Face-Slapping14 min read
The Glass Cup and the Red Pendant
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I woke choking on a scream and the taste of iron.
"Let go!" I spat into the dark.
"Please, don't sell us," someone begged, sobbing.
"You're asking too much," a woman's voice hissed like wet cloth.
I was twelve when I first learned how nightmares could smell like rain. I was Bristol He then—still am—and I have kept that name like a small, stubborn talisman. I clutched the rope of the dream like it was a vine thrown over an abyss. "Bristol!" Gina Youssef called, voice soft as cloth, tugging at me through the dream.
"I won't let go," I whispered to the dark.
A girl—her hair loose, eyes raw—tore at my braid in that night's nightmare. She screamed, "Let go, you little tramp!" and I held on. I felt skin give, felt tears splash. "Bristol, wake up," Gina held me like a raft. "Bristol, come back."
Cold water hit me. "What—?" The bucket sent the dream away in an instant. I gasped and sat up, lungs burning.
"You finally woke," Gina cried and hugged me hard. "You're here. You're okay."
"We're alive," I told her between breaths. "Alive."
"Don't speak of it," she said, and kissed the scars at the nape of my neck like a plea.
A small dagger fell from my sash. Gina's fingers closed around the red-hued handle. "Where did you get this?" she teased, eyes sharp.
"It's not stolen," I lied and for a second the face of a stranger flashed like a shard: pale-skinned, sharp-jawed, a loneliness in his gaze.
"An admirer, hm?" Gina crowed. "He must be handsome."
"Shut up." I reached, but she held it just out of reach. "Tell me the story and I'll give it back."
So I told her. I told her about the burning temple and the bleeding man, about a secret door and a hand that clutched at my wrist. I told her about taking an injured stranger into a shadow and a magic that hummed in the air—then the man waking and leaving me his knife while he slept like a wounded thing. "For safety," I said, lying with the ease of children who have learned to protect the truth.
Gina pouted. "You stole a knife," she concluded.
"I borrowed it when he slept," I said, and the memory of that stranger warmed the lie.
Footsteps: Florence Berry entered with a rod in her hand. "Bristol, you little fool," she snarled and slapped me until my backside bloomed purple. I bit back the sound and took the bottle she tossed with practiced calm. A dozen girls watched, eyes like moths. One of them, Gianna Winter, smirked and left with her skirts swishing.
Gina whispered while she tended my wound. "She'll try to make you into a flower for the lord."
"I know," I said. "I know how to mend a skirt."
Later I sat under an old tree and handed Gina a sugar wrapped in white paper. "Gina," I said, as if spinning a coin, "Florence thinks Gianna can be a great flower for the city. Do you think that's good?"
Gina chewed slowly. "I think your hands should do needlework, not dance stages."
"You only see the surface." My voice sounded small. "There's more."
I did not sleep well that night. I thought of a red-checked dagger and a hand that did not feel like another's. I thought of the sound of the rain. I thought of my brother's vanished hand.
The next days rolled like weather. We traveled to the city—South Jing—where strange men in good clothes said strange things with soft mouths. In the private room of the Ying Prince's manor I watched a man in red like a blossom comb a bookcase and find a plain jade pendant with a curious carved coin at his palm. He smiled like a cat, and I missed the warmth of the countryside. "He lost something?" his young friend asked.
"He keeps it," said Aiden Crowley, and when he dropped a teacup the glass spidered into a dozen stars. "Some things are meant to be kept."
The man who moved like a shadow wore a mask like a carved face. He knelt and stood like a weapon. "Everything is ready, my lord," the shadow said.
"Patience," Aiden said. He put the broken cup in pieces on the floor. "We must catch the big fish."
I first met him at the Flower House—the place they called East Joy. The hall buzzed like a hive. A white-clothed boy bowed to Aiden like he was carved from the same night. "Your errands?" Aiden asked him, and the white boy left. He was Colton Perez; his bowing was a blade.
"How many more will be part of the show?" Aiden asked me without looking. "Countless. Life is a long trap."
Cody Berger, the red-robed son of a noble, took to fawning over the lovely women like a moth. Kenji Cole, the man with the measured face, took his place like a second moon. Diesel Coelho wore black armor and moved like a promise.
They watched the Flower Contest that day. I had sewn a dress—pink and stitched with small leaves because I have a hand for needlework that won't stop even when my heart is angry—and Florence wanted it on her prized Gianna. When the piece came back, holes gnawed by mice, Gianna fainted. Florence blamed me at once. I told her I could fix it, and she watched me weave color into the damaged petals like a spell. I did it because Florence's hand was the only one I could count on to keep my drowsing life from falling apart.
Cody Berger and his friend approached. "This child," Cody said, "what is her name?"
"Bristol He," Florence said, because sometimes a lie helps to keep bread in a bowl.
