Sweet Romance13 min read
A Reluctant Bride, A Relentless Regent, and the Price of Truth
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I never thought an imperial edict could feel like a noose until I was folded into red silk and carried across the city to the house of my father's worst enemy.
"My daughter will be useful to the court," my father declared in the ancestral hall. "She will repair what swords have broken."
"You do as you must," my mother whispered into my hair. "Three years—just give me three years and bring grandchildren. Do as they ask."
I sat and nodded because that was what daughters do when statesmen decide for them. I was Juliana Beard, daughter of Per Kuznetsov; the emperor's decree named me wife to Gerard Brennan, the regent who stood beneath the throne though the emperor sat above it like a gilded statue.
They said Gerard was dangerous. I only saw the part of the story told at tea parties: "Handsome but cruel," someone would hiss. "Ruthless, all ambition." Another would contradict: "He is brilliant, a sword and a scholar." When I met him under the red veil, he looked like both stories and neither.
"Come here," he said in two flat words when the veil lifted.
"Come here for what?" I asked, and he answered with the small, formal act—"Cup the marriage wine,"—and the scent of him folded between us like a woven promise.
"Stay," he instructed later when we stood in my bedchamber.
"Stay for what?" I asked back.
"For the rest of our lives if need be," he said, and the tone had no softness but the words settled strange and heavy in my chest.
I married him because the emperor ordered it. I whispered to myself that I was marrying an arrangement, a thread in a net intended to hold a fragile realm together. I did not expect tenderness; I expected bargains and cold civility. What I got was complicated.
"Are you comfortable?" he asked one morning, voice hoarse from pre-dawn paperwork.
"I am," I lied, then, braver than I meant to be, I leaned in and kissed him.
His eyes widened. "Juliana," he breathed, and then he laughed once without mirth. "You're stubborn like your father."
"I can make do," I said. "I can be the loyal partner the emperor expects."
He was not the monster the slander made him. He kept late hours, studied maps, signed documents, and wore his authority like a second skin. Yet when dawn found him with hair in disarray, he was a different man—soft, oddly tired, and foolish with private jokes. He punished me with sarcasm and rewarded me with small attentions: a pastry bought on his way home, a hand that smoothed my hair when fever stole my sleep.
"You are unusual," he said one night, when we lay watching shadows on the ceiling. "No one else would kiss me first."
"Someone must," I said. "You are more bearable than your reputation." I could hear a smile in his breath. "Besides, who else would share the city's best sweets with me?"
He lowered his head and kissed me again, quieter. After that there were no grand declarations. There were only moments—small, ordinary, and impossible to schedule. He stood sentinel by my bed when a fever spilled me into weak, hot delirium. He scraped my back when sickness twisted my stomach. He kept a list of medicines and watched my cup like a hawk.
"Drink," he said, pressing the herbal cup into my hand.
"I don't like it," I said.
"I'll drink too," he promised, and he did, and the ridiculousness of the scene made me laugh despite the bitter taste.
When the imperial court called me to the palace—"go, accompany Princess Aurora"—I thought it was merely ceremonial. I did not expect the banquet to end in darkness.
"I want you to return in two weeks," he told me as I wrapped my cloak. "Rest, keep an eye for politics."
"Two weeks," I promised, stepping into the carriage.
"Do not tire yourself," he added.
"Nor you," I said.
At the banquet, I felt the seam of the world rasp. They served the same dishes that had been offered to a dozen women before me, but the soup I sipped carried a note of iron; a chill that slid down my spine. My lips tasted copper. I excused myself and then it slid out of me—once, twice, a mouthful of red—and panic replaced my composure.
"Poison!" someone yelled.
"She bleeds," another cried.
"To the palace physician!" the regent demanded, and for the first time I watched Gerard Brennan move with something like fury. He pushed through the crowd, his face as gray as slate.
"Call me Juliana," I wanted to tell him, but there was no breath to fashion the words. I clung to the bed and felt a hand—his hand—on my forehead as if it could steady my failing life.
When I woke, the room was too bright. My mother stood like a guardian statue; her face was a map of anger. Gerard knelt by my bed, his sleeves crumpled, eyes wet.
"If you had slept past morning..." he said, voice breaking. "If you had not..." He stopped and swallowed. "Forgive me."
"Who did it?" I wrote because my voice hadn't returned. I needed to hunt the shadow that wanted me dead.
He would not say then. He only took my hand and, Abruptly, my mother stood and said, "We go home. Now." She packed like a general and left the regent looking at me as if I had the answer he feared.
