Sweet Romance12 min read
Who Will Save Me Now?
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I woke up gasping, heat and thirst crawling under my skin like hungry insects. My head felt heavy, my chest full of someone else's panic. I blinked into dim lamplight and found myself curled against a cold bolster, small and ridiculous in a house that smelled of iron and burned oil.
“Who are you?” a voice cut through the dark.
“Itzel,” I whispered. My name came out thin. I shoved myself farther into the corner. “Please—don’t—”
The man across from me sat up. He was impossibly large. The lamplight edged his jaw with steel. He looked like a war-banner in human form. He frowned, rubbed his temples, and for a breath I imagined he might be gentle.
“Don’t what?” he asked.
“Kill me,” I blurted, and the words tasted of the novel I’d read one sleepless night—the plush cruelty of someone else’s plot bleeding into me. Tears came. “Please don’t kill me.”
He blinked, confused, then something in his face softened. He nudged his fingers toward me like a soldier checking a bird for broken wings. I shrank back.
A loud commotion crashed outside. The door burst open. Voices came in like tide—scorn, gossip, the particular kind of cruelty primed to enjoy spectacle.
“Shame on you, Itzel Fox! Trapped in a general’s room while your betrothal waits! What an unseemly thing!” a woman bawled. Her voice had the acid of a woman used to being obeyed—Valerie Cowan. I remembered: a stepmother, a matron with a throat like a bell.
“Isn’t that the minister’s sickly daughter? The one set to the prince?” someone hissed.
I pressed the quilt to my face. My thoughts scrambled—this was the chapter I’d read. The scandal. The beating. The prison. The ending where pain swallowed every page.
“Bring her out! Drag the harlot to the courtyard!” a voice commanded.
Logan Butler’s voice—hot with fury and decay. The prince’s silhouette filled the doorway, face a storm. My fingers clenched the quilt until my palms ached.
Hudson Renard rose slowly. He did not shout. He did not panic. Instead he stood, a calm mountain between me and the mob, the room shrinking to his measured heartbeat and my fluttering panic.
“Wait,” he said. His voice was low, made of wind over iron. “This is my house. If I invited her, then it is my honor. You have no right.”
Valerie’s mouth opened, then closed. Her daughter, Clementine Bridges, flared her outrage into the air with practiced venom. The crowd loved it. They smelled a story and leaned closer.
“Did you invite her to your bed, General?” Clementine’s voice was a blade wrapped in honey.
“You dare,” Logan snarled. He was the prince; his will could make men disappear. He had come upon me believing whatever lie his rage demanded.
Hudson’s lids narrowed. He pulled his robe close and held up a yellow parchment. “This is the Emperor’s order. I may take any daughter of a minister to my house as my guest.”
A murmur like a river through reeds. I heard my own breath as if for the first time.
Valerie seethed and then, losing ground, resorted to the only weapon left—shame. “You brought her in under the guise of charity. You besmirched my house!”
Hudson’s eyes flicked to me, and something I had not expected rose like warmth through the chill.
“You will not shame her,” he said.
They retreated then, like wolves sensing impossible teeth. The courtyard buzzed. Someone took out a hand-mirror and pointed it at me—as if a woman’s misfortune should be frozen for art.
Later, in the muted hours after everyone had gone, Hudson knelt and did what no other man had: he smoothed my hair, awkward and earnest.
“Call me Hudson,” he said. His voice had no flourish. “Eat something.”
I saw his hands tremble when he offered me a tea biscuit.
“Hudson,” I repeated. The name felt strange and safe.
*
Days folded into something that might be called life. Hudson kept me close but gave me space to be small. He walked me through the house, taught me which bowl held safe broth, and spat on anyone who spoke of me like a puppet.
“Why are you so…fiery about me?” I asked him one late afternoon as we sat by a withered fish pond. The soldiers had come back from campaigns and turned the garden into a place to hang banners. He shrugged.
“I do not tolerate fools who harm those who cannot fight back,” he said. “I have only my honor. I will not squander it.”
I started to learn his edges. He called me “Itzel” at first, then “warm”—a nonsense nickname that somehow stuck. It made my chest loosen.
“Warm?” I teased once.
He looked ridiculous trying to say it. “Warm, warm,” he repeated until it came like something he had practiced all his life.
