Sweet Romance17 min read
I Woke Up Drowning — Then I Married a Prince, Opened a Pharmacy, and Never Looked Back
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"I can't breathe!"
I tore my face out of cold water and gagged. Air hit my lungs like a knife. I gasped and clawed to shore.
"Miss! Miss, are you alive?" A maid's voice was sharp and small. Someone wrapped a cloak around me. Hands were warm. I coughed until my head cleared.
I sat up and looked around. Stone paths. A low pond. Wooden houses with tiled roofs. No cars. No neon. The world smelled of wood smoke and river mud.
"Where am I?" I whispered, but the maid only cried.
"Miss Joanna—no," I stopped. The name that trembled in my mind was not mine. Not my modern name. It was a name that belonged to the girl whose life I had stepped into. I pressed my palm to my throat. My voice sounded the same, but everything else was not.
"Miss Dawn, you must not say you fell in. You must not tell Lady," the maid said, stumbling over old titles. Her name was Evie Karim. She smelled of starch and fear. "They would be so angry."
I blinked. Evie used words like "Lady" and "Madam" the way old movies used them. Confusion rolled up inside me and crashed down as a flood of memory that was not mine. I saw a father who loved power more than daughters. I saw a mother sick and small. I saw a cruel older sister. I saw a life that ended by drowning.
"I'm Dawn," I said, because that name fit like a summer shirt. Evie stared in relief. She folded my cloak around my shoulders.
"This is a pond in the estate. You fell in. You are fine now. Come back to the rooms," she said.
I stood and walked because standing didn't feel like surrender. The house had dresses on wooden pegs, a heavy bed, a window that did not open to skyline but to a small garden. The room belonged to someone named Dawn—my new body, my new fate.
Once I was wrapped in a dry robe, my hands shook. There were bruises along my ribs. Old scars on my arms. My chest ached in a way I recognized: someone had lived through pain in this skin.
"Eat hot ginger tea. Do not let the cold in," Evie said.
I drank. The tea burned in a good way. I closed my eyes and let a calm voice take shape in my head. "I will look after her mother," I whispered out loud. It was the first promise I made in this life, and I felt it like a lock closing.
"Miss, your handmaid—she is waiting outside," Evie said.
"Tell her thank you." I smiled and left the room.
Outside, servants bent like reeds in lists and whispers. A senior steward named Canon Cole announced a message. Men in official clothes bowed. The house thrummed like a trapped bird.
"Bring the decree," Canon said.
I stepped forward because everyone looked at me. A yellow scroll was unrolled. It read: The Emperor grants that Dawn of House Per shall be the bride of Prince Griffin Alvarez to bring good fortune.
My knees went soft. They were choosing my fate with silk and stamps.
My father—Per Yang—smiled like a man who had placed a bet. My eldest sister—Estrella Reynolds—smiled thinly, eyes like knives. The world had chosen me. I looked at my mother, Joanna Bennett. Her ribs climbed with each breath. She smiled and tried not to.
"Three days," my father said. "The prince waits three days."
Three days to marry a man I did not know. Three days to leave the one person I had promised to protect if this body belonged to me. Three days to turn my life into a rumor.
I walked away from the hall and felt the floor rock under me. I went back to my room, closed the door, and shut my world down.
"Wake up," a small voice said inside my mind.
I opened my eyes and saw two figures in the clearing haze of memory. They were devices of light and sound in my head—Harmony Baker and Blake Sjostrom. Two assistants that had come with me from the life I left.
"You came with me?" I said, and the relief in my voice made me laugh once.
"Yes, owner. We cannot move from the clinic perimeter, but we see everything you see," Harmony said. Her tone was small and precise.
"We will help," Blake said.
I lay back and planned. I had medical training. In my old life I was in a clinic. I could make medicine. I could patch wounds. This strange world had little in the way of advanced drugs, but it had herbs and trades. If I could make medicine, I could earn money. If I could earn money, I could buy my mother a place to live, away from the cold rules of this house.
