Sweet Romance14 min read
I Hung Myself, the Emperor Fell for Me, and Then I Made Them Pay
ButterPicks12 views
I hung from the beam and waited for the black-and-white specters to take me away.
"Come on, little black, little white, drag my soul out!" I waved one hand like a lunatic and grinned.
"Ah! A ghost!" The black-and-white ghosts screamed and fled.
"…"
Later I heard they threw a three-day feast in Hell to celebrate that I had come back to life.
I was a fierce ghost. So fierce that even the bureaucracy of the underworld didn't want me. They said my anger was too strong. So I drifted, I ate other ghosts, I frightened people. Centuries folded like paper.
Then, one morning, I woke up in cold cloth and stale air and discovered I had been reborn — as a discarded consort of the Great Yuan.
"Why would I be made human?" I muttered, tugging at the white silk around my neck. An hour earlier the man in the room had hanged himself for loneliness and left me with a body again. Terrific.
"Fine. If life insists on giving me a body I'll make it exciting." I smiled as I slid my neck free and dropped to the floor. I had not felt the solidity of ground beneath my feet in a very long time. It was dizzying and delicious.
I crawled to the edge of the man-made lake in the palace and flopped in. Salt and river clay filled my mouth. "Die already," I thought, and didn't struggle.
Hours later I bobbed up, spat water like a cat, and then — because being stubborn is my favorite hobby — I plunged a hairpin right into my chest.
It hurt. But I liked it.
Two weeks passed. I should have been a corpse, should have been dragged by the black-and-white. Instead the body's chest rose and fell on borrowed heat. I spat, shoved up from the floor, and decided to accept being human for now. Life can be a good toy.
Then a man in wet white crawled from the lake.
He looked fragile as a reed. He lay beside me and breathed, and his breath sounded unexpectedly steady and, disturbingly, warm. I did not like warm. Warm was for people who trusted. I was an excellent old ghost; I knew all the delightful ways to ruin people's expectations.
He watched me for a long time. Finally he said, "You didn't die."
"No," I said. "Death didn't want me."
He sat up and blinked. "I'm Jonas—"
I cut him off. "Names are messy. Call me what you want."
He frowned. "You're… strange."
"You have no idea." I reached for a carp and skinned it with my bare fingers. "Do you like fish raw, roasted, dismembered?"
He tilted his head. "I like the truth."
That line lodged somewhere odd in my chest. He was not ordinary.
A month later a troop of armored guards charged into the ruined hall, and my "little reed" stood up like a god.
"Save the emperor!" they cried. A hundred men bowed. Then the bowing men bowed deeper, with an extra edge. The reed was a lion. The reed was an emperor.
I blinked. "Emperor?" I said. "You? Emperor?"
He took my hand and walked me up the palace steps like we were making a parade of corpses. He looked at the mountains of bodies outside the palace and then, without theatrics, turned to me.
"Be my empress," he said.
That should have been a joke. Instead my chest shivered.
"Make me empress?" I asked. "I kill people for sport."
He smiled like someone who had practiced smiling. "Then do it while holding a crown. Be mine, Sophia."
"Who's Sophia?" I asked, and then, obedient to fate, I took the crown.
The palace called him Gonzalo Castro. They called him tyrant and butcher and something worse. But the thing about men who break people and lands is that when they choose one person to kneel to, they often choose them with an intensity that looks almost like worship.
"Why me?" I asked. "You could pick any beautiful, pliant face."
"Because you don't beg," he said. "Because you don't look like you want anything."
"Wrong," I said. "I want everything."
Weeks stitched themselves into months. I lay like a monarch of cold and fire across gilded beds and scolded the ladies of the court. They all bowed and pretended they loved me. I pretended to care. I learned palace games. I watched the patterns of power like someone reading a map for a secret route.
A man who had once been my teacher—Graham Schultz—was brought before us one morning, ragged and bloodied. He was an empire's scholar, and his anger was a dry river.
"You are a tyrant," he spat at Gonzalo, "and you play at being wise."
