Sweet Romance14 min read
I Ran to Find Him — and Almost Bled for Love
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"I can't breathe," I gasped, and then I ran.
"Haley, slow down!" Jensen Reid cried, her small hands tugging at my sleeve as we pushed through the crowd. My hair pin pricked me, rain slicked my dress, but I did not stop. I wanted the first floor, the street, the noise, anything but the palace rooms that smelled like duty.
"You're being ridiculous," Jensen panted. "If Mother finds out—"
"I told you, Mother won't find out. She won't even notice," I lied in the same breath and snatched a sugar stick from a stall woman's tray. Sweet, sharp sugar hit my tongue and I grinned. "Eat, Jensen. The city is wrong if I don't taste everything today."
"You'll get whipped," she warned, but her eyes were bright. She followed like a little shadow. I loved that she trusted me.
We walked into the first floor that afternoon just in time to hear a young storyteller. The room stilled. Then a man stumbled in, blood on his chest, and the world changed.
"Help!" someone shouted. The man slumped, someone fell into me, warm wet cloth on his face. He smelled of iron and cold. My hands—stiff and clumsy—took his token jade. I felt it buzz in my palm like a small pulse.
"He's hurt," Jensen cried. "We must run."
I shook my head. "He looks like a ruined statue." I touched his cheek. "He is beautiful." The word came out wrong—soft and fierce at once. I did not mean to say it out loud, but the room hushed. He looked like rain, like a book pulled out of a dream.
"Princess!" Jensen snapped, finally remembering.
"I'll fetch help," I said, but instead I felt the jade against my fingers and something old and sweet clicked inside my chest. I knew that jade. I knew that face.
When I was five, a boy in a poor blue robe had wrapped me with his arms from under a runaway wheel. I had named him "my brother." I had pressed a small jade pendant into his hand and fled, promising a childish forever.
I looked down at the pendant then back at his face. The memory landed like a heavy coin.
"Jensen, find Murong," I ordered. "Tell him to bring me soldiers, and tell Captain Murong to bring—"
Before the order was finished, everything went black. The injured man’s eyes were closed. A small knife nicked my thumb as I pried off the jade, and warm blood smeared the white of the pendant. In a second, a tear fell from my cheek and I whispered, "Everett?"
He stirred later in my pavilion, and I watched him wake like someone watching a sun rise.
"Who are you?" he said in a voice rough with pain.
"Shh. Rest," I told him, too many words in my throat.
Jensen burst in fanning herself. "My lady, the doctors say—"
"Don't call me that in front of him," I hissed. I braved a smile. "You can call me Haley."
He caught my eyes and flinched. "Haley?"
"Good," I said. "Eat."
When he looked at the jade he had been wearing, his hand shook. He snatched at it and then froze, eyes wide with a memory that wasn't strictly his.
"That jade," he whispered, and his fingers closed harder. "I remember a little girl... I remember her name."
"Did you come looking for me?" I asked before I could stop myself. I wanted him to say yes more than I wanted to breathe.
He closed his eyes. "I thought... it would be safer not to tell you who I am."
"What do you mean?" Jensen interrupted. "You told the court you were a merchant."
"I did not tell the court my blood," he answered, and there was a hardness under the words. "My name is Everett Estes. I am from the east."
"You're a merchant?" I asked, then laughed at myself because the truth was bigger than that. "Who cares? You saved me."
He put his hand over mine. It was cool and strong. "You did not save me. I fell in. You kept me." He tried to be distant. He could not.
Days turned into small, impossible hours of stolen sweets, stolen browns of street bread, and whispered arguments about whether he would stay three months as my guard or leave at dawn. He promised to stay. He promised—and I believed him like a child believes a story.
"Three months," he said, tired of my entreaties. "You may command me for three months."
"You leave sooner, you will regret it," I told him, and my voice shook. "You will have to answer to me."
He laughed, a low, pure sound I had never thought to hear from him. "I already answer to more dangerous things."
The truth came in pieces. Everett had a crown close enough to burn. He had left a land called Eastrealm to track traitors and poisoners. He had been stabbed into a silent place by men who used a poison unknown in the books. He had been hurt, carried, rescued—by me.
We fell into a rhythm—him steady and distant, me loud and foolish. The palace in the mornings, the city in the afternoons. Harrison Conley—the first-floor storyteller I made friends with—started showing up with a tray of tea. He was a man who smiled small and read the edges of the world. He watched Everett and me in ways I did not understand.
I kissed Everett on a foolish dare once and he pulled away, both stunned and angry in a way that made my heart leap. "Not now," he said, and then, softer, "Later."
"Later," I answered like a vow.
Then he left, suddenly, a black horse and a line of urgencies and howls at the gate. He kissed my hair, pressed the jade into my hand, and promised, "When I have steadied the field, I will return in ten days with ten colors of fire." He rode away. I counted the days like beads.
