Revenge15 min read
I Was His Crown—and Then I Became the Power He Feared
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1.
"I will make her my empress," he announced in court, and the whole hall went cold.
"Francisco," I said later, "what did you say in the morning?"
"You heard me," he answered in that soft, flat voice he used since he took the throne. "My aunt, Florence, will be my empress."
"That's impossible," I said, because hope goes before sense. "Aunt Florence is family."
"I am the emperor," he said. "I will be what I please."
I had been his wife for ten years. Ten years of standing at his side when courtiers spat, ten years of letting my kin bear the cost—my father, my brother Daxton, my home. I had given everything so he could sit safely at the East Hall. And now he put aside the vow he made in my father's hall, the vow that meant I would be his true wife.
"You will regret this," I said, and my voice did not break.
He smiled like someone testing an old toy. "Soledad, you were my wife in name. Do you not see? Time changes everything."
I left the court like a windblown cloth. I only learned the truth when I stopped a passing eunuch and forced my way into the study—because I would not let court whispers be the only proof. The sight that met me there froze my bones: Francisco and Florence, disordered, their robes askew. They did not see me in the doorway.
I walked out. I ran. I wanted to hide, to fall down in a corner and laugh and not stop until my face cracked. Instead I went home and held myself together, because the palace smells of eyes and rumor.
That afternoon the emperor ordered death for everyone who had been in the study that morning.
"Kill them," he said with soft clarity. "Every last witness."
"Your Majesty," I breathed. "Those are your servants. They have been loyal."
He turned to me. "Do you know why I would kill them?"
"No," I lied.
"Because," he said slowly, "I need reasons. I need someone to blame for what I choose."
"I will plead for them," I said. "They served you. They were with you when you were a prince."
He looked at me like I was a child offering a paper flower. "Soledad, will you stand with me? If you will, you can take the blame for me. You can be the fallen wife who forgives me. You can be the one who speaks for the household and explains to ministers."
"You would have me ruin my name to save yours?" The words were hot in my mouth.
He did not look ashamed. "Someone must carry the burden. You and I are not the same now."
2.
He had always been clever at asking, never giving.
"Give me Shoukang Hall," I said later, softly, like a woman asking for a shawl. "Let me have Shoukang for my rooms."
He gave it, surprised at such a small demand. "Take it," he said. "It will suit you."
Shoukang was not a crown, but it was comfort. I moved in and set it as my center. I let the court think what they wanted—let them whisper—and I smiled when their whispers curled into knots around Francisco's ankles.
"Why do you accept it?" my eunuchs asked.
"Because," I told Jolene, my maid, "I will not be the cause of his smugness. I will not beg for what is taken."
They thought me calm. Inside, every thought turned like a millstone. I remembered his promises in my father's hall: he had gone on his knees and promised to care for me, to make me his proper wife. We had built his path; my family's fortune had sheltered his claim. Daxton had bled for him. My father Gunther White had spent honor and influence to hold him safe. And he repaid us with an aunt on a throne.
"It is his choice," I said aloud sometimes. "If he wants shame, let him have it."
3.
William Britt, the prince who had always watched quietly from the side, came to my rooms the night of the imperial marriage.
"Why did you invite me?" he said with the blunt tone of a man who did not waste words.
"I didn't invite you. You came." I poured wine and did not offer him the reason.
He removed his hood and sat. "You look well for a woman who was made a joke this morning."
"Thank you," I said bitterly. "Do you think me a coward?"
"Not at all." He fixed his gaze. "But you are deciding what you want to be. Tell me."
"I want to be more than insulted," I said. "I want power enough that no one throws me away."
"You want to be the empress," William said.
"No." I turned the wine in my cup. "I want to be the empress's mother, or the mother of emperors. I want to be the woman who sets the rules."
He smiled, slow and dangerous. "Then let's stop pretending small things matter. You were foolish to love a man like Francisco. Love clouds the mind. You have cunning instead."
"We will work together?" I asked.
"We will," he said, and the word settled like iron.
4.
"I will not go to the Grand Palace to bow to her," I told the emperor when he offered me room and position in the ceremony.
"You may stay in Shoukang," he said almost kindly. "I have given you a gift."
