Sweet Romance14 min read
The Bridal Mask I Couldn’t Drop
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I took my sister's place and went into a marriage that every whisper in the capital called cursed.
"You're sure you can do this?" Klara Long asked me with eyes that flickered like candlelight.
"I can," I wrote on paper and showed her. My ink strokes were messy; my heart raced.
"Then don't speak," Klara said softly. "The less you move your lips, the safer you'll seem."
I had never planned to stand in for Aviana Adams. She had the gilded life and the lacy air; I had the kitchen scars and a heap of quiet. Still, when our parents decided the match would soothe both houses, I held the little white sheet and pretended to be silenced by an illness of the throat. Pretend well enough, my mother said, and our family would mend.
The wedding night was a test. I sat in the bridal chamber until the moon drowned. When the door finally opened and a tall silhouette filled the frame, half my body wanted to shout that he was beautiful. My mouth stopped me. I remembered: I could not talk.
"You're very quiet," he said, and the hush of the room made his voice feel like leather and wine.
He stepped in, and the heavy curtain parted. He looked up like a man who smelled something familiar in the dark and found it comforting. His eyes slanted tenderly, and he reached to lift my chin.
"I heard," he murmured, "that you had a fever three years ago and lost your voice. Perhaps you cannot complain when you are hurt."
My heart gave a wild, stupid leap. Rumor painted Greyson Patel as a man who kept grudges and sharpened them into knives. "So you marry to revenge," I wrote on paper, shaking as I did it. My handwriting betrayed me in little rushes.
He smiled—"You must be Aviana," he said. "The one who threw coins at a beggar and laughed."
His fingers felt like a test. He leaned in, kissed me, and said against my mouth, "Even if you are quiet, some sounds are enough."
My face blazed hot as if he'd put a torch to me. I did not know whether to be insulted or safe. I held my silence like armor.
The capital had stories about Greyson. He was the emperor's half-brother in title, stripped of favor in childhood, dragged back when fortunes shifted. Two previous brides, the gossip went, died within the first night of marriage. People spoke in stifled tones of traps and vendettas. But sitting beneath his hand, I felt not a butcher but a strange, meticulous cruelty. He tasted like rain and glass.
"Afraid?" he asked later, when my shoulders inches away from his warmth trembled.
"Not afraid," I tried to write and forced my hand to be steady. He laughed then, a low sound like coins dropping.
"You're good at acting," he said. "You make a better silence than most."
I hated him a little for seeing through the shape I'd been pushed into. He traced the edge of my jaw, and in those fingers I felt both the promise to break me and a sliver of something else. "I will listen if you ever wish to tell me something," he said, "even if your voice does not come."
I wanted to tear the curtain down and run. I wanted to fling every secret at him. Instead I nodded in the dark and learned map lines on his expression.
Daylight in the palace is a different animal than night. Greyson's tenderness was practiced like a general's salute. He could be casual and devastating at once. "Try this," he offered one afternoon over lunch, pushing a bowl toward me. The kitchen girl had made me a stuffed cucumber, a thing I hated.
"I—" I started, then clamped my lips. The persona of Aviana could not say she disliked what was placed before her. I smiled, meek and obedient, and nodded.
"Do you miss your voice?" he asked later, like a king testing a vassal.
I wrote, "Your work at court must be exhausting. I worry for you." He read. For a moment he let that be all.
"Do you want to speak to me now?" he asked.
I could, for a fraction of a second. I almost whispered, "You're very handsome." I swallowed the line down. I wrote, "To care for you as your wife." He took my hand and said, "Then be my wife."
Klara moved into the wing as one of my attendants. She was practical and had a face that did not scatter easily. She put up my hair and tended the small wounds my pretense attracted. Outside our rooms, the court's shadows moved in predictable patterns: watchers, claimers, people who measured what little favor a woman could gather in a smile.
After a time, I saw how Greyson worked. He had muscles of a puppeteer: he could make a councilman squirm with a look and make a stage of a room. "I keep people alive when it suits me," he told me once, lifting my hand to his face. "But not for their gratitude."