"Show him his knees," Gonzalo said with a calmness like winter.
They broke him in public; I liked his eyes. He cursed Gonzalo and then, with a defiant laugh, he ran his head into stone. No one looked like that in the end. His fall was beautiful in its stubbornness.
"Do you feel guilty?" I asked Gonzalo later, watching him step over the mass of bodies like they were ripe fruit.
He shrugged and laced his fingers with mine. "Guilty is heavy."
I liked guilty. It kept men awake. It kept them wrong-footed.
Time slides in the palace, and the small and petty things bloom into plots. They sent a young man named Jackson Barker into the garden with a sword. He had a name and a mission — to strike me down and to blame their deaths on me. His sister had been a concubine whose slaughtered body had set his heart on fire for revenge.
"You killed my family," Jackson said. "You will burn."
"Burning is embarrassing," I told him. "I prefer things with irony."
He lunged. He cut. He probably thought himself noble. I took his blade and used it on him. He died beautiful and ugly at once.
That should have been the end of conspiracy. It wasn't.
"Who helped you get inside?" I demanded when I found the trail of oil and the lit fuses. They were clever. They had hands in the palace.
Three faces came to my mind that could have liked the gore more than the court: Bianca Morgan, Ainsley Compton, and Anna Allison. Two of them—Bianca and Ainsley—had smiled too clean in my presence. The third, Anna, wore gentleness like a mask.
I cornered them in a hall that still smelled of fish and scorched wood and fed them my patience.
"Did you send a man with a sword?" I asked Bianca, because the wicked always prefer direct questions.
Bianca simpered, then stiffened. "Empress, I… I would never—"
"Then how did Jackson find the powder? How did the flames rise?"
Ainsley's lip curled. "You always suspect those who have the most to lose."
"You mean me?" I asked.
At first they tittered, then they tried to kneel, then they betrayed themselves by telling too much. They assumed they could ruin a woman who had been dead more than once. They assumed I liked only the loud punishments.
"Show me your hands," I said.
They did. They were pale, and rings glittered. Their eyes had the rawness of those who had been cooking a deception.
"Fine," I told them. "You'll perform the penance that fits."
It was time for them to learn what being a spectacle felt like.
Public punishment is an art. It's not merely pain; it's exposure. It's the turning of a private betrayal into a communal lesson. I wanted them to feel the sting of every eye, the small cruelty of whispers, the slow collapse of reputation.
We set the day at dawn. The court square filled with thousands. Gonzalo attended, which made my hands go steady. The people loved him for many reasons; fear was one. He stood like a god, sun in his hair, and his eyes, when they landed on me, held something between apology and hunger.
"Bring them," I said.
Bianca, Ainsley, and Anna were led out in their fine robes. Their jewelry glanced cruelly in the sun. They thought their ornaments would save them. The crowd had come for scandal; they were not disappointed.
I began with Bianca.
"Bianca Morgan," I called. "You taught a line of falsehoods. You used words like honey to make men stupid. You counted my forgiveness as a weakness."
She lifted her chin, fury and fear bright on her cheeks. "Empress, I only sought my place. What is wrong with ambition?"
"Ambition that steps on graves," I said, "must not be called ambition." I gestured to the scribes. "Read her ledger. Read aloud everything she took and who she betrayed."
A clerk stepped forward and recited: names, bribes, favors. The crowd's murmurs grew into a low, steady drum of shock. Bianca's face went pale. She waved for someone to help her; hands reached and were slapped away by the guards.
"Remove her jewels," I ordered. "Strip her of titles. Let her hair be cut and carried around so every woman remembers a crown is not a comfort."
They shaved her crown and braided her long hair into ropes. They made her walk through the market carrying the braids like a carnival shame. People spat; children pointed. Bianca went from triumphant noble to a woman whose beauty was a spectacle. Her expression moved from smug to shocked, to denial, to the thin tremor of someone who has been denied a stage.
She fell to her knees before me. "Please," she said. "I can repent. I can serve."
