Face-Slapping19 min read
I Came to Kill an Emperor — Then He Held My Hand
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I remember the first time I heard them call me a gift.
"Gia Long," my father had said, voice like a cracked bell, "this is the only move we have left."
"I know," I had answered. I was thirteen then, a child wrapped in silk who had already learned knives and secrets. "I will be what you ask."
Years later, riding in a closed carriage, the capital of Qin passing like a long, indifferent river, I unwrapped the new name they had given me. I folded my fingers around the paper and felt the weight of an entire ruined court press down on my ribs.
"Gia?" Kaylin Edwards leaned close and whispered, "are you all right?"
"I'm here," I told her. "We survive."
Kaylin had been my friend since we were small. She had been torn from her home and made my handmaid to watch me, and she had never asked for more than the truth. She had what I could not have: easy laughter, the loyalty of a family, a father's land that still breathed beneath his feet. I had only one thing: a brooch with my mother's crest and a stone-cold promise.
"Do not falter," she said. "You promised."
"I promised to keep my brother safe," I corrected. "Everything else is a tool."
We entered the city and the whispered rumors swirled like dust: a princess from the fallen Li court arrived today; the emperor rarely saw women; who had sent her? People pointed and argued, and merchants sold fruit with less interest.
"People will stare," Kaylin said.
"Let them stare," I answered. "They will look at a stranger. They will not see the past."
They brought me to a quiet wing of the emperor's palace. They dressed me in colors that were meant to please but could not hide the hollow I had learned to wear. They told me to remain within the hall of my appointed rooms and to wait for the emperor's favor.
The first time I knelt before him I thought he would stare right through me.
"Stand," he said.
His voice was soft, but it had that current beneath it that told everyone in the hall: when he spoke, the world tilted. He was young—too young to be called a man by those who only measured years—but his eyes were older than the years. He wore the dark robe of the Qin throne like it belonged to him, effortless and dangerous.
"Cameron Cardenas," the steward intoned, "the emperor."
"Purely formalities," Chen, the eunuch, mumbled to me when he thought I could not hear.
"Gia Long," I said, and the syllables tasted like the letter my father had taught me to keep like a bone in my mouth.
"You are far from home," he observed.
"I have been many places," I replied. "I am a guest."
He looked at me as if he were measuring the distance between two stars. "A guest who will be at the palace for five years."
"Five years," Kaylin whispered to me later in our room. "They gave us five years."
"Five years to kill a man," I said, and I meant it.
For three months I learned the palace's rhythms—when the emperor rose, what kind of fruit he disliked, which courtiers laughed at which joke, and where the guards liked to sleep. I learned on purpose. Pretending to forget my past was easier than pretending not to miss it; pretending to be fragile was a shape I could put on like a cloak.
"Are you certain he will come?" Kaylin demanded the night I wrapped a small vial in the folds of my dress.
"He will come," I said. "He will be curious if not foolish."
"Why would he be curious?" she asked.
"Because curiosity is how rulers keep their hands on hot iron," I said. "They like to know what is new. They like to hold it."
On the night of the palace banquet I slipped into the corridor with a wine bowl in my hand. The plan was simple. The poison Kaylin's friend had prepared—bitter and invisible—would make the emperor fall as if ill, and in that illness the palace would strain and reveal its secrets. In the panic we planned to have Kaylin's father’s men remove the messenger plates the chancellor had built into the walls and send coded letters out to the hiding places we trusted. That was the dream at least: a wound to the palace so the iron teeth in the ministry would show themselves.
Only it did not go to plan.
A black-clad figure stabbed me first.
"Protect the princess!" someone screamed.
I dropped, hands instinctively covering where the blade had cut. Hot, bright pain flared, and I tasted copper. A palace maid fell with me, probably dead. I remember the street lights slanting. I remember Kaylin's voice screaming like a bird.
"Call the guards! Call the guards!" someone shouted.
"Find the blade!" a voice commanded, and then heavy steps closed in.
It took me hours to learn what had happened exactly. A guard had caught one of our men. A dark figure—an assassin—had attempted to slip through our plan and had been caught. There were men with black faces and a long scar across his cheek, dragged in front of the throne. The emperor pointed and said two words.
"Kill him."
"Your command?" the general—Victor Jorgensen—demanded.
"No," Cameron said. "Bring him here."
