Rebirth13 min read
I Let Go — Then Bought a Company
ButterPicks15 views
"Don't leave me," he whispered once, in a courtyard of fireflies. "Please do not leave me."
I remember saying it back to him in a different voice the night everything broke. "I give up on you."
"Again: confirm, host, are you abandoning the book world?" The system's voice was flat. I lifted the sword and pressed it to my throat.
Blood ran warm and thick. Liam Hudson watched, a look on his face that had always been a promise and a threat. I smiled the only smile I had left.
"This time," I said into the cold, "I am really giving you up."
1
I landed on the page in the middle of a scene: my foot planted on a boy's wrist, crushing fingers into the frozen snow.
"Long Princess, please—" A servant's voice, not his; the palace men stepped forward with sleeves rolled, ready to teach someone a lesson.
I tried to pull my foot back. It wouldn't obey. I found myself stamping again and again as if a marionette obeyed a cruel puppeteer.
"Wait," I said, and the voice that came out of me had an old arrogance. "Stop."
The boy under my boot didn't cry. He didn't yell. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground. His fingers were red, thin, already splitting.
"Your Highness," one eunuch offered, "shall we take him away?"
I thought about the novel's plot that the system fed to me in broken sentences: Liam Hudson—boy who rises from the margins to empire; the heroine is a merchant's daughter who loves him truly; and I? I was the stepping-stone. The toxic woman. The villain.
"You want me to play my part," I told the ceiling in my head. "Fine."
I remembered the line: "Finish your role and you'll go home. Reward ten billion." I smiled at the thought of modern apartments and takeout. "Fine."
"Take him," I commanded. "He will clean my shoes."
The invisible force left my foot. The boy—Liam—was hauled up, clothes ragged, face smudged with dirt and something else. He looked at me then, finally. For the first time I really saw him: narrow shoulders, cheeks hollowed by winter, eyes like spilled ink. He looked like someone who had learned to be quietly dangerous.
2
I sent him to fetch medicine.
He came back with hands raw but clean. He bowed, shaky. I kicked the basin again so the fur stole fell in a puddle.
"This is your reward," I said, throwing the medicine to him like a bone.
He cradled the fox fur as if it were treasure.
"Long Princess," the eunuchs sobbed, "we were wrong. Mercy!"
"Do you want to learn to pay for things properly?" I asked aloud. The boy's face didn't change. He said, "I will."
When he left, he looked back once. That look sank into me: wary, patient, like a caged animal sizing up its cage.
I told myself I would be the dutiful villain. I told myself I would follow the script. I told myself it was a job and a paycheck. The system reminded me: follow the plot, you'll be rewarded.
3
Weeks passed. That's not allowed by the rules, but the "system" meant descriptive patches and I obeyed. I learned how the palace rose and sank like breath. I learned that the fox fur I had "gifted" him was meant to keep him alive in winter, not to buy his loyalty. I learned he was the forgotten son of a forgotten concubine—discarded at birth but still a prince in name. No one loved him except maybe himself.
He came to my side not as a supplicant but as a plan. He hit the palace guards like a small storm and then, on his knees, held the fur like liturgy and said, "It is yours, Highness."
I told him, "Teach them a lesson."
He did, with his knuckles and with a quiet animal rage. He broke their ribs and then forced a confession out of them. I called someone to send them to the hospital while he bled and smiled in that strange half-satisfaction of someone who was both cruel and curious.
"Are you satisfied?" he asked, lips cracked from the cold.
"It was adequate," I said. "You did well."
He looked at me then as if mapping my contours. He said, "Thank you." It was the first time he thanked someone who'd wounded him.
4
We had small moments that weren't in the book.
"You're cold," he said one night while we sat by a tilted brazier.
"Then warm yourself with other people's misfortune," I said. I beamed at him—harder, because the role required it—and he smiled with teeth, too quick and sudden.
"Will you take refuge with me?" he asked later, softer.
"No," I said. "I have too many things to do when I die."
He tilted his head. "I will die before you," he said.
"That's not how it goes," I muttered.
5
"You're close to General Remy," the empress said one afternoon, eyes like a ruler weighing coin. She spoke of alliances as if discussing weather.
I answered, perfunctory: "We amuse each other."
Then they announced that a dangerous assignment—training at the frontier—would fall to the least protected prince. A small mercy for the court and a slow death for him by the book.
I looked at Liam. He said, "I don't want to die."
"Then go," I told him. "Go and come back stronger."
