Face-Slapping15 min read
I Died in a Wedding Dress, and Came Back to Marry My Way to Justice
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I died in a wedding dress, my skin burning like fire, and then I opened my eyes to a world that smelled of tea and rain.
"You are dreaming," someone said, but the voice was not kind. "Wake up, Marina."
I blinked against white light and the rough face of my maid, Marine Long, leaned over me like a worried bird. Her fingers were warm. The room was small and familiar, a place I had known when I still trusted the world.
"Marine?" I said. "Did I—"
"You fainted in the rain, miss," Marine said, fussing with a handkerchief. "You knocked yourself out waiting and got soaked. You must stop waiting on Davis Buchanan."
"Stop waiting," I repeated like it was the name of a spell.
It was, in a way. I remembered the heat, the smoke, Davis's laugh, the cruel press of January Huber's face by his side. I remembered the rope, the blindfold, the way my breath had gone shallow as the roof burned. I remembered the last sound my lungs made—how my chest filled with a different kind of pain—and then nothing.
Now I sat up and my skin was whole, my face unscarred, and outside the window the city was green and wet and whole, as if a merciless storm had not ripped apart my bones.
"I woke up," I told myself, and felt something hard settle in my belly. "I woke up. That means—"
"That means what?" Marine asked, sharp, because the servants know when a mistress is pretending to be light.
"That means I have another chance," I said. "Another chance to stop what was done to me."
Marine's eyes softened. "And what will you do, miss?"
"Survive." I smiled in a way that had nothing of the old softness. "And make them burn in a way they can never forget."
*
Three days before the lantern festival, I learned what a reborn life felt like: careful, measured, dangerous. I had only one advantage—knowledge. I had mapped the betrayal and the cruelty like a map of a city with its poison wells marked.
"Davis sent for you," January—my half-sister—whispered in the garden that afternoon, her voice honeyed and bright, the sort of voice that had stripped me of my sense so often in the past. "He says there's something you must hear. He says he's sorry."
"Did he put those lines in a play?" I asked, watching her hands play with the hem of her sleeve.
"Marina, you must not be bitter," January said, fake pity sliding from her like oil. "Or you'll ruin everything. For instance," she added with a little laugh, "you could ruin my chances of becoming the house's favored daughter."
The old world. The new me closed a hand around a letter I had found earlier tucked into a drawer—Davis's clumsy penmanship promising comfort. He had always been practical with promises. He kept them only when they served him.
"You want me to play the wronged sister again," I said, standing. "Fine. I will act. But if you think I will let you or him decide my fate this time, you are as foolish as you are pretty."
"Pretty!" January clapped and made the same ordinary smile she always had. "Of course. What harm in beauty?"
"Plenty," I said. "Plenty."
That night I practiced the face I would wear in front of Davis. Not the asking, not the pleading, but the face of someone who had made a plan and would not be distracted from it by tears.
"Will you go to the shrine with me tomorrow?" January asked, feigning sisterly concern.
"Yes," I said. "If you will go too."
She nodded, satisfied. "I'll come."
But I did not trust her. I had learned, from the smoke and from the quiet, that some people are set on the slow business of evil, and they do not stop until the world resembles them.
*
I hunted for an ally. I needed the kind of man whose favor could hold armies at bay and whose face would terrify schemers the way lightning terrifies the petty. I thought of the one who had appeared like a sudden gust the day I had died—Magnus Golubev, the man called the Wing Prince for his wild eyes and the careless grace with which men and women bent to him.
It was not for love that I went to him. It was for strength.
"Magnus," I said the first night I found him at the floating house of song and wine, the drunk glow of lamplight painting everything soft. "Do you take favors?"
He lifted his head from a cup of wine and looked at me as if I were a curious insect.
"You mean, favors in exchange for safety?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "For protection. For one year. One year in which I ask nothing but access: to learn, to be safe, and to test a lie."
His mouth curved. "And your name, little spider?"
"Marina Beltran," I said. "And I want to marry you."
He laughed—soft and startled—and then, because he liked the shape of my audacity, he said, "Tomorrow then. Noon."
"Is that an acceptance?" I asked.
"It is a promise," Magnus said. "You're reckless. I like reckless."
