Rebirth19 min read
I Fell Into a Book, Said "Whatever," and Found Two Men Waiting
ButterPicks8 views
1
I had been awake at the lab for four nights straight, eyes glued to numbers until the spreadsheets blurred. I remember my mentor tapping my shoulder and saying, "Go rest. I'll watch the data."
"I can do it," I said. "Just another hour."
When I shut my eyes, the whir of machines turned into wind. When I opened them, the fluorescent lab was gone. A carved wooden screen and paper lanterns took its place. I sat on a futon in a room that smelled of incense, not coolant. My hands were tied with soft cords.
A woman I had never seen before, exquisitely dressed, looked down at me as if judging a bad actor. She said, "This is your fate, Antonia."
"Antonia?" I tried to answer, but the name was already mine on her tongue. I blinked, and the cord burned my wrists.
I looked at the woman more closely. Left eye, a little red beauty mark at the corner. It felt like déjà vu—too specific for chance. I had read this book last month, the one that made my hands shake and my throat dry. The heroine in that book was Veronika Fletcher, the pampered daughter of the chancellor, set to marry a prince. The heroine used a servant—someone who looked like her—to swap places the night before the wedding. The servant, cast as disposable, was meant to be left to die.
Now I was in that servant's body. Or the servant's fate had been stitched to mine. I had no code to debug, no grant to finish. I had a choice I had not prepared for.
"Relax," I told the room, because old habits die hard. "This is a cosplay. My lab mates are doing a prank."
The man who carried me was quiet and masked, moving with a slow precision that made the hair rise on my arms. He put me down, and I noticed how his eyes were a clear, cold black even through the mask. He looked at me like he was trying to remember a face.
"You can loosen that," I said. "It hurts."
He did not obey my request. He did not seem to understand the joke. He only pressed his foot until my leg snapped. Pain hit me like a hammer. I tasted iron and had a very clear thought: I had slipped into the book.
2
The book told me where I was in the plot. The servant would be taken, abused, and then left for dead. The heroine would escape and triumph. I was the "evil supporting role," the one who once had the chancellor's favor and thought life would be kind to her. The book had written my death as necessary and neat.
I had two possible strategies: fight like a heroine, claw my way up the ladder, avenge myself; or lie down and let the plot take me where it wanted. My brain, exhausted from nights in the lab, chose an option I had never considered before.
"Die fast. Die clean. Back to the lab," I whispered. "If I'm going to be a corpse for plot convenience, at least I won't be dragged to insanity."
I closed my eyes and stuck my neck out like a well-trained martyr. The masked man looked confused. He tilted his head the way a dog tilts its head when listening to a new sound.
"You can break it," I said to him, loud enough for anyone who might be eavesdropping.
He cocked his head. He did not know how to act like the book's villains. He did not know how to be cruel in the book's tidy way.
"What's your name?" I asked to stall.
He crouched and pinched my jaw, smelling my breath as if I were a specimen. "Yuri," he said at last, slowly. "Richards."
Yuri. The book called him a machine, a trained killer who only showed feeling when told to. In the book he was dangerous because he followed orders. Up close, he looked like someone who had never been asked how he felt.
"Do it," I said. "Kill me."
Yuri's face twisted—first confusion, then what looked like sudden, bewildered tenderness. He took my leg into his arms instead of my neck. He ripped a strip of cloth, wrapped it around my wound, and sprinkled some powder that made fire numb and pain dull. He carried me back out the window we had come in through, moving like wind.
"Why didn't you kill me?" I asked when we were running through the dark.
He said, "Because I haven't seen a butterfly yet."
"Bird or insect, it won't help me now," I said. "I'm trying for a quick exit."
He looked at me as if a whole new world had opened and said the most impossible thing. "Stay until I meet the butterfly."
3
Yuri was the opposite of the book. The book had made him a stoic blade. In life, he was awkward and curious. He asked questions in a way that sounded like a child asking the same question a dozen times. "What is a butterfly?" "What is joy?" He wanted simple answers, and I, who had spent four nights writing code so complex it could make a machine learn, found myself explaining feelings like I was teaching kindergarten.
"He'll be a problem," someone said once at a distance. A tall, composed man who looked like he belonged in command stepped into our small life like an actor taking the stage. He had regal angles and a smile that looked like it had been cut out and polished.
"Bruno Warren," Yuri said quietly, watching the man from the shadows.
