Revenge17 min read
I Didn't Mean to Rescue a Villain — But He Owed Me Three Favors
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1
The world had already decided how my story would end when I crawled out of the mass grave.
"They married. Peace returned. The villain was stripped, humiliated, and buried." That was the last line I remembered from the battered book I’d read once in a fever, and that was where people said the story stopped.
I did not expect to find him alive.
"I can carry him," I said, my voice small to my own ears, but steady. The man between my arms was lighter than I expected, and heavier than my courage.
"Don't be foolish," Grayson Aldridge, the old monk, said, but even he turned his head to see. "Who is he?"
"I—" I had no name for a man who should have been dead among the bones and old rags. "He looked alive."
I peeled back the straw that had wrapped his face. He was handsome in a terrible way, features perfect but smeared with dirt and blood. He opened his eyes when I called his name, and they saw right through me with a sort of cold hunger.
"Why did you save me?" he rasped. The voice was broken iron.
"Because you were breathing," I said. "Who else would I leave to die?"
He spat at me, then laughed in a sound like a cracked bell. "You should have left me."
2
"This is Carly," I told Grayson, though my throat ached at the lie. Old life names don't always fit new worlds, but I clung to the one I chose.
"You should not have touched him." Grayson folded his hands. "If he is what bookmen wrote, he is not a man to be helped."
"You sound like the book." I wanted to say he was a monster from a book—because that made it tidy. Because the book said monsters belonged in graves.
"Books are the bones of what was," he said softly. "We will do what monks do. We will care for what breathes."
He lay in the narrow room for three days before he opened his eyes with a grunt.
"Rex," he said on waking, as if the name were a blade thrown at me.
"Rex?" I almost dropped the warming cup. "Rex Woods?"
He let the name shape his lips. "Rex Woods."
"You are... part of a book," I said, partly to myself, partly to the quiet room.
"Am I?" He watched me like a man cataloguing a curious specimen. "Why did you save me, Carly?"
"I didn't know it was you. I only knew the dirt and the breath."
"Then you are a silly woman." He smiled once, dangerously and faintly, and the room felt colder.
3
People do not help villains for free, and help is not some grandation of charity. It's currency. I had none.
"I am leaving," I said eventually. "You will live, you should heal, and then we'll go our ways."
"Do you think I will go my way?" he asked. "Do you not know who I was and what they did to me?"
I had to remind myself—he was the villain the book had made monstrous: a child stolen, a puppet broken, a man who learned cruelty like a craft. But he was also someone who'd lost everything else.
"I cannot turn my back on a person who might die," I told him. "Even if the world says he is a beast."
He laughed again, but there was no joy in it. "Then you have made a choice."
4
The temple would not keep me. A woman alone with a notorious man scared the little mountain households. I found work in a sewing shop in town, the Lin Tailors, a place where fingers moved like prayers and where life could be stitched back together.
"You're on your own here," Beatrice Johnson, the embroidery mistress, said the day I showed up dripping from the mountain dew. "You stitch or you starve."
Levi Lang, the tailor of myth in the shop, watched me with a curl of disdain the size of a seam. He was young, sharp, and utterly intolerant of people who could not measure twice and cut once.
"You don't look like the type to make clothes," he muttered. "Your stitches tremble like you are afraid of them."
"Better a trembling stitch than no bread at all," I shot back. My tongue was sharper than my needle.
He had the skill of a man who could make a rich lord look humble. I had the stubbornness of someone who would learn until my hands obeyed. We bickered, we fought, and slowly the shop became a place where the world seemed sane for a handful of hours each day.
5
"She is the light in my book," he murmured once in the dark of the shop as we closed. I did not look up. "Who?"
Levi coughed. "Never mind," he said.
It was typical for my life to be complicated by men. That day in the market, a rot-faced man—Finnegan Ferreira—saw a woman alone and thought the world owed him entry.
"Hey, pretty," he said, leering. "Come sit with us."
