Sweet Romance14 min read
The Bottle, the Wolf, and the Deal I Signed
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I woke up in someone else's skin and found a man bleeding on a stone like a broken statue.
"Who are you?" he rasped when I first opened my eyes. His voice was silk and steel, and it landed on me like a verdict.
"I—" I swallowed dust and the taste of someone else's fear. "My name is Jessalyn."
He spat, a thin ribbon of blood, and pushed my hand away. "Roll away from me."
"I didn't do anything," I said, and I meant it. My head still hummed with the echo of another life—metal birds and sirens, a squad that called me Big Panda, and a piece of the government's vault sewn into my ribs. Now my ribs belonged to a wild-girl with scars that made people look twice. I blinked at the cave mouth, at the tangle of green outside, at a bottle with a flying-bird pattern glinting in the dirt.
"You drank it," the man accused. "That's what you did."
"I—" My fingers found the bottle and, stupidly, lifted it. "This wine? I found it."
He cursed. "The kind they only pour when they want trouble. Why are you here?"
"You tell me." I laughed then, a small, bitter sound. "Why are you here with a sword through you?"
He tried to look grand and failed. "I am Liam."
"Liam?" I echoed. The name should have been a label on a crown, not on a man with linen sticking to his chest.
"Stewart," he finished. "Liam Stewart."
I had been a field medic in a future that smelled of rot and disinfectant; I had seen men die with better manners. This one felt like a king in a cave. My body, which used to be someone else, reacted in ways my old bones never had. I put my trembling hands on his thin chest and found no gunshot wounds, only something the field books called toxin burn and the sort of puncture that liked royalty.
"You're poisoned?" I said.
"Apparently," Liam said. "And you are apparently trouble."
"Guess what," I said, and the old fight rose in me like steam. "I'm trouble's new roommate. If you bleed to death because of me, I'll... I'll make the wolf eat me last."
He looked at me like he wanted to laugh and then he didn't. The cave spun. I sat on a stone and tried to remember who I had been: Jessalyn in another life—no, I had been called Du Yuexi in those old files—and the memory that burned brightest was betrayal: a man named Noah had smiled with my blood on his hands. Noah—Noah Lorenz—had wanted what was inside my body, something called the mobile space. He had pressed a blade into my ribs for it. I had lit the world on fire and fled into darkness. I had not expected a rebirth in a cave with wolves and an injured prince.
"Help me," Liam whispered, and for a moment his kingship dropped like a curtain.
I loosened his bandages, fumbling. "Keep still." My hands moved the way fingers learn when a body is taught by pain and repetition. I found rotten dressing and old blood and replaced it with the salvaged gauze in the pack he had come in with. He coughed when I touched the old wound and looked at me the whole time.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked, breathless.
"Because if you die here, your men will come ask where you went and find you on the floor in a cave with a girl who smelled of wolves," I said. "And because I'm not an animal. And because I'm tired of men dying off me for stupid reasons."
He made a sound at that, something like a chuckle and a choke. "You are very forward."
"Try being a medic for a demobilized army; our sarcasm training is mandatory," I muttered.
Days peeled like rotten varnish. I fed him fish I learned to trap, then rabbit, then the marrow of an old hunting culture that belonged in a body I didn't know. He woke one night and shoved my head from his arm like a small, furious child.
"Get off," he said.
"Get off what? The whole world?" I asked, and the cave echoed with the ridiculousness of it.
"You are unqualified to be anywhere near my things," he said.
"Unqualified? I sewed you up with one hand and a spider's patience."
"Silence." He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.
"Fine." I sat on the cold stone, my ribs aching in a new way. "But you owe me food."
When he started to walk again, people came.
"Drake!" the first one cried, kneeling and then freezing because Liam's eyes were hard as flint. The newcomer bowed lower to me by mistake and then froze when he realized I was not a maiden he expected. He blinked like someone outside the tent in a snowstorm. "Sir, we found them in the cave."
"Who is she?" Liam asked.
"Her face," Drake said, "is—"
"I know," I said.
"No one looks like that on market day," Drake said, an accusation and an awe together. He knuckled at his brow and spat on the floor like a child averting bad luck. Around us, the mountains exhaled green and the wolves resumed their half-sentient watch.
Liam had men—two in particular who became both shield and mirror: Mario Barton and Chester Burke. Mario was blunt and honest as an ax; Chester watched me with a wary appetite, a man who liked things catalogued and who also could not hide the way my hands patched him when he sprained a thumb. Liam's brother, Clayton Oliver, ruled a distant garrison. The adviser was Damien Herve, a thin man with a head for ruinous plans. They all questioned me, then watched me work. They watched my hands more than my face.
"Why do you care about a dog?" Mario asked once. "It's not like it can save a battle."
"It saved me," I said. "And if a dog remembers, humans should too."
