Revenge16 min read
The Fox Bride and the Cold-Hearted Hunter
ButterPicks12 views
I was always louder than I needed to be.
"I am Autumn Garcia," I said to the little camera in the campus square, tilting my head, smiling the kind of smile that had taken me centuries to practice. "Why not? Why shouldn't I be?"
The student reporter blinked and asked, "Do you think you're the most beautiful student at Southdance University?"
"I..." I let my chin dip, let my laugh come out soft. "How could I not be?"
"Then what about Bella? What do you think of Bella Knudsen?"
"Bella?" I made a small, careless face. "She works hard. She gets up at five every morning to do her makeup." I clapped a hand over my mouth. "Oh, sorry — can I say that?"
The reporter looked at me, grin small and sharp. "Sure."
That little clip went viral the same day.
Comments splashed across the feed. "Who does she think she is?" someone typed.
I typed back without thinking: "Because I'm the only one who looks like this."
I left my contact below, two WeChat IDs. Girls added the first. Boys added the second.
Within hours, "Autumn Garcia, arrogant queen" trended at Southdance.
I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Messages flooded in. The first inbox, full of venom from girls. The second, full of offers, dates, men calling me a goddess. I answered both. Girls called me names; men offered their time. Both proved my charm worked. I liked to think of myself as generous: I took what I needed and left the rest breathing again.
"Why would you hurt so many?" a friend asked one night.
"I'm not hurting them," I told her. "I protect them. I take what they give me and let them go back brighter. I only take a little. It helps them. It helps them be better." I smiled as if that settled it.
I had rules. I never took from a good man. I left men with loyal partners alone. I preferred the careless ones, the easy ones. They were safe. They were convenient. They paid and left. I rotated lovers like seasons, and it was enough.
Then I saw him.
"He's different," I told Bella, when I first saw York Robertson standing on the basketball court like a statue. He moved like a machine built for speed and balance. His skin was pale and clean as bone under the sun. He was a national-level athlete, someone whose body sang with power.
"He's also pure," Bella said, eyes glittering. "I haven't seen him with anyone."
That word made my claws itch. Pure. Untouched. Pristine.
I moved my water stall to the edge of the court.
"A bottle costs ten," I announced, smiling. The boys bought the water and pretended to brush my hand "accidentally" as they took it. They all believed they had won something.
For a week, he didn't so much as glance at me. He practiced his layups, too focused to be distracted. He didn't notice my skirts flick or my eyes linger. I realized I had to try something larger, bolder.
The ball arced and hit me on the head like a comet. I feigned dizziness, let my face fall against his shirt, and the world narrowed to the scent of his sweat.
He moved — and stepped aside.
I fell to the ground.
"Autumn!" one of the boys called. I used the moment; I clung to him like a shadow, inhaled. Warm, bright, true. It filled a hollow inside of me.
He pulled a little away, his face a cool mask, but his ears burned pink.
"How much for compensation?" he said, crouching beside me. His voice was flat and practical.
"Money?" I looked up, heart racing. "I don't know. Maybe we should check at the hospital."
He showed me his WeChat instead. "Scan this. If it's about money, find me there."
He walked back to practice.
I left my red cap at his feet on purpose.
I left like a satisfied thief.
For days I waited for his messages. Two days passed. I sent him a voice trembling with barely concealed mock-panic.
"York, my head still hurts. Could it be a concussion?"
"Go to the hospital," he answered an hour later. "I'll transfer you whatever you need."
"It's not the money." I leaned toward the phone. "Will you come with me? I get scared alone."
He answered after a long time. "Take your roommate. I'll cover her fees too."
That was not what I wanted.
"Then come," I lied. "I want you."
The phone went silent.
He texted slowly. "Autumn, four of the boys in my dorm are your exes. Are you someone who loves one after another?"
"You're the one I love the most!" I wrote, because it was the truth I wanted him to believe. He didn't reply. He blocked me.
I begged, whimpered, sulked — finally he agreed to go.
In the hospital corridor he flinched when I climbed into his arms. I leaned close. The scent of him filled my lungs and something ancient in me reached for it.
"You're pale," he said. "You look sick."
I dropped onto him and breathed. He sidestepped me again, and the emptier the space, the stronger his light seemed.
"You should be careful," he said stiffly. His ears were red again.
