Revenge13 min read
"I Don't Beg — I Rewrite the Ending"
ButterPicks14 views
“You crawled into my bed and still thought of another man?”
He spat the words like venom as he pushed me down.
I tasted dirt and shame. I had been traded like a coin, first handed to a penniless scholar who rose to power, then sold to this noble as cover for someone else’s rise.
“You promised my father safety,” I said through a broken throat. “You promised him freedom.”
“Get out,” the noble snapped. “Don’t make me vomit.”
I stood and bowed because my hands were empty and the only weapon left in my life was my face. I left their house to the dark and the cold, and they thought they had finished me.
They were wrong.
A month later I woke up in the straw room with a hand on my shoulder and a voice close to my ear.
“Cooperate. Or I kill you.”
I opened my eyes to the sharpest face I had ever seen. His mask covered half his face but not his eyes. They were cold and precise and they held a question.
“You’re alive.”
“I was supposed to die,” I said. My chest still burned where a blade had entered me last life. “You’re the one who promised to kill me if I ever betrayed you.”
“I’m Andreas Yamaguchi,” he said without pride, “the Prince you think you seduced.”
I swallowed. The man I had saved in the shed, the same man I once thought would give me power by bed, was the very monster who traded my life to the highest bidder. He did not kill me. He had reasons of his own.
“Give me a name,” he said.
“Why?”
“So I can remember who to use you for.”
I laughed because that was the only sane thing to do. My laugh sounded crazier to my ears than his quiet voice.
“I am Katelyn Booth,” I said. “I will not be used again.”
He leaned closer, his breath cool as winter. “You will cooperate.”
I pretended to be frightened, and he pretended to believe me. Outside, people were searching. Inside, I remembered every cut, every betrayal, every face that had turned from human to knife.
Three days later I learned how precise the knife could be.
“Jana Conway says her father sent the evidence,” the matron announced in the great hall. “Katelyn Booth, you carry disaster. You must leave for the convent.”
I watched Helga Barlow—the grandmother who favored the other girl—rise like a tide and push my world out.
“Do it,” she said. “Send her away.”
I put my hand on the lamp and watched its light tremble.
“You did this before,” I whispered.
“So what?” Jana Conway said from her silk cushions, smiling like a windless pond. “I am a true daughter. You are a mistake. The law will do its work.”
“False smiles,” I said under my breath. I had a choice then I didn’t have before. I could walk out like I had last time and die a little by little, or I could burn the map of their roads and draw new ones.
I drew new.
*
“I will not marry him,” I told the servant who came to fetch me for the Prince.
“You are to go,” she said. “The Prince demanded it. He has a will like iron.”
I said, “I will go because that will give me the only tool left. I will be the thorn they used. I will let the scorpion step into the flame.”
On the way to Andreas’s house I thought of the first life: how I loved Lincoln Roberts, the mind-poor scholar who rose like a tide on my labor. I had cleared his path, taken shame for him, and he traded me for power. I thought of my father, Finley Camp, and how his life had been stolen because of me. I thought of my little brother, who had been broken in body then in spirit. I swore then, not softly but like an oath struck in iron, that I would make each person who had pried open our home pay.
The Prince surprised me from the start.
He did not act like a lover. He acted like a man with a plan.
“You are not the maid from the note,” he said the first night, when he caught me pretending to be small and frightened. “Who are you?”
“Constance told you my name,” I lied. “I am a servant.”
“It’s a bad lie.” He reached for my hand and instead of cruelty he pressed an ointment into a cut I did not remember making. His fingers smelled of wine and cold cedar. “You are Katelyn Booth.”
“You should not know that,” I said.
“I remember faces,” he said. “And I remember promises.”
I began to use him the way I used the map of this city. He thought of me as a means. I let him. I let him move close enough to keep my enemies blind, and far enough that he could not touch the truth.
But he did things no one expected.
“You let the Prince undress you in front of everyone?” Jana screeched one night during a feast. “You are shameless!”
“I am not shameless,” I told her. I was strategic. “I am pretending. It suits my purpose.”
The Prince watched her like a hawk watches a mouse. Then he stood.
“Enough,” he said. His voice cut across the great hall.
Jana’s smile froze. Helga’s face went the color of old paper.
“What do you mean?” Helga snapped.
“You like to pass judgement,” Andreas told me later when he found me in the courtyard. “Who taught you to be silent and then sharp?”
“You did,” I said. “You taught me to hide in plain sight.”
