Sweet Romance15 min read
I Died, Came Back, and Made the Prince Pay
ButterPicks15 views
I drowned once and woke up in someone else’s life.
"I remember the river," I said that first morning, tasting the mud in my memory. "I remember his face."
They had called me Camille Duran then, the woman I’d become after the fall. In my last life my name had been Camille, too, but different—thin seams of the past fit wrong and I knew things they thought I should not know. I knew the way the Sixth Prince, Lance Moreau, loved noise more than promises. I knew the soft laugh that had covered a knife. I knew the water taking me under.
"I thought you were gone," said Dev Laurent, my husband in this new life, the Chancellor who had become the only man to make the court obey him.
His voice reached me like a warm hand. He looked like he always did—calm, a little severe, the sort of face that wrote law with the corner of an eye. He had been the person to bring me back from whatever limbo had taken me. He'd fetched me from the funeral and put me into a house I had once called mine and told everyone I was alive again.
"Dev, I'm—" I tried to answer with something like gratitude and ended with a laugh that wasn't mine.
He stopped me with one of those soft, accurate smiles people use to hide all their teeth. "You look like you have a plan," he said.
I did have a plan. I had one bone-deep, plain thing in me: I would take back what they'd stolen. I would make the man who drowned me pay. I would make the side who smiled while my lungs filled with water pay. And I would do it alive.
"How are you?" my maid asked me that afternoon, leaning forward with a tray. She called me 'Madam' with secret affection. "You look... different."
"I am," I told her. "I'm someone who will not be anonymous under a stone."
Dev had been oddly gentle since I came back. He had kept his distance and crossed it at his whim, like someone used to drawing lines on a map. At times that gentleness felt like armor. At night he would sit beside me while I fumbled through the old life—my old dances, recipes, the way my father Ignacio Barrett laughed—and I would tell myself it was enough.
But it wasn't about comfort. It was about justice.
"Do you want me to do something?" Dev asked one rainy dusk, when thunder seemed anxious to be closer.
"I want Lance to burn," I said simply.
Dev looked at me for a long moment, as if cataloguing weather. "Then we'll make sure the fire doesn't miss him."
He had already started. On the day of my public memorial—my own funeral, which I had attended like a ghost at my own wake—Lance had found the nerve to be obscene in the gardens of his mansion. He laughed and rolled in the light of smokers and careless men, a prince playing with his newly raised house. I watched him from the hedge.
"You going to stand there forever?" Dev asked. I had been frozen halfway up the garden path when he came round to my side.
"They put my memorial at the front of the house and he shouts in the backyard," I said. "He ate fruit in a room that should have been empty for respect, and they laughed."
"Then we will let them laugh a little less loudly," Dev murmured.
That night we burned his bridal chamber. The plan had the necessary cruelty: I would be the spark that haunted him, and Dev would be the quiet hand with the torch. We left no witnesses who mattered.
"Do you understand the risk?" Dev asked me as we prepared.
"I understand the reward," I said. "I died once. I will not die for him again."
We slipped into his courtyard like thieves. I licked the match that would start the story and Dev had already made sure the guards were where he wanted them—over there, an ill-placed patrol, a jest of authority. It was a small thing to make him panic, but it unfolded beautifully.
Later, in the carriage home, Dev put his hand over mine.
"You didn't have to do that," he said softly. "You could have asked me to hold your hand and missed the applause."
"I wanted to show him flames," I said. "I wanted him to remember the burning."
The rumor spread like gossip on spice. Lance's reputation was a thing of fine cracks; the city loved to lean into scandal. "The prince with the laughing eyes burned with a secret," they said at the teahouses.
But burning a room was not enough. Dev and I knew it. That same night, when the city's rumor mill turned and spat out more than the ordinance allowed, Dev whispered, "You will need more than smoke. You must stand in front of those who harmed you and name them."
"Okay," I said. I did not yet know how far he would take me.
