Face-Slapping21 min read
I Don't Want to Die — A Game of Blood, Bed, and an Heir
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"I don't want to die," I said, barely louder than the sound of water.
Colton Blankenship's shadow filled the doorway long before his voice did. He stood there like a mountain, the hints of candlelight catching the hard planes of his face. His robe hung perfect; his jaw was a map of command. He did not move right away. Instead he listened to the water for a long, patient beat.
"Why would you?" he asked finally. "Why say such things in a bathroom, Coraline?"
"I—" I swallowed. The bath had been meant to soothe a head that could not be quiet. He had come to the ceremonial hall; it had been expected. What I had not expected was looking up and finding his shadow over me like a winter cloud.
"You look guilty," he said.
"You came to the hall just now and saw—" I tried to make my voice even. "You saw the candled room and the quiet. I thought sometimes a proper prayer might please an old man's spirit. Old men were the fuss of the day."
He crouched so close the scent of cedar and iron and something smoky from his sleeve filled my nose. "What did you do, Coraline?" His hand rested on my jaw, fingers cool and precise. "Why are you in my baths?"
"I need to be kept alive," I said, and laughed the sound away. "I need favors. I need bread and a roof. I need you."
"Favors are traded," he said. "You know that."
"I offered you my skin and my nights." I turned my face up. "I offered that for a single promise."
He watched a bead of water fall along my collarbone and seemed to taste some private calculus.
"Last night," I said, reckless with the familiarity we had cultivated between the sheets, "I told you I would do anything."
"You did." He smiled then, a rare curve that did not reach his eyes. "You did not say you would be patient."
"I will be patient," I lied.
"Good." He let go of my jaw as if released from an obligation. "Then get dressed and show me the rest of your chest tomorrow."
I felt the cold of him falling away, the same thin mercy he gave like an edge. I watched him leave, and when the screen murmured closed, I should have been relieved. Instead the bathroom smelled like the hollow inside of a bell.
*
I went to the hall to wait. In the wide, echoing room with a single snuffed candle, I made myself small. I had thought of worse vows in the dark: to spit on some names, to steal, to slit throats. That I must live to carry a child made all the sins palatable.
"You are sure?" Xander Murphy asked me when he led me in. His voice was level, owed to years of practice. He had been Colton's attendant for a long time. He knew the difference in the air that passed between men and women of power.
"If he will keep his word," I said. "Then I will."
"You will say you are with child?" He cocked his head.
"Say nothing. Let him ask."
"Fine." He glanced at the heavy curtain and straightened his shoulders. "If you want the world to shift, then we will make it."
"I do."
There were whispers on the corridor like mice. Beatrice Seidel, pearled and perfumed beyond reason, had already moved like a shadow through court. The people who loved her wanted her to have power. The people under her elbow bowed low or scurried; the ones who worked for her like Rowan Nielsen stood ready. He was a man used to being first to go forward, a soldier who liked the weight of his boots.
That night, when she told lies in the bright chambers and wagged accusations at me like a mare showing teeth, I only watched. She had the habit of smiling at her own cruelty as others might smile at coin. Vincent Alvarado, her brother in law and the man who moved like a shrine around her, was more cautious, but the whispering had mounted, and with it their appetite for my ruin.
"You are accused of..." Beatrice announced loud enough to make the lamps catch, "...poisoning the late emperor with your wiles. You made his meals drugged, you courted him, you are guilty of sleeping him into a grave!"
"The testimony is thin." Colton's voice dropped into the hall like a blade. He stepped forward then, the room tight. Even standing for ceremony, he had the air of a sovereign without a kingdom: a man who ordered storms.
"Bring out the proofs," Vincent said. "We have witnesses."
"Do you, Coraline?" Colton asked, and I saw, in the way he looked at me, that he enjoyed the moral puzzle. He had not asked to be my savior; he collected debts, and I had sold him one for my life.
"Ask the physician," I said hoarsely. "Ask Floyd Miller. He can feel the pulse."
A little while later, Floyd Miller arrived with the precise gait of someone who crushed the wrongness in others with steady hands. He took my wrist and murmured, as he had before to anyone who would listen.
"She is with child," he said quietly. "Early, but there is a pulse."
