Face-Slapping19 min read
I Woke Up a Crime Queen Inside a "Worthless" Noble Girl
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They threw me into the street like a broken puppet.
"That's her—drag her out," one of them barked. The hands that held me were rough, the air around me smelled of sweat and street smoke, and my body—this borrowed body—tasted of old bruises.
"Throw her clothes off. The Spirit Sprout must be on her," another voice hissed.
I lay curled, a useless noble's daughter on the cobbles, and listened to them talk. I could have laughed then—laughed until my lungs hurt—because I remembered a different life, a different corpse stack of memories that did not belong to this soft, shivering thing they called Angelina Schwarz's body.
"Hit her!" someone shouted.
Fists landed. I protected the thing in my arms because the borrowed hands still knew how to protect a prize. I protected it because one life must have dignity under my feet. I protected it because the world had always responded to force.
A heavy boot struck my shin. I felt it, yes. But something else answered: sight sharpened, memory came pouring in as if every scene of my past were a film rewinding. The street, the men, the opulent flop of the noble household—the chorus of smearers—folded into a smaller focus: the wooden boot that had found my ankle.
"Did you take it from the Langhan Pavilion?" the leader snarled. "Who gives you the right?"
I did not act like a noble. I didn't protest. I curled tighter around the little green sprout in my lap, feeling the warmth of a miracle plant that nobody in this world should have. People pointed. People laughed. I pretended I had gone limp.
"She's dead, right?" someone fretted.
"Dead is fine," the leader answered. "We have proof. Put her corpse on the cart. Lord Lang has his face again."
They had a name for me: "the noble's mad daughter." They had a history of pulling knives from pockets and calling it justice.
"Angelina Schwarz," the leader spat my name like a curse. "Don't play dead. Hand over the sprout."
I felt my fingers close without asking me. My hand seized a wooden leg, and I heard a sickening crack. There was a howl, high and sharp. For the first time since I woke up in this body's skin, people went still.
"I—what is this?" I heard one of the men choke.
I looked down. Between my palms lay a severed big toe from the man who had stood nearest. The shock in my borrowed mind tasted like iron. Under the shock, a thought like a coal burned—this body, despite its official uselessness, came with something. A bracelet. A tiny ring of carved metal I had worn as a child and never questioned.
"Why is a foot in my hand?" I said aloud, but the voice that came out wasn't the thin frightened sound I'd expected. The people who saw my face froze like deer at torchlight.
"You dare?" the leader spat, fury returning. He positioned his gang to move.
"Xin—stop," a small voice said, and a girl the men had called "Honoka" stepped forward with a stick.
"Don't you dare lay a hand on our mistress," she declared, absurdly brave. "Honoka will bite you all."
I almost smiled. From the other life—my old life—this was the sort of soliloquy that would have been hilarious. From this life, it was a tiny, human anchor. I let the borrowed body lean on it.
The crowd waited, hungry for blood, when silver armor cut through the air. Someone in gilt carried swordlight like a proclamation. A youth in polished silver stepped into the street with an aloofness I recognized from the memory-curves: he'd always been a disaster among men’s hearts.
"Angelina Schwarz," he said, pointing. "You stole a treasure. Once a thief, always a thief."
My new life registered the name: Dawson Bennett. The boy's expression was a cocked smile and a sneer.
Dawson lifted his chin. "I, Dawson Bennett, would never marry—"
"Shut up," I said, more mood than language. The voice inside me wasn't entirely mine, but it had teeth.
He sneered. His companion—Marcella Church, the smiling, honeyed sister—lilted across the street like perfume and said, "Angelina, admit your little crime. Give up the sprout and we'll let you go."
"Admit? To you?" I tasted blood on my lip and found sudden amusement. "You think a sacred plant is yours to bargain with?"
Laughter rode the winds. Marcella's smile glinted like a blade. She played the sacrificial sister with the practiced ease of someone born to rehearsed wickedness.
"That sprout is worth a fortune," the leader hissed. "It could buy a month of a Lord's expenses. Hand it over!"
"Not today," I heard myself say. A hand closed around a throat. The leader screamed and doubled. People backed away as if I had burned them.
"You—" the leader began, then a man ran forward and swung a sword. I felt the air cut my arm. The world went narrow and bright like camera flash. I moved without thinking: a twist, a snap. The man's kicked leg bent like a twig. He fell and hugged the ground, blood seeping.
They gaped. I had that old part of me logged: the instinct to make things stop. "Where did I learn that?" I wondered. Then an old laugh curled in the back of my skull—my other self, the queen of the underground, had taught me.
