Sweet Romance18 min read
The Lotus on My Chest (an impostor's vows)
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I do not start with running or screaming. I start by sitting on the edge of the silk bed, fingers on the edge of a carved comb, feeling the raised line of the lotus on my chest. The room smells like incense and iron—palace perfume with the sharpness of men’s leather belts—and I hear wheels creaking somewhere beyond the curtains.
"Are you cold?" Everett asks from the shadowed side of the bed.
I look up. Even half-hidden in darkness, he looks like something painted into a story: pale, long-limbed, the kind of handsome that makes people stare and then pretend not to. His voice is softer than I expected. "No," I answer. "Just tired."
"Then sleep." He lifts the bed-drape one handed, the other resting on the wheel of his chair. "You will need strength for court."
"I will wake," I say, a little too bright. I smooth my hands over the embroidered silk of the marriage gown he had me wear that first night. The stitches on the lotus are the same as the princess’s—but I know every thread of that design as if I put them there. I learned to make people believe.
He laughs, low and pleasant. "You are the best liar I've ever known."
"You've only just learned to listen," I reply. "You told me stories of battle and lost horses, and I told you how I learned to do a wedding curtsey." I feel the old habit of performance settle into my chest like armor. "We exchange lies and call it companionship."
"Do you mean it?" Everett asks. His eyes find mine. "Do you mean I told you true things?"
I want to say yes. I want to say anything that will keep the hand that is not weak—on the wheel, on his robe—near me. Instead I say, "I meant the lie well."
"Good," he murmurs, and he turns away, as if the small private thing can stay small.
When I first arrived at the gates of the imperial court, I was still Delilah of the brothel district—a child of a bargain, a painted pearl. They had taken my hairpins, my small chest, and my story, and placed a lotus on my skin until it sang with heat and the taste of iron. I watched the real princess sit high in her silk and hurl the dagger at my cheek like I was nothing and would always be nothing. I learned then how ugly pride could be when it was wrapped in velvet.
The old emperor wanted a marriage that would save face and keep the border quiet. He wanted to humiliate a son he could not bear to love—Everett, the ninth prince, said to be broken and dying. Because they thought him spent, he was given a wife to comfort his bed; because they feared the loss of face, I—Delilah—was shaped into a princess.
"You're so dramatic," Galen Dawson said when he handed over the silver mask that first night. "Don't be dramatic when you meet the emperor."
"Do you think the emperor will notice I'm not a princess?" I asked, polishing the edge of my own lie.
Galen's smile was thin. "He notices face value. He never sees the life under it."
Galen pushed the chair with a sure, soft touch during the ceremony. He never left Everett’s side; his presence felt like the hush before disaster and the warm hand after. I would come to trust that hand more than anyone else's.
On the night of my wedding, I pulled the veil aside at the appointed moment and met two figures: one broad-shouldered and healthy, and behind him, in a silk robe, a young man sitting in a lacquered wheelchair, his legs covered. For a heartbeat I thought the broad shape was my husband. I said, "Rumors are false. My lord is strong."
The man in the robe looked up and smiled like mischief. "If you prefer men who stand, I'm afraid I'll disappoint."
He was Everett. He had let me make the mistake; he let me blush and pull my hand back when I realized which of the two I had praised. "No matter," he said, amused. "Tell me what you really mean."
And so the masquerade began with laughter.
"Do you know how to be a princess?" he asked me once when he taught me how to hold a cup of tea. "Or do you only know how to be a woman sold?"
"I know how to hold attention," I said, and his mouth twitched. "It's useful."
"It is," he agreed. "But a woman who can hold attention also holds power."
That may have been the truest thing I heard from him in the first month.
I learned the palace like a servant learns the pattern of steps to a bed: where the guards hid their eyes, which cups were favored by which ministers, who liked sugar, who liked the news twisted. I learned to fake grief when required; I learned to look at the emperor with something between fear and admiration; I learned to let the other princes think they had opinions about me that could be freely spoken. That was the dangerous part—being spoken about in public—and Everett watched it as if it were a map he were slowly folding and marking.
"You made them laugh," he said one afternoon when we were alone in his study. He had a book on his lap but his eyes were only half there. "So they did not suspect."