Bruno was the prince-in-waiting in the book, the man who wore diplomacy as armor. I had thought of him as untouchable on the page. In the room, he smiled at me with a softness that did not reach his eyes.
"Antonia," he said, and when he called me by name my skin crawled. He called everyone by names like they were chess pieces.
"Why are you treating me like a candidate for a medal?" I asked.
Bruno's laughter was quiet. "I'm not treating you anything. I want to know what you will do when you are finally honest."
"Honest about what?" I shot back. "That I'm a lab rat who can't even write clean code?"
He put a black pill in his open hand and looked at me. "Trust," he said. "Take this. If you trust me, take it. If you don't, spit it out. I will know either way."
I took this as a bet. I swallowed the pill because I wanted to see the end of Bruno's little game. I wanted to see who would be crueler—him, the supposed prince, or the plot that had pushed me into a sacrificial role.
He told me a date: the ceremony in two weeks. He told me my task: be the heroine at certain spots. He told me a sweet lie: that if I followed the plan and survived, I'd be rewarded.
"I will live," he said to me once. "I will make sure you live."
I had a feeling he wasn't promising me anything good.
4
"Burn the palace," Bruno told me later, in the moonlit garden where magnolia blossoms fell like pale coins. "Create chaos at the Empress's feast, and in the confusion I will enact the rest."
"You want me to commit arson," I said, very impressed with his calm.
"Yes," he answered.
"Do you really think the person who gives such an order will spare the arsonist?" I asked. "You expect me to be naive enough to trust that one who asks will rescue me afterward?"
He smiled. "I expect you to be cleverer than that."
"That doesn't sound like a promise."
He touched my shoulder like a lawyer placing a gentle hand on a witness. "Consider it security."
5
Two weeks crawled like a stuck gear. Yuri was suddenly always near me. He asked naive questions and then listened like a priest. I found myself telling him things I hadn't told anyone: how I had dropped out of a prestigious fellowship for a botched experiment, how the lab never had patience for me, how I had learned to surrender my best self for the sake of survival.
One night Yuri put a small butterfly in his palm. "We were talking about this," he said. "Do you see? It is fragile. It trusts the world and flies."
"That's a weird thing to say to someone you intend to murder," I said.
He looked at me like someone watching an equation finally balance and said, "You are different."
"Different how?" I asked.
"In ways my training doesn't understand," he said. "You make me want the things I don't have names for."
I wanted to tell him at least one truth that would stick. "If you ever break me," I said, "I will find you in a hundred worlds and break you back."
He nodded solemnly, then applied medicine to my scar. "Then don't break."
6
The night we were supposed to burn the palace, my plan was simple. Follow Bruno's map, light the slow fuse, escape. If half the palace went up, many would be blamed and then the ashes would all be swept into one neat political pile. If I died, that fast death I had wished for would come.
"Antonia," Veronika said before I left. She was beautiful in a way that made people give her their chairs. "I hope you recover from your cough in time for the ceremony."
"Must be nice," I said.
"Do you know," she said softly, "when you look at someone, it is like opening a window to the world. I like seeing what people hide."
I should have hated her then. The book had told me she was the one who would willingly take my life, who had cast me as her discarded shadow. But when she said that, I saw something else—fear under the vanity. A woman who had never known a defeat.
I lit the fuse as the first firework between two painted dragons shot into the night sky.
"Run," Yuri said.
I did. I ran to the room where I was supposed to set the main kindle, but the door slammed and locked behind me.
From the corridor, the sound of footsteps closed in. A hand shoved into my back. The next moment, flames licked at my hem. For minutes that were a lifetime, the heat wrapped its hands around me, pain bright as a white line. I had been ready for this pain. I had not been ready for the hands that lifted me.
"Get on my back," Yuri grunted. "Hold tight."
He climbed through a window with me across his shoulder, bounding over the tiled roofs like someone made of rope and will. We landed outside, breathless and soot-streaked. I smelled smoke and a sudden, sharp sense of betrayal.
"Why didn't you let me die clean?" I asked.
He answered simply, "I couldn't." Then he kissed my forehead with a softness that terrified me more than fire did.
7
News spread faster than loyalty. The palace burned at the edges. People screamed in the streets where servants and nobles mixed blood and poetry into a single stew of accusation. Bruno's plan was supposed to be neat—my arson would cause the right panic. But someone had changed the script.