But he did not return in ten.
I began to stitch a life of waiting. I learned embroidery until my fingers bled tiny proofs. I drank bitter tea. I scolded Jensen for being too loud in the halls. I met Harrison for silk and stories. I watched a million small things and waited for the sound of his foot.
When I could no longer bear the waiting, I went east. I bought a rough horse with a cartman's savings, smeared coal on my face and pretended to be nothing. I followed a caravan across mottled fields and into the capital where Everett's house—Yuan House in my childish name—stood ornate and quiet.
"I can't go alone," Jensen begged. "If something happens—"
"I will not ask you to." I hugged her until her little shoulders found steel. "Rest here. Wait for my note."
She left in tears at dawn. Harrison found me one evening in a lane and did not turn away. "You're reckless," he said. "You will be missed, and your father will be furious."
"I know," I answered. "He will forgive me if I come back with love."
He nodded like a man who wanted to steal braver things for other people. "Then go."
Everett surprised me in the east. He walked out from a lane like a memory, hair like night and worried lines on his brow.
"Everett," I said and flung myself to him. He closed his eyes and caught me like I had been falling forever.
"Don't sneak away again," he said, voice rough. "Don't leave me like that."
"I came because I was afraid," I confessed. "Because I couldn't imagine any day where I didn't see you."
He said something hard that made the muscles in his jaw flash. "Haley, there is something you must not know."
"Tell me," I demanded.
He swallowed. "I am... I was given a name no one says. I carry duties that will not let me fall in front of you. I can't promise you a crown's life."
"Then marry me as is," I said. "I will be your wife without titles."
His hand covered my face, gentle and fierce. "You would do that?"
"Yes."
He laughed, full and soft, and for a moment I thought every wall would fall.
But then the world turned on its dark hinge. Word came that in the capital, a man named Song Ming had been killed and someone left a clue that pointed at a minister. Everett's steps grew heavier. A shadow greater than him moved its Armada.
One night he did not sleep. He walked the garden like an animal with the moon in his teeth. "There are worms that live in feelings," he said once, like a riddle. "They were made long ago by people who wanted to break people. If they wake, they use feeling to eat your blood."
"What?" I said, because that sounded like a story.
"They call it a love worm." He would not look at me. "If it wakes in a man's chest, the only cure is—" He stopped, and the words tasted like iron.
"Everett," I begged. "Tell me. Tell me any way I can help."
He turned, and in the moonlight his face was empty as a sea. "If it wakes, only the blood of the one who is truly beloved—blood taken with consent—can lead the worm out. Even then, it kills. I cannot ask you."
I put my hands on his cheeks. "You would die because you loved me? That's the only choice?"
"I don't want you to die," he said plainly. "I will not let you."
The words came like two drums: I loved him and I would die for him. I made plans then without asking his leave.
"Will you accept one impossible thing?" I asked later, my voice small and iron. "If ever you were taken, I would give you my blood. If the worm needs it, then I will give it."
He grabbed my hands. "You cannot be selfish and kind both," he said. "You will not."
Soon after, war cracked across the cities. The second prince—Jackson Lefevre—rose and burned small things until he was a terror. He laughed at the law. He wanted a throne and would do anything to get it. He sent men in black, he took briberies and he took more. He moved like a viper and left ruin.
Then on a rain-smothered night, the worst thing happened. Everett went to battle in a small, raw place to stop Jackson's men. I heard then that the second prince had taken a woman and offered her as a token. When I learned that Jackson's men had chased me through the city that night, that my bloodied handkerchief had been found under a bridge, my heart clicked and fractured.
Everett returned covered in rainwater and blood, but worse, his face had that hollow hunger in it again. The old poison—this "love worm"—had woken. He fell as if from a cliff.
"Don't touch me," he said once, and then laughed like a bird in a trap. "You are the trigger."
I did the only thing I could think of: I learned. I asked Harrison, who found books, and Harrison called in favors like a man folding paper cranes out of money and skill. He found a doctor who knew of mountain herbs—the Snow Lotus—they said could slow the worms. They brought one moon-rare herb.
"Give him this once every three days," the old physician told us. "It will buy time. There is no cure known but the price the stories name."
"There is a story," Harrison told me in the pale dawn. "It says only the blood of the loved one—true blood—taken with consent and a certain rite—could draw the worm out. But the rite, in some versions, kills."
"Then kill me," I said under my breath.
Harrison's jaw tightened. "Don't joke like that."
I did not joke. I planned it the way I had planned to run away. I wrote a letter for Jensen to take to Mother and Father if I failed. The letter said I had gone to hunt through a wild country for a cure, that I gave everything for love. I packed a cloth and the knife to cut a small vein if there was no alternative.
One night, Everett woke like a man in a fever. The physician looked at him and then at me and said, "There is a path."