Beatrice's mask cracked into something practised and predatory. "You cannot trust him! This is a palace trick," she snapped. Vincent's jaw tightened; Rowan's eyes flicked. "If she is with an heir, we will not let such a child be raised to challenge us."
"Then we will handle it properly," Colton said. "If she is with child, she is under my protection. If she is not, she dies for treason. That is the measure."
I had not dared to believe in the hope of the child's existence until Floyd announced it. Then, like a tide, everything else changed. They would not kill the mother if the child could be claimed as the late emperor's. If the child was mine and Colton's, then the world tilted.
"Go, Qin," Colton said to Xander, who went to fetch the legal physician.
"You would fight for me?" I asked afterwards, when they had left and his silhouette hovered against the lamp's glow.
"My interest is rarely charity," he said. "But the child—"
"Is mine?" I whispered.
He shrugged, an infuriating casualness. "We will weigh the fruit of the bargain later."
"I will not be a bargain." The words felt small. He had already measured my worth.
"You will be the container for what I want." He said it like a trade ledger.
"Then do not be soft when others come." I tried to sound brave; my voice trembled. "I will do my part."
"Do not die before then," he said.
"Neither will I."
*
They tried to take me for a verdict in the great hall. They tied a noose of accusation around my neck and pushed me toward the edge. They showed folded letters that I had never written. They called witness after witness—women bought, men threatened, hands that had been paid to watch.
"You are a temptress," Beatrice hissed at me in front of the court, waving small pieces of paper like a fan. "You set the old man drifting on his bed!"
"I am not corrupt," I said, and the words echoed between the pillars like a pebble in a well.
"You are brash," Vincent spat. "You tried to trick us."
"Trick you?" I swallowed. "I survived. I did not trick."
"It is the same thing." Rowan said softly. His hand was the length of a cudgel.
"Where is Colton Blankenship?" Rowena—no, do not use names you don't have. They were all so eager to catch me with the single flimsy net they had spun. I kept my hands folded.
"Bring the doctor," Colton said then, in a voice that smoothed like silk over iron.
"Floyd Miller, step forward."
Floyd stepped up, looked at me with the same bland compassion he had when examining a throat, and spoke plainly, "There is evidence of pregnancy. It is early."
The gordian knot of their accusations unraveled slightly. I saw the faces of my enemies shift—first to fury, then to calculation. Beatrice was too fast to recover. She had to win; shame would ruin her. If the child were real, so was my claim. If I proved pregnant and Colton sanctioned me, the bedrock of her intrigue dissolved.
"Let the Imperial Wardens stand aside," Colton said. "No blood will be spilled today."
"Listen." I seized the moment. "If you press me, I will expose everything. I will bring the court what they all deserve to see."
"You mean his marks," Colton murmured. He watched me like a man who studies the weather before deciding to sail.
"Yes." I named the truth that had been between us—the marks left on my skin that could set a litany of mouths to the truth. "They are all invited to see."
"Do not tempt me," he said softly. "You have my protection if you behave."
"I will not hide," I said. "I will stand."
So they withdrew. For that hour, a shaky peace held. But the gears kept spinning, and I understood I had only purchased a reprieve.
*
Soon after, I was hidden and fed herbs and lullabies. Floyd came several times and said the same: it was early; if I preserved it, the child might be the bridge between two houses. I learned who the allies were like one learns the routes on a map—Xander and a few quietly loyal servants, Amber Lopes and Melanie Barrera, who smeared balm over bruises so their work would not read as traces of battle. Raj Tang, the quiet physician who had once been a lover to comfort and physician to secretly help, brought me small remedies. I was not proud of my tricks. Survival required small lies.
"We will make a story," Raj Tang told me once, and his hands moved over my wrist like a carpenter. "You will be pregnant. The court will have no reason to strike."
"And if they test?" I asked.
"They can test. You will be what you say you are. If not—" He did not finish. There are boons and curses that come from men who have nothing to lose.
"If you lie and I fail," I said, "I die."
"I will not let that happen." He pressed a small packet into my hand as if handing me war-iron.
I spent the nights turning his words like coins in my palm. They clinked, and I swallowed them.