"Let the record show," I said, "I am thankful, Your Majesty, and I will keep my place."
He believed it. How could he not? He was always the man who wanted to believe he could seduce loyalty.
Florence came to Shoukang of her own accord later, regal in white.
"You still call me aunt," she said. "Why do you not fight for your place?"
"I fight in other ways," I told her.
She tried pity, then mockery. "They say you are too forgiving."
"Forgiving has never been my strength," I replied. "But patience is."
She left, and I had what I needed: the look of offense that would be repeated by many.
5.
Rumors spread like lantern smoke. Francisco's indulgence shifted—he spent nights at other rooms, doted on a new favorite, Regina Dawson, a woman of small origin and practiced sweetness.
"She is obedient," William told me. "He likes the same face, the same voice, always."
"Keep her," I said. "But let her be loud about his pity. Let her sing his praises when he sits cold."
We planted songs in the market and small verses on paper. Children hummed them.
"Don't be too obvious," Daxton warned. He limped with a brave smile when he came to Shoukang; his legs would never stand him as before because he had saved Francisco once.
"Too obvious has never been my style," I said, and looked at my brother. "Let the court live by its tongue. It will choke on itself."
6.
Florence came to Shoukang again with a smile like a new moon.
"I am with child," she said, as if telling a private tale.
"That is good news," I said sincerely.
She blinked and leaned in. "Are you surprised Francisco loves me?"
"Why should I be surprised?" I asked. "He is drawn always to what is near."
"You should be glad," she said. "You will have a place because of me."
Her obstinate innocence amused me. "No," I said. "I do not want the throne in name. I want the throne in hand."
7.
At dawn the palace buzzed. A delivery of sweets had arrived from the imperial kitchens to the Grand Palace. Regina Dawson presented them to Florence in the morning.
"Try one," the young woman said, eager for favor.
Florence smiled at the offering like a queen at tribute.
That night, Florence was taken ill. The palace doctor called for help; the corridors filled with hurried steps. Francisco demanded that the palace guards search for those who had prepared any food for the queen.
"They tried to poison her!" he cried. His voice shook.
"I will see the kitchen," I said aloud and sent Jolene to watch. Jolene returned with quiet eyes.
"The kitchen did not do it," Jolene whispered. "The cakes from the palace were taken into the private pantry and replaced."
"By whom?" I pressed.
"By a eunuch who answers to no one but you," Jolene replied.
I smiled. "Then let him have the loyalty of the wrong master."
8.
The court gathered and the doctors examined blood. The old ritual of proof unfolded—blood tests, proclamations, the loud words of loyal ministers.
"They are incompatible," declared Emerson Howell in court, holding the verdict for all to see.
Francisco's face bled color. "What do you mean?" he cried.
"It means the child is not his," Emerson declared in a voice meant to be final.
Florence wept and clutched at her belly with sudden horror. The court gasped. Francisco's hand turned into a fist that trembled.
"What treachery!" he shouted. "Who would say such a thing about my empress?"
"I do not know," I said softly. "But the blood does not lie."
"Seize the traitors!" he barked, and guards moved like shadows.
9.
The palace suited drama. A collision of grief and performance. Florence was dragged to the Hall of the Ancients, and the old rites were judgements. The ministers who had sung to her favor turned away.
"This is monstrous," Florence sobbed. "You cannot do this to me."
"You were my empress," I told her in a low voice. "You were also a woman who sought his comfort. Now you will be what the court makes of you."
Francisco's command was swift and cruel: Florence was deposed and sent to the cold palace. The infant she claimed to bear was declared dead. The world tilted beneath us and then steadied into a new order.
I went to view Florence before she was taken away. She looked at me with the last of that woman's pleading.
"Help me," she begged.
"I have helped you," I said, and there was no softness left. "You wanted the throne. You had it for a breath. Now live with its weight."
When guards carried her off, some courtiers murmured. "She deserved it," said one. "Shame is its own justice," said another. Children sang the rhyme I had set in the market.
10.
The emperor became a wrecking stone against his own house. He drank and forgot, and the court began to fracture. The ministers petitioned that the emperor was not well enough to govern. William Britt, who had been watching like a steady lamp, came to me with a paper sealed by signatures.
