Sweet Romance11 min read
I Broke Her Game and Saved My General
ButterPicks17 views
I did not plan to be clever the first day Jaelyn Bridges arrived at our gate. I only wanted my marriage to Clayton Brantley to be simple and quiet.
"Angelina," Clayton said the night he came home, "I'm sorry I left so soon."
"You left the bed empty," I told him, "and the whole house kept whispering." He smiled like a soldier who had seen too many winters. "I won't let you be whispered about again," he said.
Clayton is blunt and honest. He is not made for drawing secrets out of corners. "So tell me plainly," he said once, voice low as a lantern, "do you hate her?"
"Who?" I asked, and we both laughed, even while my heart felt tight.
Jaelyn Bridges arrived like a folded note of trouble. She had been saved by Clayton from bandits on the road. She looked small and frightened, exactly as the gossip sheets would want, and she played tenderness the way some women play music.
"Sir, please," she had said in front of everyone, voice thin. "I was scared. Forgive me for troubling you."
I stepped forward and lifted her chin, and I whispered what she had not expected. "Little fool," I said, "your reputation matters more than any misunderstanding. Stay quiet. Leave now."
Her face froze. Clayton blinked. The servants stared. I let the moment sit and turn.
"Angelina, you sure?" Clayton asked later, when we were alone by candlelight.
"Of course," I said. "Her honor is fragile. Mine isn't. We'll not give gossip a toe-hold."
"You're something else," he said, and that made my chest warm and small.
I learned fast that Clayton thinks in straight lines. He thinks battle, honor, loyalty. He does not live in the shadows where women wait with scissors. So when Jaelyn tried to wedge herself closer, I had to be sharper.
"Please, General," Jaelyn murmured, hands clasped to Clayton's sleeve, "let me stay a while. I owe you my life."
"She seems tender," Clayton told me later, honest as ever. "Beautiful and shy."
"I am not shy about protecting your mind," I snapped. "You are my husband."
He looked at me, puzzled and angry in a harmless way. "Are you jealous?" he asked.
"Not jealous," I answered. "Just watchful."
At the long house visit with Princess Kiana Karlsson, the plot thickened. Jaelyn's elder sister, Brynlee O'Brien, went to stir the pot before any whispers could cool.
"Many thanks to General Brantley for saving my sister," Brynlee said out loud. "We must properly thank him."
Princess Kiana's small smile turned sharp. "In public you parade thanks. In private, you make plans," she said. "You are all the same."
Then the princess ordered the attendants and the guests to leave, and studied Brynlee with an old woman's patience. "Who else knows?" she asked.
Brynlee's mouth dropped. She had spoken loudly enough. The room sang with silence like a blade.
"You should not have said that in front of so many people," Princess Kiana said coldly.
Brynlee knelt with a sudden thud. I felt like applauding.
That was the lesson I learned: the old women see faster. The men who fought at the edge of camp did not know the ways of shade and candlelight. So when Jaelyn tried to charm Clayton again, I stepped between them and offered a courteous lie.
"Let it be said," I told the servants loudly, "that I met Jaelyn on the path and brought her back. Keep it at that."
"Yes!" the chief steward answered. "We will say so."
Jaelyn left that day like someone shoved into a closet. I smiled to myself. The first skirmish had been won.
We shared a few small sweet hours too. One night Clayton and I sat up late and he whispered, "I won't let you suffer here."
"Then prove it," I said. He blinked in that honest way. "Do you mean—" he stammered.
"Come to bed," I finished for him. He obeyed like a man who had never learned the fine arts of flirt. Later he kissed my forehead and said, "No matter what, you are my wife."
The city noticed our closeness. People began to nod and say, "The general loves his wife." That stink of complacency made Jaelyn angrier.
At a grand banquet at Carrick Richardson's house, I used a different kind of armor: shine. I put on a bracelet that everyone knew was rare and had the servants pretend it was a simple trinket from Clayton. Attention slid away from Jaelyn's pretty face and landed on me. Women whispered. "Oh, what a treasure! Where did she get it?" Their eyes were small knives; I used them.
Jaelyn could not stand it. She shot me a look like a thrown stone and whispered, "You take every chance."
"Good," I said loud enough for her to hear. "I am keeping my life. Try not to be upset."
She kept her plans. She kept her smile. She kept coming closer.
Then she did what I feared: she set a trap in the mountains.
"Come with me to the temple," Justine Ilyin had invited. "A nice procession, a small blessing. It will do you well, Angelina."
I had told Clayton and he shrugged his soldier's shoulders. "Rest," he said. "Enjoy the day."
On the road, at a tea stall, Jaelyn slipped away first. She sat quietly and let the guards move on. Night fell and then my head hummed and I woke bound to a tree.
"How dare—" I screamed when I saw her and the bandit with the scarred eye. The bandit's grin was a knot of knives.
"You were drugged," Jaelyn said without shame. "I needed you out of the way to make my case better."
I reached the spot where the world tilted. "Release me!" I cried. "You planned this?"
"It was the only way," she answered. "If I had only been taken, everyone would pity me. If I had only been freed, he would have seen me as brave. This was the only play."