*
There were nights when Colton came like a tide: fast, imperative, and leaving wreckage. There were other nights when he came soft and steady, asking for the simplest things. He would say, "Come to me tomorrow," and the entire day became a hollow of waiting. I learned his moods the way a sailor learns the stars.
"You have other men in your head," he said once when I sat across from him like a veiled supplicant.
"I had to know how to breathe before I could love," I replied.
He snorted. "You are alive because you know how to bargain."
"Then bargain with me." I smiled. "Call me 'Coraline' at least."
He looked at me like he measured an amount. "Coraline," he said at last, a single syllable, and there was a brittle warmth in it that started up in my chest like embers.
It became a game: I would tease, and he would test. When I threatened to go elsewhere, he drew the line: "Try it and I will be the blade that cuts you."
"You would have me helpless," I said.
"I would have you as mine," he murmured.
"Whose son will the child be?" I asked once, never meaning to put my survival to poetry.
"Yours," he said shortly.
"And mine?" I looked for some sliver. "Are you mine?"
"In the way you need me to be," he said. "Enough."
That was the closest I dared to the word "promise." I folded it and kept it under my tongue like a bitter seed.
*
Then they upped their designs.
Rowan, whom Beatrice trusted like a loyal hound, grew bolder. He moved like someone who served pride with a short temper. He stalked the halls and watched my comings. If I saw him, I hid; if I was caught, I had to be quick. It was Rowan who cornered me by the pond one night—his steps were sure, his face iron.
"You cannot keep playing this," he said. "You come to the long hall one day, the private rooms the next. Whom do you think you are to toy?"
"Who do you think you are to touch me?" I said, and he reached and grabbed my wrist without care.
Someone struck him from behind. He staggered, and the crowd rushed in. He had misjudged how thoroughly Colton kept watch. The man who burst from the shadows was Xander, Colton's hand.
"Back away," Xander hissed at Rowan. "This lady is under the regent's eye."
Rowan sneered and recovered, and he did not bow. That arrogance paid for him later.
Beatrice invented new mens' faults and then sold them as facts. When she could not break me, she chained some to the wall. She had tried to use poison, once, in a cold way that chills any stomach who remembers it. Someone put a serpent, a silver one, into my bath—a warning, not an attempt. The snake bit the hem of the skirt and the servants screamed. I kept my face close and pretended to faint; it is an art to keep your limbs civil while your soul screams.
"You are very fond of theatrics," Colton observed later, when he saw the coiled hospital news and the careful physician's notes.
"I am fond of food," I said. "And bread. And life."
"You will have life." He regarded me with something that resembled affection, but half of it was ownership.
It was his ownership that saved me when Rowan decided one evening that a small abduction could finish the matter. He had me in a courtyard behind the service quarters before the plan unravelled: two men moving, the smell of oil and rope. I struggled and managed to bite. Rowan lost his hands long enough for me to whisper the one word that had become my barter: "Colton."
He came like a weather event, not polite. Men scattered. Rowan was dragged before a tribunal, and Beatrice tried to make her short speech, but when the crowd of courtiers saw Colton's thin patience turn to volcano, they faltered.
"Rowan Nielsen," Colton said in the daylight of the main pavilion, "you will stand and answer for your cruelty."
Rowan tried to grin, used to knights' arrogance. "I would do what every man would do," he said too loudly. "We defend our honor."
"You defended nothing," Colton replied. "You plotted to injure the emperor's household in our mourning. You tried to murder and to disgrace."
The hall was packed: eunuchs, scribes, maids who never expected to watch the great be judged. They had a particular hunger for spectacle. I watched them like pins falling and thought of all the small debts I had bled to get here.
"Bring him forward!" Vincent Orchestrated; he had adopted the duty of public moralist during the campaign. Beatrice's simper dissolved into a hellish kind of softness.
Rowan's face first took a smirk, then a flush of incomprehension. "On what proofs?" he demanded. "On what authority?"
"On my word," Colton said. "And on witness testimony." He looked at me then, and I felt the room close as if by coaxing.
"You know what will happen." He leaned forward. "You will deny everything at first. You will pretend to be insulted. You will ask for judgment. You will deny. Then you will collapse when the sentence is read. You will beg. And then the court will record you."
Rowan still tried to laugh.
"You would humiliate a Lord of the Court?" he spat.