"We will ask him to step down," he said simply. "There is a child of the palace to protect."
"Who will hold the reins?" I asked.
"Heirless, the court will choose," William said. "But with our people present, the safe choice will be a child of the line."
I thought of Daxton and Gunther, of the home that had given everything to keep a weak man on a throne. I thought of the blood the palace had spilled for him and how easily he had cut his own roots.
"You will take the signatures," I told William. "I will take Shoukang and make it the center of power."
11.
They came to the hall. Emerson Howell read the charge: the emperor was mentally unfit, the court petitioned for a change of stewardship. Francisco's face was pale beneath the court lamps.
"No!" he cried. "This is treason."
"It is not treason to save the realm," Clifford Coleman answered, stern and breathless. "We ask only for stability."
"Stability?" Francisco laughed, but it was a broken thing. "You want a child to rule while you eat the spoils."
"You have shown whose life you valued," I said, my voice an even thread. "You ordered the death of witnesses. You made mock of vows. You turned a household into a scandal. This is not rule."
"Stop," he said suddenly, and his hands shook. "Soledad, you will speak for me."
"I already have," I said.
Against him, the court moved like a tide. Daxton limped forward with a signet in hand; his face was scarred by what sacrifice cost us. "I believe in the realm before one man's lust," he said plainly.
William stepped up and bowed. "For the good of the realm," he declared.
The seal was broken. The throne was handed away. Francisco, once the man who had promised me forever, was escorted away in chains. The guards who held him were men he had once called to kill the very witnesses he had so feared. They held him gently, because punishment is more bitter when there is tenderness left in the hands that bind.
12.
What I had planned to be quiet took on a public face. The morning of the formal removal, the court was filled to overflowing.
"Tell me," Francisco hissed at me as they led him through the great gates, "did you set this all?"
"I set a stage," I answered. "You walked onto it."
"You will regret this," he said, the old threat returning like a broken tool.
"Perhaps," I said. "But I do not fear regret."
They sat him upon a low stool in the square before the Outer Gate, where commoners might press close and the traders might pause their carts. "Hear the edict," Emerson Howell read. "By the will of the ministers and for the safety of the realm, Francisco Blevins is relieved of the throne. The young prince shall succeed under the regency of Soledad Novikov, Empress Dowager."
Gasps moved like wind through the crowd.
"Do you know what they will call me?" Francisco snarled. "Empress Dowager? You?"
"You will not be emperor," I said. "You will be a cautionary tale."
He changed then—his face went from anger to a strange, raw pleading. "Soledad," he whispered, "we were married. I loved—"
"Love does not bind you from disgrace," I said. "You made your choices."
He backed away, eyes searching the crowd for faces that were not turned away. "My ministers," he cried. "My friends!"
"They are quite busy," I said. "They have a realm to save."
Someone in the front row shouted, "He ordered the death of his servants!"
"Yes," I said loudly. "He did. He would burn witnesses to cover his shame."
The crowd hissed. A woman spat at his boots. Children laughed and then were hushed by their parents because there is a cruelty to laughter at a fallen man.
He fell to his knees. "I am your emperor!" he wailed. "You must listen!"
"Stand up," I told the guards. "Bring him his chains and set him where the world can see him."
They tightened the irons around his wrists. His legs shook. Faces leaned forward. I watched the change crawl across him—pride to bluster, bluster to anger, anger to denial, denial to pleading, pleading to raw, animal terror. It was a slow unpeeling, and the crowd watched like a jury.
"Do you see?" I asked the assembly. "This man could not keep the household. He could not keep a vow. He would have destroyed the house of those who stood by him. Do you want such a man behind the curtains again?"
"Never!" a voice answered.
The ministers presented proofs of his misdeeds—the study’s witnesses, the secret letters, the small verses sung in the markets. People wept and nodded. My father, Gunther White, stood and spoke plainly. "We did not sacrifice for this to be his end," he said. "We sacrificed so the realm would be stable."
Francisco looked like a child breathing smoke. He lashed out in words first—accusation, blame, then names. "It was William! It was Daxton!"
"Name who you will," I said. "We sought to protect a country, not answer personal spite."
"Shame on you," he sobbed. "You used me. You faked love."
"You used power," I answered.