We waited for the right moment. Three days later the capital held the Emperor Earl Ellis's public ceremony: the crowning of his chosen consort. The court swelled. Lance and his new queen, Emmaline Jackson, attended with the grandeur of people who were covered in one another's deceit.
I wore a dress Dev had suggested—nothing showy, just enough color to be noticed but not to inflame. "Be Camille," he had said. "Not a mask that worries at the throat."
It was not a court proper of law. It was an arena of eyes and gold. I moved across it like a woman owned by memory. "He will be here," I whispered.
He was. Lance walked in with Emmaline like a pair of proud birds, hands held like a private sin. I watched them, my fist tightening so that my nails left crescents on my palm.
"Who is she?" Dev asked.
"Someone who does not keep her promises," I said.
When Emmaline leaned in to whisper something to Lance, she made the mistake of smiling in my direction. "Madam Camille," I said aloud so that the hall could hear. "How did you learn to carry yourself with his laugh?"
Heads turned. The Emperor's ministers murmured. The music stuttered.
"What is the meaning of this?" a commentator demanded, because the court loved a performance, even one with knives.
"I remember," I said. "I remember how his laughter was louder than a woman's screams. I remember how he hid the truth in his hands while I slept in cold water."
A hush. Emmaline's smile froze. Lance's color changed; his eyes found me like a blade.
"You cannot say that," Lance hissed. "You—"
I lifted my chin. "My name was given a funeral last week. I attended my own ashes. I am back because Dev Laurent—" I let his name sit in the room like a verdict— "chose to let me live, and because I am tired of walking quietly."
There are people who shrink at a raised voice in a palace; but there are more people who lean in. The Emperor asked sharply, "You say the Sixth Prince had a hand in a death?"
"I say Lance Moreau and his consort had a hand in my death," I said. Every word landed like a stone thrown into glass.
The court erupted. Emmaline's face bled from normalized smile to shock to shrinking fury. Lance's fingers tightened on his sleeve. The faces who had once looked away now looked at Lance's shoes as if nails might be embedded into them.
"Bring witnesses!" Lance roared, and he did the thing men in power do best: he brought his cadre of loyalists, his retinue, his men with a demand on their tongues. But we had already set our stage.
Dev stood and said, with a slow, surgical calm, "There are letters, sir. There is a token found among your guard. If you will permit a search and let the court decide, all of this can be proved or disproved."
He had buried his trap in protocol and taken the perfect chance to use the Emperor's patience. The Emperor, weary of empty spectacle and eager for a clear head, waved for the search.
"Search Lance's household," he ordered.
They found the token: a foreign seal, a forbidden symbol of a liaison with outsiders. They found letters. The court turned like a child finding cards in a sleeve. Emmaline's mouth opened and closed. Lance went through a private death in public—a chain of disbelief, denial, anger, shame.
"I am not afraid," Lance said. "I would never—"
"You would," Dev said softly. "And you did."
Lance's color froze then broke; his smile collapsed as if someone had taken the warm wallpaper off a wall. He had not expected the Chancellor to be brutal in this way. He had expected the Chancellor to smile and take his place. He had not expected to be put on the slab.
The Emperor rose like a storm and said, "Take him. Bring him to the palace jail. He will answer these charges."
Lance's expression cracked in ways that had nothing to do with nobility: first it was an arrogance of disbelief, then a flush of fear, then denial—"No, no—this is a lie, a trick!"—then a shriek of bargaining, then the collapse into accused.
The crowd loved the scene. They crowded the courtyard to watch him carried away, to watch the man who once made jokes at funerals be led by the very law he had thought himself above. People whispered; some threw curses, some threw flowers. A few laughed like vultures.
And outside the palace, in the glare of a hundred torchbanks, we did not let him die in silence. We made every step a scene.
"Public punishment," Dev said to me later. "If we remove him privately, it will be done as a favor. If we make it public, his fall will teach others not to try their luck with people like you."