The bandit lifted his hand and slapped me. I hit him back. He tried to climb me like a beast. I screamed until the sound tore space. Then Jaelyn did something I did not expect. She struck the bandit over the head with a rock and ran.
We walked back in the rain, two soaked figures under the sky, and Jaelyn suddenly broke down. "Why won't he look at me?" she wailed. "I did the wrong things—because I loved him. Did loving someone mean I had to break them?"
It should have been easy to hate her. Instead, her voice broke the edges of my anger.
When I woke up in Clayton's house, it was with the feeling that the choice belonged to me. The guards had caught one of the bandits. Clayton sat by my bed like a statue made soft.
"How did you end up in the forest?" he asked. "Who did this?"
"Bandit remnants," I said. "Jaelyn was there. She saved me—afterwards."
He stared at Jaelyn when she came to our room. Her face was pale and guarded. "Thank you," he said softly.
Later, alone with her, I asked, "Why?"
She looked at me with something like grief. "I was foolish," she said. "I thought if I could secure a place close to him, everything would be solved. I thought…"
"You thought you could play fate with other people's lives," I finished.
"Yes," she said. "I am sorry."
She left like someone who had lost a harvest. But the war that women wage does not end with apologies. It needed reckoning.
A week later, the moment came. Carrick Richardson held another public feast. Many families were in the hall. Princess Kiana Karlsson sat like a small, bright moon at the head of the room. Women in gowns made soft noises. Men drank and told old battle stories. I had decided to make this scene the stage for justice.
I stood up when the servants brought the jade cup to the princess. The hall folded into the usual hum that attendants call civil. I walked to the center and let the light find me.
"Princess Kiana," I said, voice steady, "may I speak?"
She turned her calm eyes my way. "Speak, Angelina."
I looked out at the guests. "You all know Jaelyn Bridges as the gentle girl rescued from bandits," I began. "You know Brynlee O'Brien as the anxious sister who thanks the general's family in the open. I am going to tell a story that does not fit the pretty line everyone's been told."
Jaelyn's face went white, then forced a smile. "Angelina, what is this?"
I had told myself to be crisp, to choose simple words that would break her lies like glass. "On the mountain road, the tea stall, I was drugged. I woke tied to a tree. The man who took me had a scarred eye. He was not a random brigand. He was arranged."
"You're mad," Jaelyn snapped, voice thin. "You set this to make me look—"
"I will not set traps," I said calmly. "But I will show you evidence."
I raised a small cloth band. It was the same fabric the bandit had used to bind my hands. "This exact cloth," I said, "was seen in Jaelyn's carriage before I left, and later, a guard saw Jaelyn speak with a man in a gray coat behind the tea stall."
Gasps rolled over the room like a long, cold wave.
Jaelyn's first face was denial. "That is a lie," she told them. "Do not listen."
"Where is the man who struck you?" I asked the captain of guards, Tobias Emerson—Clayton's old friend and a man of record, though I did not name him in public. He stepped forward and presented a folded paper: a sworn statement from the guard who arrested the bandit. The guard had seen Jaelyn's carriage leave and had heard her pay the man in the gray coat.
The guests murmured. Brynlee turned pale. Princess Kiana leaned forward, knitting the thin lines between her brows.
Jaelyn's mouth flapped like a wounded bird. "I—" she began. "No—"
"You arranged for me to be taken," I said, and my voice was a quiet hammer. "You intended for me to be ruined so you'd be spared, so you could become closer to Clayton. You used a man's life as a pawn."
She tried to smile. "I didn't… I only—"
"Only what?" I asked. "Only risked another woman's life to prove love? Only played coward's games?" The room was hushed as a pond. Even the servants seemed to hold their breath.
She started to shift, to attack back. "I loved him," she said. The words came like a child protecting a broken toy.
"Love built on ruin is not love," Princess Kiana said, cold and soft. "You endangered a woman. You enlisted a criminal. You broke a bond."
Jaelyn's face crumpled. "It was all for him!" she sobbed. First she was furious, then shocked. "I thought if I made him owe me—"
"Stop," Brynlee cried suddenly, standing. "Stop this! I did not mean—"
"Then explain," Princess Kiana ordered. "Did you speak to him? Did you persuade him? Or did you take out the chance that Angelina might stand in your way?"
Brynlee sank. "I listened to Jaelyn. She frightened me." Her voice was small, ashamed.
Around the hall people reacted like split wood. "How could she—" someone whispered. A gentleman clucked his tongue. A maid gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. Phones did not exist, but everyone imagined the story as if it had spread.
Jaelyn's denial broke. Her cheeks flooded red then white, as shame and anger traded places. "You're lying!" she shouted at me, and then at the princess, "You would let her ruin me!"
"Ruined?" a woman near the dais said, incredulous. "You mean the woman who put a life at risk in exchange for a man's glance?"
Jaelyn looked around, and the crowd turned. Some frowned like mothers. Others looked shocked, fanning themselves with napkins. A few began to murmur and comment in low voices, the way the world now learns news.
