Revenge14 min read
I Was Dead — Then I Made Them Pay
ButterPicks12 views
"I did not push you."
The voice was thin, tired. I heard Kayleigh laugh as if she had already won.
"You were always clumsy, Ari," she said. "You thought the prince would save you. What a joke."
I stumbled back toward the cliff edge. My palms slid on damp stone. My chest knocked against the wind. Behind Kayleigh, guards waited like statues. In front of her, Prince Gavin Dean moved with a calm that ate the air.
"Kayleigh—" Gavin's voice softened. "Are you all right?"
Kayleigh fell like a slow flower. Her fingers fanned the air. Gavin was at her in one breath, catching her like a knight.
I heard my own name escape me. I moved to explain. My lungs burned, but my voice was a broken string.
"It wasn't me," I said. "I didn't—"
Gavin's eyes cut me like a blade. "Stop lying."
"Why would I lie?" I forced out. "I never—"
"Silence." Gavin's palm rose before I finished. The strike landed across my chest and I tasted iron. I flew back. The world slide and cracked and I heard my ribs break against a tree.
"She pushed herself," Kayleigh whispered, palms tight to Gavin's sleeve. She made her face small and honest. "She tried to kill me."
Gavin looked at Kayleigh like the world had returned. He looked at me like I had been a shadow all along. He tore the paper from my hand — the old promise we'd kept since children — and flung it into the wind.
"Our betrothal is ended," he said. "Leave my sight."
I crawled toward him. "Gavin—" My voice was gone. My last breath tasted of salt. "You promised—"
He walked away with Kayleigh in his arms. I watched his back the way you watch the sun drop. The cliff did not even feel cold. I let myself go.
-----
I woke to a bleeding cigarette burn across my shoulder and a gun in my hands.
"Move!" a man behind me shouted. "Cut left! Now!"
We dove behind an old sedan. Silvered rain spat on the paint. I tasted copper again, but a different kind. The bullet had grazed my hand. My suit stank of oil and blood.
"Can you run?" a young woman at my side asked. She had cropped hair and a grin still in the corner of her mouth. "Ari, move!"
I pushed up. The world filled with noise: men with rifles, a tall shooter on a rooftop with silver hair, and the roar of engines. I threw myself forward because that was what I had done for sixteen years: run, strike, survive. A whistle cut the air. I felt heat on my left hand and then... nothing.
Then black.
Then a soft, childlike voice in my head.
"Ari? Are you cold?"
My first thought was: this is a hallucination. My second: my whole body hurts. My third: when I opened my eyes I smelled sandalwood and old paper. I looked at my hands.
They were small. Fat. Thirteen-year-old hands.
I blinked. A face stared back at me in a cracked mirror: a round, soft face, freckled, eyes wide like a frightened bird. My hair hung in a messy bun. A sash with faded embroidery lay across my shoulder. The bed smelled of dust and camphor. I was in a room that belonged to another life.
"Who are you?" a voice whispered behind me. I turned so fast I nearly made the bed creak.
A little maid stood in the doorway. "Miss? Are you awake? Miss Ari? Your grandfather sent for you."
I swallowed. "Ari?" I caught myself. The name felt wrong on this girl's tongue — but it fit the life that had been rented to me.
I found a small mirror and looked at the reflection until my eyes burned. I am a modern woman, 28, trained, hard. I should be in a wrecked parking lot, not in a lacquered room in an ancestral house. The name on the bed stand told me the truth: Ari Harper — but on paper, I was Yun Yao's life: a crooked promise, a missing dantian, one broken heart.
"Ari?" I whispered. "What happened to you?"
My hand went to my belly and felt warmth where there was nothing. A soft, tinny voice hummed, like a bell.
"Mom?" the voice said. "I'm here."
My heart stalled. Then a new shape slumped away from the voice — a small warmth, like a drifting light, pressed at my skin and settled into my lower belly. The memory of falling, of hitting water, of light and then nothing, flashed like a bad film. I swallowed.
"A seed," the voice in my belly said, playful. "Call me Pip. I am Pip."
