Face-Slapping10 min read
I Woke Up with a Stolen Heart and a Fox in My Pocket
ButterPicks10 views
I woke under the moon and first saw a woman above me, her face twisted like a lesson I had failed to learn.
"Little wretch! How dare you glare at me?" she hissed, and the whip in her hand sang like broken promises.
I tried to move. I could not.
"I told you not to make a face." She leaned in, voice sharp. "Tomorrow you will kowtow to Prince Dax De Luca. Don't think you'll be his bride."
I smelled blood and old silk. I felt the whip as it cut, but I couldn't move my limbs. I could only watch, like a guest at my own torture.
"Ah—" she said, savoring the sound. "Tell me, is it worse when bone is broken and mended, or when the whip eats your flesh away?"
The whip cracked again. The world narrowed to the rhythm of blows and my useless eyes. My chest felt empty. At first I couldn't even feel the pain. Then the world returned in a rush—hollow, then burning.
"You should rot here," she whispered. "Or I'll settle you myself."
She raised her hand slow, like a theatrical villain. "This is the most exquisite pain—the gouging out of a heart."
The knife was cold. The world was loud.
I screamed without sound. The blade slid. I tasted iron. Then everything went bright and slow and I smelled mud and hot water and the shock of another body.
"Wh—who's there?" I heard two voices weeping by the corpses.
I opened my eyes. Cold moonlight. Two servants, eyes wide as saucers. They saw me and screamed.
"Monsters!" they cried, and ran.
I rose as if pushed by something older than hunger. My hands found hot water. I hit the spring and sank. Warmth wrapped around my ribs, and the hole in my chest knitted itself with a careless warmth that felt impossible.
A man came up out of the steam like a statue bored of being admired.
"Who trespasses in my pool?" he asked, and even his voice seemed carved from ice.
I blinked, because he was breathtaking; ugly to call him handsome and wrong to call him ordinary. He looked like a carved lord, white robes and a danger tucked into those purple eyes.
"I didn't mean to," I said. "I didn't look."
He snorted but did not move to strike. He only watched me fumble for a ring on my finger and smooth it.
"That ring holds my power," he said slowly. "I should take it."
I laughed, because I had learned the truth about my luck: it was always absurd. "No," I told him. "It wore me first."
He paused. "You?" he said like a man tasting a memory. He looked at the ring, at me, and the steam that curled between us felt like an old map.
"One hundred years," he said, as if the words were a clock. "I remember a night. You sang drunk on the shore of the living because you had no voice of your own. You took my ring and pretended it was a joke."
I remembered lips and wine and a rash, foolish laugh. "That was me," I admitted.
He studied me as one studies a wound. "You are not alone now," he said. "You do not have one soul. You have something like three."
"Then names are a mess," I said. "I don't remember which name is mine."
"Chaya Jenkins—White Manor's fifth miss," he said bluntly. "And you have pieces not meant for this world."
He held out a hand. "Give me a drop of blood," he asked. "I will know what was taken."
I smiled, because what else does a girl with a stolen heart do but bargain? "Fine."
I bled into a vial I kept like a secret. He peered into it like a chemist into a prophecy. His eyes darkened as if someone had asked the moon to stare at a dying fire.
"Your blood is old as the first field," he murmured. "It has life inside. It's why you burst through my seal."
He was not polite. He was not warm. He was necessary.
Later I learned his true name—Felix Hughes—but that night he was simply the man who could read vows like maps. He watched me leave and said, "You will meet those who want to cut you into pieces."
I had already been cut into pieces once. I decided I would learn to stitch myself.
A fox slid into my arms, all soft and eight little lies. It nudged my cheek with a tiny paw, then spoke with the voice of a spoiled child.
"Silver tail's fur is cute," it said. "I will be yours."
"What?" I said, because foxes don't usually volunteer.
"To bond," she said. "We will be bound. I want a home."
The fox bit my hand. Pain blinked. A thread looped into my head—the world hummed and something ancient clicked.
"You're mine now," she said. "Call me small-white if you like."
I cursed my luck: cursed by a sister, pushed into the living, shackled to a ring and a fox who called herself domesticated. I laughed though. This life had complications. I could work with complications.
The palace that night smelled of incense pretending not to be politics.
"Chaya Jenkins!" a voice sang, and a woman—my sister Francesca Newton—peered down like a hawk glancing at carrion.
"You still breathe?" she said. "How courageous."
