Sweet Romance14 min read
I Fell into His War Crown (A Time-Traveling Rescue)
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I woke up wrapped in purple silk, and the first thing I noticed was the sound of horses outside and the smell of wood smoke. My name is Haylee Petrov. A minute before, I was in my bedroom apartment, watching a fashion gala on TV. Now I blinked at a wooden beam, at lacquered furniture, at a paper lantern throwing soft light across a face I didn't know.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
"Haylee," I answered myself aloud, because the mouth moved and the word tasted like my real name. It felt like my throat remembered a life it hadn't lived yet.
A man stood at the doorway—tall, sun-darkened, hair tied in a high knot, his clothes edged with the symbol of a cloud. He looked like every warrior hero in every old movie I'd loved. He did not smile.
"I'm Emery Courtney," he said. "You were on the cliff. Rest."
"Emery?" I echoed. The name fit him perfectly—short, hard, like a sword. He crossed the room, careful and exact, and reached for a basin of warm water.
"Don't try to move," he told me. His voice was low, steady, and it reached somewhere very small and secret inside of me.
"Why would I want to?" I said before thinking. "Why are you being so kind to a stranger?"
He paused, then shrugged a little, like pulling a sword from a scabbard. "Because I couldn't let the mountain take you."
I tried to imagine the moment I fell—my shoes slipping, the cliff edge, the panic—and none of it had the clarity of the moment I met his eyes. Time felt like two different things. The Haylee who lived in a city of steel and glass and suitcases had vanished. The Haylee in purple silk was trembling and dizzy and oddly willing to surrender to a man who smelled faintly of horse oil and pine.
"Do you remember anything?" he asked once he'd wrapped my ankle with a linen bandage.
"I remember a gala," I said. "I remember laughing at bad jokes. And a red dress. Then—nothing."
Emery's eyes sharpened. "You came from far away, then."
"Far away, yes." My voice shook and I laughed. "Too far."
He sat beside the bed and looked at my hand. "I will find out who you are," he said. "But for now, rest."
"Why would you care?" I asked, and the question surprised me with how naked it felt.
"Because sometimes duty arrives dressed like curiosity," he said. "And because someone should be kind without a reason."
Over the days that followed, my world narrowed down to Emery, to hot water, to a warm bed in a place called the Rui Wang Mansion, and to an old woman who called herself Elsie Denis and treated me like a child who might break. And then my life widened again until it hurt, because what I learned about this time and this place was like opening a book I had read all my life and finding out the pages were made of real blood.
"This is not your home, Haylee," Elsie told me one night as she braided my hair into a clumsy plait. "But if you're here, we will make you safe."
"Why do you sound like a mother I never had?" I whispered.
Elsie laughed. "Because mothers come in many shapes. Some have names like 'Li' and carry broom handles. Some are called 'Elsie' and have very soft hands."
I stared out the window. The moon looked small above the tiled roofs. I couldn't shake the feeling of being an actor who'd forgotten her lines—except the set was real, and the stakes were not.
*
He told me pieces about himself in small doses, like tests he didn't want me to fail. "My father is Fernando Baumann," he said one evening while we walked past the koi pond, "the emperor. My mother is Katya Perkins. I was raised away from the palace."
"Your name—Emery Courtney," I said, rolling it around like a coin. "Does it mean... anything?"
"It means what I make it mean," he said. "Call me Emery."
"Call you Emery," I repeated. "I can do that."
He taught me how to hold a bowl without turning it into a weapon. He taught me to read the little knots on ropes used to tie parcels in the market. When I laughed, something in him loosened like a lock popped open.
"Am I safe?" I asked once, when the guards' armor clanked like distant thunder and the palace gossips spun their wheels.
"You are safe in my house," he said, blunt as a blade. "Out there, the world is made of wishes and knives."
"I don't understand politics," I admitted. "I barely understand my phone."
"You don't need to," he said. "You need to stay alive."
"But the world wants to be dramatic," I pointed out. "Is that allowed?"