I watched while they unmasked the man. He looked like a peasant; he had a scar and a blankness that only the poor can wear. He stank of sweat and fear and duty.
"He says he is from the princess's retinue!" someone shouted.
"Take him away," Cameron said. "He is not your concern, pure one. Go recover."
"Why not kill him?" Kaylin hissed when we were alone again, fingers white with the handle of the knife she had hidden.
"He was not ours," I said. "Someone else moved faster."
Kaylin's brow furrowed. "Then who—"
"It is not time," I interrupted. "Bide."
He watched me like a man studying a fox. "You hunt," he said once, when we were alone in a corner of the palace garden, and his eyes softened before hardening again. "Children make good hunters because they never stop learning."
I nearly said I had learned sharpening knives on waking up to soldiers in the night. Instead I let the silence gather and kept my knife upon my lap.
"Why keep me alive?" I asked that night because I wanted to know.
He smiled, small and unripe. "You were a child," he said. "And children are interesting."
"Are you alone in your palace, then?" I demanded, because I had to move like a snake now and not like a lamb.
"Mostly," he said, watching me with flat amusement. "My brother grumbles from his house, but he has not the authority to undo what the throne decides."
Everett Lewis—my eyes had not noticed him then—was the emperor's brother. People whispered that the prince outside the palace was like a coiled snake waiting for a mismatched coin. He had been held away, kept like a wine in a low cellar. When I thought on his name I thought of the palace rooms that smelled of bitter wine and forgotten vows.
"Do not be foolish," Kaylin said in my ear later. "He is like a fox and a hawk crossed. Do not make him your enemy before you must."
"Enemies are counted later," I said.
The palace, in its quieter days, is ruthless with secrets. The emperor had one: the child he had been searching for since he ascended the throne was not in his harem, but her likeness sat across the garden as I cupped hot tea. He had been searching for a face he remembered walking away from years ago. I was not that face; I told myself that even as something colder inside me thought he might be.
"Who was the child?" I asked once in private. "Who did you search for?"
He did not answer me directly, only that he had been searching for someone for three years.
Three years. It was a span that could bury half a life. In those years my own life had been a string of knives and disguises. I had been ordered, shaped, and sent like an arrow. They had promised me five years. They had given me knives.
"Do you think I wanted to come?" I asked him later when he sat like a throne stillness across from me.
He tapped the table with a long finger. "Do you think I wanted to inherit a crown that tasted of old blood?"
"Then perhaps we were both given the same fate," I said.
He worried a corner of the napkin with long nails. "Fates are never so kind. They are more like recipes in which someone else writes the measurements."
We argued our lives in the quiet. I learned quickly that sarcasm made him relax; flattery unnerved him. He was wise in ways that did not show easily—survival had taught him to wear surfaces like armor.
When I failed to poison him in open sight, he did not scream. He laughed.
"Why?" I demanded, trembling with rage and humiliation as my plan miscarried into a nauseous farce.
He shrugged. "You were expecting pain," he said. "I prefer questions."
I could have killed him then—there were knives and paths and men who would have raised me to queen of a ruin. Instead I felt something else: curiosity. He was the first man in a long time I had not known how to map at once, and that terrified me more than any blade.
"What are you?" I asked because the knife in my hand felt heavy with everything I could not say.
"An emperor," he told me simply, "who likes to be amused and frightened in equal measure."
"Do you play with people's lives for sport?" I snapped.
"Sometimes," he said. "Sometimes for better reasons. Sometimes because it is simply the way the world is made."
And so my plan—finished and undone in a single heartbeat—was altered by the man I had been trained to kill. I cursed myself for being so naive that I had believed in one clean, beautiful back-and-forth of poison and death. The palace is not made of such mercy.
Weeks passed in an odd rhythm. He let me move freely, then restricted me, then let me sit by his tea. I learned to watch which ministers whispered into which sleeves and how the emperor flinched at certain names.
"Who is Gideon Craft?" I asked Victor one day when we stood in the courtyard and watched soldiers drill in silence.
Victor's jaw tightened. "He is the chancellor from your country, Gia. He had power then, and he has power in exile now."
"Do you fear him?" I asked.
"Fear?" he said. "We fear the knife, not the handholding that precedes it."
There it was: the man who had sent me like an arrow, Gideon Craft. His son—Marco Hartmann—had been appointed as a steward inside the inner court. Marco wore arrogance like armor; he pleased his father by being shameless. The court spun like a wheel of knives and bargains, and I was a single stone on its rim.