"I made them laugh so they would not point knives at me in the dark," I said. "Is that not reason enough?"
"It is." Everett tipped the book closed. "You are not what they expect, Delilah. You are not the story they keep."
He called me Delilah like a secret. Once, drunk on boldness and wine, I asked him, "If I became the throne, would you still love me?"
He did not hesitate. "I would sit with you," he said. "Right by your side."
That was how it began: with softness disguised as strategy.
Not everyone was kind. Two of the palace shadows, Decker Vieira and Nicolas Barlow, came with eyes like knives. They were the ones who had once been assigned to watch me—secretive men hired as if they could keep a nation's breath from snatching. They were rough-mouthed, sharp in the corners. Decker had thick hands and a habit of smiling too loud when he thought he had the advantage. Nicolas, who wore the crown's favor like an itch under his collar, smirked at me more often than he spoke.
"Keep that smile for your customers," Decker told me once when he found me in the corridor. "Your kind is good with smiles."
"Your kind is good with steel," I shot back. "Try smiling with that."
Nicolas barked a laugh at that, but Everett's eyes darkened. He did not like the way they looked at me.
"They will try to make trouble," Everett warned one night. His gloved hand drew a circle in the air, slow as a clock. "They think you are nothing. That makes them reckless."
"Then let them be," I said. "Recklessness dies easily with a good plan."
He smiled then, not the kind humor this time—we had another sort of plan behind his eyes. "I like it when you find ways out of traps," he said. "It makes me like you more."
I should have been frightened; instead I found his praise warming me like the hearth. It made my chest ache in a good way.
In the second month, a test came like rain.
I had taken to walking the garden paths and buying the warm chestnuts from a vendor who had no time for court. When I returned one day carrying a packet of fresh cakes, a scene unfolded that looked like a script contrived by malicious playwrights. Two princes—Nicolas and another, Bjorn Baldwin, full of arrows in his voice—spoke about me as if I were a thing.
"Poor man nine," Nicolas said. "He got such an unfortunate match. The brothel gave the court its laugh."
Bjorn only sniffed and turned his eyes on me like an accusation. "Do you like him?" he asked, disdain like steam.
I dropped into Everett's arms like a reed. He caught me with no trouble at all. The court chattered. The emperor smiled on the surface and on the inside kept his pot of disdain simmering.
"What a show," I heard someone whisper. "The palace gives bread and takes a clown."
I stood and bowed like I had practiced. "I am honored by the attention," I said. "I only hope I will not disappoint by being more than you expected."
Their faces flushed. It was small comfort. It was enough.
They sent small gifts—pearls and a jade pin neatly carved like a small column. One box caused a scandal: a strange, crude thing—an object meant to mock a certain private male disappointment. The ten prince, Nicolas, sent it with the snicker that only cowards have.
"We'll accept," Everett said, face all ice. "And make a return."
I nearly broke the box into a hundred pieces when I took it from the tray, but Everett took it and wrapped it again as if it were a fragile thing and set it aside. "You will laugh now," he said. "And later—I'll take that laugh and weave it into a trap."
He laughed later, low and dangerous, and men who had once mocked began to trip on their own words. Everett did not move like a dying man; he moved like someone who had mapped a long road and refused to die at the first ford.
One night, I was nearly forced to the edge of a blade.
I had been taught by birds of the brothel how to read an enemy: where the shadow lengthens, where the voice breaks. The men Decker and Nicolas had hired did not hide that they were trying to pry something from Everett. Cold, subtle reasons. They believed he was a corpse with a face, nothing more.
"She could be useful," Nicolas said, whispering in the dark. "Put a knife to the goat and she'll sing."
"You think?" Decker's laugh was a stone. "She'll sell anything for gold."
They waited until late when the house grew quiet. They tried to break into Everett's study. I heard the scrape of leather and held my breath so hard my chest hurt. Everett's wheel scraped on the floor. I thought I could feel the air still, like a man holding back a wet cloth from a flame.