The crowd retreated in a wave. Someone named Pedro Bernard—my so-called father, the man who ran a house of brittle honors—stared at me with a face that had been molded in the shape of disappointment for half my life.
"This—" he began. "You can't—"
"Pedro," I said, and the way I said it had no mollifying tenderness. "You said you pushed me into the ice when I was five, and said I was dead to you. Remember?"
My words were a match to tinder. His face changed from grip of power to a flaring red of realization. Marcella paled but tried to smile.
"A show," she whispered.
The angry king of my old world—Azariah Conway—landed in the street like a storm. He wore a mask of carved iron, half a crow's beak. He did not glance at anyone but me. His voice slid across the space like silk dipped in steel.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, and the world blinked.
"Who are you?" I asked, real bewilderment now. My other life’s headlines told me I should have been bedded by some younger lord, not cradled by a man who walked through storm and left the storm quieter.
"Azariah," he said. "Azariah Conway. I have waited a long time."
"Azariah?" I said. The name tasted foreign and right.
He stepped closer, hands like weather. He tilted my chin. "Call me Azariah. And you, Angelina, don't call me by anything else."
"Wait," I said. "You rescued me?"
"You were insulted," he said simply. "I did not like the sentence."
"Do not call me your mistress," I retorted. "I was a queen of blood. I am not to be claimed."
His dark eyes brightened. "Then call me your husband, or try my patience," he said in a half-joke that was not a joke. He lifted me and the black-feathered shadow of a great bird unfurled in the sky. We rose on wings. The world's voices below shrank.
"Angelina," he murmured, putting me gently on the bird's back, "how do your fingers taste of the street and the storm? Did you ever think to come to me instead of the gutter?"
"Who are you really?" I asked, although my chest answered with a pulse I did not want to name. I had never cared for a man's words, only actions.
He smiled like a faultline. "I will tell you later," he said. "For now, fly."
We landed in the dark, in his estate where moonlight respected him. A man in pale robes, Olivier Dyer, the healer, fussed as a servant would, counting my injuries. Azariah's hand hovered over mine with a kind of ownership that made bile and warmth both rise.
"Give me the bottle," I said suddenly, and something in me reached for the tiny jar that had been tucked inside the bracelet. I had carried that little porcelain bottle for years without knowing why. In my old life it held nothing but my family's lies. In this life, it hummed like a caged thing.
Olivier's eyes widened. "That's—"
"A rare spring," Azariah said, then low, to me: "Nirvana Spring. It will mend more than cuts if you let it."
"Let me be clear," I said, flipping the jar between my fingers. "I am not a thing to be mended. I am a weapon."
He laughed softly, delighted. "Then let us hone you."
"Fine," I said, and for the first time in a long while someone answered my words with an appetite rather than a cudgel. Azariah had not mistaken me for a toy. He intended to use me, and that suited me. I liked him already.
"Good," he said. "We begin with water and heat."
"Do you always talk like a man writing poetry?" I asked.
He kissed the edge of my hand like a man offering a vow. "Only when I am trying to win my favorite troublemaker."
I blushed despite myself and admitted later that he was terrible at love poetry. He was better at making things move for me. He bought rooms in the palace and built a courtyard overnight. He called it "Wutong House" and placed around it guards that were more like constellations: elegant, precise, and very dangerous.
"You're building me an entire sanctuary," I said once, as breezes smelled of pine and incense. The place rose like an answer to a prayer.
Azariah watched me with a look I thought was shock, then something like worship. "You will need a base," he said. "You are not to be toyed with by fools."
"Thank you," I said. I did not say that the jar in my bracelet had more than water. It had a whole private lake inside it, an echo of something older and meaner. It pulsed when I put it on my tongue and the world turned incandescent, and Azariah did not flinch.
"Don't call me your husband unless you want me to be cruel later," he warned with a smirk. "There will be times you will search for mercy and I will have none."
"I will remember," I said.
Days blurred into training and quiet. I had a space inside the bracelet—a hidden room—full of bottles and strange things, and a small river inside it that bubbled like liquid fire. I took three drops and felt the seal inside my chest quiver. Then another night I drank and felt a spark lit deep, deep inside my belly.
"Twice in my life I have been given power," I told Honoka one evening. "Once I used it to carve an empire. Once I used it to vanish."
Honoka only blinked. "Please don't vanish again," she said. "I like having a warm bed."