I acted faint. He snorted and actually tried to steady me. I felt him tremble, felt the warmth under his shirt.
He said, "How much is the bill?"
I teased him: "Then don't make me go to the hospital alone. Touch me once and I will be cured."
"Don't touch me," he said. "I don't like being touched."
"Then that's what makes me want you all the more."
And so he came to be the reason I changed my rules.
"We are foxes," Bella said later when I told her everything. "And our master died because of a man centuries ago. He was a hunter."
"I won't be like her," I said.
"You should be careful," Bella warned. "Men are dangerous."
But the pull of raw, undiluted sunlight on skin is harder to resist than any warning. York's body was a luminous reservoir. To be near him was to bloom.
He was colder than anyone I'd met. He did not smile for others. He watched the world with a stillness that might have been ice. When he finally let his hands find me, it felt like theft. I took and the world brightened, and each kiss made my fox-heart beat faster.
"How do you feel?" he asked once, lying beside me in the dorm hallway after a storm. The rain had shut the campus gates and we could not go back.
"The rain smells like a clean start," I said, and meant it.
We found a cheap hotel with one room left. It felt like destiny, like the plot of a stupid romance everyone loved. He left the door to the bathroom closed, and when he came out wrapped in a towel my body was a map of hunger.
I kissed him until my fox-pearl inside me began to glow. I pushed too far and my nose bled.
"You're bleeding," he murmured, his face unreadable.
I lied. "I am fine. A nosebleed from the rain."
He smoothed the hair from my face. For the first time I saw him smile in the dark — a small, crooked thing, like a moon-slice. I memorized it.
"Thank you," he said later, voice soft through the thin wall between our beds. "You were the first to come to me. My father... he left shadows."
I took his hand through the gap. He held it. "Try not to play with fire," he warned.
"What fire? I only want to be warm."
He asked if we could try. "Will you be mine?" he said.
"I will be," I promised.
Love changed my daily rhythms. York's physique fed me like some sacred fruit. I found myself stopping my other games. A month passed with no new lovers. It was the first time in centuries that I hesitated.
"Are you in love?" Bella asked bluntly.
"I adore him," I said. "He is mine."
"Are you sure?" she asked. "You have been a fox for centuries. You know what men are."
But this love was different. York sent flowers — simple stems of moonlight grass — every evening. He held my hand in public. He defended me when students whispered cruel things.
"People say he will hit you," someone called one afternoon, cruelly. A boy shouted obscene lies.
I laughed it off. "He's not like that," I said, but when the mocking voice stirred something in him, York grabbed my hand and pulled me out into the night. He ran until the city lights blurred. He held me so tightly I felt anchored.
We hid in a convenience store from the rain, and the hours slid into something comfortable.
We argued sometimes in whispers. "You know I'm fragile about my past," he said once. "My father broke my mother." He pressed his head into my shoulder like a child. I felt my claws retract.
"Then don't be cruel," I told him. "I won't."
We moved in together, because leaving the campus behind kept us safe. He began to take over parts of his father's company, and he worked hard every night. I would wait on the doorstep, ready to hold him.
One night, the phone tugged me out of sleep. "York?" I said.
He didn't answer. The call said he was in surgery. My hand shook as I ran through rain to the hospital.
A nurse said, "He has critical injuries. Come quick."
At the emergency room I learned the story: an attack on a hill where the company had held a team event. York had been alone. "Bear attack," the nurse said, but the air tasted wrong. My paw-throat pressed.
I thought of the Master I had once loved and lost to hunters. I thought of the quick barbs of malice that lived in men's hearts. I ran to the only place left where bargains were struck: the threshold between worlds.
"I want him alive," I told the keeper of deals. "I'll give anything."
The keeper — a fox of terrible beauty named Joselyn Heinrich — raised an eyebrow. "Anything?"
"Everything," I said.
"All nine tails?" she asked, and the world shrank. I thought of the Master and the last lessons. I thought of winters, of poetry, of the small, bright face of York sleeping under fluorescent hospital light.
"If I lose them," I said, "I will not keep my long life. But he will live."
She smiled as if I'd offered her a cheap bauble. "Done."
I handed over my tails in the solemn place where bargains take flesh. I woke up in my bed with my chest hollow and York asleep beside me, bandages rolled into a small, steady mound.