Then he did a thing no soldier should be expected to do: he took my hand in the open and let the world see it.
“You are mine to protect,” he said.
The world, and the soldiers, and the ladies who had loved gossip, could all go to whatever ruin they pleased.
*
One night the Emperor’s messenger arrived with orders. Hudson went to the palace. He came back quieter, a dark stripe under his eyes.
“He asked you to stay?” I demanded.
He did not answer me directly. Hudson held a letter in his hands and watched the ink.
“He must go north to quell rebels,” I read in his expression before his mouth shaped the words. “They say the rebels have taken my father hostage.”
Atticus Bates—my father—was the Prime Minister. He had always been a man who loved the fields more than the court. He had gone to the north to study harvests and talk to people. In my memory his hands smelled of soil; he loved the ground. The idea that his stubborn heart had led him into danger made me sick.
“I will go with you,” I said. I felt the decision land like iron. “You cannot—Hudson, you cannot allow him to be alone because of me.”
Hudson’s face tightened. “Itzel—you cannot come. The road is violence. You are not a soldier.”
“How can I stay and do nothing?” My voice trembled, but my resolve steadied. “If you go without me, I will sink into worry like a stone in deep water.”
He looked at me as if I had suggested a quiet method of suicide. Then he sighed.
“All right,” he said, each word a painful scrape. “I will take you. But you obey me. Promise me—no rashness, no solo acts.”
I promised.
*
We rode north behind the banners. Tobias Marques—young, polite, and bothersomely earnest—joined us. He was the prince a book had promised but fate might still ruin; he had an easy smile and an odd lack of steel.
On the third night of our journey a gunshot cracked through the forest like a thunderclap.
I had never fired a gun. My hand, driven by a panic born of living through other people’s tragedies on paper, fumbled the glinting hairpin Hudson had given me—the Emperor’s envoy’s gift.
The hairpin held a secret: a tiny lock of space inside it. It hummed and spat out noise and light and a cold metal taste.
A pistol—small and ridiculous—appeared in my hand, and with shaking fingers I pulled the trigger.
That sound—raw, echoing—sent Tobias’s horse skidding. A man screamed. The prince’s shadow became a creature of fury. Logan Butler lunged at me like a viper that had been tripped.
“You—” he croaked, the blade at my throat. “You want me to bow? Tell me you love me.”
And there it was—the ugly truth I had read: the prince who saw himself owed the world, who loved the idea of his own possession, who wanted worship not rulership.
I froze. I reached for the hairpin and the gun stuttered; the recoil had already bruised my arm.
Hudson returned like storm-light. He wrapped himself between Logan and me. He drew an arrow and loosed it; the shaft plunged into Logan’s shoulder and pinned him to a tree like a useless puppet.
“You dare,” Logan screamed, turning his fury on Hudson. “You will hang for this—treason!”
Tobias placed himself between the prince and the crowd.
Hudson said, and I heard the world tilt under the words, “You will not threaten her here.”
*
At the palace the matter ignited. The Emperor was furious that so public a scene had erupted. The young prince, though wounded, was the son of many alliances. Court whispers shifted like a knife.
Logan Butler tried to twist the story: Hudson had tried to kill the prince, he said. Hudson’s arrow, Logan claimed, was evidence of treason. The court gasped. The ministers bled whispers.
I sat in the front row that day as Hudson was summoned. I had a plan that trembled like a thread. I had the hairpin and whatever dim magic it let me borrow.
“You accuse Hudson Renard of attempting to assassinate my son?” the Emperor thundered.
Logan, posing wounded, spat, “Yes. The general aimed at me. The proof is the arrow in my shoulder.”
Hudson stood quiet. He was a plain man of clean reasons. He did not beg. He did not flail. He bowed his head and then spoke with a cold clarity that halted breaths.
“Your Majesty, I came upon the scene and I shot the arrow to stop the prince. Also—” his hand did not shake as he lifted the long scroll he had seized—“I have something to bring before the court: letters, false promises, evidence of the prince’s schemes.”
He turned the scroll open and his soldiers unfurled it. Ink, names, lists of bribed officials and illegal requisitions, ledgers of seized grain and diverted supplies—Logan Butler’s handwriting among them, orders masked as royal proclamations, signatures forged in haste.
“Fabrications,” Logan sneered. “Forgeries! How dare you—”
A voice from the back cried, “Show the people!”