He was clever, and he was kind in ways that made me angry. He let me sleep in, let me linger at the kitchen door, let the small things in life become things he noticed. "You always go for the best sweets," he teased once, seeing me steal a honey cake from Gia Brooks. "And you never say no to a second one."
"I like them," I wrote back. He pouted and called me "my quiet piece of sin" and then laughed as if he'd shared a private joke with himself. "People will see you different," he warned once. "They always do."
"That's your problem, not mine," I wrote.
He curled his fingers into mine with a softness that made a knot inside me loosen. It was enough to make me remember nights in the rear of the manor, the way my mother had arranged me like a place-holder doll in life. My father, Bowen Hughes, his eyes practiced the look of not seeing me. Lenore Burns, my stepmother, had been an artist at quiet cruelty in the household. Their faces had shaped my childhood like a chill.
"Your mother asked for you to return," I told Greyson a week later. "She says she is ill."
He looked at me and the expression folded like paper. "Then go," he said simply. "Go and see her. I will not go with you."
"You're sure?" I asked. He pressed his forehead to mine. "Go."
I returned to the house of my origin and found what the last five years had done to a family. "We miss you," my supposed mother said, but not with tenderness.
"Did you come back to stir trouble?" Father Bowen asked with a dangerous patience.
"We asked you home, that's all," Lenore said. "You can come for your mother."
They wanted me to poison Greyson; they wanted me to take what had been promised elsewhere by their new allies. A small white bottle rested in my mother's palm like a confession. "Drop this in his cup," she whispered. "Then your fortunes change."
Aviana—who they treated as the favored, until illness took her voice—sat across from me with eyes that blinked like someone without keys to speech. She looked at the bottle and at me with something like pleading. I took it and hid it beneath my skirts. "I will think about it," I wrote.
Back in Greyson's house, I watched the courtly tide roll over him again. "You left in a hurry," he said, flopping onto the couch like a man too tired to be dangerous.
"I took care of family," I wrote. "Everything is taken care of."
He smiled and said, "You look like you could use a good rest." He fell asleep curled against me. In his breath I smelled herbs and tobacco.
Then he was poisoned.
He choked at the dinner table, blood leaking like scarlet ink into the candles. My heart tried to jump out of my throat. "Help him!" I wanted to call, but the mask I wore would not let me.
"Get her," someone shouted: Adam Schultz stood near the door, eyes ice.
They fished in my jewelry box and found the white bottle. The menacing faces of those sent to seize me were faster to point than to think. "She tried to kill him," Adam said.
Greyson's hand found mine even in his pallor. He looked at me and whispered, "I trust you." He spoke and yet he trusted me. My throat clenched. I couldn't speak. I could only write: "Not me."
He pushed words out like an injured animal letting breath. "Klara, call for the physician," he said.
"It is poison," Adam said. "We will take her to the cells."
"No," Greyson's voice slid into a softness that made men defer, "don't."
"Don't what?" Adam said. "He's right. She must be questioned."
Greyson reached for me with a hand that trembled. "She couldn't do this to me," he said.
"Then prove it," Adam said. "Let us search the rooms."
He did not shout me down. Instead he said: "Search the house. Find how the bottle ended up where it did."
When the men pushed past me, a part of me wanted to scream that my life had been set to burn by family hands and that Greyson, for all his fearsome reputation, had not been the one to light the match. Instead I sat with the weight of his trust in my palm and knew that the world had shifted.
"Don't put her in the cell," Greyson told Adam later, in a thinner voice. "Find the truth."
Adam looked at him like he had asked to move a mountain. "Yes, my lord," he answered.
Greyson's eyes did not look away. "If I am to trust anyone in this house, it will be her."
I sat with that sentence like a stone. It comforted me and frightened me. I wanted to stand and tell him everything: my mother's plan, the way Lenore had smiled while clutching the bottle, the callousness of Bowen Hughes. But the mask kept me silent.
"Then find the liar," Greyson said.