He looked at me long enough that I knew he was deciding something invisible. "Not when it touches you," he said. "Not when it touches me."
It was the first time anyone had put me in the same sentence as anything heavier than an evening dress.
*
"Haylee!" a voice called one morning. "You must try the sweet rice. The palace cooks would be jealous."
The voice belonged to Lila Voigt—my childhood friend in this adopted life, Lev De Luca's daughter, who had grown up in the house where Emery had been raised. She arrived like sunlight, small and bright, and took my hand without waiting for my permission.
"This is Lila," Emery said. "She is the closest thing I have to family here."
Lila's eyes were quick to laugh. "You're staying, right? Emery wouldn't let anything happen to you."
"I hope he wouldn't," I said.
"We will teach you everything," Lila declared. "And you will teach us how to make bracelets out of ribbon. That part of your world sounds important."
I smiled, because teaching felt like giving back what time had taken away. "I will teach you. But only if Emery agrees."
"He has no say," Lila teased, but her voice dropped. "Emery takes on the world for people he loves. Be ready to be spoiled and protected in equal measure."
"Is he always like this?" I asked.
Lila's brows arched. "Only with people who manage to make his mouth soften. And you are good at that."
That night, Emery sat by my bed while I tried to sleep and said one sentence that lodged itself like a seed.
"If trouble finds you again, don't run," he said. "Let me catch it."
"Deal?" I asked.
"Deal."
*
There had been a boy born years earlier who should have been the empire's pride. He was taken under danger and hidden in the south because a woman of silk and iron named Ekaterina Almeida had wanted power and feared a rival. I learned the story in fits and fragments—by listening to servants whisper, by reading a torn letter Emery kept folded in his sleeve, by watching the way older men straightened when someone mentioned "the Xianfei."
"Isn't this the child who was smuggled away?" I asked Findlay Allen one afternoon. He was Emery's tutor, a quiet man with an unshakable manner.
"Yes," he said. "Her name was Katya Perkins then; she was called 'Xianfei.' She gave the child up to save him."
"To save him and send him away," Emery said from the doorway. "Because the palace can be a basket where vipers hide in the lining."
"That's a ruinous sentence," I said, and then blushed because he had used "vipers" and it sounded like a prophecy.
"But it's true," Emery said simply. "People plot like cold winter winds. They cut what they must cut."
"Who plotted?" I asked. My voice shook less than I expected.
"Ekaterina Almeida," Findlay said. "She is the Empress."
The name landed in my mouth like ice. Ekaterina Almeida—empress—someone with a smile that could hide a thousand knives. It fit the stories I'd read of women who wore jewels like armor.
"What did she do?" I asked. My curiosity had the sharpness of a blade; it kept me alert and alight.
Findlay lowered his voice. "She tried to take the child. When she could not, she marked the mother and the mother’s allies. There were always people who would obey the order to find a child."
"Why?" I demanded. "Why hurt a baby?"
"Because children are future flags," Emery said. "They can be reasons to love or reasons to fear. Power is afraid of anything that might grow in secret and then surprise it."
"That's terrifying," I said.
Emery's hand found mine without ceremony. "Then let's be on the side of the surprising things."
*
Autumn came and with it the emperor's hunting festival. I rode in the back of a carriage, my hands clenched in my lap while Emery sat on a high steed like a king of wind and dusk. "Stay close," he murmured. "Don't let anyone take you for a prize."
At the field, arrows sang and horses leapt like fish. The princes competed, and the crowd watched in a sea of glittering eyes. The emperor, Fernando Baumann, smoked his pipe like someone who held a map of every human secret in his palm.
"Who do you think will win?" I asked Lila, as we watched men race toward the beasts.
"Emery," she said without hesitation. "He rides like he repairs fences—fast and careful."
"You won't embarrass me in front of the emperor, will you?" Emery asked, a hint of humor in his voice.
"I would never," I lied, and the lie felt like a warm coat on a sudden fall night.
The hunt turned violent and glorious. Emery's horse thundered through brush and he moved like a man who knew the body of danger. Then a scream—high, sharp—and the world collapsed into motion.