"You're alive," I whispered. He slept as if his life had been returned to him.
I felt fragile as paper. The tails were gone. The pearls were quiet.
For a while it worked. He was tender. I was grateful. I became small around him, aware of the emptiness where my great tails had been. I fed on the little warmth he offered and I learned the meaning of being human-small.
Bella and I spoke less. "You gave everything for him," she said once. "What will you do if he turns?"
"He won't," I said, and tried to believe it.
He started to bring me little things: flowers, small notes. Each note made my heart twist. He seemed gentle, clutching me near and sometimes asking stupid, honest questions.
"Are you sure you want to marry me?" I asked one evening as we placed plates on the table.
"Yes," he said, without hesitation. He bought a ring and asked me under an empty sky.
I hesitated. "Is this too soon?"
"It is never too soon," he said, and the ring glittered.
I wanted to say a thousand things: that I was not only a woman; that my past had teeth; that my body had been a storehouse of other men's light; that I had traded my tails for him. I said, "I will marry you."
The day of the wedding, I prayed silently that Bella would come. I had sent her the time and the place like a hand-written invitation. She did not reply.
I walked down the aisle in white, the room full of faces that had watched me change seasons. He looked at me with a face so intent it was like a promise. We exchanged vows. The officiant smiled at our happiness. For a moment I trusted everything.
Then York did something I could never have imagined. He pulled a dagger — a small, precise thing — and plunged it into my chest.
"Why?" I whispered as heat and light popped like stars. My fox-pearl shimmered and popped like a match, and the hall saw it. People gasped. I tasted the betrayal like poison.
He struggled, the knife in his hand slick. His face was terrible and strange. The color drained, and in his mouth there were sounds like a child choking.
My fox-pearl, bright and pure, left my chest in a light that painted the hall. I reached toward it, half in hope. He seized it — and for a second the light was inside his hands and his face filled with a joy so insane it shook me.
"Autumn," he said, very softly.
"No," I whispered.
I watched the life leave me in pieces. I thought of Bella and the master who had died. I thought of bargains and the cost of love. I thought of all the men I'd taken from and left.
The room was a mirror of faces.
"Stop!" someone shouted.
A hundred eyes turned toward York as if he had committed sacrilege. The music died. People hurried forward. The bouquet tumbled from my hands and hit the floor. My breath came thin.
"What have you done?" cried a woman near the back. A man backed away as if the one who had committed the act might contaminate him.
York stood, the fox-pearl in his palm. The jewel pulsed with a grotesque light. He had the face of a man who had won the war but lost the country.
"Why?" I tried again, but my words were small, like leaves in a gale.
He looked ashamed and angry all at once. He tried to speak but his mouth would not make sense. His hands trembled. He looked at the crowd and his expression changed — surprise to denial to panic to a thin, raw pleading.
"Please," he said. "Please—"
The hall closed in like a trap.
Someone grabbed him by the collar. "You won't get away with this," a voice hissed.
I turned my head and saw the guests' faces change. Their polished smiles cracked. Phones came out. Hands reached to record, to declare, to witness. Mothers shielded children. A few stood forward and accused. "He killed her!" someone shouted. "He murdered the bride!"
A woman near the stage stomped toward him. "How could you?" she cried. "We trusted you. Your family—"
He shoved her away and staggered. That gesture broke the last of his armor. The crowd's expression hardened.
"You liar!" a student screamed from the back. "You showed her tenderness and then you stabbed her!"
I tried to reach for him. My fingertips were cold. He looked at me as if he had just discovered a new map of cruelty in his hands.
"Stop!" York's voice rose higher and thinner. "I didn't mean—"
"Don't you dare," someone hissed. "Don't you dare say that."
The first blow came: a man rose from his seat and punched York in the side of the head. Another pushed him. Gripped by anger, by betrayal, the crowd surged. People who had once applauded York's athletic achievements now pushed him to the floor.
He tried to defend himself, but he was only human, clumsy with the new jewel that burned in his palm. The jewel flared and showered light. A child shrieked.
"You're a monster!" someone cried. "How could you? A wedding—"
Security rushed them both, but the crowd reached anyway. Someone tore at his clothes, trying to get the jewel. "Give it back!" they demanded.
