Rebirth11 min read
I Came Back to Settle Scores (and Keep My Own Life)
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I woke up gasping, the river cold in my lungs, the taste of mud and iron still clinging to my teeth. I sat bolt upright in a bed I did not recognize, my body light as if the bruises and broken bones had never happened.
"Child—my child?" I called out without thinking.
A pale canopy, sunlight through gauze, a stranger's back framed in the doorway. He turned, and something in me leapt—familiar as a scar.
"You are awake." His voice was low, edged with an easy calm that made my chest both tighten and loosen. He had black hair that brushed his shoulders, eyes narrow and hard. Up close he looked younger than the man who had once saved me; up close he looked like the outline of that memory made flesh.
"Where am I?" I croaked, and my hand flew to the copper mirror on the dressing table. A girl stared back—eighteen, skin like milk, lashes thick. My palms sweated. I remembered drowning, remembered my last breath, remembered the river swallowing my cries for my son.
The man's mouth tilted in a faint, careless smile. "You passed out by the roadside. I could not leave you there."
"My—my name is Gracelyn Ali," I said because manners are stubborn even in panic. "Who—who are you?"
"Orion Dell." He shrugged like the name was nothing, like he didn't owe the world an introduction. "Rest here. You are safe."
I wanted to toss myself at him, kiss his feet, weep for the second chance I had been given. But the memory of that last life clenched my ribs like iron. I had not been rescued by kindness that day—I had been rescued by fate, or perhaps by some careful hand who had their own reasons.
"Thank you," I said instead, and watched his jaw tighten. He was courteous and cold. He moved like someone who had learned to live with distance.
The sunlight made the embroidery on my sleeve sparkle. My hair was in two simple buns, little beads at the flips. I breathed the room in—sandalwood and lacquer, carved screens and an ancient zither in the corner. It was a house fit for a scholar's daughter, not the river's wet corpse.
"It feels like fire and ice," I told the mirror, and smiled without humor. The girl in the mirror was the me who had been fooled and drowned. That Gracelyn had been simple, trusting. This Gracelyn had teeth.
The man at the door had already left by the time I found my voice to stand and thank him. I had to be careful. I had to remember everything that went wrong the first life and unmake it.
"Gracelyn," said a tiny voice when a maid pushed the door open. "You're awake!"
It was Miranda Jones, all quick steps and softer cheeks. She hovered with a bowl of soup. "Our master brewed this himself. Please drink, miss."
"Your master?" I repeated. The memory of a flute at night came back to me—someone in black playing a lonely tune under the moon. The thought made my throat ache.
Miranda blushed and stepped back. "Just rest, miss. He will send you home when you are well."
I sipped the broth. It warmed my innards, chased away the last of the river's chill. Someone had carefully tended my body before I had even opened my eyes—so whoever they were had done more than slip a hand into the water. They had kept me.
That night, a melody floated through the courtyard. I couldn't help following it. Orion Dell sat under a woven pavilion, a flute in his hands. Moonlight silvered him; his profile was cut as if from stone.
"Why do you play so late?" I asked. I didn't mean to be brash, but the music unlatched a yearning I had kept caged.
He didn't look back. "Music clears the mind," he said. "You should not be out in the night air. You're recovering."
"Tomorrow take me home," I said. The thought of returning to the old place—where a jealous woman named Kataleya Cooper had schemed—made bile rise. I had to protect myself. "I will not be a naïve girl again."
"Safe enough," he replied, and finally his gaze slid over me. For a slender heartbeat his eyes softened, then hardened again like a blade. "Tomorrow, at dawn."
I made my plans in bed. I remembered everything as if it had happened yesterday—the spring outing, the smile of a certain girl who called herself a friend, the hush of the road, the absurd kindness of strangers who did only what benefited them. In that life I had trusted; it had not saved me. Trust would be a currency I would not spend lightly.
"You're home," Miranda said the next morning with a relieved laugh when I stepped into the scholar's courtyard that had been my family home for eighteen years. Grandmother Beatriz Ogawa patted at the air with a hand like a rooster's wing and looked at me as if I were fragile and precious. "My poor child, you gave us all a scare."
Mom—Elaine Dixon—ran forward, tears squeezed between steady smiles. "Gracelyn, you're back," she whispered, holding my hands as if she would not let go. This time I let myself be held. I let those old comforts wash over me because I needed allies and I needed to sow the illusion that I was the same meek girl everyone had once scorned.
Still, when my chest tightened and a taste of blood came to my tongue, my first thought was a cold one: I had been poisoned before. This cough might have been the last life’s venom trying to finish me off. "Take me to your physician," I murmured to Beatriz. "Check everything."
"You foolish thing," she scolded lightly and pressed my hand. "Chen will come."
At dinner they fussed. Kataleya Cooper, the great lady of the house, watched like a hawk. You could smell disdain on her: expensive scents and coil of superiority. Her daughter—Giselle Ferreira—arrived later, honey-skinned and smiling like a knife. I kept my expression light. I had to. She had been the one who once smiled me to my death.