He had the strange habit of keeping his feelings folded tight like a wet cloth. Sometimes he was a fortress. Sometimes his hand stung with heat. Once, after he’d called for the maid who was accused of poisoning him, a woman named Constance, and questioned her openly until she cried, he turned to me and said, “You lied.”
“I did,” I answered.
“Why?”
“Because I would rather save a life and plan than die under someone else’s foot.”
He watched me for a long time. Then he did something that changed the board we were playing.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
So I did.
I told him about Lincoln Roberts taking the throne of power by sleeping in beds he should not have touched. I told him how Jana had wormed her way back into the house. I told him about the snake I found under my mattress, about how Constance had laughed as she set the trap, and about the priest who had lied when the matron wanted a scapegoat.
“Andreas,” I said, “this is the path they paved. They used my life as stepping stones. I will not let the stones be their road.”
He rubbed his thumb across the small scar on his palm. “So you will burn the road.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I will do it by daylight so that everyone sees who made the path.”
He smiled then, brief and sharp. “Good. I will be the wind.”
*
The first strike was small and precise.
At the river fair I walked in red, carrying the Prince’s reputation like a shield. The city’s eyes fixated on me: the scholars, the merchants, the long-limbed nobles. At my side, Andreas read from folded papers and rested his hand at my back as if to claim me publicly.
Jana saw me and pretended not to. She sent a servant—Constance—toward the private garden near the river with a basket. Constance had been greedy and thin as a lie. She took what she could and thought no one watched.
She was wrong.
I had placed a message inside the pastry she took to the Prince's steward. The message was written in Lincoln Roberts’s own hand and full of promises that belonged to the wrong man. It listed deals, bribes, and names. It mentioned the priest whom Helga had bought off and the doctor who had been paid to lie.
When the steward opened the pastry, he found paper.
“What is this?” he asked, and everyone heard the rustle.
Andreas took the paper, read it slowly, then set it down like a challenge. He did not shout. He never did.
“You gave this to me,” he said to the assembled hall. “You fed me bread with signatures.”
All eyes turned from the pastry to the Prince. For the first time in days, the hall was silent enough to hear clocks ticking in far rooms.
“Who sent it?” Helga demanded.
No one answered. But the paper had fingerprints. It had proof. The Prince had men who could trace every line back.
The first liar's face twisted.
“It’s a mistake!” Lincoln cried, pale with sudden hunger.
It was not.
And the noise that came after was delicious. People remembered every cruel word, every slight, every act of betrayal. They remembered our father dragged in the rain begging for me. They remembered the time we had nothing.
Helga could not hide her rage. Jana’s smile lost shape. Constance fell to her knees and cried that she had only done what she was paid to do.
“You were paid to make me the fall guy,” I said. “You were paid to tear my house.”
Constance’s face was wet. “They told me it was this way for the family. They told me the family would be saved.”
“You told them lies,” I said.
“And what will you do?” Helga shouted. “You think a paper will undo the debts?”
“No,” I said. “But it will show people the names.”
There was a sound, low and sharp—the sound of a knife being taken from a sheath.
“You will be judged,” Andreas said quietly, and his words ran through the crowd like steel through silk.
The judge at the fair was not a real judge. It was the court of whisperers and men with money. They did their best work quietly. Within days, lists were compiled. Accounts were opened. Men who had smiled at our misfortune now looked like they had swallowed something bitter.
Lincoln Roberts found himself alone.
“How did you know?” he demanded of me one night when he still had the nerve to stand before my father’s house.
“I remembered you,” I said. “I remembered the way you looked when you thought you could own me. I remembered the names you wrote. You trusted paper, Lin. Paper remembers.”
He lunged like a wounded animal and the Prince—Andreas—pinned him with three men and a look that froze the blood.
“You will face them,” Andreas said.
They dragged Lincoln out into the light. The men spoke plainly of his deals. The people who had once bowed to him now spat on his name. He begged, he wheedled, he offered to give up rank if they spared his life. But the debt was not for money alone. It was for the lives he had used.
They stripped him of office. They took his seal. For a man who had risen like a tide he fell like broken rock. He was made small enough for the truth to land on him with the weight it deserved.
I watched him go and felt for the first time an odd, bitter peace. It was not joy. Joy would have fouled his pen and tongue. It was vindication.
*
But revenge is never only one thing. It must be a web, and a web must be cut in the right places.
While the city talked of Lincoln, I walked to the scholar Gabriel Ahmed. He had been poisoned once before when he stepped too close to the wrong man. His hands were gentle and he had more books than enemies.