"Yes." Colton's voice went low and cold. "If he tries to break an oath and ruin the house."
The judges convened and they found Rowan guilty of the attempted abduction and cruelty. The sentence was to be public—to be the ceremony where the court would strip him of his honors. They dragged him to the square outside the Hall, where the crowd was thick as grain.
"Bring out the charges," Colton said.
A scribe read: "For attempted violence against the imperial household; for the use of unlawful coercion; for the desecration of the mourning."
Rowan's expression changed in a few beats: first a flicker of denial, then a tightening, then a shock. He shouted, "You cannot!"
"Cannot?" Beatrice cried, thinking herself secure. "This man is a fool."
"Is he?" I said, and my voice cut through like a knife. "He thought his hands could do what his mouth could not."
Rowan's color drained. In public, the faces around him unfurled like paper. A crowd had never been kinder to the condemned than to the successful.
"Do you deny your acts?" Colton asked.
"I—" Rowan tried to spin. "I was acting under orders of—"
"Whose?" Colton asked, the shadow of a smile a map of cruelty. "Whose orders? Speak plainly. Name your protectors."
The man found his tongue. "You cannot—"
Dawn crept across faces. "Name them!" someone shouted, and the crowd rounded like a chorus.
Rowan's voice faltered. He looked at Beatrice, who had sunk into pale dignity, and then the island of Vincent. The courage that came from a quiet palace bedroom dissolved in front of scribes and pageboys.
"I was told to bring her," Rowan said finally, "to take her away from the regent's influence, to... to expose her."
"Expose?" I asked, letting the word a low stone drop.
"Yes! Expose her—"
"Whom?" Colton prompted.
"I was told by—" He stopped, like a man frozen in mud. He was at the edge of the abyss.
He tried to deny, to claim bribery. The crowd leaned closer. "I didn't mean to—"
They made him kneel. I had never seen a man so sure of himself become so small. "I did not—" he stammered.
"Then explain the white cloth found in your quarters with list of names," Colton said. The document had names and times. "Explain the personal notes. Explain why you had a list of my servants' routes."
Rowan's face cracked. "It was—" He started to beg, first his voice thin with defiance, then snapping into idiocy. "I was asked—"
The crowd shifted. A dozen small voices pulled into a crescendo. "Name them!" men cried. "Tell us!"
He tried to thickly smear everyone's honor, to call them liars, to invoke some code. The judges read the cold list of facts. Rowan laughed and then slammed into denial; the laugh turned to sputtering, sputter to a sharp, furious denial. Then his voice broke. The features of a man who had been proud shifted in a few stabs—the arrogance fallen, the denial failing, the shock bursting out like a wound.
"Do not lie!" someone hissed.
"Name them!" they demanded. "Who asked you?"
He looked like a man who had the rope finally around his neck.
"Wh—who would I name?" he said. "You—" The sound he had would have been comic if it hadn't unfolded like a play: the smugness, the confusion, the faltering, the collapse.
People around the square began to film the scene in their ways: scribes scratched furious lines; a servant took notes; another woman's lips parted to catch the breath of a story. The crowd rustled, some laughing, some taking out small inks and copying words to send as gossip. No one forced them to watch; no one wanted to miss the spectacle.
"On my knees," Rowan blubbered at last. "I beg—"
"Beg!" they cried in unison.
He knelt, and the softness of the dust left an impression on his knees. The judges pronounced him stripped of his titles and ranks. He was paraded with his face turned to the crowd; men spat; women shook their heads and cried about justice. The sound of shoes on stone and whispering made the moment thick.
"I didn't! Please!" Rowan begged. "You must—"
"No." Colton's voice was a scalpel. "You are left to the law."
There is nothing more indecent than a sudden cruelty dressed up as justice. Rowan's eyes went from arrogance to pleading to horror. He tried to justify himself with words of loyalty. Then he tried to say his hands had been forced. Then he asked for mercy. "Please," he said almost in a child's voice, "I have a family."
The crowd watched as the judges read the sentence: exile from ranks, the shackles of disgrace, and a public notice pinned in the square. "Let it be seen," Colton said. "Let them all know the cost of trying to touch the house."