I stood in the doorway and let the world spin for a moment. A marriage offered me safety and a place behind his curtain. It offered me the ability to push my enemies into the light. It also offered me a cage—but cages hold power sometimes, and power is a language I planned to learn.
"I will make you regret biting me," I said softly when he walked me to the gate, merely to test his patience.
He smiled and kissed my forehead. "Try," he said. "I like a challenge."
*
At the lantern festival I moved with a purpose. The streets were piping with music and the air filled with smoke of candles and small fires that made the night tremble. January clung to Davis's arm while he bowed before my grandmother, Laura Laurent, who had more pride than most kings. They were delighted, convinced the world belonged to them because they had taken every careful step.
"Marina," Davis said, voice syrupy as ever. "Forgive me for missing you that day in the rain."
"You missed more than me," I said, safe on Magnus's arm, as he watched the festival like a man observing a chessboard. "You missed a chance to save your soul."
He laughed. "Souls are expensive, Marina. Too expensive."
And he reached his hand toward my sleeve, as if to touch something of me, something owned. My fingers tightened around the small white jade pendant my grandmother had given me that morning—a token she had pressed into my palm, the jade cool and heavy.
"Mother," Laura hissed in a small stage whisper. "Enough. The night is for celebration."
"Yes," I said aloud. "For those who deserve it."
I went with Magnus to the shrine. He kept a watchful arm around me and Kenneth Karim, his faithful attendant, followed discreetly. The shrine bell chimed, and people prayed, and the bright threads of the city braided themselves into a single, fragile rope of light.
"Aren't you afraid?" Magnus murmured as I stepped forward to tie a red ribbon to the wishing tree.
"Afraid of what?" I asked.
"Of burning again."
I smiled a small honest smile. "I am more afraid of not burning them with a larger flame."
His hand brushed mine. For a second I imagined a life that was not a plan. Then the world remembered what it had been.
Arrows cut the air like screams.
"Move!" Magnus bellowed and he grabbed me, shifting so that his body took the shock. An arrow hit the prayer ribbon and pinned it to the old wood. Knights and masked men sprang forward like crows.
I saw stillness in Magnus I had seen only once before—the silence before a great animal kills. He moved, and men fell, but there were so many. Too many.
"A trap!" I shouted, because I knew it was. I had against my skin the knowledge from the future—this was where the first attempt had failed before.
"Get down!" Magnus growled.
We made it out; chaos tore the night into small ripped pieces of cloth and blood. Still, they swept through the crowd like locusts, and someone cast a white powder that smelled like sleep and fear.
Marine screamed as the world folded. I wanted to hold her, to say a thousand things, but the darkness had that old tenderness back again. I tasted smoke and then nothing.
*
I opened my eyes in a prison of aching light. This time I was in a palace, and the person at the foot of my bed was Magnus, his face pale as a worn coin.
"You are alive," he said, as if it were any small miracle. "Do you know what they called you? They said you'd be the one to torch the city. They said—"
"Who called me?" I asked, pushing the pain out.
"Whispers," Magnus said. "And Davis Buchanan is already—"
"Dead?" I asked too quickly.
He nodded. "Not quite. He's bound. But you might want to go. The Emperor—My uncle—has questions."
We walked to the great hall and there, like a circle of crows, were the men and women who had always calculated mercy like interest: ministers, judges, and the Emperor, a man with patience like stone.
"You saw the plot," the Emperor said, eyes landing on me like small bright weapons. "You came forward. For that, the realm owes you much."
"You?" I said, surprised that he spoke my name.
Magnus filled the space with a small truth. "She saved the city. She baited a trap. If I do not over-sell her, it's justice to say she broke a scheme that would have destroyed this court."
They looked at Davis when his fetters were dragged in. He stood still as an unfastened statue, arrogance like a second skin. January Huber stood nearby with a face composed of fine porcelain—except she had been sharper than them all, a knife masked by satin.
"Davis Buchanan," the Emperor said. "You are accused of treason."
Davis threw his head back, laugh thin as wire. "Treason? I sought a better order. Do not mistake ambition for sin."
I felt anger as something easier to use than charm. "You murdered men to get there," I said. "You gave them false orders. You lied and burned people as if fire were a servant."
He turned toward me, his eyes flat. "And you, Marina—what is your charge? A woman who sleeps with princes for advantage?"