Evie came back with dry linen and pulled it over my head. She fussed like she loved me with quick hands.
"Don't let them pin you," I told Evie, not sure if the words were for her or for the world.
"I will not tell anyone," she promised.
That night I went to sleep with Harmony and Blake whispering diagnostics like lullabies. I dreamed of sterile white rooms and the smell of antiseptic. I woke at dawn and thought: Step one, save the prince. Step two, save my mother. Step three, build my business. Step four, leave.
The prince's name was Griffin Alvarez. He was a man the court feared and pitied: handsome, brittle, sick. They had married me to him because the court said our fates matched. He had poison in him when I first found him. The poison made his color waxen. He lay on a pale bed and looked like marble that might crack.
"I can't believe you moved him," the court physician, Cedric Atkins, said when I told him not to worry and walked into the sickroom. He was a kind man with tired hands.
"Trust me," I said, and my voice was steady because I had scanned him. The machines in my head helped. Harmony fed me scans. Blake ran data I could not see here. I told Cedric what to pull, what to stop.
We worked through the night. I gave the prince nutrient mixes, cleared clots, pushed oxygen. Harmony ran fluid mixes with a careful rhythm and Blake kept the environment clean. They were small miracles in my palm.
At three in the morning his pulse steadied. His eyelids trembled. I covered him again with a blanket and told him softly, "Rest."
Days bled into each other and the prince began to grow less like a waxen figure and more like a breathing man. His hand was hot when I let it go.
"Who saved me?" he asked, voice rough as gravel.
"You did not die," I said. "Eat this. Open your mouth."
He did. He tried to seem fierce and distant, because strong men who needed help often kept distance to hide fear.
"You're from House Per," he said one morning, when he had more voice. "Why did you risk yourself for me?"
"You are my husband. I am your doctor. Same thing," I replied. I felt a small glow—dangerous and plain.
For a week we lived in a small island: I treated him, he slept, he learned to eat. I cooked simple meals with the herbs I could salvage from the clinic. I wrote recipes and prescriptions. Harmony and Blake helped me make pills the old way and the new way. They would never leave my side.
"Miss Dawn," Evie whispered one afternoon, "your mother is worse again."
Joanna's cough had been quiet. A small test of blood in my old life—easy in a clinic—took more effort here. I pulled blood anyway with the tools Harmony conjured from memory. The result hit like cold.
"Stage two lung disease," Harmony said.
"We can do surgery," I said. I shut the door on fear and moved like I moved in the clinic: calm, methodical. I set up a sterile place. Blake sterilized towels with embers and herb smoke. I prepared instruments the only way I knew how.
We worked for hours. Evie stirred hot water and kept Joanna from shivering. I put a needle by muscle practice. The mother gasped and then slept. We pushed blood back into good places. We fought infection with herb poultices and with a precise dose of what I could make: a blend Harmony said would reduce fever and help the blood.
It worked. Joanna woke with a softer breath and opened her eyes. She thought she had died. She thought she would not feel the sun again. She smiled like a woman who had been given a gift not to be wasted.
When she could whisper, she said, "Dawn... you will make me leave this place."
"Yes," I told her. "I will take you away."
That promise stirred me. It opened plans. I could not use the estate's money. Per Yang would never help. I would have to buy freedom with my own hands and pills.
"Make pills," Blake said quietly. "Make a medicine the people want."
So I started small. I made herbs into small balls. I used beeswax to seal them. I named them for common needs: digestion, cough, blood clear. Evie helped me sell them to the kitchens and the poor helpers. It was not much, but each coin felt like a small boat, carrying us away from this house.
Three days later they arrived to take me to the prince's house. It was a parade of drums and silk and faces. My sisters watched me mount a golden carriage with eyes that cut like cold knives. Estrella's smile tore at me like a paper cut.
"When we return," I whispered to Evie, "we do not bow to them."
She nodded.