"Your family still has men in the city," Victor said lightly. "Do you trust them?"
"No," I answered without pause.
We were playing a dangerous game: I learned to sit near the emperor at times, to spill small compliments that felt like acid. At other times I plotted with Kaylin and with a quiet ally from my homeland who had surfaced: Kaylin knew many people, and Kaylin had a cousin who could move messages unseen.
"You will not lose sight of the real target," Kaylin reminded me.
"I won't," I said. "But sometimes we must cut through the crown to reach the heart in the chest."
One night, months later, I climbed onto the emperor's roof and moved like a shadow. The whole palace smelled like woodsmoke and old incense. I had sharpened my resolve until it hummed. When I slipped into his room and found him awake, I swore the world had tilted.
"Stop," he said, catching my wrist with two fingers like catching a song. "You will make an ugly mess of things."
"You are awake," I breathed, shocked.
"Of course I'm awake," he said, and then he laughed softly. "I saw your shadow. I thought it lovely."
"Why?" I hissed, using the one blade I had left: words.
"Because you wear danger like a dress," he said.
The next thing I remember is cold leather around my arms and his breath at my ear. He did not kill me. He wrapped my body against his chest and smelled like sandalwood and command.
"Why do you keep me?" I asked then, long after the awkwardness and the attempt had passed into the quiet.
"Because," he said, "I want to know what you are like when you are not trying to be something else."
The confession sounded like a dare.
"Then you know me now," I replied. "You know I will kill you if given the chance."
"Then I will hold you until you decide not to," he said.
For someone who had eaten grief like bread, I found the words almost tender.
The days that followed were a masquerade. He allowed me small freedoms and watched from the edge of the garden while I sat among the camellias. The court spoke in circles, and in those circles new plots took shape. My homeland's chancellor, Gideon Craft, remained as a dark center. He had not simply let go of a kingdom—he had nurtured a plan.
"Everett will help us," his son Marco whispered one time, thinking himself secure in a brother's loyalty.
Everett—my young prince—smiled the smile of a man who thought himself a god of embers. He wanted his brother's crown. They wanted me to be a pawn in their plans. That knowledge made my blood run chilled.
"I will not be a pawn," I told Kaylin.
"You cannot refuse the hand you were dealt," she said.
"Then I'll pick the blade," I answered.
We watched them all. There were too many alliances to count: a man called Keegan Vasquez sold nonsense to men who wanted numbers, a man named Marco was too eager for glory, and others twisted their loyalties like cloth. In the end, though, nothing moves without an audience.
The festival came—the Flower Day—and with it came delegations from other states. Wu's princess and prince arrived like a bright wound. Their arrival was meant to test loyalties. At the banquet, a rowdy girl from Wu, loud as a bell, insulted the people of the capital. The crowd turned against her as a wave turns. It was a small thing, a spark in a palace of tinder.
The emperor watched it all, and in that quiet watchfulness I felt a strand of curiosity snag hold. The Wu delegation left offended, and their prince, Wu Zhen, clenched his jaw like a fist.
"Power is a stage," I observed when we were later alone.
"It is a blade," he answered.
I used the days to coax him out of the palace. "The mountain will suit us," I said. "It is a day to breathe fresh air."
"Why?" he asked.
"Because it's easy to hide the truth in wide open places," I said.
We rode out together, and for a time, when the air was salt and clear, I considered the possibility that even the edges of murder might yield something like truth. I made my attempt again—this time on the path, amongst the pines—but the blade caught on a rivet. He did not die. He held a hand on my wrist and pulled the knife from my fingers.
"Why did you not simply let them bind you?" he asked.
"Because," I said, and replied with the same truth I had learned to keep, "I did not want to be brought home in chains."
He smiled then in a way that made my stomach fall.
"Are you so determined to be a ghost?" he asked softly.
"Only if death is the only language they understand," I replied.
I failed again. But in failing I learned something that chiselled me harder than any blade: Cameron Cardenas did not fear me; he wanted to understand me. He saw in my attempt more than an assassin. He saw a person who had worn a throne's crown too early.
"Why do you not hate me?" I demanded one night. It was a dangerous question.
"Because," he said, "I do not know you well enough to hate you. I know how to be angry; hate takes time."