A murmur rippled.
"I slept with a man who kept me alive long enough to play him," I said, "and I do not apologize. But here is where the story ends."
He smiled. "You have no proof."
"Proof?" I held up a small scrap of paper Davis had left in his study—his own hand. "You kept lists. You kept messages. Here are plans, Davis; here is your handwriting ordering the diversion of troops, and here is January's note agreeing the night of the fire."
The Emperor's face flickered. "Come, then. Show us everything."
They marched Davis into the square. The world he had planned was small—and tonight, it would be its own exposure.
*
"You wanted spectators," I told Magnus quietly as we walked to the square.
"I thought you'd want them," he said, voice dry. "You like an audience for the burning, remember?"
I had always liked the taste of watchers when it was my turn to be seen. I had told myself I would do justice, not spectacle, but justice loved an audience with the appetite of a festival.
The square filled with faces—commoners with lanterns, merchants with their ledgers shut for the night, palace attendants who had not seen a scandal in a generation. The Emperor took a throne like a judge and a parent both.
Davis was brought forward in chains, January at his side, her dress clinging like a promise.
"Look at me," I said aloud.
Davis lifted his chin and spat. "What will you do, little spy? Plead? Sing?"
"Watch," I said. "Watch what it means to be cruel and think the world will not repay you."
The magistrate shouted words that I already knew—they read out lists, they read out letters, they named men who had been sent to die to fetch Davis's crown. The crowd listened as if it were a bard telling a tale.
"I gave orders to move the troops," read the magistrate, and the crowd drew in its breath.
"You used the Gold Eagle command to send good men to certain fields," the emperor said. "You used their loyalty to bury them."
January's eyes narrowed. She moved as if she were about to say something—something like denial—but her voice would not find purchase.
Davis laughed, then, cruel habit making his words like knives. "You will always love me," he said to me, confident and dull. "You are so small without me."
The square stung with a sudden, private laugh. The crowd had changed. Their curiosity stiffened into hunger, the way people near a fevered pit hunger for a sound.
"Now," the Emperor said, "You will see what people do when they no longer fear only you."
They brought forward men Davis had hurt—widows and sons and wives and one man with a necklace missing the locket—that man raised his voice like a bell.
"This man took my brother," he shouted. "He told me that my brother would go to the border till the rot of his feet came off. He lied."
"On what authority?" Davis spluttered.
"On the command of the Gold Eagle given by your hand," the man said. He held forth a symbol like a badge. Journalists in cloth would have loved this for clarity: the world was small now and sharp.
The crowd began to chant. At first it was only one voice—thin and hurting. Then two, then fifty, until the square felt like it could lift itself. "Justice! Justice! Justice!"
Davis's bravado evaporated. He was a man who had prepared himself for siege but not for the tide of ordinary people's outrage. Ordinary people do not tremble for rich words; they tremble for truth.
"Public apology!" someone cried. "Public penance! He must kneel!"
The emperor nodded as if he had been waiting to see if the crowd would be merciful. "Davis Buchanan," he said, voice like a bell. "You are sentenced. Kneel."
Davis's face, once iron, flickered with something raw—first denial, then anger, then the displacement of a man watching a skyscraper crumble.
"No—no—" he said, voice high. "You cannot do this. This is slander. It's impossible."
"Denial is easy for guilt," I said. "Watch him. Watch how a man who thought himself immovable becomes a fool."
They made Davis kneel on the flagstones. The crowd closed like a tide. January's face, once so smooth, showed a crack of falsehood. She stepped forward, tears fashioned like pearls, voice sharp with practice.
"Please," she cried. "My lord, please have mercy on this man. He is a good man. He keeps—"
"You lied," the Emperor said, slow and cold. "You played a part in sending men to die and you used love as the mortar."
The crowd booed. Men began to step forward and hurl small things—rotten fruit at first, then paper, then fists of paper. The world had returned to a more ancient justice: public scorn. The magistrates read aloud more things: Davis had spoken of an army, of removing the Emperor. They played a recording—Davis's voice pleading with an outsider for weapons.
"Are you sure?" January muttered.
"Yes," the magistrate said.
The first thing the crowd did after the order was to take Davis's fine clothes. "Strip him," shouted a woman who had lost a husband. "Let the scum feel the shame." The crowd obeyed and there was no official dignity left to the man who had once thought himself above death.
