Revenge15 min read
I Took My Sister’s Voice and Married the Man Everyone Feared
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I am pretending to be Isla Amin.
I said those words to myself like a prayer and like a lie at once. "You are Isla now," I wrote on paper the first night under the bridal canopy. "You must not speak."
Arden Fontaine pushed the bridal curtain aside with one steady hand. He looked like a portrait come alive—too handsome to be real, too calm to be harmless. I almost said it—"He's beautiful"—but the costume would have collapsed. I was the stand-in bride; I had to keep my mouth shut.
Arden's mouth twitched. "I have heard," he said, "that my wife caught a fever three years ago and lost her speech. She must not be able to tell when she hurts."
I clutched the folds of my skirt. He was already at my bedside, the candlelight striking his cheekbones. "I—" I began, but then the old rule tightened around my throat like silk.
So I nodded instead. "Mm," I wrote in the air with my eyes. "Mm."
He smiled as if I'd handed him the world. "They say mute women still make little sounds," he murmured, and when I blinked he leaned in and kissed me. "That's enough," he breathed into my hair.
I sat there after he left, legs numb, and my mind raced in the dark.
"You're telling me," I wrote to the empty room, "that this man—Arden Fontaine, who everyone calls the Regent-blood and the iron fist—killed wives before? That my sister used to throw coins at him when he was a beggar? That he kept each coin?"
There was a sound at the window. My heart thudded.
Days passed. Arden returned sometimes and vanished other times as the court demanded. The servants changed—my small maid, the one who had come with me, disappeared—and a new girl knelt and curtsied in the doorway. "My lady, I am Kimiko," she said, fumbling for paper. "Master asks if you need anything."
I looked at the girl and then at Arden's fireplace where a wooden box sat: his jewelry box. When he wasn't there I opened it with fingers that trembled.
There was a jewel that had been in my mother's chest for as long as I could remember. Arden had ordered new trinkets from his stores and said, smiling, "Your family is honest; your eyes are too high for these. I have chosen something to match you."
"Match me?" I wrote to him on a slip and handed it to Kimiko. "You think I am worth new things?"
He read it and raised one dark brow. "You care for me?" he asked. "Do you want to speak to me?"
I wanted to shout how terrified I was. "Yes," I wanted to scream. "No." But "I am not Isla" lived behind my teeth. So I wrote a line about his health and the household and tried to sound respectable.
He laughed then, a little soft and private. "Oh," he said, "how dutiful."
At night he would do things people in the city whispered about. He would touch my hand and then flit away like a moth. He would watch me eat and comment on which vegetable I refused, then feed me with his own chopsticks as if training a child.
"Eat," he said one dusk. "This preparation will make you stronger."
"It is cucumber," I wanted to say. I hate cucumber. Instead I wrote, and then forced down a thick stuffed cucumber rolled in meat.
"Do you wish to say something?" he asked after, tilting his head.
I shook and nodded at once. He beckoned Kimiko with an order for paper. "Write what she thinks," he said to her.
I took the brush and wrote, "My lord bears the affairs of state. He must be weary."
He glanced at the words and smiled. "You are thoughtful."
"Because I want to keep my life," I almost wrote.
Instead he reached and took my wrist and drew me close. "Open your eyes, look at me," he said softly. "You used to be fearless."
I did open them. In his gaze I saw an echo—an old memory he liked to call a slight: the day my sister, Isla, did throw coins at him in the square, and how he'd kept them in a small pouch like a promise. "You gave me coins," he murmured. "I kept them."
I felt like a mouse in a trap.
Time lengthened like sugar. Arden's hands were sometimes soft and sometimes iron. He built an obsessive orbit around me. "Why do you come to the kitchen so much?" he asked another night.
"Because there are good cakes," I wrote.
He pretended to be jealous. "You must not look to others," he teased. "My heart is small; it will only hold you."
I pretended to be moved.
Then one evening the house shook with the news of my husband's sudden sickness. He had retreated from the palace and returned pale as the moon, spattered with rain and blood. My chest dropped into my stomach like cold lead.