"A woman fell from the cliff!" someone shouted.
"She needs help!" Lila cried.
Emery vanished into the trees like someone who had only been waiting for permission. He returned within moments, not alone. He carried me like a story carried its hero. I lay in his arms and watched the sky and the way his jaw tightened around worry.
"You're safe," he repeated, as if saying it could make it so.
But safety was a brittle object in that court. Rumors were hounds and jealous hands were eager. At the banquet later, the officials clapped for the winners. Emery's victories were counted like coins. Then the spymaster announced the tally and the crown settled like a real weight on Emery's shoulders. He had won.
"Mr. Yue," someone said nearby—an old voice. The emperor's steward.
"Rui Wang," Emery corrected automatically. The title held him like an iron glove.
"Rui Wang," the emperor said, like an answer that both blessed and burdened. "We will celebrate tonight."
I felt the room tilt. The emperor's eyes found Emery, and something like pride melted the creases in his stern face. I, who had never wanted crowns for myself, felt the hush of a city holding its breath.
*
But nights in palaces hold many candles, and shadows gather at the edges of happiness. Ekaterina Almeida sat across from the emperor, angles soft as carved wood but with a smile like a closed door.
"Congratulations to our boy," she said, meaning someone else entirely.
"What did you do?" I asked Findlay later, as he poured tea in the quiet.
"I sent a message," he said. "To remind some people that the child in the south is not merely a story."
"Is she dangerous?" I asked.
"She is the kind of person who makes people afraid because she is very practiced at being hungry," Findlay said. "She eats choices, Haylee."
"I don't understand," I said, and then I did. Her hunger made the world smaller like a fist closing.
Patience is a hard thing. I was impatient. I had emergency feelings. I had the terrible, foolish hope that one day I could walk back into my apartment and pretend this had never happened. Emery and his court were not background—they were real people who loved and bled and feared.
*
Then the day came when truth had to be shown like a blade in the sunlight. The court had been a slow, simmering pot and now someone lifted the lid.
"Your Majesty," Emery said, in the middle of the audience hall. He did not bow like someone begging. He stood like someone who had already given his life away and kept nothing else to lose.
Fernando Baumann's expression narrowed into a mask of royal distance. "What is it, Rui Wang?"
"Your Empress," Emery said. "Has killed and plotted. She moved against my mother and against a mother who only ever wanted her child safe."
The room inhaled. People shifted, the sound like a crowd of birds at dusk. Ekaterina Almeida's smile did not change.
"Emery," she said sweetly. "You speak as if you have seen a ghost."
"I have seen more than a ghost," he said. "I have seen proof."
Findlay stepped forward then, holding a folded stack of letters and a sealed scroll. "Your Majesty," he said. "These are orders. These are commands to find a child, to silence those who protect that child. They bear the mark of your Empress."
Ekaterina's face froze, perfect porcelain. "Preposterous," she said. "Who would forge my seal? A treacherous servant? A jealous rival?"
Her words were thin as thread. Then Emery drew a breath and spoke so the entire hall could hear.
"Bring the letters to the sun," he said.
They unrolled like a storm. The seals were the Empress's. The handwriting matched her ink. The room convulsed.
No one moved.
No one, that is, except Ekaterina. Her face drained. The laughter at the next table died like embers. A man who had sat with her for years—an official named Cruz Han—ambled forward with a hand that trembled. "By Heaven," Cruz muttered. "This is treasonous."
Ekaterina's eyes flashed like a blade. "You dare?" she hissed.
She lunged, the movement of a woman who had spent a life learning to take without consent. She reached for the scroll as if grabbing a dagger, and the court erupted. Servants stood up, the emperor's guards moved like a glass of water thrown.
"Arrest her," someone ordered—Levi De Luca, a general who had more trust in soldiers than whispers.
"On what charge?" Ekaterina's voice was thin and furious. "You would punish your Empress on the word of a boy who just returned from the mountains?"