Everett came out to the door in half-risen haste, just as Decker and Nicolas pushed through the threshold. There was a tug, a hiss of steel. A shadow leapt. A moment later the room filled with the sort of quiet that comes after a storm. Decker fell with a long sound; Nicolas was cut across the face and gasped. Everett's hands smelled of iron. The three men had been silenced.
"Why?" I whispered, because my throat had dried.
"Because they chose to use you as a weapon," Everett said, voice even. He moved toward me. "We do not let weapons to be used on our people."
They disappeared that night, taken by men more loyal than rumor. I understood then that Everett's weakness was a show and his hands were not clumsy. He could be careful and ruthless at once.
Days later, when a servant dared whisper that my chest's lotus was only a lie and that the real princess would be honored elsewhere, Everett smiled in public and told the court about the chestnuts I had eaten on the road, the way I had laughed into a folded napkin, and how he'd seen me eat them like a commoner who loved them. He told the truth in such a way that the hall's gulls seemed to fall in love with a new story. People laughed at the wrong things; they forgot to ask the wrong questions. It pleased me to be dangerous and beloved all at once.
But there was a darker web tightening. A real princess arrived as an envoy for a neighboring court—Brielle Greco walked into the throne room and looked at me as if she had found a parrot wearing her feathers. She lifted the veil of truth like a paper fan and shuffled through lies like a priest counting beads.
"That woman is a fraud!" Brielle cried in court—before the emperor, before ministers. "She stole my face, my name, and my path. She is a brothel woman, a servant of pleasure, and she bears a painted lotus where only a true birthright should bloom."
I had been trained to take a confession like a punch, to turn away and hide the bruise. But now the entire court turned to me like vultures.
"You are right," I said softly, stepping forward. "I am Delilah. I was bought and sold. Yet I wore the lotus and stood beneath the same roof as you. You wish me punished? Take me. Take the punishment you speak."
They hauled me away—not to a secret place but to a bright cell and then into a worse place: the public sky.
At the trial inside the hall, words were sharp enough to cut. Brielle told the story of a theft and cruelty and how she had been wronged. The court gasped. The father-king fluttered in his seat with a weak smile. The princes murmured. Everett's fingers curled around his cup until his knuckles paled.
"I did not steal," I said, all eyes on me. "I was a thing bought and brought. I was told to wear the face. If I have stolen anything, it is the freedom to choose my life."
"Drag her to the prison," the minister declared. "Seal her tongue with iron and lock her in."
And yet when the guards moved, Everett spoke.
"Stop," he said, a single word like a sword unsheathed. "Court, hear me out."
They turned. He looked at the emperor and then at the princes. "She was sent by my father's order, to be a comfort for me."
"Then let the law run," the second prince Bjorn said, with a venom that made the emperor chuckle in delight.
Everett's hand moved, slow, and he smiled the smile of a man who had rehearsed ruin and found it pleasant. "There are two kinds of justice," he said. "One is to stone the accused and call it balance. The other is to reveal who truly plotted the crime."
He went on, steady as a bell: "These men, who say the woman only sought wealth, who gave the order to displace the princess, who planted this false lotus—who are they? Why are their hands on the fabric of the court now?"
The hall murmured. No one expected a defense. Then Everett called for the guards to bring the two—Decker and Nicolas—forward. They were dragged and forced to kneel. The emperor's face turned iron-gray.
"You sent her," Everett said loud enough for the crowd to hear. "You bought her from the brothel. Was it to humiliate me? To show my father I am worthless? Say it."
Decker spat. "We did as we were told. We were given coin."
"By whom?" Everett asked. The hall leaned in. Ministers stopped chewing. The scribes paused their quills.
A murmur: "Ten prince's house."
Bjorn's jaw tightened. "Do not slander the royal house," he snapped. Men shifted in their seats.
"The truth is truth," Everett said. "And truth can crush. Which of you gave the order? Which one of you thought to ruin me by making a mockery of marriage? Step forward."
Under court eyes and the emperor's frown, more fingers pointed. A whip of panic sliced through the air. The conspirators' faces fell. They began to point at one another. Somebody in the crowd shouted.
"Bring the ten prince."
Nicolas trembled. Decker swore. Everett's voice was quiet. "If there is a tenth—if there is a man who set this in motion—let him be named."