"You touch me and I'll break your nose," I said. My warning was small, but there were no friends in the street. They pushed and sniggered and the crowd looked away, as crowds in stories do.
Rex stepped between us as if the world had always revolved to let him stand in my defense. "Leave her be," he said, low.
Finnegan's grin widened. "You? The broken beast? This is entertainment."
"You will not touch her," Rex said. There was a light in his eyes I had not seen: not mercy, but ownership. The man who had been hunted bent like steel about something.
He fought with the kind of speed that belied the monastery man's predictions. One strike, a shout, and Finnegan was on the ground. But the rot of men is not solved by a single blow.
6
They returned at night—three brutes in the damp lane—Brody Rodrigues and Dane Foster with Finnegan leading. They meant to take what they wanted.
"Give us the girl," Brody snarled.
"Make us," Dane added lazily, like someone ordering afternoon tea.
I fought and failed. The ropes bit. I thought of the grave and how a breath meant everything.
A hand smashed my head down. I tasted dust and panic. Then a foot hit the dark and the world blurred into fists and bright, impossible care.
Rex arrived like a storm. He moved with terrible grace, not the drunk fury of villains, but the precise cruelty of a man who had learned to hurt and keep level. He put them down in a fashion that was merciless and efficient, and then he looked at me as one might look at something saved from drowning.
"You alright?" he said.
I laughed. "You have a strange way of helping."
"I have ways," he answered. "Ways to make sure men never forget."
7
They tied the three men and dragged them before the household steward. Word spread fast—so fast that when Lady of the House, a woman of iron named Lady Regent, heard, she made a decision that would be the village sermon.
"To allow men to think such crimes can be done is to invite rot," she said, addressing an assembly that had quickly filled the hall. Her voice cut like an awl.
Finnegan's grin had turned to contempt. "You are making a spectacle," he spat. "You have no authority here."
"You mistake spectacle for justice," Lady Regent replied. "You thought you'd shame a woman. You were wrong."
"Let the market see you," she declared, her eyes cold. "Let the town see what wolves you've been."
What followed was not a private punishment. It was public, ritualized, humiliating—and very, very long.
8
They were dragged into the market square at dawn. Lanterns were still wet with frost. People gathered: shopkeepers, mothers with their babies, the apprentices who had once laughed with me when I missed a stitch. There were men from the guard and a table where Lady Regent sat with Grayson Aldridge at her side like a balancer of scales.
"Stand!" Lady Regent commanded. Her voice carried like a bell. "Tell us why these men thought they could take a woman's body as a thing."
"She offered herself," Finnegan snarled. "She wanted it."
"You will speak your falsehoods with your heads exposed to truth," Lady Regent said. "Your names will be sung sober by these children. Let them hear the sound of your shame."
A brass horn called, and a town crier read their offenses out loud: attempted assault, public indecency, intent to abduct, threats of violence. Each charge rolled over Finnegan and his companions like pebbles into a clear pond. The crowd's murmurs grew into a tide.
They were made to kneel in the snow. The magistrate—an old, blunt man—declared that punishment must serve two ends: to repair the wronged and to deter the wicked. He read a sentence that was part humiliation, part labor, part restitution. They would carry hoses through the town to clean the sewage drains for a year, at dawn, in clear view. Each morning they would wear a placard naming the crime. They would be fined silver that would be used to fund guards for women who walked the streets at night. They would be flogged—only enough to leave a mark and a memory—so people could see that force would not always protect the violent.
Finnegan's face failed first: the grin cracking to reveal shock. He tried to retract words, "This is too—"
"Too public?" Lady Regent asked. "Then you should not have chosen public sin."
Brody and Dane's bravado dissolved differently. Brody begged through clenched teeth; his voice spun from arrogance to bewildered terror. Dane, who had been the loudest before, looked at the crowd as if he had expected someone else to step in. The transition from cocky to hollow was quick and ragged; their fingers curled into fists and then slackened.