“You saved me,” he said the first morning we spoke. “Why?”
“Because you are useful,” I said.
He smiled. “Honest.”
I told him to teach my brother. “Teach him to read maps and men.” He agreed. In time, Gabriel became our secret: a teacher, an ally, and a man with contacts in the palace that could be trusted.
“Why help?” he asked once while we walked through the market.
“Because people who read forget the names of those who love them,” I said. “You will remember.”
He did.
We worked through the next months like two thieves at the same safe. He read the documents, I read the men. We found the men who had sold the snake to my bed. We found the priests who had sold their oaths. We found the woman who taught Jana to smile like a trap.
Her name was Constance Benton. She was small and once proud. She threw herself at our feet when we brought proof of her bribery. Her face was a map of shame.
“You will confess,” I said.
“I was paid,” she sobbed. “If they kill me, I wanted nothing to do with it.”
“You are of less worth than a coin,” I told her. “But you can write what you know.”
So she did.
She named men. She named dates. She named where the snake had come from. Her list filled three sheets and three nights of witnesses.
When Jana read the papers at breakfast her hands were cold. “You have no proof,” she said with a voice that tried to be a wind.
But paper remembers. The Prince’s men were patient.
They arrested the priest who had said the snake came from my room. He confessed after a long night. He tore the piece of cloth from his tunic and said, “I was paid by a woman who wanted the house torn.”
The woman’s name was given from three mouths and one sob. The house shifted like a ship in wind.
Helga tried to bargain. She offered land, jewels, anything to stop the rot. The Prince would not bargain.
“I do not buy lies,” he said, and the way he said it made the servants weep.
They had my father’s honor on their hands. They had my brother's future. They had eaten the bread of our house and called it charity.
They paid.
*
The final scene was public because I had learned long ago people will only act when their shame is on display.
The market square was full. I stood there with my father beside me, injured but upright. My brother limped closer on a wooden crutch. Jana was dressed in silk that could have swallowed a small moon. Helga wore the face of a woman who had been surprised by weather.
“Andreas asked for me to be brought here,” Helga said through clenched teeth. “He acts as if he owns us all.”
“He owns nothing,” I said. “He owns only what he proves he can guard. Today we will prove more.”
“Prove what?” Jana hissed.
“Prove who paid for poison, who sold names, who thought it funny to trade a girl's body for power,” I answered.
Constance signed her name, her hands shaking. She stood and faced the crowd with the guilt of a dog that had been taught to bite.
“It was me,” she said. “Jana paid. Helga signed. The priest and the doctor were hired. Lincoln wrote the orders.”
The crowd shifted like a single living thing. Men who had nodded to Helga found their throats dry. Women who had once smiled at my misfortune now looked away.
“You lied,” Lincoln shouted, but his voice had no weight now. It rang thin.
“Andreas,” I said. “Do what a ruler must do.”
He walked forward with the same stillness I had seen in battle. He did not shout. He did not strike. He spoke with the authority of a man who knew every road in the courtyard.
“You will return what you stole,” he said. “You will confess to the courts. You will relinquish your titles where corruption touched them. If you refuse, we will take from you the power to ever scheme again.”
Helga’s hands trembled. Jana’s face went a color I had seen on dead fish.
They knelt. They confessed. They were stripped of duties and titles. The priest was beaten and banished from the temple. Constance—whose repentance was small but real—was spared a harsher fate and made to work to restore what she had broken.
Lincoln was exiled to the provinces to teach without title. He could have stayed in a prison of iron and gold, but he had chosen the palace of his own making first. He left as a small man with empty hands.
I watched them go and felt a peace like winter after a long fight. It was not perfect. No revenge is. But those who had used us could not use us again.
*
Andreas surprised me again.
When it was over and the city’s gossip turned from our family’s shame to new dances and new fevers, he came to my father’s garden and sat with me.
“You never begged,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I only made plans.”
“You made me an accomplice,” he said. “Are you angry?”
“No,” I said. “I am not soft.”
He looked at my hands. He had watched me break men and rebuild houses. “I have been cruel in other lives,” he said. “I tried to be a weapon then. I thought I could buy peace by cruelty. I was wrong.”
“You cannot buy peace,” I said. “You can only make it.”
He laughed, a short sound without humor. “Do you want anything from me that is not a tool?”
“You could stop looking at me like a problem,” I said.
He shook his head. “I did not look at you as a problem. For a while I looked at you like a mystery. Now I look at you like the future and an enemy—both dangerous. That is rare.”