My mother knew many things about politics. She also learned another thing quickly: I was with child. Two months ago, the tiny unreckoning had been a rumor; now it was a fact and it changed everything.
"Who wants you dead?" I asked again when we were alone for a breath. My throat rasped; words were shards.
"Someone who would harm me," Gerard said simply. "Someone who thinks by striking you they strike me."
"Why would they target me instead of you?" I protested, because I could not imagine myself of such consequence that haters would strike my cup.
"Because you are noticeable," he said. "Because harming you hurts me."
He said it as if it were a strategy, then he said it as if it were confession. I frowned. "You are my regent and my husband. We are supposed to be political correspondents, not lovers."
"I am both," he said without irony. "And I refuse to let anyone take you."
Days bled into one another. My memory felt like a map with a missing fold. Scenes had been snatched, names erased. Faces I should have known were blurs. I knew one thing with the clarity of knife-edge: long ago, in a life I could taste but not hold, I had known Gerard. I called him "uncle" and then I could not recall why. A childlike fragment returned—he had once rescued me from an autumn swing and told me to call him small-uncle, and I had never liked the name. I had been young then; now I was married to him.
"Did you know we were related?" I asked him one night, feeling stupid and small.
He stiffened. "You were meant to forget," he said, then softer, "I could not bear for you to know and yet suffer in other ways."
"Who decided that?" I demanded.
He did not answer directly. "Your father once taught me."
"My father?" I repeated. "Per Kuznetsov—he sent you away. Why would he hide that from me?"
"To protect you," Gerard said. "Perhaps to protect all of us."
Then the palace delivered its verdict. A slow, official hush fell over the city and the name attached to the attempt on my life—Hina Phillips, the wife of the An'yang Prince—began to breed rumors like a summer fever. They whispered that she wanted Gerard gone; she wanted her husband to rise; she wanted power for her house. People pointed and took sides. Cordelia Dumas, the empress dowager, watched in pearl-white silence.
I wanted to hunt Hina down myself. I had half a mind to sharpen a blade and take a sullen walk to the prince's residence. My mother flinched at the suggestion.
"No," she said. "You nearly died. You will do justice from safety."
"Is she the only suspect?" I asked.
"Not the only one," Gerard admitted. "But the evidence points toward her complicity."
I did not wait for the court to convulse. I wanted to see the woman face-to-face. They said she was pale as milk, elegant as ice. I knew what the stories said; I did not want stories. I wanted the truth.
"Bring her to the Hall," I demanded to my father. He looked at me as if he expected gratitude for his power. "Bring her," I repeated.
Per Kuznetsov sat under the ancestral carvings and scowled, then nodded. "If you insist."
The day the court arranged the public hearing, the city buzzed like trapped bees.
"Are you sure about this?" Gerard asked, voice low as we walked to the hall.
"I am sure," I replied. "I want truth in the light where everyone can see it."
We entered the great hall. Tall pillars, lacquered banners. The emperor slouched with a face like wasted paper; Cordelia Dumas sat rigid and small beside him. Courtiers filled rows like a forest of heads.
"Let it begin," my father ordered, and Hina was brought in, pale and measured, flanked by her husband's men—Lance Conner, the An'yang Prince—who sat as rigid as a bayonet. Hina's steps were composed. She smiled, and it was not a smile full of innocence. It was a thin, learned smile.
"Face me," I said, voice steady though my heart slammed like a trapped bird.
Hina's eyes flicked to the crowd then to me. "Juliana Beard," she said, as if to taste my name. "You look more fragile in person."
"Did you plan to poison me?" I asked.
She blinked, expression blank. "Poison? I see an empire eager for gossip. Why would I do such a thing?"
"You were seen near my cup," someone called. "You were heard threatening the regent's household!"
Hina's smile tightened. "Rumors are cheap," she said. "And so is courage that hides behind a banquet table."
"Stand and tell the truth," my father snapped. "We will have witnesses."
They called witnesses. Hands pointed. A server who had handled dishes before the banquet said he had seen Hina's attendant brush a cup. A messenger testified that Hina had spoken of the regent in bitter terms, of wanting to remove obstacles. Little threads pulled and a tapestry of intent showed a woman with motive.
"Why?" I demanded when they put the evidence forward.
Hina's face crumpled for the first time like paper wet at the edges. "Why?" she echoed. "Because I loved a man who would not look at me, and because I was taught that to win you must wound the ground beneath others' feet."
"You poisoned a pregnant woman," I said. "You attempted to take what lives inside me."