Milo English—my dog, my bone—followed me the way memory follows a scent. He had somehow arrived with me in the ragged shell of a stray and sat on my lap like a king who had shrunk. He listened when I talked and trembled when Liam's spiral of control loosened.
"Keep the dog," Liam said one morning, which was the first time he let a softness that was not merely strategic show. "But keep him quiet."
"Deal," I said, and Milo licked my hand.
In a few weeks, I ate and worked and absorbed wood-magic like breath. The forest gave me sap-sweet energy that hummed into my bones. I coaxed mushrooms to grow under my fingers. I made leaves bend as if to bless wounds. I am not religious, but when I felt green light moving under my skin, I bowed my head until the ache in my chest filled with roots. My old life—my Big Panda life—had taught me to beg for food and to bargain with the ends of things. This world taught me that a power like mine was not currency alone but a tool.
One clear morning, while Liam and his men debated who had enough honor to fetch water, I went to the stream with a woven basket.
"Jessalyn!" Drake called. "Bring some fish back. Lord Liam is inclined to eating like a human."
"Since when did you think it was a bad thing to be a human?" I called back.
He laughed. There is a man's laughter that is soft with relief. I hoped this man would laugh a lot in his life.
At the stream I snagged four fish in a trap and felt a prickle at the back of my neck. A huge wolf with a scar across one eye charged from the trees, its fur like a grey storm. It moved in a flash that split my breath. Two wolf-pups skittered behind it.
"Back," I muttered to the pups. "Get to the mother and stay."
The wounded wolf eyed me like an old debtor and then lunged forward, its teeth seeking the fish before me. I dropped the basket and it ate; then the scarred wolf turned and walked away, leaving blood where menctic battle had been.
"They follow you," Liam said when I came back, carrying nothing but a wooden bowl.
"They did before I could be called a human again," I answered. "I fed one once. She saved us both."
He watched me with an expression I couldn't parse. "You will not starve. If you stay, you will be fed."
"I will repay you with farmable acres," I said. "Give me hillland and I will grow winter to summer."
He squinted, calculating. "You plan to plant an army to pay my debts?"
"You'll see," I said. "Or we'll starve trying. Either way, you'll owe me."
He considered and then nodded. "You have a deal. I will speak to Clayton."
Clayton arrived with men and things from another life: letters that smelled of bureaucracy and banners that meant direction. The army near Liam's command was short of silver. The province considered selling farmland and calling it banked revenue. Liam's face darkened like weather.
"Where does the money go?" he asked Damien.
"In the open mouth of court," Damien said. "To mouths that are large and hungry. There is no coin coming from the center."
"I'll carve it out of the hills," I said bluntly, thinking of seed packets and the quiet way soil accepted prayer without asking for payment. "Give me land. I plant. I harvest. I sell. Nobody starves."
Liam's eyes found mine. "Twenty taels now," he said, sliding a small heavy pouch across the table.
I doubled my hand around it and felt something I hadn't felt in a long time: victory.
"Fifteen."
"Liam—"
"Twenty."
I grinned. "Deal."
The city we left the hills for was a ribbon of life: stalls, laughing children, the smell of spices and a million small fights. I bought a pair of cotton dresses and my first piece of pride: a small, crude pair of stitched shorts for my belly. People stared when I walked, and I stared back in a way that made trouble step aside or at least take a deep breath. My face had a map of its own. People said things. A teacher called me "an offense to manners" and I told him that sometimes manners were the armor of the coward. Some clapped. More hissed. Liam watched me from his sedan chair and laughed in a way that was not quite dislike.
"Why do you gamble on her?" Damien asked him, once.
"She makes me laugh," Liam had said. "And I like to laugh sometimes."
"That is not a reason to alter policy."
"Isn't it?"
"King's work is not for amusement."
"And yet," Liam said, "I am not a king."
The imperial palace, when I was finally pulled into its gravity, smelled like cold silk and silent plans. It was there—thrust into the center of gossip and lacquered cruelty—that I would find Noah Lorenz again. He had been in my old life, a smile made of teeth and offers like knives. In this life he was an official attached to the palace who smiled like a man delivering tea. He had the habit of leaning close when people could not see his hands.
"Jessalyn," he said when he found me at an official's reception. He did not meet my eyes. "I never expected you to survive."
"You never expected me to be patient," I said.
"Patience is not my virtue," he answered, with that old boyish charm that had once made me foolish. Around us the courtiers rustled like dry leaves.
"Can I help you?" I asked.
"No. I only came to taste the wine the palace offered," he said, and his moustache shaved to perfection. "And... to see how the woman who sold me her future for a promise looks now."
I smiled. "You always were a gambler."
He leaned close. "And you always were reckless." For a flash I saw the shadow of the man who stuck a knife into my chest in a world I had left behind. "You took something that wasn't yours."