I sat and sipped tea as if there had been no attempt to kill me in the moonlight. The court buzzed like angry bees.
"Prince Dax De Luca," she said loudly, "will not marry a monster."
Prince Dax's eyes were like someone reading a bad contract on the stage. He made that noise—dismissal rolled into disdain. "I refuse to wed her," he said.
Murmurs. Teeth bared politely.
"Bring her to the Judgment Platform!" he demanded. "Let truth stare the lies down."
They obeyed, because what else do they obey? Politics and appearances, and old men who want to rearrange life like chess pieces.
They raised the platform. I went up alone, red robes slipping like a question. The light that crawled over me tasted like iron.
"She killed her mother," Francesca announced. "It is written on her bones."
"Enough," the Emperor said. Sterling Harrison's face was the color of thunder. "We will let the court decide."
They turned the Judgment into a machine. Light rose and a screen showed past like a cruel mirror.
"Show the truth," Francesca called, confident as a cat with clipped claws.
The platform's glow swelled. People leaned in, expecting goblets to clink with satisfaction. Instead, something impossible bloomed: lotus flowers of light. The crowd gasped.
"Impossible," someone whispered. "The myth of a thousand-petaled bloom."
The platform declared me "Innocent." The court stammered, the whispering folding into bewilderment. Light spilled like final notes.
Then the images rolled differently than Francesca planned. The screen showed her hands, not mine—her fury; her forging of wounds; men paid to lie. Her father Vaughn Dalton leaning like a fox over a table, handing over a pale pill.
"No—" Francesca said, and the first flicker of color drained from her face.
"She set me up," she pleaded. "It was for status. For—"
The crowd shifted. Eyes found her like knives—friends, neighbors, courtiers. The woman who'd stood so high trembled.
"How dare you," she cried fiercely, and then louder: "This is false! I never—"
The screen kept painting the truth: her hand on a knife, her orders whispered in corridors, a servant's coerced confession. Her proud, showy smile became a thing of tar.
I watched her move through stages as if someone scripted a tragic play: pride, then surprise, then scramble, then collapse, then begging.
"No!" she screeched when the video showed her last lie. "You cannot show that!"
Around her, people took phones from hidden sleeves. "Record it," someone said. "This—this is news."
A chorus of camera-light dots blinked like judgment. Faces leaned forward to taste scandal. Whispers crawled into shouts.
"You—" Francesca's voice cracked. Her eyes darted to her allies. They had abandoned their hands when the images had turned.
"We must leave," one man hissed, but the palace was the net; its ropes were knots that smothered lies in public.
Francesca's swagger dissolved. She was suddenly small—petty and raw. She fell to her knees in the hall in a way that had nothing to do with humility and everything to do with being caught.
"Please!" she sobbed, and for the first time she looked human. "Please do not ruin me. I will—I'll beg—"
The crowd did not step back. Some muttered, some cheered, some took pictures. A throat cleared.
"Feast your eyes," someone said. "Justice tastes like this?"
A small girl with a phone laughed with a cruelty borrowed from years of stories. "Put it on the cloud," she said. "This will go all night."
"Don't you see?" Francesca cried, mouth open, tears wet as raindrops. "You don't want to—"
She tried to stand, to pull the dignity of rank back over her ribs, but her legs were a mess of tremors. The cameras loved that.
"Shame," someone intoned. "They all loved her when it was fun."
Francesca's face twitched. Denial fought its way out. "No—no—this is a conspiracy! They forced me!"
Then ice. Her cheeks went hollow. "Someone help me," she begged, hands stretched like a drowning thing.
People gaped. A noblewoman started whispering guesses about who would inherit the family's wealth now that truth was gnawing at its roots. A servant filmed with open, greedy eyes.
"Block the gates!" someone yelled, but the gates had been open for gossip forever. The video had already gone to ten thousand hands before a guard could blink.
She fell forward, palms scraping the stone. A group of onlookers parted into a ring of ears. "Beg!" one courtier said under his breath. "Kneel!"
She did more than kneel—she collapsed into the red carpet like a burnt offering. Her shoulders shook. She mouthed apologies like counterfeit coins.
"Please, forgive—" she cried. "I will do anything. I will—"
Nobody moved to cheat the law. People recorded the full collapse. Some took out coins, some spat at her shadow. A few, small, voices clapped. The claps came like accordions—stiff and strange.
I had stood on that platform with nothing to prove but truth. When the lotus light died down, when the crowd finally cooled its breath, I turned to Francesca.