"Are you ill because of me?" I wrote.
He laughed once I touched his pulse and found him burning. "You worry for me?" he asked. "You are kind."
I fetched medicine and mopped his fevered brow. He collapsed into me and called, in a voice I had never heard before from him, "Jade—"
The syllable cut me like a blade. He had called me by his old nickname for someone else—someone once called his 'jade sister.' I found the name in my bones: a teacher who had once saved a wandering boy and the boy's later obsession. The word "sister" in his mouth was a signpost with a dead end.
When he recovered, I wrote it out. "You called out a name in fever," I wrote. "Who is she?"
He looked long at my notebook, then smiled, and for the first time I saw a softness. "She is my teacher's rescue. She saved a master I owed. I met her once in a winter field." He hesitated. "And I loved the way she looked at the frost."
"Do you love her?" I wrote, not daring the sound.
Arden's laugh was dry. "Love? I chose you," he said. "But what do I know about my own wants? You have been very clever at pretending."
He had seen through my silence, then. He had known I wasn't Isla the moment I set foot in his hall. He smiled like a man who had found a live puzzle.
Then the small kitchen girl Faith Herrmann was found dead beneath the steps of Arden's study.
I came upon the body as if fate had rehearsed it. Faith had been bright and good, always with a smile and a plate to offer. She had been the one who brought me honey cakes and taught me which bowls didn't burn my hands. I had grown fond of her.
Now she lay on the stone, eyes closed, and Arden stood above her holding a sword. The guards said she had broken the regulations and entered the forbidden study. Arden's face was still quiet, almost gentle.
"You should not go there, little one," he told me when I stepped forward, white with shock. "She touched what is sacred."
My throat closed. That night a cold settled in me like a carved bone. I began to piece together the way Arden set his traps: a woman's life taken to send a message, a coin kept as a warrant, a lover's name invoked to sway my pity.
I clenched my jaw and started a dangerous plan. If my sister's enemies had been the ones to engineer my sister's sickness and my family's abuse, then the same sources would move again to break Arden and me. They had offered me a small white jade bottle at my mother's command the day I returned to the Tang residence—"Use it in his cup," my stepmother Carmen Guerin had whispered. "If it succeeds, you will be taken back and the house will bow." My father, Penn Armenta, had not only not stopped her—he had advised caution while ordering the carriage.
"I will do it," I had written on an inside scrap that night and tucked that bottle into my sleeve. I had the poison not to kill but to scare: a small dose, something to make him stumble so strong men would come to watch him and find him lacking.
Before I could act, Arden choked on wine at dinner, coughing out a rusty breath and blood. Kimiko shrieked. "My lord!" she cried.
I stood frozen. The cup—where I had planned my plan—had already sat pale and innocent in the center of the table. Arden's eyes found mine and held. "Not you," he said, in a tone that unspooled everything. "I trust you."
"Who did it?" I wrote feverishly on paper, forcing him to read.
He stared at the white jade bottle that had been found in my jewelry box—the same bottle my mother had pressed into my hand—and Arden's face did not explode. He only smiled with a half-sad tilt.
"It cannot be common poison," he said. "Someone planned to ruin me. Someone used your family as a bait."
He trusted me, and that trust split me between relief and horror. For if the poison had not come from me, who had placed it where my hand would be caught? I swore silently to one person: whoever tried to kill Arden would answer to me.
The Emperor's court convulsed. There were messages and counter-messages, and then a grand assembly was called at the outer hall. "Come," Arden said to me one dawn. "You will go with me."
"Why?" I asked, though my fingers tightened on the lamp.
"You saved me at the palace," he said. "I will not let my wife stand in the cold alone."
When we entered, the hall was a storm of faces: nobles, ministers, and those men who live on rumor—arranged on the benches like dark notes in an accusation song. My heart beat like a drum.
A scream with the sound of metal and the scent of blood rushed through the hall. In the chaos someone leaped forward with a short blade. "To the Emperor!" the guards cried.
I moved faster than thought. The little girl who had tried to murder the Emperor—an intruder hidden as a kitchen maid—came at the throne. No one hesitated but me. I shoved the girl aside, and my small knife found her throat in a flash. Blood splattered my face. The court froze.