The man fell into a puddle of humiliation. People took the scribe notes away like bread; the memory of the spectacle wagged through the palace by dusk. I watched him on the ground and felt nothing but a cold place in me. The sight of fallen pride filled everyone with a primitive hunger; they had been fed.
"Good," Colton said quietly at my ear when it was done. "Do not worry. I will not let them hurt the child."
"Do not," I said.
He nodded and turned away. Rowan's collapse rang in the chambers like a bell, the price paid in the name of power made visible. The court had witnessed the fall. They had seen the process: smugness, shock, denial, collapse, supplication—public and brutal—and they had begun to whisper about the rest.
*
They did worse things after. Beatrice's pride bristled like an animal and wanted to lash. Vincent maneuvered, and a torturous plan was made to catch me with more force. But the court had tasted the head of a would-be murderer, and with Colton's word pending and the physicians' notes in his pocket, their strategies were more careful. The net, however, grew tighter.
They tried petty things: letters in my bed, poison in a bowl, whispers to Colton about treachery. Sometimes, Qin—Xander—would intercept a note before a courtier ran. Once they left a serpent—an ugly, shining, silver-scarred thing—in my tub; Amber killed it with a hairpin. Another time, they sent a servant with a forged message that I owed money. I learned to watch for the small dark things that men do in places where power is the only god.
There was a night when I nearly lost my head a second time. Men broke into the rear storeroom at dawn and dragged me like an animal. I was knocked down in a small room before I could make a sound; the air was thin and sweet. One of Rowan's men—no, someone more twisted, a warden in Beatrice’s employ—took a strip of white and pressed it to my throat. "The emperor deserves a throne in heaven, not the stench of your guilt," he hissed.
They were moving toward the noose, toward a ceremonial funeral that they would call "justice." I tried bargaining and propositions. They would only bite if I offered up the child. I put on my face, measured by things learned under blows and on the low beds of my youth, perfect and small and servile.
"Stop," Colton said when he arrived. He was a shadow that could fill a room and rip it. He threw himself into the men's path. "We are not slaughtering the household by street theater."
"She is guilty!" one man shouted—probably Vinny's voice rang. "She is the emperor's downfall!"
"She is under my protection," Colton said coldly. "Step aside—"
"Regent!" someone bawled. "You cannot stop justice."
He turned and the air seemed to freeze. He moved like winter itself: precise, deliberate. He called for judges and demanded the men be punished. That night the household whispered that he had saved me twice because of strategy, because the child meant power, and because he liked the taste of controlling fate.
"He will always help those who bind themselves to him," a bedmaker muttered later.
"Then bind," I thought, and did.
*
The months blurred. I learned to walk the lines between him and the rest of the palace. I learned to wait in specific places. His protection made him want more. I was a chess piece, and I bent to the necessary moves. Yet every night, when the curtains fell and the torches were guttering, he would sometimes call me by name—"Coraline"—and the word would land soft and hot, like a coin on my tongue.
"Come tonight," he would say. "Wear water and pale silk."
"Tonight I sleep," I would answer, and he would reply, always, with the same soft cruelty: "No. Tonight you come to the long hall. I will wait."
I went. I performed what he liked—a dance he called the "Green Waist," a cheap name that sounded like a poem. I danced until my legs were glass and the sweat dotted my chest. He watched on the banister like a god.
"Again," he commanded when it was over. He liked the sweat between my breasts.
When I confessed to the man who had patched my wrist and told him I would do anything to keep the child's chance, he only looked away. Raj Tang, who had been more patient than most, left me with small vials and a promise.
"If you cannot carry," he said in his low, earnest way, "there are ways to make a likeness. But they carry a debt, Coraline."
"I will carry," I said. "I will grieve and I will bear."
He nodded. "Then I will help you."
Everything in the palace moves by clockwork and appetite: the emperor's memory, the regent's calculation, a concubine's grudge. Men who think they own anything find out they only rent. That is what I learned. And when Beatrice and Vincent tried to fight me when fortunes shifted, Colton remained like a mountain that could choose to crumble or not.
"Burn the place," he told Xander once, in a voice I did not like. "Make enough trouble at the other end, and the scent of smoke will keep them busy."
"Set palaces on fire to save one pregnant woman?" I asked later.