"I will stand," I said. "I want to see him topple."
So we worked the punishment into the Emperor's orders. The court wanted spectacle and the Emperor wanted law. The two met in a long day.
The public punishment began at noon, in the central square where the Emperor loved to be seen as the distributor of justice. The crowd arrived in a hum: merchants, clerks, ladies with folded fans. News had spread like a rumor that could not be killed. Lance was led on a platform built in the square, his hands shackled. His hair was uncombed. His face had the tension of a man who had to learn new muscles: humility, then terror.
They read the list of his crimes aloud. The voice that pronounced betrayal was precise: "Murder of a woman named Camille; conspiracy with foreign agents; indecent breach of trust."
Lance's first reaction was to laugh like a man who would buy more time with noise. "You fools!" he shouted. "You—"
He had always been good at the performance of command. He tried to reclaim it with words, with the shock of defiance. But the square was careful; they had gathered witnesses, letters, a token and a net. The crowd's mood shifted from curiosity to cold hunger. People loved the fall of the mighty because it allowed them to be small and honest in the glow of someone else's ruin.
"Stop crying," I called from the dais where I had been placed beside Dev. I used a voice that had been made for demands; it carried easily. "You were the one who laughed while I drowned."
It was true; the accusation had the terrible effect of focusing the crowd. A murmur swelled into a chant: "Justice! Justice!"
Lance crumpled as the first of us brought out a witness—a former maid who had worked in his household. She told, at first with a tremor in her voice, the story of a room and a lamp, of a door left unlocked, of a hand that closed a curtain. The crowd listened and turned. I could read the changes in Lance's face: the arrogant color, the quickness of denial, a sudden furious attempt to rewrite the scene, a shaky insistence that he had loved and been wronged by a liar—and then collapse.
"You're lying," he cried. "I would never—"
But the witness had coin of truth. Other witnesses came forward, one by one. A guard with a face red with hatred said he'd been paid for silence. Another officer admitted he had been threatened. Each voice was a band removing the fabric that was Lance's carefully curated life.
I saw the exact moment the mask fell. It happened when a man stepped forward, steady, with a foreign token cupped in his palm. "I was paid to deliver," he said. "I brought messages. I took orders."
Lance's face went through all the human stages: the sudden, childish denial; the terrifying bargain—"I will give you land, titles"—the pretending-to-be-sane—"You judge me with no proof"—and finally the collapse: awareness that he was naked under the sun.
Spectators had their own reactions. Some wept for shame; some clapped; a woman nearby busied herself with her child as if to put a border between herself and the sight. Someone recorded with a new device—their hands shook. A crier read aloud the list of evidence again. The crowd bowed like ocean waves.
Lance finally, broken and alone at the center, begged—began with "No, please" and crawled towards the Emperor with a face like a beggar's. His pleas were uneven: at first, denial; then bargaining; then cursing. People who'd eaten his alms turned away. "I am innocent," he kept saying at first. Then, with no one to bargain to, his voice shifted to raw fear. His expression crumbled in stages: belief in his immunity, confusion, violent denial, humiliation, the sudden fullness of shame, then collapse.
"Spare me," he gasped at one point, to a court that had never felt mercy once it tasted spectacle. The Emperor looked on with something like a ledger closing.
I remember the silence afterward, a silence full of steam. The Prince would be stripped of title, imprisoned, his house empty. He would not simply disappear—he would be used as an example: when you laugh at funerals and think there is no ledger, the ledger will find you.
After the spectacle, Lance was led away. People threw their judgments like birds into the air: some cheered, some spat, some simply walked home quietly with heavier hearts.
Dev took my hand. "He will try to bargain his way out," he said. "He will promise anything."
"Then we won't let him," I said.
The man who had drowned me in his laughter was gone from his place. The city had a new story: the prince who had thought himself unstoppable had been removed like a rotten tooth. Publicly, he had been humiliated.