She tried to crouch, to pull at clay and clutch hearts. "I—I didn't know it would go so far. I only wanted—"
"Enough," Princess Kiana said. Her hand lifted like a judge. "You have brought shame to your house. You have dragged the general's wife into the mud, and you think a bow will fix it?"
Jaelyn's breathing hitched. Her eyes were glassy. "Please," she said, voice thin as string. "I am sorry. I will leave. I will—"
"Leave?" the hostess Justine Ilyin said. "You tried to ruin another lady. In this house, that is not easily forgiven."
Someone near the hall called for servants to remove Jaelyn's sister from the dais. Brynlee tried to speak, tears sliding down, "We were foolish. Please—"
Jaelyn's expression changed in slow steps: first fury at being found out, then panic, then denial, then the hollow of someone seeing ruin. She began to cry in a raw, public way. Her voice broke and she fell to her knees, clutching at the marble floor.
"Stop!" she cried. "I can't—please!"
A group of women nearby folded themselves away. A couple of men stood with folded arms, faces stern with the hunger of scandal. One man took out his handkerchief and whispered, "She played with another's life." The whispers became louder. Someone nudged their neighbor and said plainly, "She wanted the general."
Phones didn't exist here, but the eyes did everything a camera could. People started to look at Jaelyn the way a crowd looks at someone who has tripped and pulled the cloth of a table with them.
Jaelyn's pleading turned to small bargains. "I'll apologize," she begged. "I'll leave town. I'll pay anything."
"Do not count on easy absolution," Princess Kiana said. "You will be watched. You will be shunned where people's tongues matter most. Your sister will be careful to keep distance for shame's sake. Your household will be careful of alliances. Love pursued by breaking others will find no friendly hearth."
Jaelyn's face flickered between shame and disbelief. She stammered, then begged. The crowd shifted, some clapped in awkward derision, some only stared. A few young women walked away with their heads held high. A man near the door muttered, "She deserves that."
Later, the murmurs hardened into a public measure. Jaelyn could not pretend she had not been seen. Her plan had fallen apart, and she had been publicly unmasked—laughed at, scorned, pitied. Her reaction went from defiance to breaking, from bargaining to collapse. People with spades of gossip dug into the small pile of her life until it bared bone.
When it was done, I sat down. Clayton took my hand. He did not look like a man pleased by spectacle; he looked worried and fierce. He kissed the back of my knuckles and said, "You were brave."
"I only did what I had to," I said. "You saved more than my reputation."
And the room kept murmuring. People left with their heads full of the story. Some were angry at Jaelyn. Some were glad to see a wrong righted. Some felt the chill that comes when a small balance is reset.
After the feast, life at home returned to the steady rhythm of bread and light. We shared small things: Clayton choosing one dress that I liked, me forcing him to rest. We shared small intimacies: his hand brushing my hair when he thought I was asleep, his awkward jokes that made me laugh.
"Do you dream sometimes of battle?" I asked him late at night, while the baby kicked like a tiny bird inside me.
"A little," he said. "But I like this better." He tapped his chest where the child slept. "We will feed it, clothe it, keep it warm."
I looked at Clayton and understood why women like Jaelyn would mistake hunger for devotion. Clayton was large and kind in a simple way. He deserved someone who loved him in truth.
"Will you stay?" he asked me once, looking like a man asking to be given a map to follow.
"I will," I said. "But you must learn the shade as well as the sun. There are women who trade in whispers."
He squeezed my fingers and said, "Teach me."
So I did. I taught him small rules about faces in rooms and how to answer questions so rumors drown. He learned, and he tried, and when he failed he learned again.
Jaelyn left town eventually, not in chains but in shame. Her sister Brynlee kept a lower voice and fewer parties. The town's stories smoothed like a hand over paper. People stopped looking at me as a fragile thing and began to nod at Clayton and me together, as if we were a single shield.
On a late afternoon, as rain rubbed the windows, Jaelyn came back once to the gate and bowed low from afar. She looked smaller in that bow. Her eyes met mine for a second and there was no fight in them, only an apology too late to be crisp.
"I am sorry," she mouthed.
I lifted my hand in a soft wave and let her go.
Clayton watched me with a little smile, then asked, "Do you forgive her?"
I thought of the tree and the rock and the rain and the sound of a woman too scared to love as a whole person. "Yes," I said. "But forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting."
We moved forward. The child in my belly kicked like a small, hopeful thing. Our house filled with plans: a small cradle, warm swaddles, and songs we did not yet know but would learn.
Sometimes I think of that banquet and the hall of faces. I think of Princess Kiana's calm hand and the way the crowd will remember the night a small woman stood and made a truth be seen. I think of Jaelyn with her wasted craft and how a heart bent wrong can break both the hand that holds it and the world nearby.
"Do not be foolish again," I told Clayton once, smiling, as the sun struck the bracelet Camila had hidden for me.
He kissed my temple and said, "I won't. We keep each other safe."
"Good," I said. The house felt warm. Outside, the city had returned to its ordinary noises. Inside, a family grew its quiet walls.
The End
— Thank you for reading —