I had not meant to join the contest. I had simply wanted to mend the dress. But a man in red—Crosby Garcia—saw my stitches and took a shine to my work. "Bring her to tea," he said. "My elder will thank you." He smelled like coin and speech. I sat so still I felt like a pinned moth.
Behind one screen Aiden Crowley watched. He held cups like glass treasures, and when he let the cup go in a slow, careless action the cup split like a small earthquake. Diesel Coelho moved like a panther when he reported a minor disturbance. Something in the room sharpened.
A mob downstairs swore over an insult. A young noble, Vicente Jacobs by a different name, tried to bully other men. The owner of East Joy—Julissa Olsen—pursed her mouth and stepped into the light like a viper calmed by bonbons. Her face was silk; her goals were iron. "This room is mine," she said, and the crowd parted.
Then a commotion: a soldier's son—a Matthew Lefebvre—came with threats. Before fights could begin, a woman in red stepped forth: she sang and baited, and when a guest accused her of hiding a spy she panicked. She ran right into the lap of the wrong man. "Spy? You insult our city," someone roared. "I will gut you," the soldier whispered. Things moved with the smooth animal quickness of those who are used to violence. The red woman tripped under the wrong foot and blood kissed the floor. I felt it like a cold wind.
Aiden's attention slid to me. For reasons I cannot name, I called him "sir." He answered in a way that made the world tilt. "You like glass," he said softly. "Hold it as if it were a heart."
I did as told and saw the cup reflect a world I had not been allowed to touch. The reflection showed his face when he was not a lord with iron rules: a mask, then a hand that brushed my hair. He said, "Keep the cup." His voice was a net.
A game began. "We will play a bet," he proposed later in a dim room. "If I catch the spy who tried to escape, you owe me your silence. If you win, I will give you this pendant." He pushed a small red jade coin across the table, its hole carved neatly like an eye. The pendant looked like blood and patience. I accepted with the foolish boldness of the small.
I ate slices of orange fast as a child playing at a market. The last piece hovered between my fingers. I reached too far for the pendant. A hand moved like a snap: Crosby Garcia had already claimed it. A red-robed woman was caught by Diesel Coelho and pressed to the ground, panting: her hair was a silk-thin curtain and her eyes were bright with fury. "You ruined my chance," she cried. "You robbed me of the liberty to please."
"Quiet now," Aiden said, and the woman went from fierce to pleading in one gulp. She begged and spat and knelt, while those around us laughed at the twist of fate that turned a jewel into a noose.
I thought I had escaped the petty snares of the feast. I had not. I had only stepped into a larger net.
Two days passed. Flowers and feasts and the detritus of power came and went. Then a thing happened that made my stomach drop like a stone: Julissa Olsen's girls went missing—some vanished from the nights, and one wife's dress was torn for the sake of a contest. Rumor said the Ying Prince wanted a show. Rumor is a hungry animal.
The Flower House fell into a trembling blame. Words were thrown like stones. "They stole our girls," the older women cried. The city spat suspicion. The governor of South Jing came, bowed, and said, "The Ying Prince has sent men to investigate." Their faces said: we are all ants on the same hot board.
I kept thinking of the red woman who had lunged at me in the room—she had died with her forehead split like an unripe fruit. I had thought it an accident. It was not. Aiden had watched the woman collapse with the easy cruelty of a man who keeps a wolf by the door. He had said, "She will not trouble me." He meant the city, not her.
In the nights after the deaths, I could not eat. I watched Aiden move through his days like a winter tide. He looked at me like someone who tested their teeth on new material. One night, after wine and a hundred small mercies, he took me aside and said, "Tomorrow, come to the guesthouse. We will mark your bargain."
"Do what you want," I replied, but words were bravery and my knees were not.
"One more thing," he said. "Bring what you want for your mother. One transaction, one night."
I laughed then; my laugh was small. "You do not bargain, you issue orders," I told him. He smiled, and what that smile hid was a distance that could swallow a village. "Tonight," he said, "sing for us. Or not. If you sing, it will cost you less."
I went because Florence and Gina made small, fearful hands into silent prayers. Florence's voice was like a hawk, but in the small hours of the morning she pressed a coin into my palm and said, "Bristol, do not make a fool of me." I left my small house and walked like a thief to the guesthouse where Aiden waited.
I thought I could find protection in numbers. I could not. The Ying Prince's world was one of glass and hardness and knives that looked like smiles. In the big room behind the carved screen I bowed as one bows to a storm. "Bristol He," Aiden said, like he had my body on loan. "You will sign and in the morning your mother's orchard will be kept safe and you will be given a position. Or you will not."
I did not know what I had chosen until the next morning when men came to teach me how to be the Ying Prince's servant. The contract was a thing with ink and thread and clauses like teeth. I sat and learned to be quiet. I learned that power is a thing that can be traded like salt.
