whispered.
"And you are my absurd ruler, Dashiell."
We laughed and then the laughter left a small, warm hollow in each of us. My life had been a strange migration: from a city apartment with screens and pizza cartons to a palace with pearls and hush. I had once wanted to wander as a blade-swinging adventuress; I still thought of that dream, now gentler, like a child's memory. But what I had here—this odd family and the odd, stubborn man who had once left me—had its own pull.
"Promise," I told him, though we did not make those sorts of promises because our lives were not finished. "When we are old and stupid and stuck to grandchildren, you will still sneak me sweets."
He kissed me, softly and cartridge-quiet. "I will. But you must promise to keep your feet out of the rice bowl."
We lay on the platform under the spilled lantern light with magnolia petals catching on our clothes. Somewhere below, the city breathed, the people slept, and a child named Zaid dreamed of sugar-laden mornings. Above us, petals drifted down like insignificant snow. It was small and human and perfect.
I pressed a petal into my palm and kept it for a souvenir. It smelled faintly of the fog of a far-shore morning. It would live on the mantel, a small, ridiculous truth that had outlived the strange chaos of becoming a consort.
In the end, the crown did not change who Dashiell was at his center. It gave him power to punish the greedy and to shelter the weak. And it gave me a home I had not expected to ask for and a child who shouted at the moon. The palace taught me something basic and stubborn about life: if you can find one person who will give you clothes and also call you ridiculous in private, hold on to them. If that person is an emperor, make sure they share their snacks.
The End
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