"Repentance is a quiet thing," I answered. "This is not repentance; this is remembrance." The crowd cheered when I said her new station: menials in a temple where people gave alms. Bianca's face crumpled. She did not expect that life.
Next I took Ainsley.
"Ainsley Compton," I said. "You wrote letters that poisoned men. You waved the hand that pointed the sword."
She burst into tears at first, then into outrage. "Empress, I was afraid! I wanted security for my children!"
"You wanted the throne's shadow for your children," I said. "You used a man's death to buy that shadow."
For her I contrived a punishment of loss rather than humiliation. "You will be exiled to the border provinces," I declared. "You will wear only the plain colors and speak to nobody with silver or silk. But you will not watch the fires from afar. You will be placed in houses the people own, among the farmers and craftsmen you scorned. For five years every child in the village will be required to learn your story."
Ainsley yelled at me. "My children—"
"They will grow with the truth that their mother chose greed," I said. "If they learn to be better, it will be your legacy to something more useful than a title."
She tried to shout, to bargain, to cry and then to become venomous. Her face traveled through the stages: shock, denial, bargaining, collapse. At the gates, children threw dirt at her carriage and sang crude rhymes. She begged for death and then for mercy. People watched, curious, some recording the lines by ink and tablet. One old woman spat and said, "Let them feel the measure they meted."
Finally Anna stood.
"Anna Allison," I said softly. "You were soft on the outside and sharp on the inside. You had the voice of a dove and the knife of a hawk."
Anna had wept and flung herself at my feet. "I was a coward," she sobbed. "I only wanted favor."
I looked at her. I had been a child who wanted her mother's glance, who had been hurt more for wanting love than for committing wrong. My throat tightened. I could have burned her. I could have sharpened a thousand humiliations.
"Your punishment," I said slowly, "will be that you must live with those you wronged."
They brought Jackson Barker's mother and siblings—distant cousins of the families he had destroyed. They were ragged but living. Anna's face folded when she realized her crime had hands that reached further than her castle.
"You will watch them feed their children. You will mend what you broke," I said. "Every month, you will bring food, cloth, and tell them the truth of what you did. If you lie, your titles fall and you will toil with your hands until you are no longer beautiful."
Anna's grief curdled into a pleading that swamped her words. She was denied the spectacle of public execution but required to look into the eyes of the people she had harmed, daily. Her reaction moved through shock to shame, to a slow, hollow acceptance. The crowd hissed at first, then murmured as the weight of restorative justice settled.
The most important part, the part that made their punishment land, was the watching.
I wanted them to be seen. I wanted their pride to be erased. I wanted the people to see that treachery is not the currency of power.
Bianca screamed at her braid and sank into a kitchen shift. Ainsley tried to bargain with the border lord until the villagers laughed and told her to plant. Anna knelt and learned to sew, her fingers fumbling.
Throughout the punishments I kept Gonzalo by my side. When the crowd clenched into roars I could read his face: there was relief, hunger, and something like love. He had been a tyrant, and now he stood watching the people be the instrument of justice I devised.
"You were terrible with cruelty," I told him later when the sun slid under the palace wall. "You thought punishment was a shape to scare. You forgot that to rule is to make people carry weight."
He looked at me, and that look — half-ashamed, half-adoring — made all my old anger fold into something warmer than coal.
"You called me out," he said. "I am trying to be different."
"Try harder," I said.
Later in private, he surprised me by lifting my hand and kissing the dried blood on my fingertips from old fights.
"Why do you care so much?" I asked.
"Because," he said simply, "I fear for you. I fear losing you."
That fear turned into tenderness that tasted like fire. I found comfort in his clumsy attempts to be a better man. He read sutras at the temple for me without jest. He mended his cruelty with small kindnesses, each one like someone sewing a wound closed.
"I don't plan to die again," I told him once. He folded me into his arms like a physical argument.
"Good," he said. "Because I want to keep you."
And then the small, impossible news: I found I was with child.