Her hand flew to her mouth. In that instant she was not the composed noblewoman but a furious animal caught in a trap. "I wanted his attention!" she shouted. "I wanted him—"
"To kill a child for your selfishness!" someone spat.
The hall stilled. Then the unthinkable happened: Lance Conner pushed to his feet. "She is my wife," he said. "I will not have the world's justice turned into a private vendetta."
"Then let the world see your judgment," Per Kuznetsov said. "Bring forth the method of public atonement."
A hush. The emperor, shifting like a puppet with strings, raised a hand. "The court will judge. Let it be public."
The punishment began as a peeling, slow thing. It was not simply a sentence to hang or death; our court believed in shaming transgressors before the people, in letting pride fall as a spectacle.
Hina was brought to the center dais. The banners hung like silent witnesses. "You stand accused of attempted murder, attempted infanticide, and treason in attempting to harm the person of the regent," my father intoned. "How do you plead?"
"I—" Hina started. Her voice was small. "I plead—"
"Guilty," she blurted as if a rope had tightened. "I am guilty. I wanted him. I tried to take what stood between us."
The first stage was exposure. Servants removed her jeweled sleeves, her silk embroidered robe replaced with plain linen. The crowd murmured. "A noble undone," someone said.
"Look at her," a matron called. "She who dressed as a queen reduced to common cloth."
"It will teach other women what happens to those who think the world is merely for their taking," another whispered.
Hina's composure cracked. "Shame is not enough!" she cried. "You tear at what gave me life!"
"Confess slowly," Per demanded. "Tell the truth in full, that all may hear."
She told it. First, she said Gerard's name, and the hall recoiled at how calmly she spoke it. "I loved him," she said. "I loved the man who refused me; I wanted him to have less—less glory, less peace. I thought that by striking his household, he would look to me in fury and in need. I wanted to be necessary."
"Did you plan to kill Juliana?" I demanded.
She looked at me. "I did not mean to kill the child," she whispered. "I meant to wound him where it would hurt him the most. I misjudged the dose."
"How could you be so certain?" Gerard's voice was low and steady and full of something fierce.
"Because you are always present in his attention," she answered. "He keeps his house and his triumphs like a closed garden. I wanted through scandal to be invited in."
"Hear her!" Per barked. "She confesses intent!"
The second stage was the unmaking of alliances. One by one, Hina's friends were called; faces that had once nodded in polite agreement stepped back. A lady who had once dabbled in court influence turned away, throat tight. "I did not know such depths," she whispered.
The crowd turned ugly then, the public appetite for spectacle insatiable. People spat. A group of commoners let loose their pent-up resentment. They had watched powerful women lead and wound for generations; now they felt the pleasure of watching a noble's fall as if it were a debt repaid.
For Hina herself, the change was chemical. At first her eyes danced with a strange triumph—as if she had dared and been seen. Then her smile slid into denial. "You lie!" she snapped. "You twist it!"
"No one lies," a witness said, and thrust forward the cook who had detected the strange scent in the bowl. He explained in trembling bursts how he saw the servant's hand linger.
Then denial became panic. Her voice climbed and shrank with a frantic rhythm. "I didn't mean—" she gasped. "Please—"
The crowd's mood shifted from curiosity to cruelty. Fingers pointed. Someone in the galleries threw a cup. Another cried "Shame!" A young man in the front row filmed with a tiny glass device and people around him leaned in, hungry to spread the scandal. The guards closed ranks.
"Have mercy," Hina begged suddenly, voice raw. "I did it for love—I did it for desperation. Don't let this be the end!"
"Mercy for you?" a woman called. "Mercy is a garment better kept by those who do not drown children to wear it."
That was the turning point. The public's judgment hardened into a ritual: Hina would be made to make the confession herself and would be paraded through the market with her head uncovered. She would be bound and led by those she wronged to feel their scorn. Lance Conner, who had until now sat with a face like carved stone, rose and declared that as her husband he would sever their household honors; he would no longer recognize her claim to prestige. That gesture—his public renunciation—triggered the thousands of small humiliations like dominoes.
Hina's face moved through an agony I will never forget. She went from coquettish pride to startled disbelief, then to a brittle defiance, then to desperate pleas. "Please!" she begged at one point, eyes wet and whole. "Don't send me where I will be nothing."
People pressed closer. Someone in the crowd spat on the ground before her. A child screamed; an old woman clapped. Women whispered: "Let her learn what fear is." Men muttered: "Let her see she cannot buy the world's pity."
She collapsed at the moment of greatest drama. "I did it for love," she cried. "I did it for love!" Her hands clawed at the dais.