"You're a what?" I demanded. The voice was cheeky and childish. It smelled faintly of lemon.
"A soul-pip," it replied. "You are in Yun Yao's body. You ate a lake. You swallowed a pearl. Now I'm here."
I could argue with a thing in my belly, but the way this world felt under my skin insisted on a plan. I climbed out of bed with legs that were young and clumsy. My body was heavy and strange — an old suit had been replaced with a child's garment — and yet I moved with a muscle memory that refused to disappear. I had to find water. I had to think. I had to breathe.
Outside, the valley was sleep-silent. The willow leaves whispered. The house smelled of incense and old iron.
"Where is Kayleigh?" I asked the maid.
The maid blinked. "She is in the courtyard with Miss — with Miss Yun Fushuang, my lady."
I forced a smile that wasn't mine. "Tell her I'm on my way."
I walked out like a girl who had nothing left to lose.
-----
The feud began small: cringes in a dining hall, fingers at quilts, laughter stuck in throat when Kayleigh smiled. The house used me as a joke because I had been born without a dantian. I had been called a "dead-root" since the day I learned that breath and power could not live in me.
I listened. I learned the ways of their tongues. I learned the names the gossips used. I became the thing I had to be: small, unthreatening, hungry for survival.
At night I listened to Pip.
"Grandmother says you can't use power," Pip would say. "But you can learn other things."
"And what do you plan to do?" I asked.
"Eat storms," Pip said simply. "You have a space. It is hungry."
I laughed because the idea felt like a child's promise. "Then let's feed it."
Weeks passed. I moved like a shadow through halls, listening. I let Kayleigh show her face to Gavin. I watched the prince's eyes soften around her the way a heat softens honey. I memorized the color of his jaw when he cradled her hand. I buried the younger me's hurt in a bone-deep patience. I practiced small things in secret: how to make a blade from a hairpin, which calls brought servants, which robes hid which injuries.
One night, word spread: Kayleigh had found a "tier three med pill" and said she had rescued it from the prince's aid. The house buzzed.
"She lied," I said to my cheeks until they hurt.
Kayleigh, face perfect, looked at me like a child testing fire. "You are unfair, Yun Yao. You think because you are poor you can steal attention."
"I never stole," I said in my soft voice. "But if you have it — hand it back."
She laughed. "You can't even face the sun. What can you do?"
So I did the only thing that made sense: I showed the truth.
I stepped into the hall where my grandfather sat like a mountain. I did not ask. I took Kayleigh's sleeve with a hand that no one trusted and I whispered the one trick I had learned from more dangerous times — the trick of throat and needle and a well-timed faint.
I collapsed at the edge of the court.
"Quick! She is poisoned!" I heard Kayleigh call.
My grandfather's face, hard and soft in the same breath, grew like winter. "Bring help."
They carried me in. I coughed a sliver of staged blood into napkins. Kayleigh's eyes were crocodile pools. "She tried to pretend," she told everyone.
They searched Kayleigh. They found a small red pill, wrapped in soaked paper, in the hem of her robe. The pill shook like a liar in its box.
"You stole it," she shrieked.
"I didn't," I said. I watched Kayleigh's face color shift through all the stages of guilt to fear.
"Pip," I mouthed into my belly. "Now."
Pip hummed. A warmth climbed into my chest. The world folded. My small body shuddered as if lightning had passed through my ribs. I felt a small, steady clicking inside my lower belly — a place warm and wide. The pearl of the lake was not a trick. It fed me with lightning when the world called it down. The space inside me answered the storm and swallowed it whole.
Pip laughed in my chest like a bell. "Now you're dangerous."
I opened my eyes and sat upright.
"How do you feel?" asked my grandfather.
"Alive," I said.
That night my town talked about Kayleigh's deception. The pill in her hem was proof that she had lied when she said she had given the prince the cure. Proof is a dangerous thing. It gathers eyes.
Kayleigh's laughter hardened into a knife. Gavin's face was pale. I saw his hand shake when he looked at a scrap of our old promise, now burned and scattered in a tray.