"Fine," I said, and I smiled because even my old hull of cruelty liked the small, human things—an honest laugh, a loyal stick-wielding servant.
The bracelet's lake had a name in the old legends: Nirvana Spring. It could fix a body, open a sealed field, maybe undo the spells the world had tucked into me when I was left in the ice as a child. It dripped into the world in little miracles. I hid bottles in my pocket like secrets.
Later, in a room full of scholars and a man who called himself a National Master—Luca Costa—they argued about whether the Nirvana Spring was myth. Azariah watched me talk to them and lean in.
"Who exactly are you?" I asked Luca once, blunt as a blade.
He smiled, all books and old rumors. "I'm a man who watches the world like it were a chessboard," he said. "I have seen this water only once, in a legend. You have a bottle in your bracelet, Angelina?"
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I have a thousand. Maybe I have cats."
The man laughed at the oddity and left. I liked men who didn't always take themselves too seriously.
Once my body began to drink deep of the Nirvana Spring, something changed in me. Once the tiny lake in my bracelet met my blood, it unlocked something that had been sewn shut. A thread of power unfurled along my spine like an iron vine. I felt things: the taste of lightning and oak and fire, threads that seemed to come from the earth itself knitting into me.
"I think your internal river has become a torrent," Honoka said, watching the rise and fall of my breaths.
"It was always a river," I said. "It just needed to know how to flood."
And flood it did. In private, without fanfare, I walked out of Azariah's house and into the city. The people who had laughed at me at the market held their breath. A hundred yards away, a servant girl who had once called me "mad" crossed the road to tie her hair and spilled water over herself. The world felt sharply aware of me, as if a drummer had started keeping time.
Most of the time I kept my hands clean. Mostly. When the country began to whisper that I was dangerous, more than a few moved their positions. A man named Dawson Bennett, who had spat at me in the street and thought himself clever, stepped too close to my threshold again.
That morning, he found himself in the town square with his knees pressed to rough floor and me standing over him.
"How would you dare?" he spat, eyes furious. His face was the same as ever: a vain boy masquerading as a man.
I remembered what he had meant to do the night he tried to force me. I remembered his voice, low and oily, offering me status for obedience. I remembered how he had smiled when he described selling me to his household as a trophy.
"Do you want whatever petty honor your father buys?" I asked him.
"You will not talk to the Chen family like that," his mouth answered, but his hands were shaking. He had assumed he could rely on blood and position.
I drew a line in the dust with my toe and felt the world hold its breath.
"In front of the market," I said, "you said I could be your concubine for the price of compliance. You called me 'dirty' and 'unfit' because I would not let you have me."
"Lie!" he cried. "I never—"
I laughed and sent someone to find an attendant who had once been in his carriage. The man brought forward a box of papers: written notes, receipts, and an envelope with Dawson's seal. Morally clean? Not quite. I opened one of the notes. It was a message to a conspirator.
"You think you are invisible," I told him. "You thought your messages could be secret."
"I didn't—" he started to sputter.
I pulled another letter from my sleeve: a folded paper showing his arrangement with a woman outside our town. He had called her "a temporary joy" and had promised to make her a mistress when he had enough coin. Everyone in the square leaned forward. Above, a lawyer from Pedro Bernard's house had stopped in his tracks. Strings of gossip curled through the crowd like smoke.
I laid the letters on his face and said, "You call me dirty, you call me trash, and you think the law will shelter you? You're a small, loud dog in a noble's robe. Let us see whether the people applaud a spider with a silver spoon."
Dawson had come into the square with swagger. He shuffled, then found his feet. His brow thickened. He looked like a man trying on anger as a suit and finding it ill-fitting.
"Who gave you these papers?" he barked.
"You did," I said. "You wrote them. You signed them."
The crowd hissed. The boys who had once laughed at me were quiet now. Someone had the presence of mind to lift their hand and record the scene on a small mechanical box that people used to catch sound and picture—my world had moved faster with inventions used to make moments immortal.
"Turn the wheel," I told the speaker. "Let them hear him. Let them hear each line you wrote about money and conquest."
A clerk, trembling, wound the wheel. Dawson's voice filled the air—his own words he had written and then read back to him by his own hubris. "If she obeys, I'll take her as my secondary. If not, burn her reputation and I'll claim what is mine."
The square erupted like a kettle. The men who had been his cronies paled. The women who had once whispered about me flung their hands to mouths. The record clicked on. My heart did not hurry. I had seen far worse things in the alleys where I was queen.