"Who are you?" someone demanded.
I cleaned my blade with my sleeve, knees weak. "I am Jaden Sun," I said aloud for the first time inside the capital's great hall, the words surprising even me. "I will name the crimes of the Tang family."
"Name them!" said Arden, loud, regal as the man of iron.
I looked at the men from my father's house—Carmen Guerin and Penn Armenta—sitting with pale faces as the accusation rolled toward them like thunder.
I recited, each word deliberate: "They trafficked my mother into disgrace. They conspired to ruin a woman's reputation and then had her beaten to death. They conspired with outside men to frame my hands with poison. They planned to force me into acts I did not wish, and they meant to sell my life as if it were a token."
Carmen's face contorted from composure to rage, then to panic. Penn's mask cracked into a bitter snarl. The hall murmured like a gathering sea.
The Emperor looked at Arden. Arden looked at the Emperor. Then Arden raised his hand.
"Let them be judged," he said quietly. "Let it be public."
Public. Those are the cruellest two syllables for those who have been cruel. I had rehearsed scenarios where they would go quietly, where I would slip away with the prize: a small embroidered screen that had been my mother's last labor. But I had not imagined the vivid, hot justice the palace would hold.
The trial was not a slow bureaucrat's thing. They brought both of them to the front steps of the great hall, before a crowd roared with curiosity and scorn. "Speak!" the Emperor commanded.
Carmen lifted her chin. "My lord," she said, voice tight with outrage, "these are slanders. My husband and I have served Tang house well. This girl is nothing but a lying adventuress."
"Speak!" I said, stepping forward, not a suppliant but an executioner's bell. "Tell the people why my mother was beaten in the yard to death. Tell them which of you ordered the men to trap her in the market. Tell them which of you laughed as they carried her away."
Carmen's calm slipped. Her eyes darted to her husband for a plan. "She speaks of impossible things," she hissed. "She threatens our honor."
"Then name your proof," Arden snapped. "Either you produce witnesses, or you kneel."
"How dare you!" Penn roared, folding his arms like a trapped bull. "You—"
They had the voice of anger. The crowd had the voice of hunger.
"Bring the recorders," said the Emperor. "Bring the servants who once heard of these events."
A dozen faces from the Tang household were called. One by one they told small truths like needles: "She was hidden in the back. She didn't go to the market alone. My lord's men said to keep her quiet." Each small truth compounded.
"Arrest them for murder, for plotting, for trafficking," Arden ordered. "Bind them before the city. Let them answer to the law of the land."
The crowd leaned forward. I could feel the weight of a thousand eyes like a flint.
Carmen's expression changed as the first bindings clicked. She walked a tightrope from control into horror: "No! You cannot do this—my children! Think of my children!"
"Your children?" a woman in the front cried. "What of a dead woman's child? Who weeps for her?"
Penn's face went from anger to a white, wet shame when one servant recited how they had stolen my mother's locket and thrown it aside like a toy. "You killed her in the yard!" a guard shouted, and the clamor became a roar.
They tried to plead. Carmen's tone became servile, then shrill, then finally raw. "It was for the family's honor," she cried. "We feared rumor. I didn't mean—"
"Mean?" I repeated, voice hard. "You mean you meant to keep your face sweet and your hands stained. You meant to force me into a bargain. You meant to break a life like a dish."
Her eyes widened as the people around them began to chant. "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
Arden stood cool as the final reckoning. But the crowd did not hate only them. The crowd loved spectacle. They wanted more than simply punishment; they wanted the sham to be ripped asunder.
"Public denouncement," Arden ordered. "Bring the family heirlooms. Let them see what they stole. Let them see what they sacrificed."
They brought out the carved screen. I stepped forward and touched the embroidery where my mother's hand had sewn the words no one had seen. My fingers traced the small, secret stitches. "These are hers," I said. "She worked nights for me. She loved me."