His eyes turned frantic. He had wanted the jewel once in a cold, noble way; now the fight to hold it was animal. He was a man who had woven himself into the lives of others, and then in one obscene motion undone them all. The room smelled like perfume and iron.
He was hauled to his feet and shoved toward the door. "You're under arrest!" a university official shouted, though the words were swallowed by the noise.
This punishment — this first, fierce public whipping of shame — was not gentle. For a long while, they surrounded him, called him names, spat, and shoved. People recorded every movement. The cameras captured his confusion, his panic. He was dragged across the aisle like prey.
He fell to his knees outside the door. Students crowded him. Phones were held high. One of York's teammates — a boy who had once admired him — stood in front of him and screamed, "How could you do this? You swore to protect us!"
York's mouth made a sound that could have been a word or a sound of grief. The crowd did not wait to hear.
"Where's the knife? Give it here!" a woman demanded. A security guard knelt to retrieve the dagger from near my trembling body. Someone pulled the fox-pearl out of York's palm and hurled it to the floor.
It skittered like a beetle, and the light inside it blinked.
At that moment, the world felt like a stage of judgement. People clapped as if in a theater of revenge. They wanted spectacle. They wanted the story to be plain and clear: the hero had become a monster. They wanted to be on the side of right.
York's face, once the image of composed reserve, now unravelled. He tried to shield himself with words, then with hands, then with pleading. "I did it for a reason," he kept saying. "I had to—"
"Shut up," someone hissed. "You are a murderer."
For what felt like hours, the hall burned with accusation. They shouted at him; some spat; some shoved him to the curb. A woman slapped his face so hard his head snapped. The cameras never stopped. A hundred witnesses made a hundred hashtags in their minds.
He was taken away by the police afterwards, his dignity shredded like paper. The wedding was finished in chaos, the music stopped, the waiter forgot the champagne. I watched the scene from a place where sound became muffled and time stretched.
The punishment was public. It was humiliating. It was burning. It was not the secret retribution of a knife; it was a community verdict. Where once he had been admired, he was now a man with blood on his hands.
I felt something else then: a hollow, not of anger but of tiredness. I had been a thief of light for centuries. I had known loss. I had known bargains. I had not known betrayal like this — not by someone I had chosen to love. I felt rage like a bright, hot coal. I felt sorrow like salt.
As the light dimmed, I whispered into the air, and the words that left my mouth were not a plea.
"York Robertson," I said, and my voice made a small coldness. "May you never die, nor live as you once were. May you watch it all burn."
I felt the magic rise. I watched the faces blur. I saw the jewel nestle into York's hands like a hot seed. He looked at me with something like pain, like confusion, and in that brief second before the world narrowed to a few pulses I saw his father's face — the man who had cut a knife into his mother.
That night, the news recorded every detail. The university tried to mend the spectacle with statements, with rules, with discipline. York was taken away. For a while, there was a smell of victory in the mouths of those who had once called me names. They felt justice.
I did not get to see the aftermath for long. My body turned to ash and light. I saw Bella's fur fall where she knelt somewhere far away, and then the world closed.
*
I came back as rumor.
In the days after the wedding, the hunt for answers intensified.
York Robertson was a broken man when he returned from custody. His eyes had emptied. People whispered in corners. Some said his frame of temper had cracked forever. Others said a hunter's family might be cleansed of anything soft. The man whose father had once taken a fox pearl for power now found his hands stained.
He walked the city with the look of a man who had lost something holy. The public punishment had broken his pride but had not washed his guilt. He tried to speak at times but no one invited him a hearing that mattered. Cameras followed him. Hashtags clamored for justice and for revenge. Yet he was not a man of prison alone; he became a man who had to face the faces of everyone who had seen his betrayal.
The hunter in me — in others — needed a different kind of reckoning.
One day, months later, the university organized a public hearing of sorts. It was billed as a community forum: "On the Incident at the Wedding." The auditorium was full. The panel sat with stern faces. The moderators framed the day like a lesson about safety and responsibility. But the crowd had other ideas.
"Bring him out!" someone shouted. "Let him see what he did!" The cry rose like a storm.
York came forward in slow steps, flanked by two guards. He looked smaller than I remembered. His collar was open, revealing a pale neck that had once been proud. He walked to the center of the stage. For once, there was no brightness in his eyes.