But there was more to do. The second phase of punishment was not raw exposure. It was a slower, sharper thing: justice weaving itself into humiliation that reached to the root.
Lance's imprisonment was filmed in the town square of merchants and clerks like a play. They made sure the man who had so loved performance had none. They made sure his servants saw him carried past windows. They staged the gradual abandonment: the loss of retainers, the stopping of wine deliveries, the way a house ages when people stop tending it. That, too, became part of the punishment.
"Will he die in there?" a woman in the crowd asked me after the first day.
"I'm not the executioner," I said. "I've reclaimed my life, and that is enough."
But I later learned he had not merely rotted. He had been made to watch what he had done. They played the testimony for him alone in the cell, let him hear the names, the accusations, the letters read aloud in the very voice that had forced him to be still. They made a noise of his betrayal so he would never forget what his laughter had been worth.
And Emmaline? She was different. Women who align themselves with predators must pay a different price.
When the truth came out in the court, Emmaline went through a performance of her own humiliation. She first looked stunned, then furious, then defeaningly silent. The crowd turned on her like a knife. She was stripped of titles, and for weeks she wandered the city like a rumor. She did not die quickly; she unravelled. The pain was a long, slow drag. She was seen in public once, wandering the edges of markets, muttering that she had been framed. People pointed. Children mimicked her with cruel hands.
That was punishment in the public view: to be unmade slowly. It is worse than swift death because it has time to echo.
After the dust settled, the court shifted its eyes to me. I had done the hard part: I had spoken and I had watched their faces change. Lance's downfall was the end of the public persecution they had made me brave, but it was also the beginning of something else—something softer, but not less exacting: a life I could build with Dev.
"You could have asked me to keep you hidden," he had said once, the day after the spectacle, his hands warm around my tea cup.
"I asked you to be my torch," I said.
He smiled like someone whose plan had come together at last. Then he kissed the hollow just under my ear, where my hair was damp with sweat. "You owe me a dance when this is done," he said.
I did. Later, in the privacy of the quiet that follows the storm, he taught me to ride, to shoot arrows, to do the things that thrill you because you are not supposed to. He was not the sort of man who simply used his power. He was the sort of man who used it to keep one woman's life intact.
"Why me?" I asked him once in the garden, rain pattering in a rhythmic whisper on the leaves. "Why save me when you could have let the court do what it wanted?"
He pressed a fingertip to my wrist, light as a promise. "Because I don't like crooked lines," he said. "Because you looked like someone worth saving."
I laughed and something in the laugh stole my breath. There were times he made me feel small and cherished at once—once, he took an apple from my bowl and complained like a child that I had eaten first, and another time he showed me the book where he'd kept notes of small things about me—"She doesn't like loud music," "She prefers salted cakes"—and I felt like a thing treasured. Those moments were the ladders I hung on to.
"Do you love me?" I asked him once at dawn, while the city still breathed slow.
"I am not a man who uses the word carelessly," he said. "But I will tend you like a garden. Will that do?"
"It will have to," I said. He touched his forehead to mine like a seal.
The rest of our life wasn't all plotting and public revenge. There were small brightnesses that tucked themselves into the corners: when he remembered which tea I liked, when he sat and listened to me recite ridiculous parts of the dances I'd learned, when we walked by the river where once I had drowned and he held my hand without asking. Once, in bed, he caught my fingers in his and hummed a tune that made me think of sun after water. He made me feel both cherished and safe. He worried about me without policing me. He let me be wild and deliberate at the same time.
Months later, in a quiet court where the Emperor found reason to remake the law into something cleaner, I saw the last moving pieces fall for the people who had done it to me. Emmaline vanished into fog; Lance’s sentence was carried out in a cell where his name would gather dust. The city had turned, slowly, toward me.
One day at the windows, seeing the square where the public had cheered, Dev caught my hand. "You did this," he said.
"No," I said. "We did it."
He smiled and kissed my knuckles. The sunlight fell like a benediction.