The days after my waking were full of small revelations. I learned the lay of the manor again. Old alliances re-formed in new shapes. I learned who would carry my name to the matchmakers and who would sell me for a political hand. I learned how the big wife—Kataleya—moved through rooms like a queen bee, and how her court clustered around her.
I kept my face soft. I kept my smiles worn thin. I let Aunt Lydia Yamazaki and Su姨娘—Giselle? No—Lydia had other tasks. I let suitors bring flowers and toot their horns. I let Kataleya's spymaids parade around like peacocks. I watched. I listened. I collected the sharp things in my memory so I could use them later.
A week passed before something sharp and mean found me again. In the garden, Keyla Collins—my childhood maid, who had once been friendly—brought tea. "Miss, Green Sleeve—Eliana Yamada—sent this from Madam," she said, eyes lowering. She was loyal in appearance. My hands folded, my smile polite.
I had chosen my first small strike already: the woman Eliana was a tool of Kataleya's. She had dished dirt, scorned me in the kitchens, and taken secret delight in the way I had stuttered at court. She would be first because she was small and because small cruelties paved the way to big ones.
"Thank you, Keyla," I said aloud. "Tell Eliana I appreciated the thought."
"Yes, miss." She curtsied and took the tea away.
That afternoon, someone interrupted a quiet moment with the grandmother. A spill of porcelain, a snapped smile—an accident, but not one without intent. Eliana had clumsily dropped a cherished cup at the elder's feet. The old woman flung her cane and slapped and scolded. I watched the performance like a painter studying light.
"How could you? This cup—my gift!" Beatriz's voice broke off as Eliana's knees hit stone.
Eliana wailed and promised repentance. "Mistress! I was clumsy. I'll do anything, please—"
"Anything?" The dowager's cane hovered, and the courtyard filled with the silence of expectation. "Anything will mean something. Everyone watch."
There was no mercy in Beatriz's voice. She directed the execution with the precise cruelty of an arbiter.
"We will make an example of this," she pronounced.
They bound Eliana in the yard. The head steward held the stick high. The courtyard, usually full of servants, gasped as guards yanked her to the center.
"Mother—" I said a single name, feeling a curious steadiness in my chest. "No."
She clasped my hand. "Watch."
What I gave the household that day was proof of a truth I had rediscovered: power answers only to power. I would not soft-pedal cruelty in the face of survival.
The punishment lasted until the sun slid down and turned the courtyard's stones the color of dried blood. When it finished, Eliana was not crying anymore. She had gone still with the rhythm of wood and flesh. The guards dragged her away. Whispers followed like a current.
I did not feel triumphant. I felt like a woman who had fed a lark into a machine and watched it fly no more.
In the weeks that followed, I collected people to my cause. Miranda Jones, who had tearily tended my broth, became my hidden vassal in the household. Miranda's loyalty was simple: I had saved her little brother from a beating once, without promise, and she believed I was someone who kept her.
"Miss," she told me once at dusk, "you've been different."
"Reborn," I said.
She laughed, but only I felt the old girl slip from me for good.
I found my first true ally where I had least expected: Lydia Yamazaki, Su姨娘. She had been on the margins at court, her dowry thin, her presence quiet. She came to my rooms at night and laid a small carved comb on the table.
"I used to have a voice, Gracelyn," Lydia said, eyes down. "You and I—both used. I thought of speaking then I thought better of it. I can help. I can be the whisper you need."
I listened. I tested her. She gave me a small piece of paper—evidence that someone in Kataleya’s household had been lining pockets, buying silence, moving valuables. She confessed to being tired of being invisible. I saw, then, how fragile the power structure really was: a few coins, a few silk threads, and the great had to bow.
"So we will sing to them the tune they like," I said. "We will let them believe they're dancing, and then we will pull the table from under them."
She smiled like a woman who had just been invited to a great feast.
The plot to trap the great lady was simple and surgical. First, I protected my allies. I silenced the transmitter who would have warned Kataleya—Ping'er, whom I hoped would go on as my friend. When Ping'er came to me trembling after the courtyard incident with Eliana, I gave her a cup of tea and soft words.
"Drink," I said, and she did. "You will sleep and not betray me. Go to the kitchen and rest."
She left me with eyes wide and grateful. A quiet courtesy, a quiet cruelty: I could not risk her speaking.
It would be a long road if I was to retake my life. I would have to unperson the people who had colluded to drown my child and me, and I would have to avoid the matchmaker’s eye. I had to prevent being given like fish to a willful man who would care for me like a trophy and then throw me away for rumor.
Then the talk began about the general—Boyd Cox. Beatriz mentioned him casually over a bowl of soup, pretending to be practical, and Kataleya's smile flickered. Boyd Cox's name had weight. He was the kind of man who made alliances by marriage, not by affection.
"You're getting older," Beatriz said softly that night. "A match to bind the house would be proper."
"I will not be anyone's tether," I told her.
"Good woman," she said. "Then be clever enough to say yes to the right man."