We became a dangerous kind of friends—two predators with knives at their belts, testing the lines between them with words like light. I began to listen when he spoke of the old emperor—his father—who had died in a night of betrayal. He talked of a brother, Everett Lewis, locked by pride and resentment. He spoke quietly of a man named Gideon Craft and said, once, "He is old enough to wear his own ruin like a cloak."
"Then perhaps the cloak should be removed," I suggested, because in my heart there burned a different kind of flame—revenge.
One morning the palace announced a public ceremony to expose traitors. I sat in my rooms and waited for the procession. The chancellor—Gideon Craft—was called to the hall. The chamber buzzed with whispers. My throat went dry. This was the moment I had dreamt of—yet not the one I had expected.
When Gideon walked into the hall, he was a man who had spent his life learning how to say the right things. He bowed with all the slow dignity of someone who felt he had exhausted every ounce of favor currency.
"Speak," Cameron said.
Gideon addressed the hall and began his slow, practiced apology. "Your Majesty," he intoned. "I—"
"Enough of the preface," Cameron snapped.
Eyes turned like gulls. The emperor lifted his hand and with a single motion had the court's attention. He had found proof—letters, witness names, confessions smuggled in by men who had once thought themselves safe. He spoke calmly and then, as cameras would have it today, he let the court witness the unspooling.
"These are the words you wrote," Cameron said, holding up a sealed scroll. "These are the plans you hatched to trade lands for titles, to sell our people's safety for your family's fortune."
Gideon Craft's face shifted—an initial palette of smugness faded like oil in rain to confusion, then to rage, then denial.
"No," he said. "False! Slaves forged these papers—"
A laughter rose low at that. A man in the back whispered, "He thinks himself above the ink." People leaned forward. I felt something inside of me rise, a cold prayer that Gideon would fold.
Cameron let him speak and then, with soft cruelty, produced more. "You called my brother to your court. You sought to set a throne against a throne. You used the Li people's dust as bait to get into my court. You brought a princess as an envoy and meant for her to be a thorn. You meant to sow chaos."
"But—" Gideon tried to step forward, hands fluttering like a trapped bird's.
"Enough." Cameron's voice cut clean. "Bring him before the hall. Bring his son. Let the country see."
I watched Gideon leave with two guards. The crowd at first murmured, curious, as if seeing an opera's first act. Then someone in the crowd started clapping—quiet at first and then louder. Fingers fumbled for small devices; some recorded with their eyes. The palace's inner circle did not know yet that the Emperor had prepared a spectacle. They would learn.
They marched Gideon onto the stone dais and set him before the assembled court and the open windows where market folk could press faces and shutters against the light. The doors were thrown wide; people beyond the palace walls had filtered in like a tide. There must have been hundreds—soldiers, merchants, wives clutching children, scribes who waited for scandal like biscuits wait for tea.
"What is this?" Gideon barked at Cameron. "You have no right—"
"You will hear the reading," Cameron said. "You will hear what you wrote to your son, what you promised to the foreigners, what you plotted. You will listen in front of the people whose lives you traded."
"These are lies!" Gideon screamed now, hands trembling, eyes bright as chips of flint.
"Read them," Cameron ordered.
A clerk produced a scroll and, with loud clarity, read the messages. They were plain and flat as the truth: offers of land for loyalty, lists of men to be bribed, a plan to make the emperor's brother a figurehead if the emperor were removed. The words were cold. Gideon knew them better than any man in the hall; they had been his fingers' work.
The first change in Gideon was that stubborn arrogance broke into hurt. His mouth tightened, then opened like the first fracture in a jar. "Impossible," he said, at first like a wheeze. The denials came and sounded thin.
"You told Marco to place men in the princess's retinue, did you not?" Cameron asked. "You told Marco to watch her and use her as bait for your other plans."
Gideon stared. "Those are lies—"
"Marco stand forth," the Emperor said.
Marco Hartmann stepped out, his jaw set. "I obeyed my father's command once," he said. "I am sorry."
"See how quietly your son confesses," someone in the crowd murmured. A murmur rose into a wave.
Gideon pressed a hand to his chest. "He is mine!" he snarled. "You will not smear my name!"
"You smeared the nation," Cameron said.
Denial failed him finally. His face collapsed into panic. "No—no—" He began to stammer. "They did not—"
"Enough," Cameron said. "You will stand trial in the open. You will answer before these people. You will know what it is to be stripped of a title and have your name sung as a traitor."