"On the sound of a seal," Findlay said, and pushed the letters toward the emperor. "And on the testimony of those who tried to follow her orders."
"Traitors!" Ekaterina screamed. Her voice was terrible because it was public and private at once. "You have no proof! You will not—"
"Silence!" Fernando Baumann bellowed, and his voice was the kind that makes rooms rearrange themselves.
They brought out witnesses—servants who had been paid hush money and old messengers who could not be bought. They spoke of nights when riders were sent at odd hours, of men who crossed into the south and never came back. They spoke of the bloody blade hidden in a drawer and of the woman who ordered the hand that wielded it.
Between the testimony and the seals, the case was a rope. Ekaterina's face crumpled. She went from marble to porcelain to thin glass, and then it shattered under the pressure of the crowd's attention.
"You are a liar," she croaked at one point, and the accusation turned inward like a boomerang. People watched as she moved from furious denial to a smaller, more animal terror.
"Forgive me," she whispered. "Forgive me. I only wanted... I wanted—"
"No one bowed," Emery said, his voice hard as a blade. "No one deserved such fear."
"Get her out!" someone shouted. "Let the people decide!"
The guards took her by the elbows. She resisted then broke as a woman who had been pretending to be a storm. Her silk rustled under the hands of the men who escorted her away. In the hall a hundred people followed with their eyes, not with compassion but with a feral interest. Some took out their phones—tiny boxes of glass that I recognized—and began to record. The sound of them was like a second wave after a storm.
"Don't film," the emperor commanded, but the phones were already recording, and the images would travel.
As Ekaterina was led down the long steps to stand in the courtyard, Emery followed for a moment, then stopped. Fernando Baumann stood on a raised platform and called loudly, "By the seal of the court, and in the presence of all, I remove the Empress from her title. She is to be confined until her guilt is judged by law."
The courtyard filled with murmurs. A woman who had been untouchable was being handled like a fallen bird. People began to shout—some in anger, some in relief. A servant thrust a bowl of water at Ekaterina. She ignored it at first, then gratefully took it and smashed it on the stone before her, not in fury but in shame.
"Help me," she begged at one point, and then she did something that made five or six court women gasp: Ekaterina dropped to her knees, silk pooling around her like fallen cloud, and put her hands together.
"Please," she cried. "I beg you. I did it for my son. I did it for my house. I did what I must."
The crowd heard the words and the voice that had been a honey trap for so long began to disintegrate.
People recorded, whispered, clapped. Some near the emperor tossed bouquets of flowers to signify approval, which was vulgar but human. Others pressed their faces to the balcony rails as if they were spectators at a theatrical tragedy.
Then she begged for mercy, her voice unraveling through humiliation to a raw string that would not hold. Emery watched from the side, his face like a rock. At one point, Ekaterina managed to crawl a few steps toward him, her knees scraping on stone, and she looked straight at him.
"Emery," she said, almost a child's wheeze, "please forgive me."
He knelt—not because she was the former Empress, but because a human had asked for mercy. For the first time since I knew him, I saw his jaw tremble.
"Kneel," he said very quietly. "And say what you did."
Her voice burst into sobs. "I sent men to the south to take your mother's life. I tried to name my son ahead of his time. I thought power would fix everything."
"Then take responsibility." His voice was like winter. "Do not ask for forgiveness without telling the truth."
She told them everything in a broken sentence, and the crowd listened like a hungry animal. Then—because the court demanded a spectacle—the emperor ordered a confession to be read aloud, and Ekaterina read it. She read the names, she read the times, she named the servants who had followed orders. There were gasps. People snapped photos. The whole thing—the collapse of a woman who had once been a queen—felt like something taught in history classes: a lesson suddenly happening live.
She fell to pieces. She knelt, then rose, then collapsed again. She cried for mercy. She crawled. She looked at Emery and repeated, "Forgive me."
He didn't answer. He stood like a man who had something inside him that would not bend. People cheered. Some cursed. Some spat. Some recorded it and promised to sell the footage. It would run in the markets for days, the scrolls would pass from hand to hand, and for a time, Ekaterina Almeida would be the woman everyone had seen fall.