"You took a child's life and a man's peace for a hunger that had no right," Per Kuznetsov said. "You shall be stripped of titles, your household disbanded. You will be paraded as a warning. You will then be delivered to the authorities for punishment as the law demands."
The emperor, looking pale and shaken, signed the papers. Cordelia Dumas whispered, "Let the punishment be public so no one will doubt the law."
They did not hang her in the square. They did worse: they stripped her of everything that had given her dignity first. She was dragged beneath the empire's shame until she begged for the one thing that might have spared her: true remorse.
When they finally brought her before me, face raw, hair loose, one of her attendants attempted to kneel and plead forgiveness. "No," I said, and the word came without the revenge I had promised myself. "No mercy can be paid for a child nearly taken. The law will have its way."
I felt no triumph. There was only the cold understanding that to be powerful is to be a target; to be loved blindly can make a person monstrous. When Gerard put his hand on my shoulder, it was not out of possessiveness but a gentleness I had not expected: a man sharing the burden of an attempted sorrow.
After the punishment, the world moved like a city in an aftershock. Some applauded the justice; others whispered of cruelty. Lance Conner had been humbled and his house weakened. Hina Phillips lay broken, her ambitions poured out like scattered beads. The public humiliation had exposed the rot of a private betrayal.
For me, the result was quieter: I recovered, slowly. The infant grew inside me, a stubborn pulse of life that refused to be erased. Gerard, who had always seemed carved from stone for the court's benefit, grew tender in private. He spoke of giving power back to the emperor—slowly, step by step—so that we could be alone with our small family.
"Will you stay?" I asked one evening while the snow lay like a hush across the city.
"I will stay as long as you want," he said, and his mouth curved around the promise as if it were a thing he had rehearsed but had never allowed himself to feel.
"Did you ever want to leave it?" I probed.
"Leave the regency?" He pursed his lips. "I will hand it back when the house of the throne is secure. For you, I will wait. For our child, I will wait."
Months later, when the winds were softer and spring hovered like a secret, I gave birth to a son. He was small and fierce and began to cry as if the world had just owed him its noise. Gerard handed him to my mother, Kimber Clarke, who sobbed like a woman who had been given a miracle through many thorns.
"He is like his father," Gerard said, then broke into laughter that was almost a sob. "But he has your chin."
"Keep your flattery," I told him, tired and raw and impossibly light. "Remember you promised to not cry so much in public."
"I said nothing of promises in private," he countered, and kissed my forehead with a kind of fierce joy.
We returned slowly to the managed peace of a household that belonged to no single person. Gerard's decisions, once cold and deliberate, softened by the small gravity of domestic care. He still read petitions late into the night but he now came home with small gifts—a child-sized toy sword for our son, a stitched cap to keep him warm.
"Will you have more?" I asked once, tracing the small roundness of our child's cheek.
"I do not know," Gerard said. "But I will not let politics steal another child from you."
We laughed, because politics had stolen enough already.
Years later, the scandal of Hina's attempt faded into the archives. Lance Conner's ambitions curdled and shrank. Per Kuznetsov resumed his council with the emperor in an uneasy détente. Cordelia Dumas kept her watchful eyes. Aurora Persson married and left the rooms where we had once shared childish laughter. Journee Smirnov continued to gossip with the subtle weapon of a woman who had learned the court's ways.
I remember one afternoon when I sat in the garden with Gerard and our son. The air smelled like sap and old books.
"Do you ever regret—any of it?" I asked him. "The marriage, the court, the violence?"
He took our son's hand in his. "I regret that you were hurt," he said. "I regret that ordinary things became dangerous because of my station. But I do not regret that you are here."
We both paused, because sometimes words must be spared to preserve the fragile quiet.
"Thank you," I said at last. "For protecting me."
"For being here," he corrected, and the corner of his mouth quirked.
Years later when our son was old enough to swing on the palace ropes, I would tell him stories not of wars or edicts, but of small things: how his father once stole a pastry for me, how my mother wished for grandchildren like a weathered plant longing for sun, and how a woman once tried to take the worst from me and in doing so taught us the price of truth.
We lived in the strange balance between power and tenderness. I never stopped being the daughter of Per Kuznetsov, nor did Gerard stop being the regent regaining his stead. But in the quiet rooms and within the small, stubborn life of our child, we found the space to be human.
And sometimes, late at night, when the city was a scattered map of lanterns, Gerard would sit and read names on plaintiffs and petitions and I would fall asleep against his shoulder, the rhythm of his breath a promise that even the most public lives could be private again.
The End
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