"What path?" I asked.
"There is a way to draw the worm out with a small shared bond," the old man said. "It will take a drop of blood and a true vow. It will not kill a willing woman if performed in the right way. But he cannot be touched with love first; the ceremony must be meant with both hearts pure and sangreeded."
"Both hearts?" Everett asked, trying to laugh and breaking on his own breath.
"Yes," the physician said. "If he loves her and she gives willingly, part of the worm leaves and is bound to the give. The process will hurt both, and there is a risk—if the worm is deep, it may still take the host. But it's the only hope that doesn't require a full heart-blood extraction."
I looked at Everett. I could feel his chest rise and fall. The room filled with the quiet of people holding their breath.
"Will you do it?" I asked him.
He looked like someone choosing to die for a country. "I thought I would never learn how to ask to be loved," he said. "Now I'm asked to accept it."
I took his hand. It was cold. "I love you," I said.
"Say it like you mean it," he ordered. He sounded like a man afraid to be loved.
"I love you," I said again with all the weight I'd put into running to him and leaving all that security behind.
"Then say it to them all," he said. He turned to the physician, to Harrison, to Jensen who stood at the door and looked as if she might faint.
"I call on this world and these witnesses: I, Haley Ferrara, willingly give a part of what makes me who I am to bind this man, Everett Estes, to life. I vow my blood. I vow my love."
He closed his eyes. "I, Everett Estes, accept and thank you. I promise you I will not waste this."
The wound was tiny, the cut a sliver along the vein under my thumb. Hannah the doctor—no, the physician called out steps—mixing Snow Lotus paste and the rare moon herbs into a cup. Everett leaned over, and I let a drop of my blood fall into the cup. He swallowed it. We both screamed. The worm inside him tried to push outward. The pain hedged our bellies, and tears came like rain.
Then nothing. The world rocked and steadied. Everett's breath came hard, and then softer. The physician sat down.
"It is not gone," the man said carefully. "It is bound. It sleeps. You have given him more time than any book says. But it will wake at times. You must be careful."
Everett reached up and took my face. "You were supposed to be safe," he whispered.
"I gave you my blood," I said. "I was never safe in the way I needed to be safe. You are now."
He smiled, ragged and bright. "You're mine," he said and kissed me, like an oath, like a closing of a wound.
But peace is a thin plate; Jackson Lefevre had not been idle. He had masterminded murders, bribed officials, and used the fear of the worm to push his schemes. I had a small part—a trickle of knowledge from Harrison—and it swelled into a plan to expose him.
At the great hall, I walked in with the jade pendant Everett had given back to me folded into my sleeve. Beside me were Harrison and Jensen, and a thin file of men Everett could trust. The court buzzed, and the Emperor—Mario McCoy—sat like a rock of wind.
"Your Majesty," I said, and my voice did not shake. "I have seen the crimes that have been hidden. I have proof."
Gasps. "Haley," Jensen whispered.
"Speak," said the Emperor. His face was spare, hard with nights he had not slept—but he listened.
Harrison began, a rope of words steady and clear. He produced ledgers, letters, a little box of damning coins from the treasury, and a clerk who had been paid to destroy the records but had been too frightened to obey. The clerk took the stand and told his part. I watched Jackson Lefevre's face go from pale swagger to a rusty, brittle rage.
"You dare?" he spat.
"I dare," I said. "You tried to use my name, my life, and the life of a man who loved me as a pawn. You killed Song Ming. You tried to take an innocent girl's honor. You traded money for men to do your work."
"You will pay me for this!" Jackson screamed, red-faced. "You will die for this!" His hands were shake-ropes of threats.
I stepped forward. "You put your hands to crimes, in the dark and in the light. You will answer—publicly."
The council sat. The Emperor's hand trembled like the last leaf of autumn and then he nodded. "We will investigate."
They did more than investigate. We showed them the ledger, the artist who had painted the falsified seals, the men Jackson had bribed—men who flinched and then, spooked by other threats we used, told the whole truth.
The unmake of Jackson happened like a tide. He stood at the center, angry and then slowly shrinking. We dragged the proofs through every street: the sutras of bribery, the names of dead men whose deaths he'd ordered, the register of coin. The city turned its knives toward him.
"Why?" he bawled as the guards cuffed him. "Why would you all turn?"
"Because we can," the Emperor said simply.
They stripped him of title. They stripped down his house, publically reading off his crimes to the crowd. Men spat. Women who had been wronged wrenched the truth out in a chorus. The crowd recorded everything; hands pointed; someone took out a drum and beat like thunder. His servant women were dragged and asked to confess; some confessed and some clutched at the top of their hair and cried.
He fell apart under the watching eyes.
"Stop!" he begged once, on the steps in front of all. His voice had scraped. "Please, I didn't—"
"Silence," the crowd replied. "You have no mercy to show now."