He recovered slowly, but the poison had made a claim on his flesh. After he was well again, he seemed to take more and more pleasure in the small cruelties that had once unsettled me. The kitchen girl Gia disappeared; a body was found bruised in the west yard. He told me later in his room, "I told myself it would not be you, but the world is full of mechanisms I must attend to."
Months passed like seasons in a bowl. Greyson and I grew into a rhythm we both hoped would stay shallow enough to avoid drowning. "I brought you something," he said one evening and set a carved box before me.
Inside was an embroidered screen my mother had taken—the double-sided piece my little mother had stitched for me once, before she was silenced by the house. I ran fingers over the hidden threads and found, along the hem, small stitched letters: "Esperanza's peach," "Esperanza's butterfly," "Esperanza and me."
My throat filled; my glove felt wet. "You found it," I wrote.
"I did," he said. "They needed a reminder of the things you were owed."
"You did not have to insult them to take it back," I wrote. "You could have—"
"People do not change the script when offered a nicer pen," he said. "They keep their vices."
I went home again, this time with Greyson at my side. He stormed through the family home as if he owned the air. "You stole my wife's heirloom!" he declared. "You defied every law of hospitality."
Father Bowen tried to rise on the plea of rank. "He has no right to—" he began.
Greyson smiled like a man who loved the taste of a trap. "Indeed. But I do have the right to make sure those who cross my wife feel as if their bones might remember."
Lenore's face froze. "You cannot threaten—"
"I can," he said. "And I will."
For all his odd temperature, his threats were measured. He did not kill or burn, not that night. He took back the screen, sat me down in the courtyard and said nothing for a long time. "You made him a target," he said finally.
"If he must be a target to be free, then let him be what he is," I wrote.
He wound his fingers in my hair and said, "When you are near me, I lose the practice of cruelty."
My stepmother's contempt was a sour thing that had weathered the years. On the day I slapped her across the face at the family showdown—"You don't deserve to mention my mother's name!"—a crowd built like stormwater. Words flew back and forth until I held a small knife to my father's throat; he had called my mother a disgrace, and his words were the cigarette burns to the memory I still carried. Bowen's face paled; Lenore shrieked.
"Put that down!" Greyson ordered. His men were ready to pounce, but he held them with a look.
"Let her do it," he said to the room. "Let her cut down what is left of her father if she wishes. We will not force her hand."
I did not cut him. I put the knife back. I had wanted to show I could kill; I had not wanted to be the one to do it. The spectators—neighbors, servants, and a few distant relatives—gasped and then muttered among themselves. I watched Lenore's face undergo a series of small deaths: surprise, followed by denial, then a rise of hatred like a new scar.
"You dared to maim me?" she screamed, now with the attention she had long hungered for. "You barred us from our rightful wealth!"
"My mother was not a possession," I said aloud to the quiet courtyard, and my words landed like pebbles. The crowd shifted. Some faces drew away; others leaned in. Greyson stood at my side, and his presence made the men around him feel both safer and smaller.
That same week, in the palace, I walked into a hall of stone and glass with a suitcase of truth. "I will say it," I told Greyson. "If there is to be justice, it must be shown under the sun."
He didn't try to stop me. "Make sure it's the sun we need," he warned. "There are bargains that have teeth."
The public punishment was designed to be a spectacle. It had to be, because we needed not only to break the people who had hurt me but also to break the networks that would move to replace them. The emperor agreed to hear the accusations because it fit his design, and the court buzzed with anticipation.
We arrived in the throne room; it smelled like incense and secrets. Jonas Harris, the long-time rival whose house had backed the plot to poison Greyson, sat at a distance with his son Colin Kato. Their faces were expressions practiced for victory.
"You will speak now," Greyson told me. "I'll stand behind you. If you faint, I will carry you out."
I took my place and read the list of crimes in a voice that surprised me by not cracking. "My father, Bowen Hughes," I said, "and my stepmother, Lenore Burns, conspired to place poison in my husband's cup. They plotted with Jonas Harris to secure alliances and wealth."