A clerk stood and with simple, shaking words named the one who had plotted: Nicolas Barlow—he had been the courier and the whisperer, but the order had come from a prince named Bjorn Baldwin and men who had thought a woman could be used like a coin. The hall exploded with anger. Bjorn's face went the purple of fruit crushed underfoot.
Everett rose slowly, the wounded husband and the general both folded together into one posture. "Deceit is a seed, and it sprouts," he said. "We shall uproot it in public."
They opened the doors into the outer court. Crowds were gathered; word had traveled like a fever. Everett walked with a steady step to the raised platform and drew from the box the carved jade pin that had been sent as mockery. I stood behind him, wrapped in his cloak, the lotus on my chest hot with remembered pain.
"Look!" Everett called to the crowd in a voice that carried. "Look and see what men will trade honor for."
He placed the pin upon the steps. "This was a gift meant to humiliate my household. It marks a man who would turn his head for a trifle. For that, he shall be punished where everyone can see."
"Punish them!" someone shouted. "Show no mercy!" another voice demanded. The crowd surged forward, hungry for spectacle.
They brought the conspirators—Decker and Nicolas—out, manacled and pale. Bjorn was dragged as well, mouth open in protest. The emperor watched with a cold flicker of satisfaction: he had given the command to mock and now he watched the unwinding. Yet Everett's plan was not merely to present them for judgement; it was to make them feel the full weight of public revulsion.
Everett took the stand and spoke. "These men used lies to make me look lesser, to make my marriage a farce. They sought to humiliate me and to ruin the reputation of this woman. They thought they could hide behind titles. Tonight we do not hide."
He gestured, and the palace heralds read aloud the conspirators' offenses: collusion with foreign agents, theft of imperial gifts, plans to besmirch a marriage for political gain. Each read accusation landed like a stone.
"Look at them," Everett said to the crowd. "See their faces. These are men who would sell honor for coin. They will carry their shame for the rest of their lives. No private cell, no quiet execution will do them justice. Their humiliation must be public so that every son and daughter knows that such treachery is uncovered."
He ordered the men stripped of their ranks—stripped in the center of the square so that everyone could see that they were no longer princes' favorites but common men. Each scar and bruise became part of the spectacle. The crowd hissed. Women spat. A group of apprentices began to chant for more: "Expose them! Expose them!"
Decker tried to grin, then could not. Nicolas turned his face away as if the sunlight hurt him. Bjorn went from arrogance to shame in the span of a breath. They attempted denials—words that sounded small and thin. Under Everett's steady gaze they crumbled.
"Do you repent?" Everett asked them.
"Yes," Decker blurted, but his voice was weak and no one believed him.
"Repent in public," Everett said. "Say the names of those who paid you. Name them all, where the record can find them."
They tried to point fingers, but each name they said unfurled more bitter threads. The crowd loved the unraveling. The conspirators' mouths dried. The ministers leaned forward like predators seeing a flock fall apart.
Then Everett did something more cutting than any word: he had the emperor's scribe read aloud the logs of receipts and messages, the very paper trail no one dared to forge in public. One by one the names of those who had orchestrated the humiliation were read. The Lord of Ten stood up red-faced, then pale; his title meant nothing when the people saw his signature tied to coin and command.
As the trail reached the names of those who had ordered the crime, the crowd's mood shifted from curiosity to righteous fury. The men who had believed themselves above consequence were reduced by the sound of their own names shouted by servants. Mothers clutched children; nobles' faces tightened. They saw how small theater could become a weapon.
Bjorn tried to pull himself together, to shout orders, to brandish his rank like a shield. The crowd closed in with a chorus of hissed contempt. A throng of minor officials came forward and tore the insignia from his sleeve then thrust it into the hands of a herald who declared, "For treachery—stripped of rank!"
Bjorn's color left him. Sweat ran from his hairline. He spat on the ground, then pushed back at the men who held him. The hands that had joked at another's expense began to tremble.
"Look upon them," Everett said, voice like a blade. "Let it be known they are not gods. They are men who plotted with coin and rumor. Let their wives and their children watch them become less than what they thought themselves."