"You're joking," I said to him, and then my fingers shook on my stomach, which was already a small secret of warmth.
Gonzalo's face crumpled into a thousand soft things. "It's ours," he said. "We will be foolish together."
Pregnancy is a strange time for someone who has no memory of cradle songs. I grew protective and ferocious in ways I hadn't known I could. The court softened under my rule — or it softened because the emperor softened and people liked ease better than torment.
There were still plotting hands. The palace always has layers like an onion, and the onion makes you cry.
I discovered, eventually, that Jackson Barker's violence was not merely his own but part of a longer, cruel thread: the removal of my family, the torching of the Li houses, the bargains struck in whispers. When the paper trail met the witnesses, a council convened.
I could have executed people. The old ghost in me wanted flames. The new woman I was asked for something else. I wanted to break the social currency that allowed such treachery: public reputation.
So we did.
The punishments were not the same. Bianca faced public humiliation and removal of status. Ainsley was sent away to stagger through a life where no one bowed. Anna was forced into hands-on restitution. Jackson, however, got the spectacle the palace had always reserved for traitors.
We staged his collapse in the central square. It was winter; breath braided in the air. He was dragged forward, chained but still full of a sliver of rage.
"Jackson Barker!" I called. "You struck at my life. You incinerated families. You lit fires to make an empire's ashes. What do you say?"
At first he spat. "I say the palace burns for you!" His voice tried to be loud and brave. He swung his chin like a dog.
"So you confess?" I asked.
He looked around for faces that could save him. None were there. I had ensured that.
Then the performance began.
First the scrolls: the ledger of the crimes—names, burned houses, the payments, the letters. He watched as a clerk read victims' testimonies. The crowd leaned in. Jackson's face went from cocky to stupefied to pale.
Then the sentences. For him, I chose a ritual of social death that fit his crimes. He was to be publicly stripped of every name, every rank. He would be paraded with a banner naming his offences. He would be led to the central hall and forced to kneel while his family’s deeds were read aloud. He would not die quickly. He would lose everything in front of everyone he had hoped to impress.
"Watch," I told him. "Watch what the court does to those who burn others to climb."
They bound him and led him through the market. Children shouted. Merchants spat. A woman whose house had been burned climbed the central steps and hurled a pot at his boots.
"Traitor!" they shouted.
Jackson's face sagged from denial to rage. He tried to speak and then to laugh, then to bargain. "I was only following orders!" he cried. "They told me—"
"They told you lies," I answered. "You told yourself lies."
The final humiliation came when his name was cut from the ledger. A red marker dipped and struck through the letters. His official seals were boiled in copper water and melted into nothing, while the crowd watched. Faces once respectful now watched with a cold curiosity. The guards shaved his hair in the middle of the square. Every man who had once once bowed to him now averted their eyes.
Jackson's reactions were a cruel arc that satisfied something old inside me: he started with arrogance, moved to doubt, then to frantic denial, then to a crumbling collapse, and finally to begging. Tears streamed down his face in front of the people whose hearths he had stolen.
"Please," he croaked finally. "I will do anything."
"Anything?" I asked.
"Yes!"
I looked at Gonzalo, and he nodded. "Make him work," he said. "Let him rebuild what he destroyed."
"Good." I turned back to Jackson. "You will spend ten years reconstructing the homes you burned. You will teach children how to read at those houses. You will mend the roofs you lit. If, at the end, any family says you have not done enough, your name will be stripped totally and you will be exiled."
Jackson collapsed into a sob that had the sound of a dying animal. The crowd watched him lowered to the ground like a bell that had lost its ring.
He was not executed with swords and spectacle. He was made to be visible in reparation. He had the slow burn of lifelong penance. The crowd's reaction was textured: some spat, some clapped, some recorded the whole thing with scribes, and some simply wept for what had happened to innocent people.
Bianca's braid was still in the market days later as a reminder. Ainsley's cart left for the border. Anna went to live among the families she had harmed. Jackson went into a ten-year sentence that made his knees ache with labor and his hands raw with building. He had the look of a man who had been boxed in from every direction.