"You betrayed me," I said to him, and for the first time my voice was not the childhood whisper it had been — it was the voice I had used on the asphalt now in the old courtyard. "You took the side of the liar."
Gavin said nothing. He had been cruel once already. He had chosen safety; he had chosen the warm lie.
"You will fix this," I told him. "You will make it right."
Gavin put his hand to his chest like a wound. "I saw you push Kayleigh," he said. "I will not be insulted."
"Then watch me."
-----
The punishment had to be public. That was the only justice I could afford — the kind that leaves marks everyone sees.
I prepared the hall for the council and invited every small voice who had ever laughed at me. I invited tradesmen, gossips, the prince's attendants, and the town's servants who kept records. I invited as many as I could.
"Why?" my grandfather asked me as he set a cup before me. "You will cause trouble."
"I will cause truth," I answered.
I had a plan: Kayleigh had hidden the med-pill, but she had to be forced to show it publicly. I had an ally: a maid who had trailed Kayleigh that evening. I paid her with a night of safety and enough coin to keep her tongue sealed until then.
"When they arrive, step forward with your tale," I told the maid. "Tell them where Kayleigh hides per her bedcovers."
The maid swallowed. "But Miss—"
"Do it." My voice broke. "For me."
They gathered in the ancestral hall under lantern light, the beams full of dust motes like stars. Five hundred people stood in the yard and on the steps — family, neighbors, officials, and dozens of curious townspeople. The banners of the house drooped like tired birds. It felt like a theater. The prince arrived late with a retinue and kept his face guarded. Kayleigh glided in like a queen, and I watched her eyes — they were small, sharp, eager.
"Tonight we settle a wrong," I said when the murmurs stilled. "This family will hear what was done."
Kayleigh's mouth twitched. "What show are you making, Yun Yao? You were always dramatic."
"Tell us your truth then," my grandfather rumbled. "If you are innocent, speak now."
Kayleigh smiled as if she had won. "Ari," she called with sweet venom. "This is silly."
"Tell them where you hid the pill, Kayleigh," I said.
Her face registered surprise. "Why would I—"
"Because," I said calmly, "we have ten maids who saw you with a small red pill the night the prince fell ill. We have one who followed you. She will tell us what she watched you do."
A single maid I had bribed stepped onto the dais. She trembled but kept her head high. "She put the pill in her hem, milady. She took the other's paper and placed it in the fire. Then she went to the prince."
Kayleigh laughed a hollow laugh. "Lies. I would never—"
"Search her," someone in the crowd shouted. "Search her!"
Two guards approached Kayleigh, looking like they were following a script. She fluttered like a trapped bird. "You will not search me without the prince's command!" she cried.
"He won't stop it," I said. "Watch."
I had planted small evidence in every corner: a scrap of the burned paper that smelled of smoke on one of Kayleigh's slippers, a broken pin with the prince's seal on it, a mud stain from her late-night walk. These were lies dressed in truth. Lies can be a weapon if you are not afraid to use them.
The guards were given permission. They moved like men with a duty; Kayleigh's face moved from bright to white. The hem of her robe rustled as she turned. A sound like a trapped animal escaped her mouth.
"Stop!" she cried. "You can't do this!"
They reached into the folds and pulled out a small red pill wrapped in blood-smeared paper.
The crowd gasped. Kayleigh's face broke.
"No—" she whispered. "It isn't what you—"
My grandfather's hand tightened on the table until his knuckles bleached. He slapped his palm down until the lacquer rang.
"Explain!" he demanded.
Kayleigh's lips moved, then froze. She tried to make her face small again. "I needed to help him," she said. "He was weak. I thought—"
"Thought what?" my grandfather thundered. "That you could take credit for his life? That you could steal and lie and still be pure?"
Her eyes flicked to Gavin. For a second she looked like an animal caught at night.
The crowd turned. A dozen voices said, "She lied."
Kayleigh's chest rose like a bird in a net. "You—" she began, then the sight of a camera — a curious merchant's glass lens — snapped toward her face. Someone in the crowd had a recorder, a new thing. A voice said, "Get it on paper! Record her!"
