Revenge11 min read
I Was Born a Servant, Forced to Be His Weapon
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I wake up in a candlelit room that should not be mine and know at once that I have been moved — not in body only, but into a life already waiting like a trap. The silk walls smell of herb and ash. A man laughs somewhere beyond the curtain. I am supposed to be YuanYuan, the bedchamber maid of Colton Acosta, Ninth Prince. I am Karina Abe now. I know what happens to YuanYuan.
"Who are you?" I ask the man across the thin veil.
"You?" His voice runs like silk. "You're the chamber girl."
"The chamber... for whom?" I wrap the blanket tighter.
He taps his chest and winks. "Mine."
"Prince?" I say, because it is one question I must get right.
"Do you have to be so formal?" He moves nearer. "Colton likes a quick laugh. He likes clever things."
He puts a callused hand between the curtains and finds my wrist. His touch smells of wine and something darker. "Colton," he murmurs. "Colton likes you."
I pull back, though not far enough. "You should be at court at dawn," I say, because the only bargaining chip I have is truth. "You can't keep me. You can't—"
"I can take a day off." His grin is too smooth. "One night is worth a thousand mornings."
"One night," I repeat, voice gone small. "Prince, I—"
"Don't call me Prince." He presses his face to the curtain and inhales, as if scent could map my bones. "Colton. Call me Colton."
He slips his hand inside the folds of the blanket and moves like a predator who enjoys every slow step. "You're hiding something," he says. "What's under there, Karina?"
I don't answer. I tell myself to be still like stone. But a sentence from the other life I remember pops out of my mouth instead, the one I thought I would never speak: "I'm unwell."
"Unwell?" He leans in so close the breath on my cheek is warm. "Then we should sweat it out."
I bite the lie off, the single weak defense. "I have my time," I say. "I am... on my moon."
He stops. "Really?" His eyes turn glacial. "Does that mean you won't do as I say?"
"Colton," I stammer, "people are watching. This is improper."
He laughs and taps my nose. "You're clever. I like clever." The sound is not kind. "Three days."
"Three days?" I look at him, and I know the bargain. "Three days to live, you mean."
"Think of it as a test." He smiles and lets go of my wrist. "Live three days badly, I promise to let you go."
That night I sleep with the memory of a furnace in my throat. I remember the ending. YuanYuan does not live to count three sunrises; she dies in flames given by the jealous Isabel Nakamura. I have the knowledge of another life as a blade and a cure, and between the two I must choose.
"Karina," says Bella Blake later that day when she sneaks me a scrap of bread in a back corner. "You look like someone swallowed you whole."
"I wish I were swallowed," I whisper. "Then at least I'd be out of the game."
"You did what some girls don't dare," Bella says. "You opened your mouth and took the prince's little present."
"Little present?" I touch the powder box Colton gave me, a small square that smells faint and sweet. "He calls it a present. He calls everything what he wants it to be."
Bella slaps the ground with her hand and whispers, "Do not make him a king of your whole life. Not yet."
That night the court comes down like weather. We watch from the side halls as the great rooms fill. Eloise Stevens—"the Dowager"—arrives first, white-fingered and smelling of incense that burns down the throats of younger women. Erik Bergstrom, the Emperor himself, comes in like a shadow everyone must step around.
"Watch," Colton murmurs at my ear. "They love drama."
That drama will be my scaffold.
Isabel Nakamura, the girl with the sharp mouth and the sharp pair of eyes, arrives like a song made of knives. She seems crowned even when she is not. She spots me. Her smile is a public thing, shared and vicious.
"You," she says to Colton in front of everyone. "You keep bedchamber girls? Your house becomes a comedy."
"Isabel," Colton answers, mild as honey. "You look as bright as always."
She leans toward me, contempt spread like oil. "You know our family," she hisses as if we are alone. "My aunt loves to throw a flame into a room." Her finger is a needle in the air. "Don't be surprised if your futon is a pyre."
I will not speak of what I remember. I kneel instead, because my life may depend on the show.
Three days pass in a blur of testing. Colton refuses to go to court for a time. He comes and goes, letting rumor catch up: "He likes his bedchamber girl too much," the servants whisper. Isabel hears it and snarls. The household divides.
Evelyn Flynn, the seamstress the palace lent to the Prince—so quiet some would call her only a stitch in a pattern—gets pregnant. She is chosen by the Dowager to be placated and by Colton to be used. This arrangement is meant to bind the Emperor's favor to the Prince's house and to calm a dangerous noble family. Otto Dodson, Colton's captain and a hard man made harder by loyalty, stands waiting like a stone.
"She is carrying a child," Otto says to me in a low voice the night he and I pass in the corridor. "Do you know how it feels to be both cause and consequence?"
"Sometimes," I say. "You are a blunt thing, Otto. You should be a writing-table."
"Blunt things can break swords," he replies. "Don't make me break more."
I do what I can. I tell small lies that are true enough for men to believe. I hide things. I pin my face into a blank mask and learn the cunning of a woman whose only chance is to be unreadable.