"York Robertson," the moderator began, voice formal. "We have invited you to speak."
"I have nothing to say," York answered, voice thin as paper.
"Do you deny your actions that day?" a skeptical seat called from the crowd.
"No," he replied. "I do not deny them."
The crowd shifted. Cameras clicked. Faces hardened. Very slowly, a student, an angry one who had once loved the team, stood up.
"You claimed you loved her," he said, voice raw. "You promised forever. You killed her. Why?"
York's jaw tightened. He swallowed. "I was a hunter," he said. "I was taught to hate. I was taught to take. I told myself I would never harm her, but I did."
"Why?" another voice demanded.
He bowed his head. "Because in my family, we sought the pearl. Because I had been taught that to take one such pearl was to become something the clan would honor." He looked up then, the first time like a man seeing a wound. "I thought if I took it in the most sacred moment — in the moment of her joy — it would be the most perfect offering to my family and to the order I had been raised in."
Gasps circled the hall like cold wind. People hissed and spat words that burned.
"Do you remember her?" a woman asked. "Do you remember the way she laughed?"
"I remember everything," York said. "And it kills me."
The punishment was not only the crowd's fury. It was the unmasking, the full truth told under lights. People who had once cheered now sat in shame. Relatives of the bride cried openly. The hunter's family counsel, who had once claimed he acted "for duty," now had to listen as he unfurled his truth, word by word. He had betrayed trust. He had betrayed the one person who had given him her whole self.
There was a ritual of punishment that arose from the crowd then. It was not the rough violence of the wedding night; it was more subtle, and it lasted.
They asked him to renounce his position. The athletics department stripped his honors. Sponsors withdrew their gifts. His teammates turned away. The community placed him under an unending spotlight of shame. He had to face, every day, the faces of those he had destroyed. People traveled to the little flower shop he opened — the one he kept as a sanctuary for his sorrow — and they would stand outside and hiss.
"You're a murderer," someone would say.
"You're a liar," another would say.
They would remind him of the name he had once made sacred. They would point their cameras. They would come with flowers sometimes, but not to honor; to measure his sorrow. That daily smallness was a punishment more refined and more painful than any single beating; it was a slow corrosion.
York sat and let them do it. He knelt by the black box where the fox-pearl had once sat, and he watched the days pass. His face grew drawn. In the quiet, he kept a light by the counter. He showed up every morning to tend the shop, to put flowers into a vase. He would make bouquets and bring a single one to the small plaque where my name was written by those who remembered me with pity.
He was punished publicly — by society, by people he had known. They made his life a lesson. He was shunned, stripped of titles, mocked by the news. He lost his sponsors. He had his honors revoked. He became a cautionary tale in classes that taught about boundaries and ethics.
And yet, there was something else. Some part of him that had always been lonely kept its place. He tended those lilies and daisies as if they could keep a skeleton of redemption steady.
Years later, when the dust settled, he chose a different path. He refused to let his father's line define him. He refused the old bargains. He took the community's punishment and turned it into vigil. He shut the doors on the people who had raised him. He refused to die in name alone.
He rose, slowly and painfully, not as a hero but as a man who had earned all the sorrow he bore. He became the leader of the hunters after a string of other men had left and the clan had to face its own rot. He spoke to them of mistakes. He kept a small shop named "Remembrance" near the old university where he put flowers every day. People said he did penance. People said he watched a jar each night where he kept something precious.
Sometimes at night, a small figure — little and restless — would come to the shop. A child who had once looked up at him with admiration now looked away. The man who had once sought honor now lived under public judgment.
I learned of this later, in the other side of things where whispers and shadows cross. He sat by my pearl in a different town and kept a vigil. He refused the comfort of those who tried to make sense of him. He became a monument to what happens when love and duty and cruelty meet.
"Are you happy now?" Bella once asked him, when she came to the little establishment he kept to honor what was lost.
"No," he said simply. "I am hollow. I am awake."
Public punishment had taken his life as he knew it. It had stripped him like leaves off a branch. He had to grow again or die of weather.
In the end, the story did not end with fireworks. It ended with a man sitting under fluorescents arranging flowers. He placed one single blue hyacinth before the small plaque that bore my name.
And while he lived, he paid.
He paid with every day the world allowed him.
The End
— Thank you for reading —