"Noah." Liam's voice cut from across the hall. He did not need to move. Everyone felt the cold sail of his disapproval. Noah's smile stalled like a bird against glass.
"Prince," Noah said, leveling that smile into something thin, worldly. "Happy to be of service."
"You betrayed her," Liam said.
"No," Noah said, and the crowd, ill-timed and greedy, shifted forward.
"Is this true?" someone in the crowd called.
"No!" Noah said, and then to me, "You should be grateful."
I stepped forward, a small thing in a sea of measuring gazes. "What did you take?"
My question hung like a bell. Noah's throat bobbed. "You speak boldly for a woman in my debt."
"I sold myself once to survive. You sold me again when you tried to steal the vault space. You think the law will help you."
"Noah—"
"No," Liam said. "You will stand. Tell them."
Noah stood under the lanterns and for the first time someone took his measure without the velvet of dignity. I pulled from my pocket a scrap of writing I'd found in the storage chest the first time I'd crawled into a hollow to hide. It was an old receipt, a paper that might be nothing in another life but held enough truth to split a man.
"When you pushed me, you took a code," I said, loud enough that the chandeliers trembled. "You took what belonged to the state's vault and what you could not understand. You tried to sell it and you killed—"
He went white. "You lie."
"I have witnesses," I said, and called the people who had seen Noah trade with a mid-level official, people whose bread depended on truth for a living. "You bartered my life in exchange for a promise of power. You were paid. You accepted coin."
Noah's face moved through stages: a controlled sneer, a smirk of defiance, then a real panic that made his eyes small and ferret-like. "You have no proof."
"Then listen to them." I pointed at a clerk I'd befriended: Todd Singh, a ledger man with ink under his nails. "He balanced your accounts last autumn."
Todd stepped forward and in a voice that smelled of cold ink and fear, "I saw it. Notes of payment, a transfer, coin marked by the merchant Lorenz favors."
"Wh-what coin?" Noah stammered.
"Coin stamped with your merchant's mark," Todd said. "You gave instructions to hide transfers. You wrote receipts that never reached the ledger."
The courtyard inhaled. Pages murmured. A woman in a saffron dress began to clap, small at first, then others joined—the answer-starved crowd that lived to see a high one fall. They had no proof worth a judge's oath, but they had the weight of a thousand small eyes.
Noah's bravado buckled.
"You accused me of treason," he hissed to Liam, to me, to the whole plaza. "You accuse me of—"
"Of stealing the state's secret," I cut him off, and now my voice was cold as winter. "And of stabbing a woman so you could claim her secret faster."
He found his knife among his words, the old smile he had used in the alleys, and tried to use it. "You were always dramatic."
"People die for secrets, Noah," I said. "You thought a woman with a space on her would not get another life to tell the truth."
"Proof," he said. "Where is proof?"
"Here." I walked to the chest inside the palace, because I had friends who trusted me, and pulled from under a cushion the evidence: receipts, token seals, the kind of paper a man cannot erase when a dozen trades have written his name in the margins. I laid them for the crowd like a harvest.
For a long moment, nobody spoke.
Then the crowd began to mimic a courtroom. Fingers pointed. A clerk screamed. "You will be judged!"
Noah changed his face three times. He first looked the way men looked when they were waiting to be publicly praised, then like men who are told a debt is due, then like a child who has lost a game it could not win.
"Take him," Liam said, and the command was a blade that did not need to be sharpened.
"Noah Lorenz," I said, because names make men accountable. "You tried to sell what did not belong to you and you used a man's death to hide your greed. What do you have to say for yourself?"
He staggered, words falling like a man struck in the ribs. "I— I fought for the crown."
"You fought for coin," I answered. "You stabbed me because you wanted the code in my chest. You thought I'd be an easy shelf. You forgot that the thing you sought had a memory that could burn you." I looked at the people who had come to watch scandal as sport. "You will not be praised today. You will be known."
"Stop," Noah begged. He fell to his knees in the plaza, a grotesque mirror of the aristocrat begging for mercy. "I— forgive me. I'll pay you. I'll pay—"
The crowd had its rhythm now, hungry and exacting. "Pay!" several voices cried.
"Beg!" someone else shouted.
He did both, and the more he begged, the more his mask fell. First his confidence drained to silence, then to shame, then to the sharp, animal panic of a man whose every future calcified into a public record slammed under a judge's gavel.
"Take the torch," someone called. "Show his face to the square."
They dragged him—oh they dragged him—through the market and placed him on a raised platform outside the granary. I watched his face as the city, hungry for spectacle, turned him inside out.
At first he was smug, then flustered. He tried a thousand apologetic shapes. He called for friends to intercede. A few came and left when it was clear that commerce could not buy this moment. People took his name and called it like a warning: "Noah Lorenz, who bartered a woman's life."