He tried to laugh it off. "You fools," he said. "This is politics."
They paid no heed. Men who had been silent and dull that morning now recorded with devices—little black boxes of a new age—and took pictures as if to mark a monument. Someone shouted, "Remember this face!"
There was a staged performance. January began to wail and collapse, and then she moved to his side to show contrition. "I was coerced," she said, and tried to twist the tale of guilt into a web of manipulation.
"Do you think we will believe you?" I shouted.
"Tell them how you planned the fire," a widow called, voice sharp as a cleaver.
"I did not—" January whispered, and for a moment, her composure cracked. It was glorious to watch the mask fall.
She moved from feigned grief to genuine fear in seconds. The crowd leaned forward like a single living room, and then they began to call out observations: "She changed when the Emperor spoke!" "She looked at him when he asked for the old ledger!" Each call was a peck at the pretense.
Davis's face went from arrogance to confusion. He had practiced cruelty; he had not practiced the shame of a public dismantling. "I was raised to rule," he said. "I was trained—"
"Trained to lie," someone answered.
He tried to deny again. The pattern was the same as the night I had died: swagger, then blade, then collapse. But tonight the blade was not mine; it was a people’s brace. I felt my chest shrink as the crowd's voices rose.
They made Davis kneel longer and longer. At one point he reached out and clawed at the flagstone like a man who wanted to scratch new commands into the world.
"Beg for mercy," someone said.
"I will—I'll pay—I'll—"
He was not asking for forgiveness. He was bargaining like the man he was. There was a raw, animal sound in his voice. My ribs tightened at the theatre of it.
"Beg for mercy," the crowd chorused.
He snarled, he spat, he cursed, and then the impossible happened: sweat, ash, and finally, a small soft "Please." The word left him like an animal's final shriek. The crowd's reaction was iodine on a wound—some laughed, some clapped, some snapped pictures.
"Down on your knees!" a woman cried, and Davis, for the first time since he had swaggered into life with a sword, was small.
He saw me and his eyes pleaded with a childlike urgency. "Marina," he breathed. "Please—"
"You killed men with your orders," I said. "You hid your hand in a thousand silks. Now you're knelt like a dog hoping for bread. Do you think your need will mean anything now?"
He staggered. The realization crashed over him: power taken is painfully heavy to hold. "Please—" he managed again, voice cracking into a thin plea.
No one moved. They wanted the full spectacle. People took out small devices and streamed. The crowd recorded the downfall like devotion. January was the next to fall. She, too, tried to shape a story of coercion and loyalty. She had been deaf to the men she had sent to the field. Now the field returned to her.
"Beg," a young man cried.
"Do it!" a woman pushed.
January's face changed in a way that felt like falling apart in front of the whole town: her eyes went from calculated cold to stunned, to pleading, to pleading for what? For my mercy? For her own?
She dropped. Her hands found the stone and pressed like someone trying to hold on to an island. Her voice became a child’s. "Please," she begged. "Please—I didn't—"
The crowd did not answer with violence. They answered with the slow arc of shame. They wanted her to deny it and fail. They wanted to hear the undoing of a life.
"How did it feel?" someone asked bluntly, replaying a small piece of the ledger the magistrates had read. "To decide a man's death by paper?"
January's composure broke in pieces. They clapped, they recorded, someone started a chorus of irony—"Forgive, forgive!"—and it became the square's mocking prayer. She wept loud and raw. People filmed every tear, every shutter of a mask.
At some point Davis began to crawl, fingers scraping. He tried to reach for me as if I were the only last stem of fruit on a ruined tree.
"Beg me," I said.
His eyes widened like a trapped animal's. "Please," he said, but there was nothing noble about the plea.
The crowd's shouts became a tide. "Kneel! Beg! Confess!"
He went from loud denial to small desperation. Then, the final collapse: he dropped his face to the stone, hands folded, and sobbed in a way that was meant to be private but became public. People edged closer and the sound turned into something else: a measure of satisfaction and a witness of justice.
They took his tool kit, his notes, his lists, and burned them in a small pyre as the crowd chanted. It was not a monstrous spectacle—no one set him aflame tonight—but sometimes humiliation is worse; sometimes it is a life made small in a public square that tastes like success.