Boyd Cox came to call a week later. In his armor he looked like carved wood with living eyes. He stood at the gate like a edict. I studied the way he looked at me. He was distant in the way that makes a woman feel like an ornament to be admired rather than a person to be heard.
Giselle—Kataleya's adored daughter—watched us both with a small, calculating smile. I had something for her stomach yet, a plan that would put in her hands what she coveted: Boyd Cox's attention, carefully baited so she would chase rather than hunt.
"Would you like to see him?" Giselle asked me the morning she visited. She threaded her hand through mine with a practiced sisterhood that had once lured me into trust.
"Of course," I said, all measured kindness. "But let us leave something of the past behind. I will present myself as a shy wallflower. You may have the dance."
She sat in my garden and drank the tea I had made. I watched her sip and I listened to what she said—each word a bar of a trap. After she left, I had the tea set broken and buried. Nothing that touched her would linger in my house again.
Miranda stood watching me as I did it, small and confused. "Miss, you're ruthless."
"I'm alive," I said.
Ruthless and alive. I needed both.
One night, an attempt came cloaked in courtesy—someone sent a man into the gardens to 'speak' with me. He was a petty thing, Esteban Schmid, a nephew of a minor woman at court. He was to be the instrument of foulness: to ruin my reputation and force me into a state where I would be bargaining for safety.
He came too boldly. He was spoken to in the alley and left in the grass with his pride broken. When the old women cried that I had been with a stranger, I only bowed and pretended to be hurt. The household scrambled with the accusation; that night the old drama played for an audience.
It was a trap—someone had thought to ensnare me and paint me as unchaste. Yet my allies—Lydia, Miranda, Keyla—moved like salt to the wound, smoothing dust over it, moving things, pointing to the man hauled to the gate. In the end, the servant who had feigned my disgrace was beaten for being a common trick.
I started to see the pattern. Kataleya's reach was long, but every chain has an end. If I could cut quietly at the joints, the whole edifice would crumble.
So I fashioned a new role for myself: a patient avenger with good manners. I would bake Beatriz cakes that charmed her heart. I would learn to embroider the dowager's favorites. I would let the house see a daughter who could be sweet and bright and obedient.
And when the house gathered—as it always did—to witness the consequences of small crimes, I would let them watch the justice they asked for and would be the hand that guided their eyes.
"Watch them," Lydia said once, when we stood in the corridor and listened to servants mutter. "They will show you their faces when they fear nothing."
"They already show their faces," I said. "We only need to be patient enough to remember them."
So I remembered. I remembered the river, the scream, my son's small hands in that dark water. I remembered Giselle's smile when she said she was my sister. I remembered Kataleya's laugh as the thing that smothered me. I carved those memories into the underside of my tongue and wore them like teeth.
Public punishment would come. It had to. The household needed to learn that no one could poison my life and walk free on silk. The first spectacle had been Eliana's end; the second would be different. The people who had pulled the strings would either be unmasked, or they would die in their beds with beauty intact.
I did not celebrate death. But I had learned that living required decisions as cold and precise as surgery. You either did what had to be done or you were the one to be done to.
When the house decided to speak of marriage and Boyd Cox's visit was announced, I smiled and tucked my plans into a neat, terrible pocket of patience. The man with the flute—Orion—kept to the periphery, an enigma who watched with a flute in his hands and a shadow in his face. Mason Hahn, a silent guardian who had once intervened in the dark and who now simply stood outside my rooms, was the kind of fierce quiet that makes a woman sleep safer.
"We have time," Mason said once, when he caught me staring at the river where I had once died. "Don't squander it."
"I never did," I said, but I lied. I had squandered everything once. Not twice.
And so I moved about my days like a woman who wore a mask of softness but carried coals in her pocket. I would cook for the dowager. I would smile for guests. I would let Kataleya sharpen her claws and I would be the slow-moving iron that broke them.
It was not elegant. It was not noble. It was survival, and in survival there is a kind of beauty.
When the house truly gathered—when the whole courtyard was full and the straw of judgement lay beneath every foot—Beatriz called me to decide Eliana's fate. The crowd circled like gulls. Kataleya hid a satisfaction she could not hide. I stood at the center and gave the sentence they wanted.
"She plotted against me," I had said, my voice small and carried. "She meant harm. We must make an example."
The beating lasted until the sun was low. I watched faces as each lash fell. Some were disgusted. Some applauded under breath. Some filmed with their little mirrors—our age's new gossip. There was no dignity in it; only the hard, effective result: a warning.
"Let it be known," Beatriz said aloud when the guards dragged away the body. "Let everyone know what happens to those who harm my house."
And so the house learned a lesson. The lesson I had taught with trembling hands and a clear mind: do not poison my life and expect the world to forgive you.
I had tasted the river's water twice now: first as death, second as a wakeful, burning chance. I had promised to keep living. Whatever it took, I would make those who hurt me pay in full, in the daylight and in front of faces who loved to judge.
I would not be sacrificed again.
The End
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