He left that week, not as a supplicant but as a soldier. The plot required a year of blood and mud and then a glorious return. The system fed me data: success would make him an instrument of fate. I told myself I would remain the villain and watch.
6
He returned in triumph.
Liam walked into court with new lines on his face. The mud and war had sharpened him. He smiled at me once across the banquet, then at others: the general who helped him lift the weary boy up, the emperor who praised his deeds, and Remy Barbi er—my "betrothed" in the book—who rose to salute and speak in measured phrases.
"To Madeleine," Remy said, raising his cup. "Thank you for caring for those in need."
The emperor stroked his beard with a detached look. "She will be of age for marriage soon," he remarked casually like a knifepoint. I felt the net close.
Liam put down his cup and said, quietly, "Please, father, consider the timing. General Remy still mourns his duty."
The emperor nodded the way a man pins a butterfly. The room had birds as well as knives.
"Do not worry," I said to myself. "It's all in the script."
7
Liam stopped being meek.
"You learned well," I told him once, when we played chess on a terrace. "You know how to use someone."
He answered: "You trained me."
He had a way of saying gratitude and threat that made my fingers itch with something like hope. He would bend a phrase and make it a trap, testing me.
"You've grown wings," I said.
"I am dangerous now," he answered, smiling.
"Do not harm the man who may be my husband," I teased.
He took off one shoe and knelt like an odd little court jester. "You were a child then."
I kicked him and he laughed. "I remember," he said, still breathing too loudly. "You were cruel."
"Yes," I agreed.
8
Then Ning died. The grave was small and wind-swept. Liam took me there in the night. He had a paper lantern full of fireflies he had caught, and he wept in silence.
"Please don't leave me," he whispered then, as if those words had been living in his chest for years.
I hugged him, and for a moment the castle's iron bars felt like leaves. I slept on his shoulder and woke thinking I could be loyal to the story and still be kind.
The system said, dryly, "Host, you are softening."
"I am a professional," I told it. "I will act the part."
9
He began to cross lines the script hadn't allowed.
"Did you kill to make room?" I asked once, after the rumors whispered through corridors: men who were in the way, suddenly gone. Liam only said, "I did what was necessary."
The softness in his hands turned to the quietness of a blade. He kissed my knuckles and said, "I cannot wait."
10
At the spring flower gathering the heroine—Victoria King—walked in like someone the sky had made to distract men. The room shifted.
"Shen Qing—" The script had named her the heroine; she was luminous. Liam watched like a moth at wire.
Later the lake incident happened. I was shoved. I fell into the water with a kick and gasps for air. Someone grabbed at me and then did not rescue me: they reached for Victoria. I saw Liam, running along the bank, leap into the water for her with a violent efficiency I never expected.
"Who pushed me?" I croaked later, tattered and cold, shivering on the shore.
"I'm checking," Liam said, and his voice was flat as a drawn knife.
He turned his face to me as if the world had given him the wrong map. "Someone wanted the scene to happen," he said. "The plan was for Victoria to be the rescue. For you to be the bait."
"Who?" I asked.
He looked away. "I'm looking."
11
My betrothed's arrow missed by a hair—at an archery practice he and Liam faced off. Arrows crossed like grudges.
"Sorry," Remy said later, awkward as always, and I smiled because I had to. I asked Liam, "Why did you take off after me at the lake but not save me first?"
He answered, unshaken, "You were never the star in my script."
"What does that mean?"
He stepped forward and touched my hair, shy like a boy, then nearer—a whisper. "I love you," he said. "I love you enough to move mountains."
I felt the world tilt because of those two words and the ghost of the system's voice joined like a chorus: "You are destined to die by his hand."
"I love you." He said it again. "But I need more than you."
12
The palace began to smell of cordite and old pages. The emperor faltered. The heir was made into a scandal. Factions rose like sudden storms. Remy moved like a general still practicing civility but with claws. The court's masks slipped.
I wrote letters to my family—those who would benefit if I died a martyr for the right cause—and I told myself I was preparing for the role.
But the night of the palace change came too early.
They burst into my chamber. The world filled with armor and steel, swords pinning my shoulders. Liam stood at their head, sword slick and eyes empty like a man who threw away a map.
"Why didn't you run?" he asked.
"I asked the question," I said. "Why couldn't I?"
He offered me two choices like a butcher offering spoons. "Die with them," he said, and gestured at the bodies that were strewn in the yard—traitors and soldiers alike. "Or marry Remy and remain Long Princess."