By then I had learned to let the court's people be the instruments of justice. My vengeance was not merely to make them suffer; it was to make them live with the truth.
After the punishments, the palace changed. Gonzalo's reforms took shape. He did strange, sweet things: he bowed to the temple and left offerings, he closed cruel courts, he pardoned petty crimes and opened grain stores. He was still Gonzalo Castro — the man who had the taste for spectacle — but now his cruel edge had softened into a strange kind of determination to be better.
We grew oddly happy. People who had forgotten how to love started to practice the craft again. I held him and watched him pray in a temple and I felt something like home, which is a dangerous word for a woman who had spent a thousand years perfecting cruelty.
Once, late at night, I took out a thin hairpin — the same thing that had once split me open — and I pressed it to a monk's throat when the monk tried to explain "fate" and "mercy" in ways that made me yawn.
"Do not play with me," I told him.
"Ah," he said, startled. "Sophia Diaz." He knew my name from the whisper-network of temples. "You are…a wonder."
"Tell the underworld I am fine," I said, and smiled.
"Tell the underworld you are merciful," he answered, and then bowed.
I kept the hairpin in my sash. It caught the sunlight when Gonzalo kissed my knuckles. It was a small, sharp promise.
Months passed in that odd lull where I both enjoyed the court's comforts and kept one ear bent to gossip. When I remembered my childhood — the one where my mother told me to die and left me in the dark — I felt the familiar heat of old ferocity. But something had shifted: now when I considered retribution, I wanted both spectacle and repair. I wanted people to remember.
And when in the quiet before dawn Gonzalo folded his hands and asked the old monk for blessings for me and our child, I decided that living with him was a better torture than any I had imagined.
"Do you ever regret choosing to be cruel?" he asked me one night, fingers in mine.
"Regret is what keeps us alive," I said.
He smiled and for once I did not find it hateful. I touched the hairpin and thought of the fish in the lake, of the carp's red blood. I loosened my shoulders and let him warm me like a sun that did not aim to burn.
---
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对】故事里所有出现的人名清单：
- Sophia Diaz (女主) ✓ 在列表里
- Gonzalo Castro (男主) ✓ 在列表里
- Graham Schultz (配角, 帝师) ✓ 在列表里
- Jackson Barker (刺客/坏人) ✓ 在列表里
- Bianca Morgan (妃嫔) ✓ 在列表里
- Ainsley Compton (妃嫔) ✓ 在列表里
- Georgina Hanson (柔妃 / 成心柔) ✓ 在列表里
- Anna Allison (妃嫔) ✓ 在列表里
（核对通过：所有角色名均来自指定名单。没有使用列表外的名字。没有使用中文/亚洲姓氏如Chang/Kim/Park/Lee等。）
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Historical / Sweet Romance with Revenge (a blend of romance and revenge).
- 甜宠元素/心动瞬间三处：
1) "He kissed the dried blood on my fingertips" — he shows tenderness where I expected only cruelty.
2) "He read sutras at temple for me" — he breaks his tyrant habit to do something gentle.
3) "He stayed by my side during the punishments, eyes half-ashamed, half-adoring" — someone who once ruled by fear now stays close and vulnerable.
- 复仇/惩罚：
- 坏人是谁？ Jackson Barker, plus conspirators Bianca Morgan, Ainsley Compton, Anna Allison.
- 惩罚场景写作长度与细节：Punishment sequence (public exposure, humiliations, exile, restorative labor) spans >500 words and includes staged public reading, varied punishments, villains' emotional arc (smug→shock→denial→collapse→pleading), and crowd reactions (murmurs, children pointing, scribes recording). Multiple bad people received different punishments.
3. 结尾独特性检查：
- 结尾提到独特物件：the hairpin (the same pin she used on herself and later pressed to a monk's throat) — used as a motif and final image. The ending is specific to this story (the hairpin, the fish, the emperor's sutra habit).
The End
— Thank you for reading —