"Set fires," he said simply. "Sometimes you break dishes to mend the house."
I did not worry about the violence so much as the cost. Men who plan like this are not sentimental.
*
The public punishment came later and was larger than Rowan's downfall. Beatrice Seidel's pride had demanded more than an exile. She had tried to dispose of me twice with sharper cruelty; she had thrown people's lives into play. Colton would not let her stand without a fall; he wanted the court to remember what happened when one book of authority tried to swallow the other.
So he decided to humiliate her where she could not stand: at the Autumn Court, where the official mourning had been declared. He invited the ministers, the judges, the merchantry, the eunuchs and the women who braided hair for the emperor. It would be public and complete.
"Will you come?" I asked him the night before.
"Why would you not?" He smiled like a slow burn. "Would you like to watch her beg?"
"Yes," I said. "I will stand."
When the morning came, I was dressed in the simplest of gowns, pale and unadorned. Colton appeared like a monarch with no crown and the court shuddered. Beatrice was pillared in fullest gown, outrage carved into every edge. Vincent stood by her like a statue. The air was thick with servants and scribes and the scent of ink and old flowers.
"Let the charges be read," Colton said. His voice rippled.
A scroll unfurled. The scribe read the list: "Complicity in the attempted poisoning of the late emperor's meals; conspiracy to overturn palace procedures; ordered assaults on the household; plot to abet the removal of the Emperor's consort."
Beatrice's face flickered through colors—anger, then confidence, then something else that perhaps was fear. She smiled without mirth. "Preposterous," she said.
"You organized men to assault an imperial household," Colton said. "You moved men into the role of judge and jury. You broke the law."
"You're jealous," she accused. "You would have my favors removed."
"No." He looked at her as if he searched for a single misplaced coin. "I have authority. You used yours to set the palace aflame in rumor and in plot. You will be punished where everyone can see."
"Punish!" Vincent cried. "You cannot!"
He smoothed his robes. "We will present the proofs."
They unfurled letters, witness statements and records. The scribes had taken down the whispers; Beatrice's household had bribed men. The proof was not ugly; it was clean—handwritten notes, a servant's testimony, a ledger of sums exchanged, Rowan's confession.
Beatrice's face paled, and then paled some more. "You—" The first moment of the desktop pride thundered into shock.
"This is a spectacle," Colton said quietly. "You will listen."
"You—" she tried to bolt for dignity.
"No." He pointed. "Down on your knees, Beatrice."
She laughed at the idea and then the sound died. She did not go gracefully into humiliation. She tried to act martyred, to wear a regal suffering like a mask. "You have no right!" she cried.
"Yes," Colton said with a hardness that made the very pillars listen. "I have the right to order the household. Kneel."
She lunged for denial first.
"I am not—" she began, then looked to Vincent for rescue. He looked like a man who had lost his map. His mouth opened and closed. The crowd watched with the delicious slow hunger men have for collapses.
"Name a single lie," she demanded, and then broke into a frenzied denial, "I did not. I did not! He would—"
"Then explain the record," Colton said. "Explain the paid men who followed you. Explain the gifts to the guards. Explain the plans and the lists."
The crowd leaned in. Someone whispered, "She is a dragon in silk." Another said, "She is a serpent."
Beatrice's reactions moved like a theatrical set: first arrogance, then a rapid eye for escape, then denial. She tried to flash her smile, once, like a weapon. She swung into counter-attack. "The emperor favored the regent! He kept him in command! Why would I defend a woman who... who seduced the old man?"
"You accused her in public," Colton said. "You tried to pin on her the crimes. We proved the facts."
At that point, the crowd's tone shifted from gossip to howls. The scribes wrote faster, the guards shifted like actors waiting for a cue.
She collapsed then. Not into tears, but into a ridiculous, feigned faint. For a small beat she acted the wronged noble, only to realize the audience had no sympathy left. They had the neat table of facts, the ledger, the men who had been paid. She tried to produce witnesses and they shrank; some who had once been loyal now saw their own hands in the ledger and turned away.
"Please!" she begged at last, a sound that had once not come from such a woman. "Do not shame me before the court!"