The prince's house was a different prison: more guards, less warmth. The bed smelled of herbs and old dust. Here, I found that Griffin—my husband—was not only a man struck by weakness: he was a man who had been stabbed by politics. The poison he carried was not simple. It had been placed by someone who wanted him dead.
"Why would someone kill you?" I asked one night as I sat by his bed, hands wrapped around a bowl of warm milk.
He was honest in a way men who have faced death sometimes are. "Because I stand between men and power," Griffin said. "Because I will not be whoever they want."
"Who?" I asked.
He drew a breath and closed his eyes. "I do not know yet. But someone will try again."
I closed my mouth and decided one thing: I would keep him alive and I would not let a blade take him.
Days turned into a new pattern. We made a deal. I would be his doctor and his partner in life. He would let me move freely and learn. We signed a paper—two copies, ink and seal. "Yimin Hall" it read in my hand when I later wrote it: House of Medicine for the People. He laughed when I said the name. He wrote the characters himself later on the shop sign.
"Partnership?" he asked.
"Five and five," I said, thinking of making my own future with my own hands. "You give the space, I give the medicine."
He signed.
Opening a pharmacy in this world was like opening a bright window in a dim room. People came first from the side streets, then from the market, then from towns. My pills helped digestion, helped coughs, consoled fevers. I taught Evie how to write numbers the way I used to, and she wrote receipts with a bright hand.
We called it Yimin Hall and put it on Griffin's old silk shop on North Street. The palace and the town watched with a kind of curiosity usually reserved for bright sunlight after long rain.
"How do you make money in silk and tea?" I said to Griffin the day we opened.
"By making people trust me," he answered. "You have earned mine."
He had a way of watching me that made me feel like a subject in an experiment that turned sweet. He would come to the shop sometimes, but not often. When he did, he was awkward at first. Then he would stand behind the counter and hand out bowls of porridge to a child. I loved him in the little rules he made for us. He called me "partner" in public and "Dawn" in private.
One night, after a long day, Evie came back white-faced.
"Miss Dawn, your father is at the gate. He says he wants to see you."
"Tell him no," I said, but I already knew my father's hunger would not stop until he had the one thing he wanted. Power. The knowledge that his daughter had turned a prince's favor into a house that would make money for him—he wanted that part of me.
Per Yang arrived like a man who expected the world to bend. He saw the shop full of people and his eyes narrowed into a measuring stick.
"You opened a shop on palace land?" he said. "Who gave you permission?"
"Griffin did, with my agreement," I said, calmly pouring a cup for a street vendor. People watched. My father's face found thin veins around his mouth.
"Shame you didn't think to consult your family," he said.
I said nothing.
"Leave the shop and come back home to the estate," he said. "Your mother has her place by my side."
"She is sick. She is free," I answered.
The words landed like stones. Per Yang's face went cold then white. He had not thought I would speak. Estrella, who had followed him, looked at me with a hungry smile.
"You've put mother with rag houses," she spat.
"She is with me now," I said.
"How dare you," she hissed.
Men of the estate murmured. Some looked at me with envy, some with quiet joy. I felt a new strength settle down the length of my arms. I had a medicine business. I had a husband who would stand beside me. I had Harmony and Blake. I had Evie.
"Take your money and your pride and leave," I told my father.
He left with his face like carved wood. The look he gave me when he walked away was one that said he was not finished.
Days later a man came at night. A knife flashed in a candle's dark. The assassin moved like a hungry animal. I felt heat in my shoulder and the sound of a cello string popping. I reached for the small rod hidden beneath my skirts—my defense—and it sang like lightning. He dropped. The house erupted. Guards came and took his body away. The man had a mark—black wolf on his shoulder. Someone was sending killers.
Griffin watched me from his bed that night, and his eyes were strange.
"You fought," he said.
"I defended," I said. "You do not always have to fight with your sword."
He closed his eyes. "You saved my life tonight again."