The crowd watched, some in stunned silence, others in furious applause. Scribes wrote feverishly. A woman in the crowd clapped so loudly the sound cut the cold air. Children craned their necks. Someone took out a writing board and copied the names. What had been private betrayal became public record.
Once the stripping of titles and the reading of lists were complete, the conspirators were led to a high bench in the square. There, Everett commanded they state publicly, under oath, the scope of their lies and the names of their paymasters. They recited what they could, failing under the weight of names and the knowledge that every syllable might be used against the noble houses they had served.
They crumbled. Pride liquefied into pleas, into apologies too late. A great many in the crowd photographed the spectacle with pen and memory. They took down words as if plucking fruit.
Decker's bravado broke first. He cried—not loud, but enough for his voice to tremble. "I was paid," he said. "I was a fool. I thought I could take a coin and be safe."
Nicolas's denial turned into confusion. He started to stammer, to point fingers. "They told me—" he began, then sobbed and stopped. The sound was shame.
Bjorn's face transformed from regal to naked panic. "I never thought—" he gasped. "My house—"
"You thought your house would shelter you," Everett interrupted. "Houses stand on honor or they fall by greed." He leaned forward. "Now you have chosen. Confess. Tell us the names."
They did. Each name peeled back another layer of conspiracy: small favors, dirty gifts, the whisper of a crown for a future assassin, the promise of a title if one would just be the hand that tossed a coin and set a plan. It was a filthy, writhing list.
When it was all finished, the crowd had their medal: the men were stripped, their hands cut from officious roles; they were paraded past the palace gates so that every baker's boy and seamstress could murmur, "Remember. This is what treachery looks like."
Bjorn walked out with his face open to the wind, stunned and broken, while the crowd followed with a mixture of triumph and hunger for finality. The emperor looked down, face unreadable, and Everett returned to me as if nothing had happened—arm slipping around my shoulder, voice soft.
"You kept your demeanor," he said quietly. "You were better than they deserved."
I leaned into him. "You made them suffer in front of everyone."
"I did," he said. "And they will remember. That is the point."
We returned to the quiet of the inner court in the hush after applause. Galen Dawson pushed the chair and walked beside us; Ensley Wood stood near the door, eyes bright.
"You were magnificent," Ensley whispered.
"It was your day to be seen," Everett said to me. "I only gave them a stage."
In the weeks that followed, the story of the public humiliation spread across markets and into homes. Decker and Nicolas were disgraced men. Bjorn’s fortunes cracked. The emperor felt a sting and tucked it away. The palace's balance had shifted. Everett's name no longer read like a casualty, but a man who had been wronged and would shape the court himself.
I did not expect triumph to taste as sweet as it did. I had been a thing they used to make a point, and yet the public had witnessed treachery undone. The men who had laughed at the brothel girl were now the ones who stood with empty hands.
But punishment skirts justice. The public spectacle satisfied a craving for the dramatic, but it also left a trail of broken private lives. I watched the men crumble and felt both a rush and a cold hollow. I had become something more than a liar in silk; I had become a force that could cut a path through a kingdom. Everett's hands steadied me then, as if to say: this is what survival looks like.
"Will this make them all stop?" I asked later, neck still hot with the light of that day.
Everett looked at me with a kind of tenderness that was both shield and chain. "It will make them think," he said. "And thinking is the first step toward being careful."
Months turned and the court learned to whisper differently. Everett's health rumor ran like a broken thread in a tapestry; some believed him doomed, some believed him a phantom who fooled fools. I had seen him move; his legs were not what the rumor claimed, but he used the chair when it fit the plan and walked when a step mattered. He betrayed himself only to me and in private times when we were honest in ways the public would not allow.
"Are you happy?" I asked him one night, sprawled against his chest as he read politics by the dim light.
"If you are next to me," he said, "I am less afraid."
I thought of the lotus on my chest—the tattoo that had once been a mark of shame. Now it tasted like my name: Delilah, the woman who learned to be brave. I was no longer the naïve girl who thought being pretty was the sum of worth. Everett had taught me honor by showing me how to wage it.