"Liars!" Bowen barked, red-faced. "You—this is slander!"
"Do you deny giving me this bottle?" I asked, pulling out the small white vial. The court breathed in as one organism. My hand was steady.
Lenore's expression shifted first from anger to a small calculation, then to fear. "I..." she stammered, "that is not—"
"Enough," Greyson said and with one motion signaled Adam Schultz and Booker Kennedy. They walked forward and produced the accounts, the receipts, the notes that showed transfers and offers that linked the Hastings of the east quarter to Jonas Harris' men. "Everything that touched that vial is on record," Greyson said.
The crowd reacted immediately. Murmurs became a roar. "No!" Jonas said, pounding his fist. His composure cracked like thin ice. He stepped forward, rage flashing in his eyes. "You have no proof!"
"We have more than proof," Greyson said. "We have witnesses." He called them up. "Klara Long, Gia Brooks, and others who saw the bottle handed over and watched the exchange."
I watched Jonas's face go through a progression I could memorize: first contempt—he thought himself untouchable. Then fury—he realized his empire had termites. Next, denial—his mouth shaped the wordlike prayer that this wasn't happening. Finally, collapse—his shoulders slumped and the corner of his mouth drooped, a man who saw his life unspool.
The emperor, who usually sat with an ivory calm, lifted a thin finger. "Stand aside," he said to Jonas. "Let the law decide."
"They be stripped," Greyson whispered to me, but the room heard. "They will be stripped of titles, their lands seized, and they will stand in the square for three days. Let the common folk judge them."
Other punishments were creative and public: Lenore Burns was made to sit upon a low stool in the market square while the town criers read out her deeds. They did not beat her; instead, they made herbs and ashes and covered her hair with them, and her gilded hairpins were taken and hammered before the crowd to be meaningless. People took pictures with small woodblocks of her face turned away. The humiliation was slow, surgical—her social currency was robbed before her. A pack of women threw soups and coarse bread at her as she sat. She went white, then beet-red, then began to beg for mercy.
Bowen Hughes was stripped of his minor civic title and publicly removed from the merchant rolls. Men who once bowed no longer met his eye. He went from a man of some standing to a footnote in the town ledger. "You thought I would let your good deeds remain in shadow," Greyson said aloud when Bowen tried to make a speech. "You performed murders under the cover of household disputes. The court sees you now."
Jonas Harris suffered a different end. He was accused openly of treachery and collusion with foreign merchants. His banners were burned in the main square, and then he was escorted from the city to be held until a formal sentence. But before the gates closed, Greyson ensured a final humiliation: Jonas had to kneel and publicly apologize to the people for using their lives as his commodity. At first Jonas refused. "I won't kneel," he sang, like a warbird refusing a net. Then his face contorted through the same playbook: arrogance, shock, denial, frantic bargaining, and finally, when his son Colin Kato stepped forward and begged, Jonas fell to his knees with the look of a man whose dignity had been monetized.
The people reacted with a carnival of sounds: gasps, clapping, bows of satisfaction. Some pulled out little blocks and etched the day into wood. A child in the crowd laughed and slapped their thigh; a widow cried. The officials noted every reaction, the cameras—those modern scribes—whirred. When Lenore's hairpins were smashed, a chorus of voices rose: "For the wrong they did!" Some people spat; others silently clicked their tongues in condemnation. The entire spectacle was more than punishment—it was a re-setting: it told everyone who watched that the old games ended and that new prices must be paid.
Jonas's reaction as they dragged him from the stage was the most dramatic. "You cannot do this!" he cried. "You will be undone!" His voice turned thin. People shouted. A woman in the crowd, a mother of three who had once suffered a spat of loss at Jonas's private mills, stepped up and spit at his boots. His face collapsed into a wet, animal fear. He begged, he cried, he tried to bargain—"I will give land! I will give wealth!"—but the court was having none of it. "Repent in public," the judge declared, "or forever be the man whom history names small."