Gideon shook his head and took a step back. A line of officers moved in to bind him. He resisted and—like any old man who believes himself immortal—he expected mercy in the end.
But the people gathered did not plan mercy.
"Traitor!" someone shouted.
"Shame!" another voice joined.
Phones—no, scratch that—small tablets did not yet exist in our time, but hands reached for anything that could record a movement: quills flew, ink was wet, tongues moved quicker than thought. Women clutched their children and pointed. Hands rose with vehemence. Someone spat. A ring of soldiers tightened the circle.
They dragged Gideon to the middle of the courtyard, forced to kneel upon the cold stone. He was flushed and wild. For the first time I saw him lose the practiced composure of years. There were other men in the crowd—courtely, yes, but the ones who mattered today were the commoners who had come to watch. They formed a tight ring and watched as if the world were a stage and they, at last, were in the audience.
"Beg!" a voice cried. "Kneel and beg!"
Gideon had always thought himself the giver of orders, not the receiver. He looked up as if he would bite the sky and find an ally. He found only faces—fierce and hard.
"Cameron!" Gideon shouted. "Mercy, your Majesty! Think of my service!"
The emperor looked down at him with absolutely no shade of softness. "You serv'd your own pocket," he said. "Not the realm. Kneel."
Gideon dropped to his knees in a ragged clatter, the court watching in stunned silence before a low, ugly ripple of applause swept the onlookers. He clasped his hands and started to beg—at first clumsy, then frantic.
"Mercy! Mercy! I did what I had to—my son—my land—" He had the dignity of a man burned away, revealing only the animal panic of him.
The crowd's reaction was like a living thing. At first there were gasps, and then the scene became one of the most human spectacles I had ever witnessed. Children pointed; a woman behind me let out a long, low sob. Someone took out a strip of cloth and wrapped it around their head to steady themselves. A man in the front row took a coin and flung it into the air as if a coin could buy back a wasted life. The emperor observed everything as if he were practicing a lesson.
"Do you remember how your men burned fields?" he asked. "Do you remember the infants in the ruins? The grain stolen? You will be remembered."
Gideon wept now with something like fury and disbelief. He shouted and begged and then tried to push past the guards only to trip and fall to his knees. The crowd roared, and then shockingly, some began to clap. An old woman sobbed and then said aloud, for all to hear, "It's about time."
"Forgive me!" Gideon shrieked, tears cutting tracks down his face. "I did it for my family. I did it for—"
"You will not die today," Cameron said slowly, his voice like a bell in the hollow. "You will be cast from your office, stripped of your titles, your lands to be redistributed to the people's funds. You will stand accused and tried in the open. You will not leave this city. You will be a cost to those who thought they could rely on you."
They bound him with a cord the color of twilight. He slumped like an animal, disbelief turning into a gutted, public collapse.
"Please!" Gideon moaned. "Please! I beg you—"
No one reached out to help. They opened windows and watched. A hundred hands held up rough cloths that soon would be wet with tears. People took out small tablets with boredom and with newly sharp interest. Servants moved to the edges. Someone in the crowd recorded the scene with a crude device; others simply told their neighbors to spread the story.
He was dragged out, gagged, furious, deranged, pleading. When he was taken through the gates the crowd pressed closer. Some hissed, some cheered. Mothers clutched children as if to shield them from the sight, and yet they could not turn away.
Gideon's last plea reached only the ears of the emperor.
"Do not forget," he whimpered. "You will answer for this day."
The emperor did not answer. He only turned and walked away, his cape sweeping like a tide. The crowd dispersed with a new knowledge sewn into their bones: power could fall as quickly as a leaf. The court had watched a man go from the pedestal to the stone, and they had seen the emperor's hand steady.
Afterwards, when the dust settled and the servants swarmed to take notes and to gather crumbs of information, I felt something I had thought impossible: a thin, hot peace. Not happiness—no—but a promise that the man who had burned my life into ashes would feel the earth slip under his own feet.
"Did you see?" Kaylin whispered near my ear as we watched Gideon go. "He had to beg."
"Yes," I said, and listened to my own pulse. "He suffered. That will have to do."