The crowd began to chant, low at first: "For the child. For order. For justice." It swelled. Men pointed fingers. A few who had laughed as he passed now spat at him openly. Someone shoved a bowl of cold soup toward him and he refused; another man flung it to the dirt. Each small action was a public nail.
Francisco's face crumpled. Tears mixed with rage. He screamed for mercy, for someone to enforce his name. A woman took out a scrap and wrote the cruel ditty we had taught the street children and read it aloud in the square. Merchants listened and repeated the lines. They laughed then—hard, small laughs that cut deeper than steel.
He begged me then on his knees when the sky had turned hard and high. "Soledad—"
"Do you still want me to speak for you?" I asked.
He dropped his head. "Yes."
I looked at him and thought of every time I had forgone myself for him. I thought of Daxton's broken legs, of the child I had lost because I saved him once, of my father's nights with no sleep. I had loved a man who could not love deeply enough to be loyal to anyone.
"No," I said, and the word fell. "You will not speak for yourself anymore."
His cry filled the square, ragged and small.
Around him, the crowd rustled, pulled at their cloaks, took out knives for peaches and knives for bread. Some took out small mirrors and held them up to their faces as if to tell themselves the world could change. People took out paper and wrote—some wrote the small rhyme, some wrote the names of those who had died at his command. They shared them. They took pictures in their minds and told the tale later at markets with a smile. The social weight of his fall became the public's gain.
After the reading the court dragged him away to a small residence at the edge of the palace, not in a gilded hall but in a building with low ceilings and bars. His hands were chained to a short post that would not allow much movement. The guards who led him were former servants; they had seen his threats and paid with loyalty.
He screamed and cursed as they brought him to his cell. He tried to reason with Eloquence and got only thick silence. The guards turned away, because there are things hands must do and things they will not forgive.
12a. (Punishment scene — public, extended)
The day they carried him through the main gate to the low house, I made sure thousands watched.
"Make it public," I told William. "Let him feel the eyes that once bowed."
"It will be done," he said. "But remember—mercy is a blade. If it cuts us, it will cut him deeper."
We arranged the seats. Merchants, market women, servants, minor officials—anyone who had a bone bitten by his rule—were given space near the gate. The magistrates read aloud every order he had made that served his private desires rather than the state: the executions he had signed in a night of jealousy, the orders to disgrace the rightful heirs, the letters where he praised Florence and called my family "convenient." We read the words slowly so people could taste the treachery.
Francisco's face moved through stages. First, he tried the old arrogance. "You cannot do this," he said, voice pitched like a sermon.
"On whose authority?" asked Clifford Coleman. "The realm's must be above one man's temper."
"Is this the gratitude I get?" he spat. "After ten years you do this."
"After ten years you did this," I returned. "You ruined families and promises."
The crowd grew loud. A market woman stepped forward with her child's torn hat. "He once took my husband for questioning and never returned him," she cried. "He said it was for the realm. I want my husband."
Another man held up a torn petition he had delivered and had been told to be quiet. He shook it. "This is the man who calls himself emperor," he said. "He took my youth for a dream."
I watched Francisco's face as the accusations came: surprise, anger, denial, bargaining. He called out names—William, Daxton, my father—as if naming them could unmake the proofs laid bare. He bargained for old honor, for tokens of loyalty, but the crowd counted the cost and the ministers held a balance that would not tilt back.
"Please," he begged at last, when pleading had replaced thunder in him. "I am the emperor. I have not lost my mind."
"You lost your duty, Francisco," said Emerson Howell quietly. "That is worse."
He turned to me, eyes furious, then wet, then hollow. "Soledad, I loved—"
"Love is a frail curtain," I said. "You tore it."
He sank, almost sliding, almost breaking. For a moment I saw a frightened boy who had once come to our house to ask for my hand.
"Do not make me into a monster," he whispered.
"You made yourself what you are," I answered.
When the convocation ended, the crowd did not disperse at once. They stayed to murmur and point. The ministers ordered the guards to place Francisco where he could not command armies or sign orders. They chained his wrists to a stone pillar in a small courtyard. A few of the people who had been wronged came forward to spit at him. Some laid stones at his feet. They put his name in songs. They told children to remember the day when promises were burned.