Dawson's face burned through colors I had not named for a while: pride, anger, then shock when the crowd's mood tipped against him.
"No," he began to say, loud and blank.
"You want me to show you what a cunning knife can do?" I asked. "Stand and beg? No. I have a better idea."
I pushed him to his knees with my boot. The crowd drew a line with their breathing. A man in the crowd said aloud, "Is she—"
"She is the same you called mad," another replied. "And now she reveals you."
Dawson snarled, and his pretense cracked. "You cannot—"
"You can deny," I said, and the way I said it had a slow, theatrical cruelty. "You can tell them your scribbles were forged. You can tell them you were blackmailed. You can tell them Shakespeare's tragedies as if they're instructions."
He had been smug, then startled. Now he went hollow. "I—no. I didn't—"
"You did," I said. The square had gone silent. "You said you would make me your concubine. You said the woman who loves you is a price."
He tried to rise, to drag his dignity up by the collar. He stumbled. People muttered. A dozen faces leaned forward with a mixture of suspicion and delight. Someone snapped a quick picture. Another, braver, used a voice recording. On the second recorded playback, his own lies crashed over him like surf.
"Dawson Bennett," I said, slowly, so that even the old woman in the corner could understand. "Plead. Say you were forced."
"I wasn't—" he began to say. Then, because the reassurance of law was failing him and the people's eyes sharpened like knives, he choked.
"Beg," I ordered.
"Beg me?" He laughed, but his laughter fell and cracked.
"Beg," I repeated. "Beg the one you meant to bruise publicly."
For a deadly second he held my eye. I saw the slickness of fear pool. He leaned forward, started something like an apologetic clatter. "Please—I'm sorry—"
"Not that kind of sorry," I said. "The one that tastes like your hands on my skirts breaking like a twig."
His face folded. He tried to deny and the crowd ate the denials like stale bread and spat them out.
"Please," he murmured, pathetic then. "Please—don't let them—"
They had been watching the whole spectacle. A miller pressed his palms together, the baker held breath like a prayer. Someone began a low chant that sounded like call and answer. A young woman in saffron pulled out a tiny mirror and took a photo that would travel like a rumor.
Dawson shrank. The sneer dissolved to denial of a different kind: "I didn't—it's lies."
"Look," I said. "Can you hear yourself?"
He could not. He tried again, voice catching. "I never—"
"You lied to yourself and to the woman you thought was a mattress," I told him. "Get up now and say you'll live with the shame of your writings. Swear to the crowd that you'll never touch any girl who calls you a man again."
I watched the artful collapse of pride. I learned so much from people like Dawson: how small grudges hide between teeth, how apologies get shaped like hats, how the crowd would crown you if you gave them spectacle.
He stayed sinking, jaw moving around words that had no strength. The crowd closed in with their whisperings. One by one, phones lifted like small torches. They filmed the collapse. They applauded when his voice finally broke into real sobbing.
"Please," I heard him beg, distinctly. "Don't—"
"No one will stop your father from making you a laughingstock," I told him. "But you will not use women as debtors again. Let that be the bargain."
He went through denial to a ragged plea, the change visible in his face: arrogance, confusion, fury, pleading. Someone in the crowd spat. Someone else clapped. A boy laughed and then swallowed it because he was suddenly older than he had been an hour ago.
Dawson fell at my feet and tried to crawl away. The mechanical recorder clicked. The cameras had caught the whole performance: his malicious notes, his shame, his collapse. The sound went through the city like bees. Within an hour, the city's scribes had copies. He woke next morning to headlines: "Dawson Bennett Falls—The Weaver of Laces Himself Unraveled."
He would mean to fight back. He would hire men and write false letters and threaten. But the smallest weapon had been used in perfect form: public shame, fused with evidence. In front of three hundred market-voices and the world in a glass box, he had been proven small. I watched him shrink under the weight of the crowd and felt nothing but a cold satisfaction. He had meant to make me small. He had succeeded at showing everybody his own smallness instead.
The rest of the city watched and recorded. People gathered and whispered. Some applauded. Some turned away, ashamed to have been spectators. The videos would last for days. The coins in their pockets would jingle like a jury. He begged in the square until the sun lowered like a verdict.
Later, at dinner, Azariah unfurled his newspaper—one he didn't need to read to know what it said—and looked at me.
"You are very theatrical," he observed, amusement cooling his features.
"I prefer efficient theatrics," I answered. "It costs less and lasts longer."
He smiled. "You have made a friend of the public. Keep it well."