I woke in a small bed with my arm bandaged. Veronika's head had been delivered to me in a carved box—Bruno had sent it as a warning. He had the kind of manners that dressed murder in velvet.
"You look pale," he said when I saw him next. "You know how this works now. You live and you play your part."
"I thought you promised me a way out," I said. "You told me to burn. You gave me poison. You told me you would give me a role."
He smiled like a finished map. "You promised too, Antonia."
I wanted to tell him that I would never forgive him, but the words were a luxury. So I only said, "This still hurts."
8
Veronika had been a villain in the pages; but in life she had every advantage the book had promised her. She was carried into the throne room with the haughtiness of a woman who decided that the world would revolve on her wrist. Yet that same world has a way of cracking even the finest crystal.
When she stood before the emperor's dais that day, the hall was full. Courtiers pressed like reeds. The empress's ladies whispered as if swapping embroidery tips. Servants turned their faces aside. The sun slanted through high windows and painted the mosaic floor with light.
"Your Majesty," she called with the queenly insistence of someone who expects a crown for a baby favor. "I have done nothing but obey decorum and serve the state."
The emperor's mouth was a thin line. Bruno was there, but not for show. He sat wrapped in a robe that made him look smaller and, paradoxically, more terrible.
"Bring the boxes," Bruno said softly.
Two palace guards carried a small wooden crate into the center. The crowd drew closer, shoves accompanied by the thief's whisper and the priest's mutter. I watched from the side gallows of fate, arms useless at my sides. I had expected this moment, but not the way sound would sharpen—like knives honing knives.
"Open it," Bruno said.
They did. Inside was not jewelry. A head, Veronika's head, pale and fixed in death's permanent surprise. The hall was a room of held breaths.
Veronika's face, even in death, held its practiced disdain. But when they put the box down and the truth spilled like bitter tea, the expression on her face changed. Her crimson lips split as first disbelief, then fury, then an animal panic that was startling because it showed a vulnerability she had layered over for a lifetime.
"You murderer," she hissed at Bruno. "You promised—"
"Promise?" Bruno echoed, and his voice was soft enough to be shocking. "You chose to betray the state."
"Traitor," Veronika shrieked at the guards. She lunged. She was hauled down and made to kneel, her hair a disordered crown.
"Tell them who sent you," Bruno said to the crowd. "Tell the court who would burn a palace to ruin the people."
The courtiers blinked and shuffled like a set of players remembering their lines. Murmurs climbed and then rose into a roar. People pointed fingers, some at Veronika, some at the idea of power that could condone such a thing. Watches were held up. Scribes began to write fast.
"She recruited brigands," Bruno intoned. "She talked of treason. She conspired with our enemies. She was to set fire to the palace and pin it on a loyal man. She wanted the crown."
"Shame!" a voice cried. "Monster!"
"She is a villain," said another. "Cut off her head! Save the state!"
Veronika's eyes rolled, still dangerous. She spat and cursed. "You are lying," she said. "You will pay! You will—"
"You wanted to be queen," Bruno said quietly, as if narrating. "You hoped to make the throne your stepping stone. You used others. You pretended innocence."
"Do you expect mercy?" someone asked in the crowd, not unkindly.
"Mercy?" Bruno repeated. "From one who burns the homes of her people?"
The executioners did not wait for consensus. Veronika was dragged outside, her servants crying and the courtyard echoing with a sudden, animal noise of judgement. She was placed upon a low platform, the square filling with faces—faces that, minutes before, had smiled at her in honor and favor.
She screamed at first—sharp, accusatory. Then she begged, and the sequence was a small tragedy: defiance, countenance of haughtiness, denial, the flipping into a plea.
"Bruno!" she called in a voice that tried to be the old polished command. "You promised me!"
He had come closer now, and the light caught his jaw. He said, "You promised loyalty. You betrayed it."
She shifted posture like someone sweat-sliding down a cliff. "You will not kill me," she said. "You cannot. The people will howl."
The crowd murmured. Started to take sides. For a few tense seconds, it seemed like the story might twist again.
Then the executioner lifted his blade. The sound of the blade cutting the air was obscene in its simplicity. The crowd inhaled like one body. Veronika's face moved through stages so quickly I could hardly catch them—rage, pleading, shock, disbelief, then a final flaring comprehension. Her mouth opened as if to speak, but the crowd only heard a small sound.
The blade fell.
For a moment there was stunned silence like a frozen river. Then people cleared their throats and spoke louder, as if to fill the new emptiness. Some cheered, some sobbed, some turned away.