I watched, and for the first time in years I felt the steady heat of being more than a broken promise. I had played a cold game, yes, but it was for something that mattered: a realm where a ruler cannot be above his vows.
Francisco's reaction in those hours was a map of ruin. He shifted from terror to bluster, from bluster to pleading, from pleading to collapse. People passed, shook their heads, whispered that justice had been done. I let them whisper. The punishment was public; the shame was public; the change was forever.
13.
After that, power came to me not because I sought it but because I held the only hand steady enough to manage it.
"My lady," Daxton said when ministers knelt in Shoukang, "we did what we had to."
"Do you not fear what you have become?" he asked, because he had known me a child once.
"Do you not?" I answered. "If I had not done it, who would have?"
He looked at me like someone seeing a city built on a hill. "You have the face of one who will not forget."
"Neither will you," I said. "We paid. We will be paid back."
14.
They placed the infant on the throne with his small fist wrapped around the silk. I was named Empress Dowager. My robe moved the way a shield does.
"Take the regency," William said simply. "You will be watched."
"I know how to be watched," I replied. "I will watch the watchers."
My father took the seat of a minister near me and bowed. "You are fair, daughter," he said. "Do not let cruelty call itself justice."
"I will not," I promised out loud. But promises are tricky. I had chosen the blade that cut both ways.
15.
Weeks later, a messenger brought the news of Florence Braun's end. She had hanged herself in the cold palace with a white cloth tied at her throat. They said she had been mad and lonely. Some said she died with curses on her lips.
When I stood by the cold palace gate and looked in at the place they had pushed her, I felt nothing like triumph. I felt only the hollow echo of what I had lost—what I had been forced to become.
"Did you expect mercy for her?" Jolene asked softly.
"No," I said. "I expected honesty."
"Was that what you got?"
"No," I admitted. "I got power."
16.
Francisco never walked again in the court. He would live in a small house at the edge of the palace, his days a measure of chains and regret. He would watch from a distance as I governed. He would sometimes call my name across corridors and I would not answer.
"Will he ever repent?" a minister asked.
"I do not know," I told them. "Repentance is for the soul. I have a realm to secure."
17.
At night, when the palace quieted, I would go to the small window of Shoukang and look out toward the east where the great gate lay. The lantern light made a pool in the courtyard. Sometimes I could see men and women move like small fish.
"Do you sleep?" Jolene asked when I returned to our chamber late, face tired.
"Sometimes," I said. "But not like before."
"Do you ever wish you had chosen differently?" she asked.
"Every day," I said.
She did not answer then. She folded up my robe and smoothed the silk over my lap.
18.
Time softened anger and the court found a rhythm. My father grew proud and careful. Daxton's limp healed in his humor. William kept to his quiet vigilance. The ministers pledged loyalty and they delivered what they could. The child grew, and the people began to forget the scandal that had given them a true heir.
Yet sometimes, in the soft hour before dawn, I thought of Francisco—thin, chained, sometimes weeping—and I wondered whether I had been cruel or just necessary. I thought of Florence and her white cloth. I thought of the infant who had died and never came to court.
"Is this rule?" I asked myself. "Or is it survival arranged like a crown?"
19.
One day, in the outer hall, Emerson Howell stood and announced a simple truth: "The realm is steady but fragile. We must never again let one man's appetite take the house."
"Agreed," called many voices. They clapped and pledged and kissed signets.
I listened and then I stepped forward, and everyone bent their heads as if to the sun.
"Let it be recorded," I said. "The house must stand before any one life. We will teach our children that vows are stronger than desire."
The ministers scribbled. People nodded. The world felt like it had shifted to a kinder axis.
20. (Ending — unique, clearly linked to story)
I keep the white ribbon Florence wore folded in a small cedar box in Shoukang. When I open it occasionally, the smell of old linen reminds me of the cold palace and the chord between hate and mercy.
"I am Empress Dowager," I told Jolene once late in the night. "I took what a man threw away."
She pressed my hand. "And you kept a house together."
I tied the ribbon back into the box, closed the lid, and heard the soft click of lacquer. The sound was tiny and clear. It belonged only to Shoukang Hall and to the woman who would never again be merely a bride.
The End
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