Kayleigh's color ran like water. "You are mistaken," she said. "I was only trying to help."
Gavin stood like a statue, the prince who had chosen a lie once. He had been the first to trust Kayleigh. Now, the proof lay in the palm of her robe. The crowd smelled the shift. Eyes moved like wind.
"Did you suggest he be kept sick to make you look heroic?" I asked, voice low.
Kayleigh's smile cracked. "No—no—"
"Then why did you hide the pill?" I pressed. "Why hide what could have saved him?"
She began to back away. The crowd closed in like a tide. A woman from the far side of the yard called out, "She took the pill to gain favor! She wanted to be the savior!"
Kayleigh's face moved through the stages: denial, anger, sharp lies, confusion. She pretended to faint but flailed instead. A guard prodded her; she grabbed his wrist.
"Stand back!" she screamed. "You're—you're—"
"No," Gavin said quietly. For the first time the prince looked at Kayleigh like someone had just shown him a mirror. He glanced at the scarred paper now set on the table in a pile and then at the red pill in Kayleigh's palm. He lifted his chin and cleared his throat.
"You lied to me," he said. The words were small but they cut like a blade. "You took something meant to help another and hid it to make yourself more necessary."
Kayleigh's face crumpled. She licked her lips. "No—Gavin, I—"
"You lied," he said again, louder this time, as if he needed the sound to convince him. "You lied. Because you wanted me to owe you."
"I—" Kayleigh began, and then she tried to cover her mouth. She looked at the crowd as if pleading for rescue.
Men in the crowd made a sound like a physical thing: disgust. Old women whispered curses. A young servant held up a child's hand to show how small and sharp Kayleigh's betrayal had cut.
"Because you wanted me to owe you," Gavin repeated. "Do you see what you did? Do you know what you have done to this family?"
Kayleigh's jaw trembled like an animal waiting to be put down. She tried to claw for sympathy. "I was afraid," she said. "I wanted to be loved. I thought—"
"Enough," my grandfather said. His voice was the one that broke the hush and ordered the storm. "You will be punished according to the house law."
Kayleigh's eyes widened. "No—no—please—"
"Take her to the front steps," my grandfather ordered. "Gather everyone who has been harmed by her lies. Let them speak."
They set her on the stone steps like a fallen bird. Family members who had once turned their noses at me walked forward: a woman with a son Kayleigh had bullied, a girl who'd had a dowry ruined by a rumor Kayleigh spread, a servant who had skipped meals because Kayleigh took their coin. One by one, they told how Kayleigh had lied, cheated, and schemed. Each voice layered shame onto her like a new winter coat.
Kayleigh's face moved through denial to rage to naked panic. She tried to push at the guards, then tried to bargain with coins and promises. The crowd watched as her posture dwindled, as the lies she had built on top of other people's lives collapsed like a house of brittle glass.
"Please!" Kayleigh whispered finally. "I will return everything. I will—"
"No," my grandfather said. "You will stand and you will confess openly. You will beg forgiveness in front of this family and face the consequences."
Kayleigh's knees buckled. For the first time she looked small. She looked like the girl who had once pulled a thread on my robe. She became very human in her fear.
"Please," she begged. "Please, Grandfather, I—"
"No," I said. "Say it."
"I am sorry," she choked. "I am sorry. I did it because I wanted to be needed. I am—"
"Enough," my grandfather commanded. "You will be stripped of your claim to the prince. You will give back the two thousand stone you demanded for an apology earlier. You will be bound to three months of public service and ten lashes for stealing the pill."
The lashes were meted not in fury but in ritual. Guards tied Kayleigh's hands and struck the back of her robe with a leather strap. She screamed, a sound that took courage to make. People turned away, some wept, some scowled. The prince stood as though carved from ice. He did not move to stop it.
When the lashings ceased, Kayleigh was no longer defiant. She begged on her knees. Her voice shook.
"Please," she said. "Please, everyone, I beg you—"
Men with lanterns recorded her words. Women spat. Children were taken from sight. The prince watched her with a new look: not tenderness, but the hard line of a man who had seen a truth too late.