"A fitting end," a pundit declared. "Justice."
"No," a woman near me whispered. "It was cold. She was loved once."
Veronika's loyal ladies stood there, faces waxen. A young courier dropped a seal in the mud. Someone's child howled in confusion.
Bruno turned his face away. The way he walked back into the palace was not triumphant. He looked heavier, as if the weight of the blade had lodged in him. I realized then I had not expected to feel anything at all and yet here I was—eyes stinging, stomach cold.
There was shame in Veronika's fall. There was satisfaction in the crowd's quick hunger for a story with a moral. And there was a small, bitter lesson for me. Power did not always show itself in banners. Sometimes it was a soft voice and a perfect box.
9
After that, Bruno's kindness was tempered. He offered me medicines, a bed with soft sheets, and a smile that sat like a coin on his face. Then he asked me again to stand as someone else at the coronation. He called our bargain "reciprocity."
"Do you trust me?" he asked, as if trust were a math problem.
I laughed once, too loud. "No."
He nodded. "Then do it for the moment you want."
The day of the coronation came. The palace sparkled. I put on the embroidered robes of a noble and walked among silk and gold. Bruno stood in white and planted a smile like a flag. Yuri watched from the side, mouth thin.
"Don't die," Yuri told me in a whisper that had a tremor in it. "Not now."
"For our purposes," I said, "I will live."
10
The crowning moved like a procession of symbols. People sang, and the music scraped like an old fiddle at the back of my mind. During the ceremony, I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard Bruno say, "We need to talk, Antonia."
We stepped into a private room. He took a slender rod from his sleeve. With clinical motion he drew a tiny black dot of pigment and placed it at the corner of my eye.
"A mark," he said. "So you can be seen."
"You did it backwards," I told him. "It's supposed to be on the left."
He smiled without amusement. "It's for you."
I wanted to throw something at him, but instead I did what I had done best: I negotiated. "If I survive this, you give me the antidote," I said.
He studied me like a sampler. "And if you die?"
"Then you can keep your crown," I said. "But the memory of me will be a stain."
He kept my hands in his for a long time after that and said, "Keep your hands in mine. You owe me nothing."
11
Life became a tightrope. One step and the crowd could tear you down; one misstep and Bruno would trade you like a card. Yuri stayed by my side. He would sometimes ask stupid questions about modern things, and my museum-trained brain would give him simple answers. He loved to ask, "What is a wish?" and wince if I spoke of the lab.
"Do you still want to go back?" he asked in the palace garden once. A little moon sat high like a coin.
"Sometimes," I said. "But can you imagine living another life? I'm tired of clawing at everything so that someone else can wear it."
He nodded. "Stay."
"Only if you will come with me," I teased. "You'll become a civil servant and read policy papers and learn to smile at banquets."
He chuckled. "I'd rather be at your side."
12
The final betrayal came like a gust. Bruno had always been two-faced for his job. He would give you sweetness and then wield that sweetness like a weapon. He had always tested me. He had always measured loyalty and then disposed of those who failed.
"Antonia," he said, the night before the feast that would crown me in a place of honor, "sleep."
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the lab machines hum. I imagined the steady, binary life where nothing asked me to bleed in a costume.
I dreamt of Yuri's eyes, clear and honest in a way that made everything else dim.
13
They tried to trap me at the feast. The hall filled with auspicious features and poisoned smiles. But I was awake now. I used what I knew—shortcuts Bruno had shown me, whispers from servants, the map he had given—and I slipped like ink through fingers.
When danger rushed, I ran into the courtyard and found a horse waiting. Yuri was there with a cloak and a bag. He said, "Now."
We fled under the moon, the palace a burnt fruit behind us. Bruno watched us from an arch, and his expression broke into something that was not cruelty but a deep, tired sorrow.
"I told you to stay," he called.
"Go to hell," I called back.
We rode until the city was only a necklace of lights. Yuri held me like a treasure and asked, "If we make it across the border, will you still want the lab? Will you still want to come back?"
"Yes," I said. "I will always want to go back. But maybe I will also want to stay."
14
At the border a small, honest man with a duty looked at my papers and the guard distracted me with a question about the weather. We slipped through because the world is sometimes made of good luck and sometimes of small greedy men who count coins more than the shape of a life.
We lived like thieves for a while—moving and hiding, making small fires, eating wild fruit. Yuri would find a place and say, "This is enough." He would also find a butterfly and say, "Look. We found one."