"You used me for a throne," I said softly. "You used my name for greed."
She flailed. "You—"
"Change your life," I told her. "Fix the people you hurt."
She did not hear reason. She saw only ruin. "No—please—" she begged again, voice cracked. She wet the stone with tears and begged for mercy from the very people who had once listened only to her lies.
Guards took notes, servants whispered predictions, and the city would not stop talking. The video would stitch itself into every hand. Her name would be a warning.
Later, when the palace quieted and lamps burned low, I opened the death register in my head—the ledger that came with my stolen ring. It hissed like a reluctant snake. I had used it; it had rebuked me with a cough of cold revenge. The register resisted meddling, its hunger for life balance like a beast that ate bargains.
I pressed my palm to the cheap vial of blood I had left and let a tiny drop sink into the book. It purr-groaned like an unhappy cat and set a limit on what could be changed. I had extended my grandfather Wells Taylor's years with three strokes and priced a life to keep a man who had been kind yet fragile.
"Grandfather," I said later, under the white curtain of night. "You worry too like old maps."
He chuckled, a small lighthouse in the dark. "Stop worrying the way you steal poems," he replied.
I learned the truth of my bones in the days after the trial. My luck wasn't luck. I was a spark of an old power: I had four elemental roots, not one—lightning had been in my palm before the doctor's needle. I had been made to be useful to someone greedy. They did not know how strong I could be.
I trained like a child furious at the world.
"Which should I awaken next?" I asked my fox one night.
"All of them," she answered, tail flicking smug consent.
So I did. Fire first, because it was honest and loud. I wrapped lightning into my fingers because it had been my cradle. Wood and wind followed because they listened.
Prince Dax De Luca kept his polite veil. He came with the flourish of a man collecting trophies.
"I will never marry a monster," he had announced, but the country is full of men who believe their own press releases.
"Then do this," I said, because I had nothing else to do but be sharper than they were. "If you want this house, you will have to take what is offered. I will take nothing."
He tried to bargain. He misread the weather in my face.
"Make them give you my sister instead," he demanded.
"What?" I said, as if the idea had been dropped from the moon.
He tried his threats. They clattered like cheap armor. I let him walk the day he refused civility; he went home to polish his own ego.
Weeks later the city had stopped pretending to sleep. The web of scandals and bargains had been rewoven into a cloth that still prickled. I found myself walking through markets, binding wounds, and learning how to thread power into a spoonful.
Emperor Sterling Harrison raised a brow at me the day I asked permission to enter the herb clinic.
"Who are you again?" he asked, smiling like a man who relied on his smile for everything.
"Chaya Jenkins," I said. "I want to learn."
He looked like kindness until he decided to punish me with forgetfulness. I walked in as a novice and walked out as Master Otto Richter's—no, Otto Richter was the herb sage who later took me as an apprentice—assistant.
He laughed and showed me how to turn a ruined talent into a living thing.
"You will injure many people with that blade," I told Francesca once, when she came to me for medicine. She had already been ruined by the palace but not yet hollowed by the shame. She pleaded without dignity.
"Save me," she begged.
"Not by lying and stabbing," I said. "You can be saved by cleaning up what you made dirty."
She knelt, and I watched the last motion of her arrogance turn to the slow dust of remorse. People kept walking past. The city doesn't spare change for confession.
There was a night when the fox and I fought with a pack of men who thought old grudges were coin.
"Go!" I told Felix Hughes—Felix was the man from the spring. "Take them."
He rose when I said the name and moved like an old story's hero. He never asked for my thanks. He had been wounded because of me. He had learned patience.
We bled for the little things and grew for the big things.
When Francesca's name came up on the lips of strangers, she flinched like an animal who kept expecting the trap to snap. I had given her a last, public offering of truth. I had not killed; I had cut off the rope that let lie carry her like a kite.
The fox curled in my pocket like a secret and purred. She whispered in the night.
"Master," she said, "are you going to keep that red pen?"
"The death register?" I asked. "Maybe."
She yawned. "Promise me one thing."
"What?"
"Don't lose it at a market. Old debts smell like fish there."
So I keep the little ledger locked in a box beneath my bed. Sometimes I open it and it snores like a grumpy animal. It tells me that I can change years, but at a cost.
I tuck my ring into the drawer and close the lid.
That night a single lotus light slid across the floor and the fox slept, and I listened to the sound of someone who had once been robbed of her heart finally learning how to beat on her own.
The End
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