When the day came for my coronation as consort—the one they insisted upon after the removal of rivals—the court filled with new eyes. Brielle Greco had been returned to her own court; the scandal had been a stone tossed across two borders and settled in a river. I stood beneath the canopy, in robes that were heavier than memory, and felt a hand inside mine.
"Don't forget," Everett whispered, his breath warm against my ear. "You are not the story they tell. You are your own."
I nodded. "I will be my own," I promised.
The room was filled with the same faces that had once cut me down. But now when they looked, they saw a woman who could both smile and sharpen steel. I lifted my head, and there was the lotus—inked and permanent—no longer a symbol of humiliation, but a map of where I had come from and where I had chosen to go.
Outside, beneath the palace eaves, a small vendor sold chestnuts. I bought one, warm between my hands, and thought of the first time Everett had known I was not what I seemed. He had watched me eat like a common girl and then known the truth. He had not told, but he did better—he acted.
"Do you still want to leave?" he asked later, when the flames of the festival burned low and the palace breathed.
"Sometimes," I admitted.
He drew me close. "Stay," he said simply. "Stay with me. Build a life."
"Will you promise me, then?" I asked.
"I promise," Everett answered.
When the coronation candles guttered and the final music trailed away, I sat in the private room and packed away my last bit of brothel training—how to charm with eyes, how to bow without folding my spine. I could have undone myself, but I held tight to the memory of all the hands that had chosen me and all the hands that had tried to use me. Ever since the first time I was sold, I had been walking toward something; now I realized it was not merely survival but a home.
We placed the jade hairpin—the one that had mocked us—back into the palace chest. We kept the carved lotus silk, folded as a reminder. Outside, snow began to melt into a spring rain, and I felt the cold give way to a green that promised growth.
Everett's laughter echoed faintly in the corridor, the sound of a man who had built his survival into a rule. I laughed, too—a small, honest sound.
"Do you hate them still?" he asked one late night when we traced the lines of each other's faces with fingers that mapped more than scars.
"I hate what they did," I said, "but not the men themselves. I learned from them."
He kissed my temple. "Then we'll learn together," he whispered.
And so we did: learning how to be partners in a palace that never stopped plotting. We shared food, books, and the soft covers of nights where we kept each other's breath steady. He taught me to read his strategies like a book; I taught him to enjoy the small trivialities that make a life feel like a chosen one.
Years later, when an official record would call me the empress consort and speak in hushed praise of the Nine Prince who rose from the attempt to ruin him, they would know the line of names and events but not the small things—the stolen chestnuts, the way he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear when I was afraid, the way he insisted I keep the lotus as proof of where I had come from.
There were more plots to unpick, more men who thought titles made them safe. We met them with the same steady, private cruelty Everett favored: expose, humiliate, then leave the rest to history. I watched each man’s mask crack under the light we put them in. The public scenes became his art; he perfected the performance of truth, and I became the woman who could stand up in the center and not be knocked down.
Once, in the market, an old woman who had once known me gave me a small steaming cake. "Eat," she said. "Eat and remember where you came from."
I did. Everett had told the court I liked chestnuts—Brielle had not. He once said to me, smiling, "No one else will recognize you if you eat your cake loud and greedy and with your fingers." I stuck the memory close. Every bite was a jewel.
People would tell the story as if it were destiny: the brothel girl becomes queen by fate. But I know fate had its hands in many pockets, and so did we. We picked the pockets we needed to change the map.
In the end, I wore the lotus the same way I had learned to wear the mask: as proof that I had been willing to be less, that I had learned to be more. It was not the symbol of shame anymore; it was a promise I had kept.
When I tuck the hairpin away on a small shelf, I sometimes read the ledger where names of the disgraced are written and see how many have been taught to bow. I smile at the scrawl and feel Everett's fingers in mine.
"Are you content?" he asks, once, when the empire breathes calm.
"Not always," I tell him. "But more than I thought I might be."
He holds me closer. "Then that will do."
Outside, someone sells chestnuts by the lantern light. I know their smell. I know their warmth. I smell incense and iron and the soft perfume of a hand that will not let me go.
And the lotus on my chest—inked in a night of shame and stitched with a thousand stitches of truth—sleeps beneath my robe, steady as a heart.
The End
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