In this life without Bruno's maps, I saw that being brave without theater was possible. Yuri's hands steadied me. He kept me from falling apart with small, quiet things.
"Will you marry me?" he asked one night by the fire, ringing a poor ring around my finger. It surprised me more than a sword.
"I do not know the rules," I said. "But I think yes."
He smiled like sunrise. "Then yes."
15
And then I died.
Well, not exactly. It felt like dying. We were cornered once more at a small temple. Bruno's men had been there before we realized. There was blood and then white, and a deep cold.
I woke up in a bright room with beeping machines and a nurse saying, "She's awake."
I said, "I was supposed to die."
"You fainted," said a chubby doctor. "You were found unconscious for a week."
My lab was the same as I had left. The world had not changed. I had my charts and my now-cracked coffee mug. The only difference was that sometimes the image of Yuri's hand in mine would flash across my thoughts like a heat signature.
I went back to my life with the usual lapses: meetings, emails, deadlines. But I carried a relic of that other world like a small stone in my pocket. I could feel it on my palm when I typed.
16
Weeks passed and a man sat at the café near my campus. He had the same empty look that Yuri had in the palace—like someone who had been taught to cut and then had discovered how to feel. I almost didn't believe it until he walked over and said, "You have the scar by your jaw. Antonia?"
I dropped my coffee and he laughed like a man who had waited years for the right punchline. He had not changed much. He had dirt and stitches of the old world in his face, but he had a new life too—small classes, a rented room, an old guitar he sometimes played.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
He smiled. "You left traces."
"Then why are you here?"
"To be where you are."
He took my hand and it was like putting my palm back into a glove. He spoke of the palace like a tale told over a cheap cup of coffee. He said, "I tried to kill the man who killed my friends."
"Did you?"
"No," he said. "I was caught. I lost years. I learned to live again."
"Do you still like butterflies?"
He laughed. "Yes. Do you?"
"I do, sometimes."
17
Then came the news that should have been impossible. Bruno Warren had been accused of crimes that had once been whispered and then proven with a ledger and witnesses. The kingdom had become a court of men who liked to watch a lord tumble. There was a trial in the public square.
"He'll plead nobility," someone predicted.
"He will die by politics," another said.
I went to the square with a small note in my fist. I had to see the man who had put me through the book and then left me alive like a lesson remembered. He stood tall in a carriage, eyes brave and oddly empty. The crowd pressed like bees.
"Bruno Warren!" someone shouted. "What do you say to the charges?"
He spoke like a man giving a lecture. "All I ever wanted was to secure the realm."
"Who burned the palace?" a woman demanded.
"You staged it," a voice replied from the crowd. "You used the servant to cover your tracks."
Bruno's face did not change. He stepped down and faced the assembly. The magistrate asked him in a voice like a bell, "Bruno Warren, are these true? Did you order the burning? Did you orchestrate Veronika Fletcher's death? Did you place the head in the servant's hands to silence her?"
He looked at me across the crowd. We had shared rooms, plans, bargains. I wondered if he still thought he could see my future like a game of cards.
"I did what needed to be done," he said. "I ordered what I ordered to safeguard the state."
There was a hot, human sound—anger lifting like smoke. "Then see the judgment," the magistrate said.
They displayed many things: ledgers, witness testimony, letters. People who had been with Bruno at late meetings were asked to speak. Servants told of black pills, of three fireworks, of the plan laid out like architecture.
"Did you put a sign on her?" someone asked. "Did you order the nail that put a mark on her eye?"
He did not look away. "I marked her," he said. "I tested her."
The crowd closed in. I stepped forward. The square went instantly silent in a way I did not expect.
"Antonia Cordova," the magistrate said. "You were the one used in the plan. Speak."
My voice was small but clear. "He offered to save me if I followed his map," I said. "He gave me a pill and a promise. He gave me a role in a trap. He sent Veronika's head to me in a box as a warning. He gave me a map and then tried to kill me with it."
"Why did you come forward now?" asked an official. "Why after all this time?"
"Because I finally learned to care," I said. "Because I know how to summon people and because a head shouldn't be a pawn in someone's chess game."
The crowd stared.
Bruno's expression cracked. "You lie," he said. "She was a conspirator."
"Then let the people decide," I said.
The magistrate ordered a public inquest. Witness after witness recounted moments I remembered like the flash of a bad photograph. The ledger was read aloud: money traced to burner houses, a delivery list that ended with a carved crate.