When the echo finally faded, the emperor made a decision that would be carved into the court records. Ekaterina was stripped of title, confined, and ordered to perform labor in the palace for a year. She was to stand in public twice a day, and once a week she would be required to stand in the center of the open market, where the crowds could spit or throw fruit if they wished. The imperial seals were tendered away from her hands. The palace removed her signet from the chest.
It was harsh and public, and the cruelty of it sat like a stone in my stomach. Yet I understood the point—the empire wanted to show that even the highest were accountable. It wanted the people to know they had a voice. It wanted the story to be visible and unforgettable.
When the courtyard finally emptied, a man near the steps muttered, "She will never rise from that."
Emery pressed his palms together and looked at me, and for the first time, I realized that this story was not only about justice. It was about the cost of power.
"That could have been us," he said later, almost to himself.
"What do you mean?"
"Power," he said simply. "We are always a day away from being the hunted or the hunted's reason. This doesn't make everything right."
"No," I said. "It makes everything more complicated."
He took my hands and held them like a lifeline. "Then stay by me," he said. "If you want to survive in a place that eats people, learn who you can trust."
"I will," I promised.
*
They called me many things in the weeks after—guest, oddity, miracle. Lila brought me ribbons and learned all the English swear words I taught her. Findlay taught me to read the stillness in men's faces. Levi De Luca, the old general who had grown the boy Emery into a man, gave me a nod that meant something like acceptance.
"You're no longer a visitor," he said once over a cup of bitter tea. "You are someone who chooses to stay."
"Why would I stay?" I asked him. "I could go back to my life. I could go to the city and get a latte and pretend none of this happened."
"You could," Levi said, and then he smiled like someone who had been alive long enough to understand loss. "Or you could fight with us. That is a different kind of life. It gets blood on your hands in lesser ways, but it is honest."
I looked at Emery, who was practicing sword forms in the courtyard. He moved like someone who had always had to be ready to stop a blade, and that readiness was part of his charm.
"Emery," I called, and he turned.
"I need you," he said without pretense, and I believed him.
"Good," I said. "I need you too. But I will not be your trophy."
He smiled, and the palace felt like it had a small, safe island in the middle of all the storms.
"Then we will be partners," he said. "At least for now."
"Partners," I repeated. "Do I get a say in the titles?"
"You get whatever title you make," he said. "Start with 'Haylee', and we'll see where it goes."
I laughed, and the sound echoed through the stone halls like something alive.
*
These are the days I remember. I remember how Emery taught me to throw a knife well enough to scare a man, how Lila once braided my hair into something the palace girls called 'the river', and how the Emperor—Fernando Baumann—once asked if I missed my world.
"Sometimes," I said.
"Then go back," he said, and the offer was so simple and so terrifying. To return was to abandon this story. To stay was to pick a side.
"Which side will you choose?" Emery asked me in a whisper later.
"The one with you in it," I said, because sometimes truth answers for us.
He kissed my forehead like a benediction and I slept. Outside, the empire kept turning—bows bent and unbent, gossip knitting and unknitting itself, men and women doing the small terrible things that keep great houses standing. Inside, we warmed our hands over small fires and planned how to keep each other alive.
There will be more storms. There will be more scenes that will test us. People will come from other kingdoms with promises and knives. There will be moments when someone I love must face a choice that could break us.
But there are also oranges at dawn, and the way Emery waits at the door when I step into the world like it is brand new. There is Lila's laugh like a sparrow. There is Levi's steady hand. There is Findlay's quiet intelligence. There is the way the Emperor looks at his son with something like hope.
I am Haylee Petrov, a woman from a world of glass who now lives in a palace of stone. I learned to stand here because a brave man caught me at the cliff. I have learned to be brave too.
"Stay," Emery whispered to me once, not as a demand but as an invitation.
"I will," I said. "I will stay and help hold the light."
And that is where I began to live.
The End
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