And then the punishment came down—public, inevitable, and with an appetite I had not expected.
Julissa Olsen had played games with girls as if they were beads. She had sent some of them to places where men took names and left faces empty. She had thought herself untouchable because she had been useful. She had not been.
One noon, at the market square, the wyrm of gossip curled and struck. A crowd gathered—vendors and scholars, the mud-stained peasants of the stalls and the noble children who bought sweets to feed their vanity. "Julissa!" someone shouted. "The East Joy brothel murders! Where are your girls?"
Aiden called it to order like the ring of a bell. Diesel Coelho brought with him a red woman in bindings—the same who had begged to be spared, who had knelt and called me "my lady." Julissa's head had held up in her usual silk composure, but when she was dragged out into daylight the veins at her temple twitched.
"Julissa Olsen," Aiden called, voice like a blade laid on bone. "You shall answer."
She lifted a face the city knew—the face of charm. "Lord Ying," she said. "I have been faithful. What is this accusation?" Her voice were pearls tossed into a feral sea.
"Do you deny it?" someone demanded. The crowd fed on the sound. So many faces now watched her—some hungry for theatre, others eager for justice. "Do you deny that your maidens were sent where they could not return? Do you deny the hidden rooms? The payments?"
"No," Aiden said. He spoke the word softly and it was an earthquake. "Do you deny you kept girls for the private appetites of men with masks?" A drop of sweat traced down Julissa's jaw.
At first Julissa's face was smooth with feigned outrage. "I am a businesswoman," she said. "Accusations are cheap." She smiled the smile that had cost the city more than coin. "They will say anything to ruin me."
Then the evidence unfurled like a net. Witnesses came forward—two shop apprentices who had helped move boxes, a woman who had watched a girl leave with a silk-wrapped bundle and not return. "She signed names in a ledger," the apprentice said, holding the book up for the crowd to see. The book's pages were bone-thin and smelled of ink and old skin. A name repeated: "Bride to the lord."
The currency was shown: letters of payment, a pouch with the Ying Prince's seal. The crowd's murmur rose like tide. Julissa's smile cracked. "They are lies!" she cried. "I would never—"
"Silence!" Aiden's hand rose and the square fell mute like a field under frost. "You were convenient, Julissa." His voice hollowed. "You kept girls like a store keeps fruit until it rots." He let the words hang. He was a judge whose verdict began before the trial had even dared to start.
Julissa shifted from foot to foot, went from arrogance to disbelief. She pointed at one of the witnesses, a ragged woman with eyes like flint. "You beggar, you profit from lies," Julissa hissed.
"No," the woman spat back, and the crowd's sympathy leaned with her. "She took my sister."
"I am innocent," Julissa repeated, lower now, and I saw the first true fear tear her face. It was a delicious thing for those who had been cheated. The vendors stepped closer with their knives, not because they sought blood, but because they reveled in the world balancing.
At a sign, Diesel Coelho threw down the ledger and pulled a silk cord. Two soldiers dragged forward the secret trapdoor that had been unearthed in a raid, and the smell that spilled out was fetid as old cellars. Stacks of linen, a child's ribbon, a hairpin. The crowd screamed.
Her face went from silver-calm to a crumpling sheet. "No—no—" She tried denial, but the paper had names with signatures that matched payments. The people who had smiled at her fortune now spat. "You filthy hounds," they muttered. "You took girls and sold them."
Julissa's breathing quickened; her hands trembled. "You will not—" she began, but the crowd's verdict had arrived.
The punishment Aiden gave was not immediate death. He preferred spectacle, and he wanted her humiliation to be seen by those who would have been her customers. "You will stand at the market for two days," he ordered, voice like a bell through iron. "You will be bound and made to tell the names of every man who paid for those girls. You will keep the ledger upon your chest. You will beg forgiveness for what you have done." His eyes rested on her like a seal.
Her reaction followed the recipe of disgrace. First confidence. Then a flicker of panic. "I am a lady," she cried, clutching the ledger to her silk bodice. "You cannot—"
"Watch her," someone said. "Watch how she falls." The crowd leaned in.
Then the shift. Julissa's jaw loosened. Her voice changed from command to bargaining, soap sliding on a stone. "There has been a mistake, lord," she said. "There has been—someone else. I paid, I paid men at the door, I had no idea—no idea of the contracts—" She grabbed at the names, as if denial could pull her back from the cliff. Her mouth moved but the words were paper-thin.
The crowd's reaction accelerated: shock at the ledger; gossip flew; a child laughed; an old woman spat and called her a murderer. A merchant recorded the scene on a scrap—there would be copies turned into songs tomorrow. A young scribe raised his stylus and wrote for the governor's clerk. Phones—no, not phones—but hands with ledgers were busy.
Julissa’s face lost color. "You must believe me," she whispered. "I paid for protection; I took orders. I did not mean to—" Her voice frayed.