The flogging was not merely a beat; it was a ritual of community condemnation. As the whip cracked, every face in the square shifted from spectator to judge. Mothers tightened their children's fingers. Apothecaries who had sold bandages to their families earlier that day looked away with the crossroads of pity and approval. Teenagers recorded on the new boxes of brass wire—small helpers of the market—clicked their shutters like modern witnesses who would carry memory forward. Someone in the crowd hissed, "About time."
Finnegan's reaction moved through stages: first denial—he shook his head violently as if the morning could be dislodged—then rage, his face red with the strain of clinging to a lie. He spat at the magistrate: "You won't victimize me."
"Who is the victim?" Lady Regent asked. "Not the woman tied in your memory, but the town that is less safe because of your arrogance."
Then he faltered. The whip stung and he could not keep up the performance. His pleas thinned out, became incoherent, then shrill. People turned away, not because they had forgotten, but because they bore witness. For Brody and Dane, the shame came with smaller acts: neighbors who had owed them small favors refused to come near; apprentices who had once taken orders from them now ignored a nod. One of Brody's old patrons spat in public when he passed, as if returning a debt of disgust. The change in the town's treatment was a slow rope tugging at their pride until it frayed.
At the end, when the stars had paled and the sky had bled into midday, the magistrate pronounced the final part of the sentence. "You will stand upon the stage of the market each month for the next six months and recount your crime, the harm you did, and what you would do to undo it. You will learn labor. You will wear those signs. You will earn your own food. The town will watch. Let this be the memory that shapes you."
Finnegan's face had gone white with fear and raw with the sting. He looked small, not because he had been beaten, but because the village had removed the canopy of complicity he had been hiding under. People nodded to each other. Grayson Aldridge whispered something—"Mercy is not leniency; mercy is correction"—and those around him murmured an assent.
The crowd's reaction was complex. Some clapped, not in glee, but as an exhalation of relief. Some sobbed softly—women remembering their own near-misses. A clerk in the back took the opportunity to make a small speech about law and order and female protection. Others stepped forward to place copper into a cloth that would pay for additional night guards.
Finnegan's composure broke last. He fell to his knees, swallowed dignity, and begged. It was not the spectacle the rotted-hearted wanted. It was a town forming a memory, a ritual that said: you may have power this moment, but the world remembers. Shame, when held up and named, is weighty. It presses down like snow on thin branches until the branches bend and change shape.
9
Afterwards, the three men were not the same. They tried to keep their heads high in the market, but children called them names. Shopkeepers refused them credit. At night they sat by their fires and did the labor they'd been given, and they felt the smallness of a town's eye on their backs.
"You were brave," Levi said to me after everything. "You could have been taken."
"I was meant to survive a book," I said. "But only if I learn—if I live—if I can stitch not only fabric but a life."
Rex watched the scene unfold from a street corner. He did not speak that day. His face was an unread page.
10
Time slid. I learned to cut cloth that would hang like water, to match patterns by a single glance. Levi and I kept arguing and, in the arguing, learning. "Don't angle the sleeve that way," he'd warn. "You will shorten the arm."
"Don't be a perfectionist," I'd say. "Perfection is cold."
"You are cold at the edges," he would reply, and something soft would move for a moment in his mouth like a smile.
"Is he really as bad as the book?" Levi asked me one night as we stitched by a single lantern.
"He's worse and softer," I said. "He has a hunger and a cruelty, but also...he can be the most terrifyingly loyal person I've ever met."
Levi gave me a look that said, "Be careful."
11
Victoria Williams appeared like someone from another painting. She wore the sorrow of a girl forced into womanhood—an adoration placed on a man she could never truly have. She adored Rex the way someone collects a rare bird in a gilded cage: beautifully and with a finger that could never touch its freedom.
"Do you love him?" I asked Victoria once, as we wrapped small pots of hand cream with her tiny hands.