I looked out the window at the bodies. Outside the courtyard a hundred men lay like broken toys. Inside the palace the air tasted like iron.
"You promised me a way back," I said.
"I promised power," he replied. "Choose."
"You want me to choose?" I asked. "Why give me the illusion?"
He lowered his sword. The tip pressed to my throat.
"Confirm," he said.
I laughed and then forced a smile. "I release you," I said, louder than the blood in my ears. "I give you up."
The blade grazed my neck. I felt the cold and the red and for an instant I watched him break.
He cried out like a man who had only clung to the last honest thing he had, which was the idea that I belonged to him.
"Why?" he said. "Why?"
I coughed and tasted iron. "Because even in a book," I said, "I do not belong to a crown."
Then it went black.
26 (Punishment Scene — public, 700+ words)
When the world clicked back to life it was not the book anymore. I woke in an apartment with a black card in my hand and ten billion deposited like a fairy tale. I sold the apartment, bought a company, and set a different kind of plot in motion. But justice hates being denied its scene.
A year later, the conspirators—those men who had planned the palace change, who'd bled the streets and taught a prince to swing a sword—were hauled into the capital square. The people had mouths for them now. The court had tired of hidden knives; power needs to be theatrical to survive the newspaper of rumor.
"Bring them out," I told the magistrate on the telephone. "And bring cameras. Make it public."
They were brought in, and it was, to say the least, not tidy. Remy Bar bier had a soldier's posture but a merchant's hands. Mark Weaver, the soft-faced minister who'd whispered poison into the emperor's ear, arrived shaking like a man who'd inhaled bad weather; he had thought his influence would protect him until it didn't. A dozen others—servants who'd sold rooms, guards who'd taken bribes, clerks who'd hidden files—were dragged behind them.
I stood at the dais not as long-haired villainess of the book but as the woman with the money and the whipped memory of a sword at her throat. My entertainment company had a live feed. The square filled with commoners who loved spectacle and officials who loved to be seen doing justice.
"Mark Weaver!" I called.
He tried not to look at me. He'd been the one whose counsels prepared the ground for the attack, who'd told the court when to chatter and when to stay silent. "I was secure," he mumbled. "I was following orders."
"You were following the orders that killed your master's trust," I said.
The first punishment was humiliation: public recantation. Mark had to stand on a low platform while a herald read aloud the ledger of his corruption. It wasn't merely a private disgrace. Every bribe counted; every favor logged. The crowd took to cataloging the crimes with relish. People spat and some snapped pictures. Mark's face paled. First he was smug; then angry; then denial. "It's wrong," he said. "You cannot—" The crowd shouted over him with rancor. He became smaller, words becoming stunted animal noises until the guards dragged him down and shaved his head.
A second conspirator—Captain Ernesto Clement, a man who'd turned soldiers into assassins—received a different fate. He was not a man for public scorn but for a private fall. They stripped him of command and assigned him to repair the roads for three years under watch of the people whose homes he'd raided. People watched him labor in the sun. He was watched, mocked by children who knew his name for its taste of fear.
Remy Bar bier received a punishment designed to pierce the two things he loved: honor and reputation. He was taken to the Hall of Crowns, where the court gathered, and the charges were read—collusion, attempted regicide, the strategic betrayals that had led to a night of blood. He denied at first, in a voice that strained like a man working a stuck gear. "You have it wrong," he said. "I acted for stability."
The hall watched as witnesses—servants he'd bribed, clerks with ledgers—told stories with small, sharp details: the route of a dispatch, a coin slipped beneath a table, a whispered "now" between two men that had unleashed soldiers in a corridor. Remy, whose soldiers made him feel powerful, had no single sword to take it back. When the evidence finished, the emperor's council—now a different body of men—spoke.
"By decree," the speaker said, "we revoke your rank."
Remy went through the cycle I had been told to expect in the original book when villains fall: smugness, then shock, then denial, then collapse. "No," he whispered. "You gave me command. The army—" He pointed at the stone and the banners as if they were props he could still control.
"Your command is worthless," the chief marshal said. "You will be posted to the border not as a general but as a supply clerk, and you will give your house and goods to the state." Remy doubled over like a broken man, then tried to bargain aloud: "I can be useful. I can be useful—"
"Your usefulness bought deaths," I interjected. "You used men like tools. You will use those hands to feed the people you starved."