January, still on her knees, was pulled up by a pair of guards who read her rights and then took her away to a cell out of sight.
"Remember this face," someone urged the crowd. "For when it is our rulers' turn."
They let Davis plead and plead until his words were crumbs. In the end he screamed and begged and crawled and then he finally crumpled like something used. People stayed to take pictures, to gossip, to say that last piece of cruelty had been served.
"Good," Magnus said beside me, voice even and cold. "It was long overdue."
"I wanted them to burn," I said. "I wanted them to feel the heat I felt."
"You gave them a slow fire, Marina," Magnus said. "You gave them the shame of every wrong decision."
I held my grandmother's white jade pendant and twisted it in my fingers until the warmth came back into my palm.
"You will go to the cell," Davis wailed from farther off, watched by a thousand eyes. "You will live with this disgrace."
"Live with it," I said, voice flat. "And learn to bear the weight of a soul that cannot lift another into ruin."
They took January and then Davis, and the square emptied in slow waves. People argued in whispers, recorded in pockets. Some men stayed behind and shook their heads. A woman came up and pressed a scrap of fabric into my hand—an old soldier's band for courage. The city hummed like a thing that had hurled itself.
And somewhere in the crowd, a boy who had lost a brother smiled quietly and walked away with his small piece of closure.
*
I did not let their downfall be the end. I sat with Magnus in a quiet room while the city simmered.
"You are a dangerous bride," he told me.
"I am a bride who does not forgive the burning," I said. "And a woman who will not be played."
He smiled and, for once, his face was not a blade. "Then marry me again. But this time, not because the world tells you. Because you want to watch it rebuild from the tower of a man who will keep you safe."
"I will marry you again," I said, truth a steady stone where the old me had been liquid. "But I will marry because I choose it, not because I need it."
He leaned close and kissed me in the quiet, and this time it was my decision pressed into his mouth like a small dangerous jewel.
Days later, the papers printed the story of the fall. For three days and three nights the story sold like hot bread. The Emperor declared sanctions; Davis Buchanan was to be confined and judged for treason; January Huber, implicated, would be removed from favor and tried in the court. The public humiliation had its own law: it scattered the power of the guilty like dust.
"I never thought I'd see the day," Laura said as she fastened my cloak. "You did well, Marina."
"You taught me mercy in small measures," I said. "And you gave me this jade, more weight than a crown."
She smiled and kissed my forehead. "Go home. The wedding is a formality now."
"Home," I repeated, but the word tasted different.
In the rooms where I had died, I walked slowly and let the air remember me. Where there had been smoking rafters there were newly hung prints. People whispered; their faces were kind I had not earned and did not dispute. The Jade White Pendant pressed like an icy heart against my collarbone.
"Marina," Magnus said as we stood by the window while lanterns sailed like tiny, brave stars into the night. "Promise me we will be honest."
"I promise," I said with a crooked grin. "But promises change; the world changes. Let us be ready to change with them."
He took my hand and, for the first time since my rebirth, the night did not feel like a trap laid on soft fur. It felt like a window I had learned how to open.
Three months later, in a ceremony smaller than a court's thunder but full of our chosen witnesses, we were given to one another again. I wore my grandmother's white jade pendant beneath my collar. It hummed like a memory, quiet and watchful.
"Marina," Magnus said, and his voice had the strange warmth of someone who had stood in a storm and been not broken. "Do you still want me to be your safeguard?"
"Yes," I said. "But also to be my accomplice."
He laughed. "Deal."
We leaned into each other and, for once, both of us meant the words.
Years would pass. Freedoms would be tested like glass. My hands would learn new skills, not for the beauty of the practice but for the mechanics of survival: keeping watch, reading ledger entries, turning three lines of a note into a map. I would gather patience and patience would gather me back.
And the white jade pendant? I keep it in the place between my chest and my collarbone. Sometimes, when the city is quiet and the windows are shut, I touch it and think of fire and the taste of smoke on the night I died.
"I will not forget," I murmur to it.
It is only a stone. It keeps my shoulder steady.
The next time a man thinks of moving the world by burning others, I will be ready. The pendant will be there, cool and sure, like a tiny heart refusing to go out.
The End
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