Hudson allowed the scroll to be read aloud. A low murmur began, then turned to a roar. The scribes in the court, those who dealt in truth for money, had kept their pens busy. Someone produced a ledger of the northern supply lines. Someone else held a ledger of complaints—villagers, widows—whose petitions had disappeared into the prince’s coffers.
Logan’s expression moved. First it was the slight curl of triumph—he believed himself crafty. Then confusion when a name on the ledger matched an order he had given in person last month about “requisitioned grain.” His brow tightened. He waved a hand and a guard was shoved forward.
“Stop this forgery!” he cried. “This is slander!”
The crowd began to turn. We had stacked our evidence carefully; Hudson had allies who owed him more than favors. Tobias Marques stepped forward with a parchment that had the prince’s seal, the seal accompanied by the handwriting of a trusted steward. The steward peered forward—his hands trembled—and he told, in simple words, of being forced to sign fake requisitions, how the prince threatened him, how he had been afraid for his children.
The court’s murmur became an uproar.
Logan’s face shifted—first a practiced indignation, then a flushed panic, then outright disbelief. He snapped his fingers and guards surged to his side.
“Lies!” he screamed. “Lies! They have made these up to ruin me!”
But the emperor’s eyes were old. He listened to the ledger and to the steward and then to the cries of the crowd—farmers who had been summoned, their carts lined at the palace gate, calling for justice. They showed the court dried hides and broken plows. A woman lifted a tattered shawl and pointed to where the prince’s men had taken her husband.
A chant started—soft at first, then like a gathering storm. “Justice! Justice! Justice!”
Logan’s hands, which had always been the hands of a boy used to having people obey, trembled.
Hudson’s voice cut across the noise. “Present your own words, Prince. What you called requisition—show your reasons.”
Logan tried to swear he had done what he thought was for the kingdom. He tried to claim that the Prince’s burden forced sharp choices. He spoke of duty; he accused the ministers of cowardice.
“You have stolen from the people and sold it back,” a farmer shouted. “You have starved our children.”
Faces turned away from Logan one by one—court ladies who had once smiled, maidservants, soldiers who had drunk with his steward. The Emperor’s face was stone. For the first time, the prince seemed small.
“Stop!” Logan pleaded suddenly, flinging himself before Hudson. His composure unclipped. “Do not do this to me! Please— I gave orders— I will explain!”
The crowd did not move to silence; they moved to watch. A clerk rolled out a set of public edicts on a table. One by one the inked orders matched the ledger. One voice, then another, named the faces who had profited. Someone took out a wooden board and began to beat it like a drum to draw attention. A young scribe read aloud a list of debts the prince had created, the small people he had ruined.
The mood shifted from cold justice to a hunger for retribution. The court servants stepped back. Ministers who had feared the prince’s favor now feared the Emperor’s rebuke.
Logan’s face went slack. He had gone from commandeering the room to defending himself like a cornered animal. He tried to deny the accounts; he tried to place blame. He called for witnesses. But witnesses came forward—those he had paid and who now, some for conscience and some for fear of the Emperor, told the truth.
Then the Emperor pronounced: “Public trial for treachery and extortion. The prince will answer in the square.”
The square thrummed. We were led out. The streets were packed. People had come to see scandal, to see the fall of a prince. They chanted. Children climbed roofs. Town criers shouted. Someone set a merchant’s bell to ring.
Logan stepped into the square like a king into a pit. He glared at us all, then at Hudson.
“You will pay,” he hissed. “You will regret this.”
At first he tried to be proud. He raised his chin and proclaimed innocence, stumbling through statements meant to sound magnanimous. “You have misread my duty,” he said, voice high and brittle.
The crowd laughed low at his practiced cadence.
“How could they? They would believe me,” he told the guards. “You will not betray me!”
Then little betrayals grew large. A baker shoved forward a charred loaf and declared his taxes had been stolen. A shoemaker brandished a ledger. The crowd turned into a wall of witnesses. Logan’s face paled.
First came shock—his eyes widened, his hands twitching in disbelief. He tried to twist and turn, “I did not intend—this was for the realm.” The denials multiplied until they were ridiculous.
Then denial mutated into anger. He spat accusations at Hudson. “You compelled me—this is a plot!” he cried.