"Public is fickle," I said. "And dangerous. But it brings conveniences."
"Conveniences such as exposing small men in small suits," he mused.
"Exactly," I said. "And remember—"
He leaned forward. "Yes?"
"Don't call me your wife until I apologize," I said. "On second thought—call me whatever you like. But when the time comes, I'll have knives to keep your promise."
"Marry me," he said, like a dare. "Prove me by refusing."
I laughed. "You are a fool, Azariah Conway."
He kissed my knuckle. "And I prefer it that way."
Days later, in the glare of the market, in the hush of the palace, in the quiet of Wutong House, the threads of my old life and the new body braided and became a different rope: strong enough to hang men like Dawson Bennett and to support a woman who had once been queen of the underworld.
But having power is not the same as using it. You learn that quickly. You learn that sometimes a strike must be public, a humiliating punishment given to someone who made a mockery of life. And you learn that people will come to see the show.
One morning, in the square where Dawson had been undone, they came for the others who had called me weak. Pedro Bernard, my father, had learned before anyone else what I had become. He had tried to serve his family honor on a platter. He would learn humility later.
I, however, needed a different target. Marcella—the honey-tongued sister—had spun a web of poison soft enough to crush bones. She had cried her pretty tears while signing false records, smiling at my supposed madness. She had planned a marriage out of barter; she had sharpened her smiles to sting. She must answer for that.
So I invited her, politely and precisely, to a public event. "A show," I told my staff. "We will gather the town and let art speak."
Azariah watched as I composed the arrangement like a person assembling a blade. "You plan to be merciless," he said, approving.
"If I must be a queen of blood again," I answered, "I will give them the spectacle of justice."
We arranged the market as a theater. I sat in the high chair like a judge. Marcella came in a raft of silk and expecting flattery. She smiled—mercilessly practiced—and curtsied before the crowd.
"Forgive our intrusion," she cooed. "Angelina has been so unruly. We have heard signs of theft—"
"Wait," I said. "Shall we let the people hear?"
She laughed, thinking she had the crowd. "Of course," she said. "What is so amusing—"
I reached into my bracelet and produced a stack of letters and receipts and a thin ledger that recorded Marcella's comings and goings with the Langhan Pavilion and a string of bribes. I placed them on the small table, then opened them. They were signed. Her laughing face paled.
"You thought you could clean your hands with tears," I said. "You distributed lies about me. You sold my name for access and you thought—"
"Forgive me—" she started. But the crowd had started to murmur.
"Save it," I said. "Tell them what you promised the steward of Langhan."
Her mouth opened and closed. She tried to control the lilt of panic.
"Those who watch will judge you," I said. "Read that aloud."
I handed her the ledger. She grew white. A boy in the front row clicked the recording wheel and the ledger's own ink seemed to reverberate like a confession. Marcella's practiced voice stammered and then dissolved into a ragged denial. "No—lies! This is—"
"Then deny it in public," I said. "Deny it under oath."
She tried. Her denials smeared. Her servant raised his hands and confessed under breath. People who had once smiled at her now took cautious steps away.
Marcella's expression moved from control to shocked disbelief to furious denial. She attempted to laugh, to make the crowd remember her smiles. It didn't help. The ledger was precise. The market buzzed and then fell silent as their verdict settled like dust.
When the last defense fell, Marcella hobbled under the weight of her proofs. She looked at me and tried to turn the page.
"Beg," I said, in the same slow tone I had used on Dawson. "Beg the people."
She trembled. For a clumsy moment, she tried to maintain her composure. She bowed the slightest degree and the crowd gasped. She tried to form words, then shook her head.
"I won't!" she cried. Her voice rose and broke. Her hand flew to her throat as if to keep air from escaping. "I can't—"
"You can," I said. "Stand and tell them the truth. Name names of those you took bribes from. Admit what you signed. Then we will clip what little embarrassment you have left."
She looked at the crowd as if they had betrayed her. Her fingers clawed at air. "No—this is—"
"I will speak it for you," I told her. "You sold your housekeeper's safety and you took a portion for keeping quiet. You promised an ally that I would be silenced if you had your way. You're a woman who used a gentle voice to sell a knife."
The change in her features was a thing the crowd loved as if they watched a sea creature bleached by light. She moved from Someone Who Believes She Is Untouchable to Something With Bones.
The market had been filled with the scents of bread and fish. Now it smelled like charred rope. People who had shrugged at my earlier woes found a new loyalty. The youngest boys in the crowd began to chant, not me, but the idea of justice.