Carmen's lips moved with a thousand excuses. Penn tried to look taller but his knees shook like a child's. Arden's face did not change, but when he lifted his hand, the guards dragged Carmen down to her knees in front of the scholars and commoners alike.
"Confess," the Emperor said.
"What will you confess?" Carmen cried. "That I protected my blood? That I did what I had to?"
"You will confess," Arden said, "the names of those you allied with, the dates you acted, the poisons you planned. You will admit that you bought men for your ends. You will admit that you thought yourself above law."
They called witnesses—servants who had carried away my mother's chest, men who had hidden the hammer used to beat her. The first man who had struck her was brought forward by the guards. He trembled like a leaf and then spoke.
"I was paid with coins," he said. "They said the mistress wanted to frighten the woman away. I never thought—"
"You did," I hissed. "You did what no one should do."
The crowd leaned in as each fact was named. Carmen's face finally cracked through into a mask of raw grief and fear. "Forgive me," she whimpered, and then "No! I only wanted my son's future!"
"Punish them," called a thousand throats.
The Emperor's verdict was not swift and simple. For crimes of household murder and trafficking, the law demanded a public humiliation and forfeiture of property, then separation from noble status. They chained Carmen and Penn and paraded them through the market that very week. Women spat at their skirts. Children pointed. They were stripped of titles and estates and forced to publicly atone on an open dais before the market at the front gate, where the townsfolk could see and touch the proof of their fall.
At the dais, Carmen's expression shifted from rage to shock to supplication to collapse. Penn's face, once a mask of haughty contempt, was broken into disbelief. "No one cried for me!" he shouted at first. "My neighbors—"
The crowd answered. "You had neighbors," one shouted back. "They are not blind anymore."
"They filmed them," someone said, and the clerks recorded everything. A scribe read aloud the ledger of their crimes: money paid, names of men hired, the account of the night my mother died. The words were plain and pitiless. As the reading continued, Carmen went from red to ashen.
"I did it for the family," she said at one point, voice shrilling, "for the status."
"For status you killed," Arden said, and the crowd reached a pitch. They spat, they called curses, they laughed at the once-proud couple as they were led away. The execution of their pride—public, humiliating—felt like the exact justice the market had waited years to see.
Carmen's reaction changed gradually and then suddenly. Her face crumpled, and she began to tremble violently. "This is a mistake! It was my husband—he ordered—" She tried to split the blame, if only to survive. The crowd circled like hawks.
"Do you deny it?" a woman shouted.
Carmen tried to deny, to confess in a way that might spare her. Penn kept shaking his head, muttering the old defenses—they had been for honor, for family—but no one wanted those excuses anymore. Children who had peered into the household's kitchen now saw their needlework stolen, their food withheld. Servants came forward to identify the man who had set the malice in motion. One clerk raised his hand and spat: "They made our children look the other way as they starved them."
Penn finally broke. He couldn't hold the mask of composure any longer. He began to weep—not for the woman he'd wronged, but for the status that slipped from his fingers. The crowd did not pity him. Some shouted, "Good," others spat.
By the time the punishment finished, they were both humbled, their estate stripped, their titles revoked, and they were paraded under a sign that read: "Traitor to the Household." People took pictures with them, mocked them, and some even applauded. Cameras had started to record the spectacle; the court clerks would not let this memory fade.
Arden watched from a low dais near me. He did not savor their suffering in a way that seemed cruel. Instead his face was quiet, unreadable. When the shouting eased and the crowd began to disperse, he reached for my hand.
"You did well," he said softly. "You told the truth."
"I did more than tell," I said. "I saved the Emperor tonight."
He looked down at me as if measuring my worth. "You didn't tell them everything," he said. "But you told what mattered."
Later, when the crowd had shrunk to a few lingering onlookers, they brought our embroidered screen back into sight and placed it before us. The little stitches in the reeds and the hidden names glinted in the sun. I touched the thread and felt my mother's fingers under my own.
"You asked for revenge," Arden said that night as we stood by the screen in his private gardens. He had been told by ministers that his house would gain blood-stained fame from the scandal, that enemies would thin. "You wanted justice."
"I wanted them to be seen," I said.