This new closeness between us built slowly. He trusted me with his weakness, and I trusted him with mine. I began to watch him when he thought no one else watched. The way he sat with his hands wrapped around tea. The way his jaw tightened when a letter from the court arrived. I wrote down his pulse, his temper, his small habits. He learned to let me kiss his forehead before he fell asleep.
People began to whisper that Yimin Hall mirrored the heart of its owner: gentle, open, healing. The city began to send sick children to us. We grew not only profit but community. Weaver families left their old debts at our door and we gave them herbs and the knowledge to heal.
I taught Evie to hold the cup unshaking. I taught Harmony and Blake to measure with cloth and spice. Meanwhile the court began to notice. Scribes wrote that the prince was recovering. The Emperor sent emissaries to the palace. The more we healed in the public eye, the more dangerous the men in shadow became.
"Someone tried to poison the prince once more," a guard told me in a low voice. "They failed. A servant in the palace was caught carrying poison to the kitchen."
I sat with the report until my hands went numb. The same black wolf mark appeared again. Whoever sent the killer wanted to make sure the job was done. We started to watch for patterns: which markets carried shadow herbs, which men paid for silence. Blake could track trade in a way I could not. Harmony could sense patterns in blood.
We discovered the mark belonged to a group of hired killers—men used by a single noble to do dirty work. But who paid the noble? Who wanted Griffin gone?
I turned outward. I opened Yimin Hall's doors wide and asked the townspeople to tell me anything they had seen. They whispered of late-night carriages, of sacks dropped in the palace stables. A boy of twelve offered me a clue: a name for a name—Canon Cole pointed the wrong way.
One night, during a feast where the court celebrated the prince's health, I did something no one expected. I stood up and walked to the center of the hall. The chandeliers trembled with candlelight. The Emperor looked at me with a small hint of curiosity. The court watched like a theater.
"Your Majesty," I said loud enough for the nearest servants to hear. "I wish to speak."
"Who are you to stand in my hall?" the Emperor asked, with a smile that did not reach his eyes.
"I am Dawn, wife of Prince Griffin Alvarez," I said. "I am also a healer. Last week a man came into the Prince's bed with a knife. He was not a lone wolf. He carried poison that matched the poison used before. I ask only that investigators be thorough."
People turned in their places. My father was red as a beet. Estrella clapped slowly like a blade's strike.
"It was three people who tried to kill the Prince," I continued. "One of them was seen near the stables bringing sacks at night. Then a messenger from the northern trade route came with the same sacks. The trade route is handled by Minister Galileo Duran's agents."
A silence like a seal followed. The Emperor set his cup down.
"You accuse Galileo Duran?" he asked slowly.
"Investigate him," I said.
The Emperor tapped his fingers. The ministers shuffled. Galileo's face had gone a bad purple. He stayed still like a caught fox. In a month, the investigation turned. Men who had worked for Galileo walked into the courtyard with confessions under threat and promise. The black wolf mark? It was a sign of the men he bought. He had used them to try to make houses change hands, to clear his own road to favor.
When the truth came out, it came like a hammer. Galileo Duran was dragged before the court. He screamed at first. People recorded his voice. He begged, he denied, he turned and pointed. He told names like he was throwing knives. He lost everything. His name was scrubbed from honors. His land was seized. His family had nothing. His business partners left, one by one.
In public, he fell to the floor and begged mercy. The crowd made him small. Cameras did not exist here, but the newsboys took his voice like tinder and burned it out to every corner. Men who had once courted him now spat in his face. His last wife left him the same night. His sons were forsaken. He had nothing.
I watched him crumble. I felt a small taste of victory that did not satisfy but helped. The court cheered like wolves at the kill, and I looked away. My heart was not hungry for this.
When it was over, the Emperor came to me. "You did this," he said. "You saved my son."
"You put the pieces together," I answered. "We did what we could."
Griffin stood behind me and placed a hand gently on my shoulder. He had a careful smile that meant something like surrender.