It works — until the banquet.
The Dowager has come for a birthday. The palace is hung with lanterns like constellations. In the middle of song and wine, someone screams. A servant stumbles in with his arm skewered to a table, blood pouring like a bell. "Murder! Poison!"
Isabel's side babbles how a girl in the Prince's house must be done away with. She holds up a blue embroidered pouch she claims the Prince lost—a pouch embroidered with a peony that belongs to her as token. "Look!" she cries. "His bedchamber girls take his trinkets and make of them jokes."
"Bring that woman," Colton says. He is cold and absurdly calm. He looks like a man holding fire without burning. "Bring her here."
The servant points a shaking finger at me. "It was her," he says. "She did it. She drank and threw her cup away."
Isabel's smile widens. "She will confess. Who would not, caught with a trinket and a lie?"
The crowd makes a sound. It is not sympathy.
"Stop!" I find breath enough to cry. "I did not—"
"You lie as finely as you do everything," she spits.
"You would know," Colton says softly. "You arranged this."
Her face loses a color. First her look is triumph, then suspicion, then an animal panic. "What do you mean?" she says, voice flaring into denial. "You slander me."
"Do you think I don't know what you like?" Colton's gaze is a blade. "You like to be feared. You like to be obeyed."
She steps back, and in front of everyone—the Emperor, the Dowager, ministers and servants—Colton unrolls a story like a map.
"You came here," he says, slow enough that each word lands on the air, "prepared to burn a house for sport. You have been clever, Isabel, but not clever enough."
The court hushes. The Emperor leans forward, fingers on his knee. The Dowager's beads click with the rhythm of the world.
"You left traces," Colton continues. "You always leave them. You think the fire of power will swallow everything. You are wrong."
He sets down a spool of evidence: silk thread cut in a way only one person in the palace had the skill to cut; a servant's hurried note with pen smeared in the same oil used by Isabel's household; a witness who had seen the spy carry a blue pouch across the garden. "This is not the work of a chambermaid," Colton says. "It is the work of someone who wants to make me look weak."
Isabel's jaw tightens. She laughs — first brittle, then a thin thing that dies. "You have no proof!" she cries. "You will not throw me in court!"
"Speak," the Emperor says.
Isabel's face is measured, then suddenly small with panic. "I did not—"
"Then explain the pouch with your embroidery," Colton says. "Explain the oil stain, the way the thread was sliced. Explain the man you paid to plant this on her."
"She's a liar!" she shrieks, then the shriek curdles into a whimper when a messenger hands Colton a sealed letter: Bruno Omar's seal, the mark of a powerful lord who had been feeding Isabel counsel. Bruno's name in the seal is like a thunder in a palace made of paper.
The public punishment starts the moment the Emperor stands.
"By the will of the Throne," he says with slow thunder, "we will not have treachery in our halls. If a noblewoman sends a blade into a servant's life for sport, the colors of the realm will not be safe."
"Isabel Nakamura," the Emperor says to her face, "you will be tried and publicly disgraced. Your servants will be stripped in the market square. Your jewels will be taken. Your windows will be covered with banners naming your crime."
Isabel's expression moves through stages so rapid it makes the crowd hush: triumph — "You dare" — astonishment — denial — fear — liquidation. "My family," she wails. "My honor!"
"Honor?" Colton snaps. "You used honor as a cloak while you burned a girl's bed for a trinket."
The Dowager, Eloise Stevens, does something worse than anger: she looks bored and then pleased. "We will make an example," she says. "Bring forth the tapes. Let everyone see who plotted against the Prince's house."
A servant unrolls testimony. A page steps up and recites names. Another brings forward Isabel's own chambermaid, a pale woman whose hands tremble so badly the audience has to lean in. "She paid me," the woman whispers, "she told me to smear the pouch at the Prince's house. She promised me my son's debt would be paid."
"False!" Isabel sobs. She bends and claws the floor like a trapped animal. "It's lies! I am noble by blood. You—"
"Silence," the Emperor says. He looks at Colton with a little exacted look of favor. "We will show mercy to a realm and not to madness."
They take her to the threshold. They cut her hair — the first censure. The crowd gasps. She claws at the scissors, then claws at her bare scalp. The hair falls in black handfuls to the marble. "No!" she screams. "You can't do this!"
A chorus rises from the gallery: "Shame! Shame!" People clap now, but the clapping is cruel. Someone throws a rotten plum at her. It splats against her skin like a wet accusation.
"Bring out the painted boards," the Emperor commands. "Let the ledger be seen."
They take the ledger — the ledger that lists payments, bribes, and instructions — and lay it open for everyone. Each page turned to the crowd is like a peel of thunder. Names are read: Bruno Omar. Noble houses that nodded their heads. Officials who turned eyes away. The crowd leans as if to read the fine print of a betrayal.
Isabel tries to speak, then tries to make people pity her, then tries to accuse others. Her face is a map of panic and then collapse. "You are monsters," she cries to those who used her and left her to burn. "You left me—"
"She did this for a crown she will never wear," Colton says. He steps forward so the Emperor's light hits him. "She tried to weaponize a child's death and a servant's life to make me weak."