We married in truth then—if marriage can ever be proved in a room without ceremony. The Emperor, whose authority had grown sharper after the scandal, granted us an official blessing, but it felt less like a permit and more like an acknowledgment. I learned to trust the comfort of his hands. I learned that the man who saved me was more than a strategist; he was a keeper.
"Are you happy?" he asked me one night as we lay together beneath a ceiling of stars.
"I don't know if I'm allowed to be that large," I said.
"Be large anyway," he commanded with a smile.
And so I did.
Years modelled us into something like a storybook. Dev and I had children—two of them—who climbed on the laps of our old friends and called him "Dad" with the lightness only children can give. It was a life woven with small mercies. We raised them to know that justice exists, that cruelty has consequences, and that love isn't always tidy but it can be deliberate.
Time changed Lance. It put him in a cell where few people came. He begged access to redemption and received statutes instead of mercy. Emmaline roamed the town in a state of broken pride.
There is a kind of justice that is private: I sometimes walked past their abandoned windows and thought of what it does to a person to be unmade slowly. It is a mist that does not undo the past, but it is instruction to the living.
Dev and I grew old together, not because the world promised it but because we chose it. We found the small things to hold: a breakfast that Dev teased he would not miss, two pockets of letters we wrote to each other and hid in the house, the way the children laughed when they snuck into our bed in the mornings. On quiet evenings he would count the ways I had grown brave. I would remind him, with a half-smile, that he had taught me how to be brave again.
His hand at my back when we walked through the market was like an unseen lighthouse. His presence said: you are safe here. You have been seen and you are loved.
Not everyone in the city forgave him. Lords remembered the dead prince with the fondness of those who had once benefited, and they kept a wary distance from our house. But the everyday people—merchants, bakers, water-carriers—kept offering small things without asking for anything in return. "You saved her," a baker would say as she handed me a bun. I would answer with the truth: "We saved each other."
There were moments of worry—the world kept inventing new cruelties to test us—but Dev faced them with the steady, exacted hand of the man who had learned patience in a court of knives.
When I grew older and my hair silvered and my voice changed into older music, I remembered the water often. It had been a dark place—cold and efficient—but the life after it taught me how to hold a hand without fear. I learned to keep my eyes on the people I loved and to speak loudly when it was necessary. And I learned to forgive the city when it needed to be cruel to teach itself laws.
In the end, when the last public punishment had faded and the city's gossip had become a softer thing, Lance Moreau's name became a lesson for children. "Don't laugh at a funeral, remember?" a teacher would say. They would point at the map where the river met the road where I had once been a ghost.
I do not glory in revenge. I do not expect others to find sweetness in the ash of what was done. But I also do not apologize for my voice when I used it. I found it again.
And once, by the river that had once swallowed me, I took Dev's hand and said, "Thank you."
He smiled and, as he always would, kissed the hollow of my throat. "You don't owe me," he said. "You only chose to live."
I think sometimes of the way he stood in court and held my hand through the worst of everything. There are men who buy honors and minds and places; Dev would rather build a life where rights are the architecture and tenderness their foundation. I married him because he was brilliant when the city needed salvation and gentle when I needed a field to rest in.
"After all," he said once, curling a child's hair away from her forehead, "you deserved a husband who would make a law to keep you and the courage to enforce it."
I leaned my forehead against his and closed my eyes. If I had to drown once to find that man, then the river—would anyone ever find this as a fair trade?—I cannot say. But I know that when I stand in the sun now, with children around my knees and Dev at my side, the memory of the cold water is something that has been turned into a measure. It is a thing that tells me to fight when I must and to breathe when I can.
I was once claimed by hands that laughed. I am now claimed by hands that tend. The world is not neat. But the part of it I inhabit has learned how to balance the ledger.
And when the last day comes and the sky unthreads its own mercy, I will lie down beside him in the quiet he has worked for me all these years, and I will know that I chose the right fire.
The End
— Thank you for reading —