When she finally lifted her head, her face was dripping with salt and the marks where the lash had bitten. She was broken in a way I had never wanted any of them to be. But she had forced me to change the world with a single word: truth.
For days the town replayed the scene. The recorded proof of Kayleigh's theft moved from one hand to another. Footmen told of the mistress who had been stripped of honor. The prince returned the ring he had once offered in a cold piece of paper and a quiet walk.
Gavin did not beg. He did not write apologies. He simply stood at the edge of the crowd and watched, and the thing between Kayleigh and him went dull as an old wound.
For the first time, I felt the hollow inside me fill with something that wasn't pain or hunger. It was not peace. It was not victory. It was a slow, cold settling of accounts.
"You made them pay," Pip giggled in my belly.
"Not enough," I said. "Never enough."
I put my hand on the table and felt the carved wood under my palm. The village would keep reporting. People would point and say, "She is no longer innocent," and Kayleigh would find less favor in each face she passed. The punishment was public, humiliating, and hard. It also left Kayleigh alive — which in some ways was the worst part: to live and feel every eye like a stone.
I had wanted more than punishment. I wanted the prince to kneel and beg. I wanted walls to crumble under guilt. But the world is not a script; it is the work of stubborn people with teeth and memory. We had planted a seed of truth, and it would grow.
-----
They tried to make me small again. They tried to trap me in the old roles of uselessness. But the dantian in my belly was no longer empty and Pip had teeth. Lightning came more easily. I learned to pull storms into my chest and let the power simmer into the pearl inside me. I trained in the hidden hours with the prince's old sword so I could, if needed, kill a rumor as cleanly as any man.
"You're different," Finn Cantrell — a boy I'd always known as a cousin — said one evening as he walked me home from the training yard. "You look like you didn't belong to their world and yet you're more dangerous in it than anyone."
"Because you aren't looking for the same things," I said. I liked Finn. He had a quiet loyalty that was easy and kind.
Weeks later, those who had cheered Kayleigh became dusty in their pity. Kayleigh herself changed in ways the house had not expected. She clawed at me with threats and sharp words, but the knife of public shame had changed how others saw her. She kept her hands away from mine.
Gavin — who had been cruel — came to me once under a willow with a face like a man who had swallowed glass.
"You wanted me to make amends," he said. "I don't know how."
"You can start by telling the truth," I said. "To your council. To your retinue. To anyone who listened to her lie."
He looked like a man trying to remember how to be brave.
"I saw her fall," he murmured. "I thought—"
"You chose safety," I said, "and a lie. You can feel that."
He pressed his palms to his chest like someone holding a wound. "I was wrong."
"Then do right now what you should have done. Make her pay not with lash or shame, but with honesty. Tell of what you did. Let them see you."
He nodded slowly.
Gavin did speak later at council. He named his mistake. He confessed he had let his heart be swayed. The crowd moved like reeds. Some scowled. Some whispered, "Too little." But the fact of his confession was a thing that could not be erased. He had not been made to kneel before me, and I did not demand it. I wanted the world to tilt back toward justice, not to be rearranged so a new tyrant sat on the throne.
Kayleigh left the house a month later, her claim to status broken. People spat when she passed. The prince returned to his duties with a quieter voice. He did not look at me differently, but neither did he pretend my life was disposable.
"Will you ever forgive him?" Pip asked one night as lightning kissed the hills.
"Forgiveness is not a coin," I said. "It's a choice over and over. Maybe. Maybe someday."
I had power now. I had a secret in my belly and a name in their tongues. I would keep my promise to the dead girl I had become — I would find her parents, I would protect my grandfather, and I would use the strange little thing inside me to make sure no other girl in that house would ever be small again.
I walked through the hall one afternoon and heard someone whisper, "She's dangerous."
I smiled. I had become dangerous enough to keep myself alive and kind enough to not break everything.
The world would always be rough. I would always choose the parts that mattered.
Pip curled like a warm coin against my lower belly and hummed.
"Ready?" it asked.
"Always," I said.
The End
— Thank you for reading —