The crowd began to murmur: "Shame." "Payback." "Justice." A woman in the crowd—one of the maids—began to cry and to clap for reasons she could not explain. A scribe wrote the moment down. The governor's man took notes. This was not only punishment but theater. There were those who fished in the crowd for spectacle and those who had known her cruelty.
"Beg," Colton said.
She dropped to her knees.
"Beg me," he commanded.
She screamed, "You cannot!"—and then she changed like a falconer throwing down his bird. She would not go on knees cleanly. She tried a moment of arrogance: "You are a guard," she spat, "a servant with a title."
He smiled like a trap and said, "Do it."
She did not have the strength left to swindle the court. Her face crumpled and her throat worked. The arc of emotions he wanted—smug → shocked → denial → collapse → supplication—played before everyone like a candle consumed. She begged to be spared. Then she tried to bargain, to offer lands, to throw the houses of the guilty to the wolves. Vincent stood near, shrinking.
"Stop." Colton's voice was a blade. "Stand. You will be announced disgraced, stripped of your rank, forbidden to attend court until further notice. You will leave your rooms within a day, and your brother will be fined and told to apologize. We will send an announcement to the provinces."
The crowd roared. There were those who cheered. Beatrice's knees shook as she tried to make the case that she had been loyal. People laughed. Some cried. A few more recorded the moment into their notebooks and would later tell how they had seen the high fall. The humiliation was public. The shuttered silence at the end felt like insult turned ritual.
She begged. She said, "Do not take my house," then "I will—" then "It is not—" and finally she collapsed into a heap of petty pleas. People took it as a lesson. The scribes recorded the lesson. The servants who had once feared her lifted their heads a little higher and began to talk.
"I wanted you to see," Colton said to me later, his voice a strange, low rumble. "Let them watch the cost of a single poisonous plan. Let the house be steady."
"He will not forget," I replied.
"He will not," he agreed. "But he will also remember who kept you."
Beatrice's punishment had been public and humiliating; it followed the requirement of a spectacle: she went from proud to shaken to denial to collapse; the crowd's reaction had been immediate and varied—shock, gossip, a hundred pens scratching record. There were some who made the moment a feast. For the first time in months, they had the taste of domination made visible.
That night, some of the story would be repeated in kitchens and in gutter bars. The servants would clap and whisper about a lesson in leverage. The scribes would file the record. In the corridors, people stopped me to say quietly, "You look like someone with an empire in her pelvis." They laughed cruelly but their kindnessed mirth was a new thing: safety tastes like a mouthful of metal.
*
"Don't trust him too far, Coraline," Raj Tang told me after. "Men like him keep debts close."
"He keeps debts close like a miser." I sighed. "But he keeps his hand over mine."
"He will not let more people hurt you," Raj said. "But he will also want his returns."
"I know," I said. "I will give what he wants."
The months stretched. My belly grew only faintly; Floyd said it would be weeks more before any public sign. Meanwhile I walked the palace like a ghost: seen but not touched, protected and yet monitored. Colton's interference was two-edged. His hand steadied me; his control ate entire nights. He would order people to burn rumors, to break the plans of other nobles. He was ruthless. I forgave him because he kept my life. I forgave him because the child might live.
"Thank you," I told him once, in a rare private hour.
"For what?" he demanded.
"For staying."
He regarded me a long beat, and his eyes were suddenly almost human. "We are not friends," he said. "We are measured terms."
"I understand," I said.
"Then rest." He kissed my forehead, a brief, dangerous motion. "I will see you soon."
That night I slept with my hands on my belly, listening for the small drum of a heart I had not yet heard. I had learned to live on the edge of bargains: favor traded for protection, a name whispered for a life. The palace can be a good place for women who can keep their mouths shut and their wits sharp.
My choice was to survive and to place the child above every other idea. I would do anything to keep it, to carry it until it was fit for the world. I would bargain away the rest—the bedrock of my dignity—to keep that one small thing.
"Call me Coraline tomorrow," Colton said in the quiet hours, once more.
"Good night," I breathed.
He went away, and I lay awake until the night gave over to dawn, until the long corridors lost their shadows and the palace woke and opened. It was always the fear that would keep me sharp: the knowledge that men would plan and plot and set forth to take what I had if I let my guard drop.
I would not let them.
I would live.
The End
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