"You meant to sell what belonged to others," Aiden said. "And you will pay."
Her denials flipped into denser shame. She clutched at her silk and the layers that once made her untouchable now made her look like a frantic bird. "I am sorry! I—" She knelt before the merchants like a beggar, shaking. "Please—lord—please—"
"Beg," the crowd instructed, like a drum beat. "Beg her name."
She did. She begged. "Please," she sobbed. "Please—I beg you—spare me—" Her hands pounded the pavement as if pounding could expel the deed.
Witnesses joined the dance of shame. "Why did you take them?" a voice demanded. "For who?"
"For the men who believed themselves gods," Julissa moaned. "They paid and I hid them and sold them and I thought I could buy silence."
"You traded lives for coin," a woman spat. "You traded names for favors."
"No!" Julissa screamed and then crumpled. "I will tell you everything! I will tell you all their names!"
The sequence of her emotions played out the way you see in tragedies. At first she smiled, then she flinched. She denied. She pleaded. She shook and then lost the breathing of bravado. People took out small notebooks and ink and wrote down names, faces, and times. Some took pictures with their little lenses and whispered that this evidence would spread to the capital.
A merchant slapped a coin into Julissa's palm and then spat it out. "We will not buy your lies," he said. Someone else threw a scrap of torn silk at her feet. Children shouted. An old man who had sold chickens the whole of his life pointed at her and said the thing that made her soul go cold: "You deserve worse."
She collapsed the next moment, like a doll whose strings had been cut. "Mercy," she begged, crawling to the feet of a woman whose sister was still missing. "Please."
The woman bent and looked straight into Julissa's eyes. "You will speak every name," she said softly. "You will tell us the rooms where you kept them. You will pay for those lives."
Julissa's knees hit the stone and the air seemed to suck all the remaining color from her hair. "I—" Then the sound broke into a mewling cry. "Forgive me. Forgive me, everyone." She cried again, "Please, I will tell you everything—please I will tell—" and her voice dissolved into whining pleas.
The crowd reacted: a hush of shocked pity, then cheers for the truth. Some photographed on tiny devices; some applauded the justice done; others simply shed tears at the scale of the crime. "Tell us everything!" people shouted. "Let the ledger burn!" A baby wailed in a neighbor's arms.
It lasted a long time. Longer than the public should have had patience. Julissa confessed names, and one by one men were named who might be punished later. The merchants, the judges, the small-voice men who had made the city an economy of shame—all were marked. "You will not hide behind velvet and song," Aiden said.
Julissa's face had shifted through stages: smug, then sly, then shocked; then denial and rage; then bargaining and finally a collapse into pleaded mercy. She begged on her knees with the ledger pressed to her chest. People recorded. People watched. The city turned its attention to Aiden and to us—those who had been used as coins. It was public, it was collective, and it was loud.
I watched it happen like a person seeing a lesson carved. I watched Julissa's voice go from polished to raw. I caught Gina's hand and squeezed it until she whispered, "They will not come for you."
"Do you think they will?" I asked. My voice was brittle.
"They have their papers," she said. "And he can be merciless. But the market will know." She let out a short laugh. "If they do not bring back the girls, this ledger will be a rope for more than Julissa."
I did not know whether to feel justice or dread. The market had shown how a city could correct itself when even a lord helped loosen the ropes that bound a businesswoman. But it also had shown the ease with which a man like Aiden could set the terms and then smile as the world shifted. He had humbled one villain; he had, in doing so, made the stage clearer. He had dragged rotten wood into the light.
After the market, when the city had had its fill of sound, Aiden walked me back to the place where we had first met—the quiet of the guest rooms. He looked at the red pendant I'd almost won. "You would do much for bread," he said. "You would sing for a piece of paper." He was amused and his amusement cut deeper than any insult.
"Don't make it sound noble," I said, because I could not decide whether his being pleased made me safer or smaller.
"One more thing," he said. "I mean to keep you here because you are curious. Curiosity is useful."
That night I slept for the first time since the dream without water thrown on me. The punishment of Julissa felt like a mile-stone: the world had shown one kind of balance. But the ledger was only the beginning. For every name Julissa had spoken there were a dozen who might be shielded. For every girl found there might be two not found.
I lay awake and toyed with the dagger at my waist. I thought of the red pendant. I thought of the glass cup that had shattered into stars. I thought about how, when it finally came to me, justice was not a single bell but a thousand hands ringing.
"Promise me nothing," I told the dark. "Promise me only that I will find him." I thought of the brother I had lost to greedy hands and to the city's appetites. I thought of the small dagger that had fallen into my palm years ago.
When I finally closed my eyes, the last sound I heard was Aiden's quiet voice in the corridor, like a footfall in a palace: "Do not forget the glass cup."
The End
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