He smiled—an expression that used to feel dangerous but now, oddly, felt like sanctuary. "Then be seen, Jaden. Live."
It took time after that for the city to settle. The Emperor called Arden a loyal if stern prince, and for his part Arden accepted a new title that faded the sharpest edge of his power. The hidden mandate the late Emperor had written—the yellow silk with a few fatal words—was brought out and placed in my jewelry box for safekeeping. It said across its weave that if the current Emperor proved unfit, another might be called to rule. It was a secret the court had used and would now bury.
I had what I wanted: the embroidered screen, my mother's name stepped back into the world's ledger, and the carved wooden jewelry box with its secret compartment, which Arden and I closed together.
But before any peace, there was one more reckoning: the person who had tried to poison Arden had been found. He was a subordinate of Mark Brooks—the noble who had trafficked in influence with the Longning house. When they brought Mark forward in public—this man who had courted my sister, this man whose line had plotted to unseat Arden—Arden stood before the dais and let the Emperor read the charges aloud.
"Mark Brooks," the Emperor said, "you conspired to poison the Regent. You hired those who sought to twist households into pawns. Do you deny?"
Mark's face went through a sequence: defiance, then surprise, then a grin that died slowly. His retinue murmured. "I do not admit to such things," he said, voice oily with privilege. "I stand by my family honor."
"Then face the people's judgment," Arden said. "You will be stripped. You will be made a lesson."
He was made to ride through the city with his banners taken down. His men were disgraced, his money seized. The difference was that Mark's punishment had the sheen of statecraft—losses, fines, a house no longer trusted—while Carmen and Penn were privately destroyed.
There were days after when I would wake with cold sweat and remember Faith Herrmann on the stones. I would find Arden in the study reading an ancient book, and I would watch the way he held his spoon when he thought no one watched. He had done terrible things and he had done kind ones. He had killed to secure the realm and he had kissed me to keep me; both were true.
"Do you hate me?" I asked him once, in a moment of weakness that felt like defiance and like hope.
He took my hand, thumb tracing the tiny scar at my wrist. "I wanted to marry someone who would be the shape of my life. I did not expect to find you living inside that shape." He smiled, small and dangerous. "I did not intend to hurt you."
"You spared me then," I said.
"I spared you because you were clever," he replied. "And because I am selfish—if I love something, I will protect it."
We were both guilty of wanting control. We both were fragile in different ways. He had the court like a chessboard; I had the small stitches of my mother's embroidery and the memory of a woman who had held my hair as she taught me words.
It ended not with a sweeping surrender but a quiet rearrangement. The Emperor quietly moved Arden off the seat of power—made him a title gentle and gilded but toothless. Arden accepted the trade because he had stabilized the realm and, with a court that loved spectacle, he had bought my safety. The yellow silk mandate went into the secret drawer of the jewelry box. The embroidered screen came home with me to the hall. I put the little silver flower my mother had sewn into my hair and slept.
"Will you ever leave me?" I asked him in the winter garden when frost had painted spiderwebs on the roses.
He kissed the tip of my nose. "We are enemies once, lovers the next day, and partners in the middle. Call me what you will. I will not leave."
Later, we rode north together, to the wide winds where spring pressed green against the snow. He reached for my face, both hands warm and sure, and the cold sun felt like a proof. "Jaden," he said, the nickname slipping warm into the air like a promise he had learned to make real, "stay."
"I will," I answered, and meant it.
I am not the same girl who ran with a small silver knife underneath her skirt. I am not simply a masquerade anymore. I keep the box with the yellow silk, the embroidered screen, and the memory of the woman who once sewed for me. I keep Arden—complex, dangerous, capable of tenderness—and I keep my voice.
I speak now when necessary. I speak in the court when the court needs to hear the truth. I speak at my mother’s grave and swear not to forget.
And sometimes, when the wind presses hard against the windowpane at night, I will stand and touch the little hidden stitches on my mother's screen, and Arden will come behind me and whisper, "You have given me an honest life."
I smile then and say, "You have given me justice." We laugh, and it is a sound neither of us expected.
The End
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