"Thank you," he whispered to me later that night when the court had emptied. "You took my life and set it in a better place."
I laughed softly. "You are my husband. We share both mischief and medicine."
He grew bold the morning he came into the shop and leaned across the counter. "Dawn, will you come with me to the north market? I want to see where the old silk came from."
I looked at him and felt the weight of that ask. He was inviting me into his world without walls. I took his hand.
We walked the stalls like two children in a maze. He asked questions with a curiosity I had not seen in court. When he laughed, his whole face opened. When he worried, small lines marked his forehead and I touched them with the pad of my thumb.
Yimin Hall grew. Our medicines reached farther towns. We made a pact to help the poor for little to no money. We fought off men who tried to sell fake pills by proving our blends worked. We hired apprentices—the ones who could learn and stay honest.
One day a letter came from my old home. Per Yang had been stripped of some roles because of his negligence. He had lost favor. He wrote me asking for help. His tone was humbler than the sky. I read the letter and folded it, then burned it in the hearth.
"Do you want him free?" Griffin asked.
"No," I said. "But I will not be cruel."
I sent a small gift instead: blankets and a note that said, I have my mother. Keep your wooden bed. He never replied.
The people loved the shop because it felt like a safe house. We kept the herbs fresh. We taught who needed what. Harmony and Blake kept the mixtures precise. Evie ran the shop and learned to weigh things with a steady hand. The city began to see me not as a bride of a prince but as a woman with a hand that could restore breath.
The prince began to show tenderness in ways I had only read in old romance scrolls. He left me a cup by my desk with tea when I worked late. He left small notes with poor jokes. He came to pick me up from the market and walked beside me like a man who had no need to hide. The tender ways counted like stitches.
But not every wound is healed by herbs and speech. There were still nights I woke up with cold air in my chest, waking to voices that belonged to the old me. I would find Griffin's hand at my waist and his breath slow. I learned to sleep and wake in a place where the past and present braided.
Then came a new danger. A man from the palace had been spreading rumors about the shop—poisons hidden in loaves, ingredients stolen. A puppet of the men who wanted the prince stopped. He came to the shop and started shouting. He said unfair things about the people who came here for help. The streets filled with whisper.
I did not shout back. I put my hands on his shoulders and told him plainly, "You are hurting people by lying."
He laughed and shoved me. The patrons watched. Griffin came out of his study like a blade and stood by my side, eyes flat. "Leave. Now," he said.
The man bared his teeth and fled like a dog that lost a fight. The crowd clapped—for me, for Griffin, for ourselves. I thought of the day I woke up under cold water and how much rope had pulled me to shore.
One afternoon, a small woman from the market came in holding a thin shawl and two coins. She bowed and said, "Lady Dawn, you helped my child live. I have these two coins. Please take them."
I took the coins and the shawl and put them on the wall next to a small plaque we kept for poor people's gifts. The woman left and I watched her shoulders straighten. Someone shouted from outside, "Yimin Hall! Yimin Hall!"
I had done something with my hands that made a city call my shop's name.
In the quiet, Griffin took my hand and said, "What will you do when you are tired?"
"I will rest in the shop, with you," I answered.
"Will you stay my wife even if the court wants otherwise?" he asked, a small fear like a child who might not be loved back.
I looked at him and saw a man who had learned what it was to be alive, who had been rescued and was learning to give back. I leaned in and kissed his forehead. "I already am," I said.
Months passed. We celebrated Yimin Hall's first winter with steamed buns and warm oil lamps. The pharmacy kept us busy. People came from farther towns with tattered cloaks and illnesses. My mother grew stronger. Evie laughed more. Harmony and Blake sang in their small robot voices.
Then one morning a man from the old court—Canon Cole—came to the shop, eyes like a gull. He bowed and said, "Lady Dawn, there is a matter. Your father has lost walking. He asks for medicine."
I looked at Griffin. Griffin looked at me.