Hudson only shook his head, voice steady. “You used power to line your pockets,” he said.
The prince’s mask broke. His voice rose from shouts to hysteria to pleading. “Please—” he begged. “I was young. I did what I had to. I will give it back! I will give back all of it! Please!”
He dropped to his knees in the middle of the square. His fall was a sound—cloth and flesh and the loud thud of entitlement meeting concrete.
The crowd was stunned into a hush, then into a tide of noise—some jeers, more laughter, some sobs. Some people recorded with the new little glass daggers—gadgets that would carry the image of his humiliation around the city.
“Beg,” someone barked. “Beg the people you ruined.”
Logan reached out, hands shaking, and offered a trembling bundle of coins—paltry in comparison. He tried to crawl after it on his knees. The nobles looked away; the merchants frowned. A woman who had been driven to sell her last cow to feed her children spat.
Hudson stood above him. For a beat I saw the man I loved and the general who had to keep order. He could have driven his heel through Logan’s skull. Instead, he did what the court needed: he called for the law.
“Guards,” he said quietly. “Hold him for trial. Let the Empire’s laws decide.”
Logan’s cry of despair turned into shrieks when the imperial official read charges: extortion, forging orders, requisitions for personal profit, putting men and women at risk. The crowd watched as men they fearmost had once obeyed were forced to listen to the testimony of commoners.
Logan’s reaction moved in stages—it began with bravado, then crumbled to disbelief, then denial, then pleading, then the raw animal grief of a child who must face the consequences of his selfish acts. He slapped his face, howled, begged for mercy. Men and women in the crowd alternated between jeers and applause when the charges were read.
They did not stone him. They did not drag him by the hair. But once the verdict came, the Emperor ordered public restitution: lands returned, grain sent back to villages, the prince’s steward imprisoned. Logan was stripped of his court privileges and placed under house arrest, where he would spend months under watch—his name marred, his alliances cut.
As he knelt, throat raw, he begged Hudson, over and over, for mercy—“Spare me, please. I was your prince—spare me!”
No one pushed him from the square. The punishment was humiliation and dismantlement: the prince’s web unraveled in public—ledgers, ledgers, confessions, the sound of merchants counting losses. People wept in the street as sacks of grain were returned. A woman took a small sack, hugged it, and thanked Hudson like he had given her a child back.
Logan’s face had gone from tyrant to a ruined boy. The crowd watched his transformation from arrogance to ruin and then to pleading. Many recorded it. The story would not leave the city for months.
I stood there with Hudson’s hand gripping mine. My palm felt small in his. He had rescued me. He had refused to let a prince’s lie stand. He had done what I’d never thought possible: he had made the court accountable.
When the crowd dispersed, some clapped quietly for him. Others muttered that perhaps a general could be too proud. But for the villagers who had their grain back, Hudson was a hero. For me, he was a man I had learned to love.
*
We returned north. The captors were driven back, the Prime Minister—my father—free and angry, but alive and stubborn as ever. He hugged me with a sob that smelled of soil and old books; he scolded Hudson until the sad, quiet warmth of forgiveness poured between them.
“Do not make me your shield again,” he told me half a laugh, half-cry.
I pressed my forehead against his and whispered, “I will go with him beside me.”
Hudson and I settled into small, steady things. He called me “warm” in private, and I called him “brave.” We shared tea at dawn and bread at dusk. We fought the ugly world when we had to. We chose, day after day, to be ordinary in the way we held hands, to be exceptional in the way we stood for others.
One night, long after the prince’s humiliation had become a cautionary tale repeated in the market, Hudson found the hairpin on my dressing table.
“You will keep it,” he said, thumb brushing the green stone.
I tucked it into my palm. He watched me and then laughed—a rare, real sound like iron singing.
“Promise,” he said, “that if we keep this, we will use it only to save, never for selfishness.”
I nodded. “I promise.”
When I sleep now, I do not jerk awake from other people’s horrors. I wake to the person who calls me “warm,” to the sound of a kettle, to the steady thump of boots on the stairs—Hudson checking on me.
Sometimes I open the hairpin and the small space inside shows me a thing I cannot live without: the look on my father’s face when he was set free; a child with a sack of grain; a woman blessing Hudson for justice.
I wind the little thing closed and hear a tiny, soft tick—my memory of what it means to be saved.
The End
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