I know now that the spectacle was designed by Cameron. He wanted the public to see the fall of a man who had thought himself untouchable. He had used truth like a blade—slow, precise, and merciless. Gideon Craft did not die that day, but he was broken publicly in a way that would haunt him worse than any dagger. He went from a man with influence to a man whose name would be spat like spoiled fruit.
"Is this what you wanted?" Kaylin asked me as we slipped into the shadows.
"I wanted the bread that was taken from us," I said. "Justice will not fix all the things they took, but it will mark the men who stole."
Cameron watched me that evening with eyes like iron and something softer beneath. He had seen the way I had not rejoiced openly. He had seen my clenched fists and he had not scolded me. For the first time since I arrived, I felt like I could breathe without tasting poison.
I still had knives and plans, but the public punishment of my enemy—Gideon Craft—had been a wound I had nursed from the inside. It was not vengeance that had tasted sweet that day; it was the justice that left filth under his fingernails and the knowledge that a man who had used my country like a pawn now knelt in the dirt and begged. The crowd's voices made him small. He lost the alchemy of dignity; he became merely a man.
That night the emperor sent for me.
"You were there," he said.
"I had to be," I answered.
"You did not celebrate."
"I do not find joy in watching men fall," I said honestly.
He looked at me and, for the first time, the emperor seemed less like a king and more like a man who had not slept in months.
"Do you hate him?" he asked.
"I hated him when he set fire to my father's house," I said.
"And now?"
"Now," I said slowly, feeling the stone under my nails, "I would like to see men who betray their people punished. I would like my brother free. I would like it all fixed."
He smiled then—small, private. "That is a dangerous list, Gia."
"So I will make certain I am careful with each blade," I said.
"You are already dangerous," he replied.
We were both, in our different ways, survivors. He had used the law and spectacle to break a man socially. I had used knives and thought. We were not friends yet, but we were no longer absolute enemies.
"One more thing," he said, standing. "You will not seek to kill me again."
"Why not?" I asked, and there was a tremor in my voice that surprised me more than it surprised him.
"Because," he said simply, "if you stop trying to kill me, I'll let you keep finding the truth."
We both knew that promises given under a throne never had to be kept, and yet we made them anyway, because promises give a place to hang your anger.
In the months that followed, the court shifted. Men repositioned themselves like chessmen. Marco Hartmann went to his father and cried out, furious and humbled. Everett Lewis raged in the silence of his room and plotted in ways that would take longer to reveal than any of us anticipated. The Wu delegation left in a bitter silence that later proved profitable to both sides.
For all that, I learned one fine, cutting thing: punishment suits the stage when you are made of people. When you make a man beg in public, you let those he robbed watch his fall like a theater. They remember the look of his face. They remember the sound of his pleadings. That memory is a neat, small kindling for the future.
"Is that not cruel?" Kaylin asked one night as we walked the garden.
"Cruelty gets us to the start line," I said. "Justice keeps the race going."
After that day, a new plan took root. I did not throw my knives away—nor did Cameron his wary curiosity. Between two predators there was a fragile, dangerous truce. I had not thought I could ever stand in a court and look a man like Gideon Craft in the eyes as he crawled, but I had. I had felt my hands shake, my heart ache, and then a steel rise up in me. I had been, in that moment, more than a pawn.
"One day," he said in a rare softness, "you will not need to hold a blade to be feared."
"Do not tell me how I will be feared," I laughed, because the only control I might ever have in this crownless life was the way my laughter sounded.
The palace had a thousand rooms and a thousand plots. We had taken one man down. But in the hush after the storm, I felt something else: the shape of a life that might be more than a blade. And for the first time since the fire that took my parents, I let a small, ridiculous thought creep in—that perhaps what I wanted most was not always revenge, but to build something that the men who burned my home could not scorch.
The rest of it—the slow turning of events, the betrayals to come, Everett's rebellion, the final reckonings—all live in their own places of grief and triumph. But there was one bedrock truth I learned that day watching Gideon Craft kneel in the sun: power can be stripped as publicly as clothing, and a man who begs under a hot sky can be more destroyed than any sword can break him.
I kept my knives. I kept my plans. But when I looked at the emperor afterwards—at Cameron Cardenas—there was a small shift: I was no longer only a blade pointed at a man. I was a woman watching a man who knew how to cut and how to heal.
"Do not think you have won," I told him once.
"I do not intend to," he replied.
And that was the truth that kept us both moving forward, blade and crown and after all—something like possibility.
The End
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