Marcella's reaction was textbook: delight, then terror, then unruly denial. She shrieked, then tried to insist she had been framed. She tried to point at my father as the villain. She tried, but the ledger existed in the world, and the world had a memory.
When she collapsed to her knees, the first person to raise a hand against her furious scramble was a woman whose life she had almost ruined. The people gathered like a tide and clapped for the one she'd wronged. Cameras spun, recorders turned, and I watched Marcella's smugness dissolve into a sequence of emotions: denial, outrage, bargaining, and finally, a sobbing plea.
"Please," she begged, the voice like a small animal trapped inside a jar. "Please, I didn't mean—"
"No one listened when you sold slander as truth," I said. "Now you will live inside the sound of your own lying. Let it be your cage."
I could have broken her body. I didn't. I let the law, the people, and the exposed ledger do the work. They tore off the last of her public honor. They recorded her pleas and laughed and slapped and shouted and applauded. The woman who once expected a gilded life became an object lesson. People took photos. Someone filmed her as she slipped from the market, her face slick with mascara and humiliation. Another shouted, "Remember her name!" and the crowd obliged.
She would wake the next day to find her invitations revoked. Her bets with nobles would be withdrawn; her little places at high tables vanished like smoke. She would try to buy forgiveness and find out the only coin that mattered was a thing called dignity, which does not change hands for silver.
The punishment fit the crime. It was long, public, and precise. She had moved from power to collapse, and the crowd witnessed every beat: smug grin—shock—denial—pleading—collapse. They filmed, whispered, took pictures, and applauded when she finally bowed low enough to have to pick up the dirt with her fingers. The memory of her unease would be a bookmark in the city's recollection. Her downfall was over five hundred words in the city's story, and her screams would be a refrain for months.
Afterward, when dusk came and the clamor faded, Azariah found me sweeping the dust from the market stall where Marcella had almost sold me like a piece of cloth.
"You were cruel," he said, almost fond.
"I was necessary," I answered. "Besides, cruelty is a kind of truth."
He grinned and kissed the top of my head. "My dangerous daughter, still sharpening herself."
"I prefer queen," I said.
"Queen," he agreed. "Or the woman who told Dawson where to keep his legs."
We laughed together and then went back to the house. There, tucked in the bracelet, winked the little porcelain bottle. Its water was a secret and a weapon. There were other enemies. There would be other shows. I had more names to write into the ledger. I had a mother missing and a father who pretended. I had a country that had eyes and ears in messy places.
I kept the little jar safe. I would drink again if I needed to break seals or fix bones. But I knew one thing now that my previous life taught me and the new body confirmed: the crowd is a blade if you can set it sharp; proof is the hammer; and the small men who think themselves kings will fall under the weight of their own paper crowns.
That night, I went into my private chamber and set the little red porcelain bottle on the table. I clicked it shut and smiled.
"Keep moving, little river," I whispered. "We have more shows to set, more men to make small, and a mother to find."
Azariah sat beside me and placed his hand over mine, palm to palm, no vows, only a touch that promised trouble.
"I will follow you to the world’s end," he said.
"I will not let you bend me," I told him.
"Good," he said. "Then we are perfectly matched."
Outside, the city slept, and the recorder's lights blinked in the square where my last act had been recorded: the light of a small public justice. The bottle of Nirvana Spring caught moonlight and gleamed like a tiny star.
I wound the bracelet onto my arm, felt the tiny lake's pulse, and for the first time that had counted in both lives, I decided to keep my own name.
"I am Angelina," I said, softly. "I am not anyone's pawn."
Azariah smiled at the word like a benediction. "Angelina," he echoed. "Mine only in the way a city owns a skyline: you tower and I admire, but I never control the sky."
"Then admire," I said. "But when I ask, act."
He kissed my brow.
"Always when you ask."
I closed my eyes and listened to the soft, impossible sound of the Nirvana Spring beating inside the bracelet like a tiny heart. There would be more battles, more public punishments, more ceilings to shatter. That much I knew.
And when the day came that I had to drag a man into the square and force him to swallow his pride until it tasted like dust, I would hold up the ledger and the crowd and the little porcelain bottle would shine like a promise. I would take a sip and remember the smell of the iron that had been my crown in the other life.
For now, I put the bottle back in its velvet cradle. I wound the bracelet tight, felt the faint warmth like a heartbeat, and smiled.
This city would learn to fear the woman who wore a tiny lake on her wrist.
The End
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