Remy's expression slid from bargaining to fury to hollow pleading. He cried for a long time, and the crowd was the jury. The bystanders recorded him, photographed him, gossiped. "I didn't know the plan," some of his followers shouted, and others spat at them. Their reactions were not uniform: some wept, some applauded, some shook their heads with disgust.
At the end Remy was forced to stand on a cart and read aloud a list of those he had wronged. He had to kneel before families in the square and apologize, shaming himself before those who had lost sons to his orders. The public watched the crack in his face widen. He had tried to wear a noble's armor, but cloth couldn't bear the stain of the people.
One conspirator, a petty official who had gotten into the habit of stealing from the poor, had a more cutting end. He was forced, in the city's throng, to perform the very labor he had denied others—he cleaned latrines for a week with citizens watching and naming what he'd done. People pointed fingers, scowled, filmed. He tried to hide his face behind his hands. The children who had once been his victims threw stones. He would never sit as high again, and the sound of his humiliation would be replayed like a cautionary tale.
The variations mattered. No two punishments were identical, so the spectacle would not become a ritual but a warning. The crowd reacted in a choreography of satisfaction and disgust. Someone shouted, "Good!" A woman spat on one man's shoes. A child retrieved a coin from the pavement. Men took photographs and the recordings poured into screens.
Remy bowed his head, face streaked with tears and the grime of the crowd's hatred. I watched him go through the cycle I had once expected to watch from the opposite side.
There was bitterness: he had loved the idea of power more than its people. There was sorrow: he had thought himself untouchable. And there was a final, unmistakable collapse: the moment his followers, who had knelt and called him "commander," turned away.
It was public and brutal in its own regulated way. The city ate its own.
When it was over, Mark Weaver was under exile, Remy was stripped bare of rank and honor, others were set to labor at scales that changed their lives from vanity to survival. The crowd dispersed into murmurs, cameras blurting like angry insects.
I stood and watched them go.
"Is that enough?" asked a voice beside me—Liam's, low.
"It is justice," I said.
He looked at me with a small, sharp smile. "You have become better at this."
"I spent ten billion," I said. "I can buy courtrooms."
He reached for my hand and didn't pull it away when I kept it there.
—end punishment scene—
23
The months after the spectacle were quieter. Liam—who had chosen to abandon the throne's shortcuts—came to the company I had bought. I hired him as an artist; he wore simple black and white like a man who had learned clothes had no crown to make them real. He walked into my office and said, "Madeleine."
I locked the door and pressed the black card into his palm. "This is your contract."
He looked at it as if it were a relic. "I came to find you," he said.
"You were late," I said.
"I had to destroy old promises," he said, finally, voice shivering. "I traded what I would have had for what I could be now. I chose you."
"Then show me," I said. "Prove it."
He kissed my knuckles like a man making a vow and then, in front of cameras and accountants and the small, bright staff of the company, he performed. He was charming and errant. He told jokes offstage and left his wound scars like odd lights that made his face more interesting. He worked in my small studio and he learned how to talk into cameras like a man who had been taught to lead armies but had to learn applause.
We pretended to be entertainers and somehow stopped pretending overnight.
"I loved you enough for a kingdom once," he said one evening, while we watched a jar of fireflies he'd captured on a whim. "Forgive me for the rest."
"I gave you up," I reminded him.
"So you said." He smiled. "You came back."
24
The system had given me a bargain: a life, money, and the right to walk away. But it had also allowed something it hadn't planned on: change.
I did not end as the paper villain. I did not accept the blade. I sold my black card for a different kind of power. I bought a company and built a light. I signed a man who once was a prince to a record deal. We turned tragedy into songs.
"Do you regret it?" he asked me once in the pale corporate night.
"Regret what?" I answered.
"You letting me go," he said.
"I needed to know which one you were," I said.
He laughed in a way that shook the candlelight in the office. "I was always the one who would risk everything."
"So," I said, "prove it."
He kissed me then, not like a prince but like a man who had walked through war and punishment and found something better than a throne: someone who would hold a life in his two hands and not crush it for fear of losing the crown.
We built things together that had nothing to do with palaces: studios, shelter houses, a small nonprofit that gave artisans a roof. We found ways to give the city back what had been taken.
Sometimes at night I would open the drawer where I kept a jar of captured fireflies we never let go. They lit the small dark rooms like a stubborn constellation. Liam would rest his head on my shoulder and murmur, "I am sorry."
"I know," I would say. "And I forgive you, because the world is a better place if we choose to forgive."
He would smile and we would listen to the tiny wings tapping the glass like a small applause.
The End
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