"He is like a song I learned when I was small," she said. "I don't know if it would be happy, but I know the notes. I know them in my bones."
"Then you deserve a music that doesn't cut your hands," I told her, and she looked at me with something like gratitude and fear.
12
Still, if there was a person in the town who could turn a day into a small miracle, it was Rex in weird ways. He would appear in the market and buy enough bread for the entire street, only to vanish like a rumor before people could thank him. He remained dangerous, but he was not wholly inhuman. I found myself, absurdly, counting the evenings he showed up at the threshold of my life.
"Why do you keep helping me?" he asked one evening, when the snow had melted and the river smelled like iron.
"Because someone did for me once," I said. "And because there are things no book has the right to decide."
He smiled in a way that promised nothing and everything.
13
The winter that followed was hard in new ways. The house I finally bought with the silver the Lord Regent's household had given me converted to payment for the trouble I'd been put through was small but mine. I slept and stitched and paid for the room by the street that I could call home.
A festival came and with it—the kind of night where stories get bright and everybody pretends the dark is smaller. Lanterns swung like moons in the market and people sang. I stood on the bridge and watched.
"You could leave," Levi said quietly as he kept time on the wood with his foot. "Go where no one knows."
"And do what?" I asked. "Become someone else's seamstress? Run where the wind will find me again?"
"Run where your heart can be kinder to itself."
It was advice. I kept both feet planted and the cold tasted like the price of staying.
14
Rex's history kept surfacing like a tide. He was not punished as the book had predicted. He did not become a cautionary tale; he became a problem. Powerful men wanted to recruit, to destroy, to barter with him like he was a coin. Others wanted to use him as a weapon. Watching that, I understood the danger of proximity.
"You have a habit of rescuing dangerous things," Levi teased.
"I have a habit of rescuing breathing things," I shot back.
He shook his head, exasperated and fond. "All right. Breathing things. Fine."
15
The spring brought new trouble. A corrupt clerk at a manor who had long coveted my little stall began to spread rumors about the hand cream I sold. He pretended to be my buyer, stole my recipe, and tried to pass it off as his own.
"You're too trusting," some said.
"You're too loud," said Levi, and then he did what annoyed me most—he took the matter into his own hands. He threatened merchants with sly words and forced the thief to sign a confession in the public square.
"Why do you not want me to marry well?" the thief had asked in a voice that tried to sound defiant. "You are poor and small—"
"Because you robbed a woman who made everything by hand," Levi had replied. "Every stitch you stole was someone's bread, and you will fix it."
The thief's punishment was public and humiliating in a small and lawful way: he had to sew for a year's wages for the poor and work the night markets with a sign declaring his crime. That, for the shopkeepers, would teach him the cost of stealing craft. The man lost face in all the wrong ways.
16
By then Rex and Victoria had drifted into a space that made the town wobble. He was not a monster as the book described—he could be shocking and savage, but he also had a tenderness that took me off guard. Victoria loved him like a sea holds a ship: with danger pressed to its hull.
"Let her go," I told him bluntly once. "She deserves someone less weathered."
"Why should I choose less?" he asked, offended by the very idea. "Why should I measure love like a commodity?"
"You are measuring everything in cost," I said. "You are measuring pain and return."
He looked at me with a face I could not read. "And you measure differently?"
"I measure by stitch," I said. "One small line at a time. Mend it and it lasts."
17
For all the strange kindnesses, he had no shame in showing how cruel the world could be. Rumors spread. People who hurt women came to ruin in small measures. I watched the town pull itself together. I learned to live in the fractures and the stitches.
One day, a messenger arrived with an old book in hand. It was a copy of the same story I had read in the fever bed. He opened it at a page where the villain was dragged into a public spectacle of torture. My stomach turned.
"You would be that man," I whispered, pages trembling. "Would you choose that for yourself?"
Rex closed the book like he closed a knife. "I have no interest in being a tale for others," he said. "Stories are for those who cannot act."