“I hate you,” I said, because I had to. “You helped make my death possible.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “And you tried to kill me.”
“Yes.”
“You failed,” he said.
I opened my mouth but he cut across me. “I want to marry you.”
I laughed so hard the sound startled the birds.
“You are mad.”
“No,” he said, his voice thin and honest. “I am stubborn. I want to bind you where no one can break you. If you are my wife, no matron can throw you to the dogs. If you are my wife, I will lay my life down before anyone touches your family.”
“That is a good bargain,” I said. “But I am not a prize.”
“No,” he said. “You are the danger I will keep closest. Will you have me?”
I looked at him. The city had changed. My father’s house had been burned clean of rotting wood. My brother could one day stand straight. I had made a list and scratched many names from it.
“If I marry you,” I said slowly, “I will not be taken from my father, my brother, or my house. You will guard them.”
“I will guard them,” he promised.
“And you will never use me as slavery again.”
“I will not,” he said.
“I will not promise to love you at once,” I said. “Love takes time, and I have been burned.”
“You have time,” he said. “And I have patience.”
I let him keep his hand on my shoulder then. He did not pull me into bed. He did not demand that I be less than I was. He offered me a shield, and later I learned he would offer me his sword too.
We married with the city’s eyes on us. The Prince’s marriage made the matron gape. Helga’s power had been stripped. Jana’s face was gone from the halls.
The feast was not a single sweet. It tasted of metal in my mouth. But at the bedchamber that night Andreas stood with his back to the window and did not take me by force. He stood and watched me sleep. The next morning he woke before me and wrote letters to men who still whispered, telling them not to touch the house of Finley Camp.
I spent the first year after my marriage not in triumph but in planning. I put Gabriel in the school near my brother’s house. Lincoln’s name was a lesson: how a man with book-smarts but no iron loses everything. Constance worked in the kitchen and later in the hers-choice of community work to make amends. The priest who had lied was banned.
The city learned to watch more carefully whom it trusted. People who once schemed turned meek. Helga died a small death of a woman who had no heirs left to protect her pride.
Andreas became a strange husband: public and cold, and when alone, warm but dangerous. He kept his promises with the accuracy of a ledger.
“You wanted my revenge,” he said once while we walked in the garden. “What else do you ask for?”
“For what I lost,” I answered. “Not for what they took, but for the quiet we never had. I want my brother to learn. I want a home that is safe.”
“You will have it,” he said.
“You will hate me if I do not love you back,” I said.
He shrugged. “Then hate me. I would rather you hate me and live under my protection than love me and be used by others.”
I considered that. I was not made to be a wife who folded. I was made to fold traps and open them at the right time.
Years later, when Jana’s children—few and miserable—came to ask for forgiveness, I gave them hot soup and a promise: “Do better.”
They were grateful because a poor apology is easier than the craft of living honestly.
In the palace, rumors passed that Andreas had married to cure an illness. Some said he married me to take my luck. I smiled then and thought of the nights I had been placed like a mirror for someone else’s vanity.
I had rewired my life.
One morning, the Prince took me by the hand, and for the first time in years I did not flinch.
“Katelyn,” he said, “I loved the way you fought.”
“You loved how I fought your enemies,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I loved the way you would not be bought.”
We married then truly—not in bargains, but by an oath. He put his sword above the bed and promised the men who still whispered: Do not touch what belongs to her family.
We outlived the cold years. My father grew older and found peace. My brother read more than he trained, but he found his own path. Gabriel taught and wrote. Lincoln died quietly in a small province, a broken man who wrote letters to no one. Constance breathed careless and humbled.
One night Andreas woke me from sleep.
“Do you remember the day by the river?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “You told people the truth.”
“And you did not beg me to save you.”
“No.”
He sat up and reached for my hand. “I was afraid to lose you.”
I was not surprised.
“I will not let them take you again,” he said. “I will stand in the courtyard and be their judgement if they come.”
“And if you fail?”
“Then you kill me,” he said without drama.
I laughed because it was the right thing to do. “Then I will have my revenge on the man who could not keep his promise.”
We loved poorly by the city’s standards but honestly by our own. I never forgave fully. Forgiveness is a small place for those who have been nearly roasted.
But I finished what I had started: I rewrote the map and burned their roads. I kept my father. I kept my brother. I kept my name.
And when people asked Andreas why he protected a woman who had once been called a disaster, he answered simply.
“She remembered what mattered,” he said. “And she will remember who to punish.”
I smiled and said nothing.
The End
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