There are people weeping in the galleries — not for Isabel, but for what the whole spectacle means. "How many beds have been burnt to hush a rival?" an old lady whispers. "How many wife-to-be's have been silenced?"
Isabel's posture goes from fury to bargaining. "Please," she says to the Emperor. "I will relinquish my dowry. I will kneel. I will—"
They bind her hands and throw over her the cloth that marks disgrace. Her face, so used to gilding and favor, crumples. She sees the crowd and at last considers the living meaning of being watched. The eyes do not feed her pride; they scald it. She claws at the cloth and at the guards and finally sinks into a bent shape that is not dignified.
The Emperor pronounces the sentence: public shaming, loss of title, the confiscation of her household's goods, and shockingly, a public walk through the palace grounds with a placard naming her crime pinned to her breasts. The Dowager nods. Colton looks like he has swallowed an ocean of regret and found the taste to be clean, finally.
The crowd's reaction shifts like weather. At first there was shock; then they buzz with glee; then some pity creeps in. "Too much," says a woman near me. Someone else murmurs, "Finally, power answers."
Isabel is led out. As she passes the galleries, I see her eyes find mine. For one hot moment, she attempts a look — not of hatred, but of a plea — "Make him feel it. Make him lose." Her mouth forms the words. They splatter nothing but air.
Her fall is complete. She changes through it: smugness → fury → denial → pleading → collapse. The crowd records it, some take out writing wax and scribble, some clap, some toss a scrap of fruit or a flower. Children point. It becomes a story to tell. The public theater of her undoing is loud and merciless. People look at Colton with new kinds of calculation in their faces.
Afterward, the men who were named — like Bruno Omar — find their eyes colder to their peers. Bruno's power is not taken with iron, but he is disallowed, his messengers left waiting. His public humiliation is different: not a haircut but a bureaucratic slow-cut. He loses wealth, appointments; his eyes harden. One man who once held a cup at his table spits when he thinks no one looks.
Isabel is gone from favor, her household broken. The manor she commanded is taken, its plates melted down and given to charity — a petty cruelty meant to show the reach of the court. She ends in the market square, under the sun as merchants chant and passersby drop coins into her empty palms as if to offer pity that stings.
The punishment is not a pleasant thing to watch. It is raw, long, and drenched in the smell of other people's satisfaction. For me, it is both justice and a new kind of dread. I thought I wanted her dead when fire took YuanYuan, but seeing a person unmake herself in front of the whole world is worse than a private killing. It shows the price of being human under crowns.
That night Colton sits very close and says nothing. He takes my hand and holds it in both of his like a thing he is afraid will float away.
"You saw it," he says finally.
"I saw," I whisper. "But I did not make it. I only learned to survive."
He looks at me as though measuring the truth in the shape of my voice. "You are dangerous," he says.
"So are you," I answer. "We are both dangerous."
He presses his forehead to mine. "We'll make our own rules," he says, almost like a prayer and almost like a threat. "We will. I will pawn the world to keep you."
The next months are a slow war: alliances are made in whispers, promises written like smoke, favors paid with silver. Evelyn's child grows and the Dowager smiles when she thinks of grandchildren. Bruno Omar withdraws; his teeth show in a thin anger, and he starts to make mistakes. Rosa Blake's foolishness costs her life; her story is short and sharp and ends in a public spectacle that shocks the house. Men who thought their loyalties assured find themselves with nothing but the dignity of someone who has been paid out.
And I—Karina—learn how to move between truth and lie. I learn that Colton's softness is a dangerous thing, that his indulgence is also a blade. We play a long and dangerous game of survival, love, and war.
"Do you love me?" I ask him one raw night as the wind comes down cold through the garden and the scent of crushed peony hangs in the air.
He answers after a long pause. "I love not to lose," he says. "And you are the only thing I cannot afford to lose."
It is not the most romantic of promises, but in our world it may be better than oath. We both hold knives and feathered masks.
When at last the court settles and the seasons change, I stand with Colton at the edge of the city river. He slips an embroidered pouch into my hand — the same peony that started it all — and says with a small, private smile, "This time, keep it."
"Keep it for what?" I ask.
"For the day you will demand what is truly yours," he says. "And I will be there to see you take it."
I fold the pouch into my pocket and think of fires and punishments and the way a public shaming tastes like ash. I think of Isabel's face breaking—of her perfect house becoming a stage for everyone's satisfaction. I think of Evelyn's tiny child, of Otto's loyalty, of Bella's steady hands. I think of how, in a world built to eat women like us, we learned to survive by being more shape than flesh.
"Tomorrow," I answer, "we will both be dangerous."
"Good," he says. "Then let us learn to be kind in the dangerous ways."
We walk back inside. The palace is a trade of faces and fortunes; we trade our eyes and our lies and our small victories. Outside, the court continues to churn like a mill. Inside, we are a single small fire still burning.
The End
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