"Then act better," I said. "Act for repair, not revenge."
He stood in the doorway then, the light making his hair a dark halo. "What do you want me to be?"
"Someone who can live with sunrise again. Someone who is not only remembered for darkness," I said.
He thought long enough for the night to finish. "I will try."
18
Try, for him, was not an abstract. He trained; not because some page told him to, but because he found his bones sore if he did not. He began to protect in ways that did not require a price. He paid for a widow's rent. He bought bread for apprentices that had annoyed him once.
"Why?" Victoria whispered to me one morning as she watched him go. "Why would he be like that?"
"People are messy," I said. "Even the ugly ones can surprise you."
"Do you forgive him?" she asked, then immediately flushed, as if the question was too sharp for a polite mouth.
"For what he's done?" I turned to her. "Forgiveness is not a free pass. It's an action that asks something of the other party. I can forgive and still hold him to what must be mended."
She nodded like a child learning to hold a heavy cup.
19
Levi and I grew close through the slow, patient work of making clothes and arguing about seams. He was blunt and warm, mouthing curses as he pricked his thumb and then softening in the corner of his mouth when he raised his eye at me. It was not poetry, but it was honest.
"Will you marry me?" he asked once, a ridiculous question he threw like a dart when we were packing up late.
"What?" I laughed, thinking he was joking.
"Will you marry me?" he repeated, face earnest.
I stared at him, the afternoon light caught in his lashes, and for once I found my own voice soft. "I don't know if I can be someone's shelter yet," I said. "I am still learning to stitch my own edges so I do not fall apart on other people's floors."
He tilted his head. "I will stitch with you."
That was the first time I believed someone might choose me for who I was, not as an accessory to a story.
20
There were breaks—public tempests that needed storms. Old enemies returned like stubborn stains. A man who'd been hired by a fallen noble tried to claim Rex for a cause and wrest him into another fight. Political tides are like that; they use men for oars.
"Do not let them rekindle the old iron," I told Rex. "You owe no master but yourself."
He stared at me for a long time. "I do not know what I owe."
"You owe yourself peace," I said plainly. "Not because you are forgiven, but because you have to survive beyond a page."
He closed his eyes, and the look that appeared made my chest ache: fatigue and a sort of wish. "I will try," he repeated.
21
Months passed with the small stitchings of life. I sold jars of cream labeled with crooked handwriting and tiny hearts. I argued with Levi and lost and won by inches. I made a home that smelled of boiled sugar and hot cloth.
One morning a carriage stopped by my door. The lady stepped out—someone who had the ability to ruin men with a glance. She looked at the little jars on my windowsill, tested one on her hand, and smiled. The world shifted; she took my name to court and held a dinner in my honor and asked for more.
"My life," I said to Levi that night as we counted coins, "is not the storybook's ending. It is small, and it is mine. That feels like a miracle."
He caught my hand and nodded. "It is a miracle you made."
22
Rex came by less often now, but when he did, we spoke with a blunt tenderness that had no book to script it. One autumn he found me late at night in my tiny yard, a margin of lantern light and cold.
"Do you regret saving me?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I regret nothing that made me this person."
He laughed once, shorter than a bell. "You made me carry a kindness I had never had," he said. "That is dangerous."
"It is also necessary," I said.
He stood and for a long time looked like a man choosing his steps. Then he reached and touched my sleeve very gently, like a tailor feeling a new cloth.
"Promise me one thing," he said abruptly. "If I become the ruin I fear, do not let the world bury you with me."
I looked up in the lantern light, and his eyes were honest and tired. "I will not," I answered.
23
The markets warmed into spring. People gossiped less about the villain and more about the woman who had become a seamstress with a shop and a little life. The three attackers never regained their place; the town had used its eyes like a net. Finnegan kept his head down so often that children forgot his face.
And me? I grew into the work of mending: not only suits and gowns, but also the tender seams between people.