They took his fine silk and set fire to it. People recorded with sticks and traded the news. His father, a man of rank and wealth, woke to see his name fall into gutters. For three days the city's markets hummed with nothing but talk of him. His name sank like a stone, and those who had backed him took their distance. Where his friends had stood, there stood only shadow.
On the fourth day, his wife left him, dragging his name through the house, and his housekeeper took every valuable to the Emperor's chest for safekeeping. His family was denounced at court. His daughter was expelled from the academy and the rumor mill ground his dignity to pulp.
At the final hearing, they bound him to a post and he begged in the way men beg when everything is gone. He dropped to his knees and begged—he pledged money, his honor, his life. He fell to pieces. The Emperor, with a cold that had lived for decades in his eyes, sentenced him to exile and the confiscation of family property. People hissed and spat. Peasants came to watch him carted away.
We stood on the steps watching him dragged through the city, the bright ribbons of his coat in tatters, and we felt a strange mixture of shame and justice. Jackson's empire of small cruelties had been shattered. People who had feared him came forward with complicated faces. He had lost everything.
Everett and I stood a little to the side. He had the pale look of someone who had seen the world surrender and then it tried to give something back. He put his fingers on my cheek.
"You did this," he said simply.
"I did what I had to," I answered.
He took me into his arms. "I would cross the world for you," he said. "Again."
"Please don't," I laughed. "You'd ruin the world in the process."
There were hard days after. The wound would wake; sometimes he would stare into the night and not return. We learned to hold steady—the physician gave him potions and the Snow-Lotus tablets, and Harrison stayed like a loyal anchor. Jensen became a sister for life and refused to leave my side.
I saw Everett change. Sometimes he was like a king, all hard angles and bright orders; sometimes he was like a warm pool, laughing and foolish. In his strong, nervous hands, I learned how not to be afraid. He learned to say my name and mean it.
I wanted to carve out a place for us where poison would not find small gullets of our love. We took the quiet of the countryside for a stretch, and Everett walked the fields like a man carving a life that would not break on his way to the throne.
One night, under a sky so full of light it seemed to weigh, Everett kneeled.
"Haley," he said.
I laughed and put him up with gentle hands. "You are trying a thing we both know very well will make me laugh," I told him.
"Forgive me," he whispered. "I will say it now, like it matters."
"You already told me," I said.
"I will ask anyway." He unfolded a small piece of paper. It was not a ring; it had no metal glint, only paper and ink. He smoothed it. "Will you marry me? Not because I need a bride to make me whole, nor because the throne requires it, but because I love you. Will you be mine in front of everything broken and everything bright?"
"Yes," I said the way soldiers say yes when a battle is set, the way a woman who had walked deserts says yes to the first river. "Yes."
He put the paper between our hands. A small ceremony in the country. No jewel, no pomp. Jensen and Harrison and a handful of friends. Everett's hand was warm and shook.
"We will be careful," he promised.
"We will be stubborn," I answered.
Years passed like water in the bowl, and time, which does not love secrets, gave us laughter and small children and mornings with bread, and nights with small stories. The worm returned sometimes, a hot streak of pain along the ribs or a late-night hush that took his breath. Each time he leaned his head on me and took my blood in a small, careful ritual and we both suffered, and each time we got through.
Jackson Lefevre died quietly, his name a mark some passersby now used to stir fear. The Emperor forgave some who had been used by him, but others never returned to place. The court stayed watchful. Everett built what he could of trust into the city. Harrison stayed by our side and spoke softly at the first floor, his tales winding like thread. Jensen married a soldier and had a house of her own. We named our firstborn for the man who had carved bread on a battlefield—a small, sweet name.
Some nights, when the children slept and the house was soft with dim lamps, Everett would hold me and say, "You were always reckless."
"And you were always the dangerous one," I would answer.
"You're mine," he'd say.
"And you are mine," I would say back.
We never stopped being afraid. We never stopped watching the dark. But we collected a life out of fear, like a child collecting pretty stones. We guarded it with the fierceness of people who had seen death and chosen each other anyway.
Once, years later, sitting in a garden where peach trees shook loose their petals like confetti, Everett let me see his face without the hard lines.
"If ever the worm wakes for the last time," he said, soft as if saying a prayer, "find Harrison and tell him he did a good thing."
"I will find him," I promised. "I will not run from you."
He kissed me softly. "Then I will go softly back to sleep."
I thread my fingers through his, knowing the promise we made had cost us more than either of us could count. But the world had given again: a life stitched by the brave, by stupid love and stubborn friends, by a woman who ran across borders and the man who roared back the dark.
"Don't ever call me reckless again," I told him once, and he laughed the quiet laugh of a man who had been kept alive by love.
"I will call you mine," he said, and in that small plainness our vows lived.
The End
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