Lenore's transformation was equally staged. Initially she tried to bristle, then to deny. When the mother of the kitchen girl, Gia Brooks, stepped forward and said, "She called my daughter a thief and set a blade in her bed," Lenore's face went from sneer to horror. "I didn't—" she started. The witness named specific hours, the night of the poison, the time of the exchange. For each claim, Lenore's voice became thinner. The crowd watched her go through the classic steps: charm, denial, anger, and finally collapse. Her hands shook. At one point she reached for her hairpins, then realized they were gone. She sobbed, and the crowd's laughter turned into a low hum of pity.
Bowen's decline was quieter but starker. Once he was removed from records and collections and had his title turned into this year's leavings, he found himself alone at the table. Men who had once dined with him now cross the road. He stood on his porch and no one came. He first puffed, then pleaded, then crawled to his wife asking forgiveness. When she refused—"You were warned," she said—he fell down like a broken sack. His eyes were empty as an extinguished lamp.
Every one of these scenes was public, slow, and designed to change how people looked at the perpetrators. They were not killed; they were made small, and in that smallness, they could be read and remembered and despised. That punishment was sweeter than any death I might have imagined, because it left them alive to know what they'd lost.
After the day of punishments, after the market stones had been swept and the banners replaced, Greyson and I walked through the city like two people who had survived a storm. "You did well," he said.
"You did well," I countered.
"No," he said with a crooked smile. "You did."
The rest of our days were patchwork. He told me the truth—more than the whispers: his earliest wounds, the years he had been a beggar and an angry child, and the plan he had hatched to hold the great and petty alike to account. "I married you because I wanted to own an old slight," he had said once, and I'd slapped him with paper, "because I wanted the one who had hurt me to be at my mercy."
"When I realized the joke had been on me," he said later quietly in the dark, "I kept you because you didn't wish me harm."
"I never did," I wrote, and he put his forehead to mine and said, "Then it's settled."
There were nights of tenderness—the kind that landed like a soft hand on a rough shore. "Your fingers go to the same place when you are nervous," he observed, tapping my left thumb where a callus shaped like a crescent lived. "You are not what you appear. You are stubborn, like a weed." He laughed. "And I like stubborn weeds."
"Why me?" I asked, because the doubt always came back like tide.
"Because you stayed," he said simply. "Because you did not take the easy thing and run."
In the months that followed, I found my voice—not the woven quiet my family had insisted upon, but something steadier. When I spoke at the emperor's court to claim the recompense for my mother's name, I did not stutter. I stated the facts, I named the names, and I asked the crown for a title to place above my mother posthumously so that her memory might be cleansed. The emperor listened and, after a long silence, clasped my hand and said, "You were brave."
"Not brave," I said. "I was tired of being small."
"Still," he smiled, "the empire owes you a civil debt."
Greyson's rank changed after the fallout. He was relieved of actual regency power and given the title of a prince whose lands were nominal but whose name remained important. He did not mourn it publicly. "If my hands cannot shape the country," he said, "I will shape our life."
We buried my mother's name not in dirt but in a public acknowledgment and built a quiet place in the countryside where her embroidered screen hung in the sun. On a porch of pale wood, I would lay my head on his chest and feel the war of his days ease.
"Do you still remember that night in the cold?" he asked me once as we stood on the ship to the northern provinces.
"I remember the hands," I said. "You saved me from a life of other people's design."
He smiled, his mouth turning rueful. "And you saved me from the hatred I might have made into a god."
We went to the far north when the snow receded and found a wide gray plain with green beginnings. The wind bit. "It looks like the world has been scrubbed," I said, and he laughed.
He cupped my face and bent down. "You will not be called anything other than Esperanza to me," he whispered, and I felt the old name settle like a warm stone.
"You said once to call you something else," I replied, both of us remembering the murkier nights.
"I will not be called by that old name either," he said. "Call me what you will, and I will answer."
He kissed me then, a clean, honest thing. The air filled with the scent of thaw and new grass. For the first time, I believed the warmth might last.
The End
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