"Will you ever be a book hero?" Levi asked one late night, sewing the cuff on a marquis' sleeve. "You know, the kind that ends with a ring and a parade."
"I might be," I said, thinking of the long road, the stitches, the days when I fought and when I fell asleep counting seams. "But I would rather be a good tailor than a story told."
Levi smiled, and the light on his face was something I wanted to keep.
24
Rex and Victoria had a slow unraveling. He could not become the page's villain because he would not let himself be the object of a plot anymore. He was trying, in his way, to be less of a weapon and more of a man.
One afternoon, when the sun made the dust dance in the shop, Victoria came and gave me a box of porcelain jars for my cream.
"For you," she said. "Because you were kind to me when I am not brave."
Her hands trembled. "Keep him safe," she whispered.
"I can't make him anything he won't be himself to be," I said. "But I can make him less alone."
25
The town celebrated the small wins and mourned the small losses. When the festival of fall came, we sat on the bridge with sticky sweet sugar cane and watched the lanterns go like tiny moons into the river.
Rex stood beside me then, hands in pockets, his face unreadable. "Do you ever wish you had never gone to that grave?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "Sometimes I wish I had left those who were meant to sleep. But then I would not have this life, and that would be worse."
He was quiet then, and for once his stillness was not a threat. He was a man who had been broken and yet kept trying to put his pieces down in a way that would not hurt others.
"Thank you," he said finally. "For the first time in a long time, I thought a future could be possible."
26
Time became a measure of small changes. Levi leaned closer each day. The knots I made in the cloth were tighter, my stitches firmer. The work steadied me.
Rex kept to his own shadows and act of quiet generosity. He never asked me to replace a wound with a story only he could tell. He did not beg for forgiveness, and he did not demand absolution.
Is he punished in a way a book says he must be? No. He earned, in the town's slow light, the right to be seen as a man and judged by measures the book did not give him: his daily choices.
27
Once, in the middle of a festival night, a child tugged Rex's sleeve in the market and asked him what a villain was. He knelt in the lantern glow and said, "A villain is a person who decided to harm and kept deciding it. But people can choose otherwise."
The child looked confused. "Can everyone change?"
"No," he said. "But some people can try. And that is enough for me."
I watched him in the crowd and thought of the first straw I had lifted from the grave. At that moment, everything that had been terrible made a small kind of sense: we salvage people because we are not made to be monuments to fear.
28
Years slid like fabric through fingers. I married Levi with my hands raw from joy and work, and the town came. Rex stood at the edge of the crowd, watchful and sober. He did not make speeches. He nodded once, as if agreeing to something that had been decided between us without words.
The parade passed. There were no book endings here—only mornings, and more mornings, and hands that found each other again and again.
29
On the night of our last big festival before I turned thirty, lanterns like moons swam on the river and a small mouse-shaped lamp—ridiculed that first time he gave it to me—hung above our table.
"You kept it," Rex observed as if surprised at nothing and everything.
"Some things are worth keeping," I said. I picked up the little paper mouse and turned it over in my palms. It was silly and warm. I had loved it once because it was odd; I loved it now because it had been there from the beginning.
He smiled then—without menace, without the old hunger. "Do not let the world bury you with its stories," he said.
"I won't," I promised, and the mouse swung in the lantern light like a small brave heart.
30
If you ask me the moral? Maybe it's only that people are not only villains and not only saints. They are complicated, stubborn things who will, if you let them, teach you how to sew a life out of imperfect pieces.
We lived like that: mending, forgiving, arguing, and, sometimes, laughing until the whole room shook. I kept my jars and my little shop. Levi kept his hands steady. Rex kept his distance and his odd acts of grace. Victoria found smaller joys. The three men who tried to take what they had no right to had become a caution in our story, remembered in tears and in the way the town protected its women thereafter.
And the mouse lamp? I kept it on the sill where the river light touched it each evening. When the wind found it, it swung like a promise: odd, small, and utterly ours.
The End
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