He pounded his fists on the wood and his voice went hoarse, and the plaza answered him with a chant that dried his mouth: "Trait—or! Trai-tor!"
They slashed his pride in stages: first, they read the receipts aloud, each line of ink a bullet; then they recited the names of the men who had died because of his deals; the crowd took photos with their crude crystal devices—oh how crowd memory had teeth—and they recopied the receipts and handed them to the town criers. He tried to bargain with silver he did not have; his merchant accounts were frozen, a dozen small ledgers decreed it.
Finally, the magistrate-acting-in-public raised his hand. "By the town's rules and the evidence," he pronounced, "Noah Lorenz is to be disgraced. He will wear the collar of shame, paraded for three days, and all his claims to property are forfeit."
Noah's face went through terror, then pleading, then a thin, vanishing anger. He turned to me once—no, not to me; rather, to the memory of what he had tried to buy—and in that look there passed a man entirely unmade, a man whose plans had been sand under the city's feet.
Liam watched, and something like triumph softened into something else—an aching I could not name. Noah's servants abandoned their cart in the square. Noah cried for pity and found none. People spat on him and some recorded his confession. A guard lifted him; they put a collar on his neck, the wooden kind carved with names and the crime. They led him through the city, and by the time the sun bowed, his voice was a scrap of cloth.
We watched him go. The crowd cheered as if they'd seen justice; other half of me—old Jessalyn—felt the thinness of revenge like a cold wind and wondered what it had traded. Noah's eyes met mine once when the sun was low. They were small and empty. For a flash of a breath, I understood why I had gone too far the other time in dying.
"Is that enough?" Liam asked quietly.
"Enough for now," I answered. "His name will keep others from following him for a while."
"And you?" he asked. "Do you feel better?"
"Less lonely," I said. "And less afraid."
He put his hand out like a truce. "Come home with me."
"Home?" I echoed.
"Stewart House has a garden," he said. "You will teach me how soil behaves."
"I will teach you because you didn't tie me down and sell me," I said.
"Because you didn't starve."
We laughed, a raw sound on a cold night.
Over the months that followed, my plan unfolded like green shoots. I took the land he promised; I planted rice and sorghum; I built irrigation with men who only knew how to measure a blade at a time. "We grow first for winter, then for coin," I told them. "We sell the harvest for seed. We do not starve." Liam watched me with a soldier's pride and a lover's curiosity. He watched when I bent over seedlings with my hands and when I tucked a warm scarf around Milo, who slept at the foot of my bed.
"Why do you keep the bottle with the flying bird?" he asked one afternoon, watching me clean jars.
"It means I almost died for a laugh and a drink," I said. "It reminds me that small things can change everything."
He smiled as if he'd never heard of small things like that. "Then keep it."
Months passed. We argued like people who knew each other's edges. He called me forward when decisions needed steel. I taught his men how to live with gardens and seasons instead of wars and paydays. I mended a hundred wounds with the same hands that had sewn Liam in a cave, and sometimes we lay together in the tall grass and did not speak.
Publicly, Noah's punishment became a legend of the square: the man who bought greed and received humiliation in return. He crawled back from pariah toward a small, quiet life as an accountant, but everyone who passed him spat and turned away. "Let him keep his pocket," Liam said, and I knew some payments are moral, not coin.
At night, when the wind smelled of grain and the wolves howled like a chorus that had learned our names, I would hold the bottle we had found in the kill-site and listen to it catch the light.
"It is yours," Liam said once, as we watched the moon tilt above our fields.
"It kept me breathing," I said. "It will keep me honest."
He kissed the top of my head like a promise being given and kept.
I had crossed a world to come home to a cave and a man who could be more king than any crown. I had been betrayed and had burned the betrayal into memory; it was no longer a trap but a map. I planted and I healed. I made friends where I could and enemies where I must. The bottle sat on a shelf in our little room like a comet's dull shard: a thing you could always find again.
And every market morning, every time the city called for justice, I remembered the look on Noah Lorenz's face when the crowd turned its eyes on him. He had been an early lesson. The public punishment had been a wind that rearranged the city; I had been the one who learned how to use it.
When I watch the bottle now, sunlight through glass, I still hear wolves at the cave mouth. I still feel the pressure in my chest that used to be the end of a universe. But when I get up, I go out and teach seedlings how to get tall. I teach men how to measure harvest, and sometimes I teach a prince, for we are both students in the work of not dying to foolish plans.
"Do you still hate him?" Liam asked once, and I looked at the bottle.
"Not hate," I said. "I prefer consequences."
He laughed. "A wise answer."
I touched the bottle, the bird painted in relief, and I knew that some things will always be my sign: a bottle, a wolf, a sales contract signed in a panic. They are reminders that a life can be saved and sold and saved again. I put the bottle back on the shelf.
"Here," I told the night. "Here is the proof of who I am."
The End
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