"Take him," Griffin said. "If he is sick, he needs care."
When Per Yang came, his knees shook. He asked for his mother. He asked for forgiveness. He wanted his family back. I bandaged his hands and gave him a brew that would settle his stomach. I set a corner at the shop for him for a day so he would have shelter. He stayed three days and then wanted to take back his power.
"No," I said.
I had the power to be merciful and the power to be firm. I gave him food and then helped him to leave with dignity—no public ruin, no feast of cruelty. He left a letter thanking me in a small hand. I burned it like an old coat.
At the year's end, the Emperor came to the shop. He brought the Empress and the elder prince and the court with him dressed in finery. He walked slowly and his eyes scanned the room.
"Dawn," he said, "you have done well. You have made medicine and you have healed my son. I—"
"You did not heal him," I interrupted, because silence can be a weapon for those who hold it too long. "You gave me a chance. You gave me the power to heal."
The Emperor smiled and nodded, and in his smile I saw the map of a man who had learned to trust a small thing.
At the feast that night, Griffin took my hand in public for the first time. He fed me bean pastries in front of the court like a child. The Emperor laughed kindly. The Empress watched me and gave me a silk scarf. The world bowed in small ways like a stream moving around stones.
Spring came. The shop's sign read, in Griffin's fine hand, "Yimin Hall." He had carved the first character that winter and refused to let me change it. The letters were crooked and beautiful.
We married again in a quiet room, just us and Evie and Harmony and Blake. No decree was needed. We promised aloud that we would be partners. He pressed a small ring into my palm. It was not gold with jewels. It was a thin band he had found in an old chest, engraved with the word "stay" in the prince's hand.
"Stay," he said, "not because you must but because I ask it."
I put the ring on. I kept it.
Years later, Yimin Hall was more than a shop. It was a place where midwives slept between births, where old men took tea and told us stories of rain, where apprentices learned to read numbers and hold scales. It was a place people trusted their children to when they had fever. It was a place that made a city kinder.
One evening, as the lanterns burned low, I closed the shop and walked with Griffin down a small lane. He held my hand without any armor of office. The world bent into dusk.
"I was afraid when I woke in this body," I said softly. "I was afraid I would wake back in my old life and never love this one."
"You came back," he said, his thumb rubbing over my knuckles. "You stayed."
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small wooden hairpin Joanna had given me before I left the estate. On it I had carved, in a child's scratch, a small sun. "This is the thing that came with me," I told him. "It reminds me that even when you are out of breath, you can rise."
He kissed me like a promise. "You taught me to rise," he said.
We reached the little garden behind Yimin Hall and sat on the stone bench. Griffin took a small knife from his belt—a sharp thing he kept for carving—and made a crude mark on the wood of the shop's bench. "We leave our mark," he said, and carved a small sun beside mine.
When I closed my eyes, I saw the pond. The water had been cold. I had learned to breathe.
I had learned to build a life, to make medicine, to make a shop, to make a home. I had loved—and been loved—by a man who used to be near death and had become my partner.
I put my hand on the bench where his sun sat and my hairpin rested. I smiled and felt the weight of a life that was mine.
"Stay," he whispered again.
"I will," I said.
We sat until the lamp under Yimin Hall burned out. Outside the street vendors closed their stalls. Someone laughed across the lane. The city pulled its blanket over its shoulders.
Inside, on the shelves, little jars lined up like small suns. Each held something that I had mixed with my hands and with Harmony and Blake's help. Each was labeled in ink and in a careful hand: for cough, for heat, for a fevered child, for a tired mother, for a father who had lost his way.
They were not miracles. They were medicine and work, and the work of people who kept making the city better, one small ball at a time.
Later, when I stood before a mirror and braided my hair with the small hairpin, I looked at the woman in the reflection and said, "You did good."
She reached for the sun on the bench with a hand that had known drowning and healing. It was warm.
And I was not afraid of the water anymore.
The End
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