Bruno's face went through an old evolution. First, a sheen of disbelief. Then, fast, a flash of anger. He looked like someone learning that a plan you've lived with is now dissolving in light.
"You're trying to ruin me," he told the crowd. "Politics will suffer."
The crowd was not merciful. They shouted and accused. People slapped their hands together with excitement. A street vendor cheered. Children clapped, thinking it a show.
"Enough," Bruno said, raising his hand like a general. "You accuse me. Produce evidence then. Show a law I have broken."
They did.
They paraded the boxes. They read the letters aloud. They called the men who had held the torches. They called the witnesses who had watched Bruno's carriage move. They called the servant who had delivered Veronika the tea.
He stumbled as more names were read. Claims he made as a prince—of saving people, of being above petty crimes—turned into a thin white thread. The more he tried to defend himself, the more the rope tightened.
"Traitor!" someone cried.
"Cut him down!" another shouted.
He reacted in the way rulers do when their world crumbles: first with denial, then with anger, then with the old, practiced cruelty. He tried to denounce the witnesses. He accused the magistrate of slander. He moved like someone who had no other language.
People started to throw things—roses at first, then mud. A woman spat. A man struck Bruno across the face. He did not flinch when his crown—an emblem now—was removed.
The magistrate announced the verdict later that day: exile and forfeiture of title. Bruno was to be stripped in public, his robes removed, his name scratched from registry. He was to stand in the square and be told the names of those he betrayed.
When they removed his cloak, he did not fight. He stood, naked of pretense and rank, and the court read his crimes aloud. He watched everyone as a painter might watch a blank canvas.
"You will live with the knowledge of what you have done," the magistrate said. "You will have to see every day the consequences."
Bruno's face finally broke. He went through the stages—smugness, denial, pleading, disbelief, then collapse. The crowd that had once admired him now spat and shouted. Some booed. Some took out small stones and threw them. A kid near me who had loved the way Bruno had walked two seasons ago now screamed, "Thief!"
He fell to his knees only when a child called him "a coward," and in that moment he finally stopped pretending. I watched him like a scientist watches an experiment end. There was no joy in it, only relief that the public had seen the man for what he was.
People took pictures with their small devices, laughed at his exposure, recorded the spectacle. Someone cheered. Someone cried, thinking of Veronika. A woman left flowers in Bruno's path and then, after a pause, stomped them under her heel.
Bruno looked up at me for a long second. "Antonia," he said, and the voice had changed. "I did what was necessary."
"You were the necessary cruelty," I answered. It felt hollow to say it but true.
He shook, the old machine in him finally failing and spilling human dampness like water. "I'm sorry," he said, quiet as the shell of a seashell.
I did not laugh. I did not smile. I watched the man who had put a head in a box, who had tried to use me as a ladder, who had kissed me like a confessor, fall into a heap of human pity. The crowd closed in, snapping pictures, talking into their phones, turning punishment into entertainment. I had wanted justice, not spectacle. The spectacle was what we got.
18
After the trial, we left the square together—Yuri and I. He had been there the whole time, standing silent and steady like a pillar. He squeezed my hand as if to make sure I was real.
"How did you survive?" someone asked me later.
"Because I decided to feel," I answered. "Because I wanted to keep breathing for something other than fear."
He—Yuri—kissed me in a way that was not dramatic. It was small, like a bandage over a wound. That night, by a small lamp, I told him about the lab.
"I will help you," he said simply. "No more maps. No more tests."
"I like my lab," I said. "It has humming machines and predictable results."
He smiled. "Then let's make our lives like a lab. Predictable, steady. Intermittent experiments for fun."
19
In time, Bruno's exile turned into a softer demise. He died not on a scaffold but in a small house, alone, with a cup of tea that someone had poisoned in revenge or despair. The people who had been his allies moved on. The court found new favorite players.
Yuri and I married with no ceremony beyond our friends in a small park. We watched lanterns float like tiny moths and promised to live like people who keep the other alive.
When the world threatened to drag me into the old story again, I would remember Bruno in the square—stripped of robes, name cursed by a thousand mouths—and I would remember Yuri's hands. I would remember how power can dress itself as virtue and how cruelty can sit in a velvet chair.
I had gone into the book as someone who wanted a fast death. I came out wanting to write my own life in slow ink.
The End
— Thank you for reading —