Revenge14 min read
I married a eunuch — and every eye watched
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On my wedding night I climbed his shoulder and asked, breathless, "What do you think, Gideon?"
Gideon Olsson bowed his head in the candlelight and answered softly, "Lesly, it is I who am fortunate."
I laughed then, loud and pleased, and almost wept. "Gideon, give me a foot massage," I teased. "Do you remember how you used to soothe my feet when I was a silly girl sold like a trinket?"
He knelt like he always had, hands cool against my skin, and for a half-beat the house we had built with blood and bargains seemed the only thing that mattered.
"Stop," I said, and pushed him with a careless, laughing kick. "You old eunuch, you're freezing me."
He smiled and did not answer. That night I fell asleep in his arms like someone who had finally stopped running.
01
I was Lesly Diaz once upon a very different life. I was a princess, arrogant and sure as a child, who had marched into the hall and demanded marriage to the man I believed to be the best. My father smiled, indulgent and proud. I thought I ruled the world.
I thought wrong.
By the day of my wedding to a man I trusted, my world had been cut down to ruins. The house of love I wanted to enter was a smoking ruin. Men I should have been able to call brothers were corpses. My family was taken in a night of plotting; my name, which had once opened doors, bought only leers and contracts. I was sold into smoke and song: Faith Ellison's house, the house that taught me smiles shaped for other men's hands, the house where I learned how to turn charm into survival.
"Tomorrow, serve extra chicken for my guests," I told Faith while petals fell and men threw coins at me like it meant something.
She laughed, bent over with a practiced cruelty that was all warmth and teeth. "You were meant for this, child."
I would wear that label like armor. I would become their marvel — the pearl they thought they could possess by force.
Until I saw him in the audience.
Vince Campos. He had a mole under one eye like a tear, and when he stood I thought the world would right itself. I was a fool who loved a silhouette.
When the house took me to the court of power, it was not into a bed of silk but a nest of vipers. Carsen Webb and his kin, the ones who should have protected me, used my trust as a step. They moved the pieces, and the board bled. I ran, I fought, and I was sold again—this time as a beauty who could sing men soft enough to change the course of a night.
But in a courtyard slick with rain, I found a new bond: a pale, lean boy who had once been small and obedient. Gideon. His hands were steady as a surgeon’s, and his kindness was not the sickly sweetness of pity but something hard and purposeful.
"Back me," I said once, leaning on his shoulder as thunder rolled. "Help me stand."
He did. He did everything.
02
We staged outrageousness for the world. "I serve a third kind of person best," I announced once on the stage at Faith's house, and the room bristled. "Men and women and those who do not belong to either. I will please whoever needs it."
People gasped. Faith grinned. I was the scandal and the prize.
He kept me protected. He brought back my bedding from the house I had been stripped of. He moved my bed into his den and pretended to be my servant. He would kneel at my feet and call me "Princess" and I would call him "Gideon" and it would mean more than any throne.
"Do you wish for my husband?" I said to him one night, teasing. "Do you remember him?"
His temples tightened, his face like a cliff. "If you wish a husband, I will get you one," he answered, a promise that sounded like steel.
He meant it in a way I did not yet understand. He meant he would bend the world for me.
03
We played palace games and survived cutthroat nights. When Vince's family came to feast and spy, Gideon would take my hand in the middle of the crowd and lift me like a shield.
"Do not bow to them," Gideon said once in the hall, vein flashing with warning. "They see you as a prize. Let them taste your temper."
I laughed and bit his lip. The room watched us with a dangerous curiosity. Mirth and malice had the same face in those days.
"Why do you protect me?" I asked him once, heart loud and stupid.
He smiled a smile that had been carved from so much loss. "Because you are mine to protect," he said. "And because I once promised a young man I would keep you."
"Who?" I whispered.
He looked at the candles and answered, soft as ash. "Because you once stepped on my shoulder to climb a throne, and you have never left me."
04
But there were knives in the dark. The court breeds venom. Carsen Webb hung like a shadow with a smile that could cut. Vince, the man I had once loved and still loved in the quiet, was either a pawn or a player; I could never decide which at first. The brothers listened to one another like they practiced betrayal together.
"Lesly," Carsen said one afternoon, cold as a lake. "You seek a stubborn justice." He toyed with his cup. "It will not be so satisfying to you as you imagine."
"Who are you to judge my want?" I said. "You who have fed on plans."
He shrugged. "I am what the world made me. You are what the world left." His stare slid like a compass point toward Gideon. "And he is useful to me."
He left the room that way, slow, sugared with a threat. I felt the edges of my breath harden.
05
I began to strike back, not with swords — with names, with scenes, with a voice that made people look. I named myself on stages. I performed the scandal I had been forced into and used it to make them believe me dangerous. When a court noble laughed that I had only been a stage beauty, I stood and said, "I love a eunuch. I will marry him."
They thought I was mad. I meant every word.
"You're courting ruin," Vince said once, eyes like a summer night. "You will be a mark, Lesly."
"Then mark me," I whispered. "Mark me well."
06
Gideon built the world to hold me. He traded favors with Dario Dickinson — the old eunuch who taught him the law of survival. He bargained for men and silence. Lane Otto muttered and weighed consequences in gold and roster names; Tomas Mariani marched armies on others' commands.
Our bargain was not clean. There was murder and there were bargains that smelled like rot. We answered in kind. When the prime minister in a crowded hall raised a voice against me, Gideon laughed and pulled a shard of porcelain, its edge steady and quick. The man faltered, bled, and when he failed to protest again, the hall decided to look away.
"Lesly," Gideon said that night, dragging his sleeve across his mouth, "I will make them kneel. But do not ask me to become what I am not."
"What are you not?" I asked, breath tight.
"A man who can be satisfied with small mercy," he said.
07
They sent knives and sleep-poison and whispers. Carsen's hand was in more than one plot. Vince moved between us like a ghost and a lover, sometimes warm, sometimes distant. Once, in a bed that smelled of blood and rose, Vince lay pressed into a sheet, and Gideon, skin still warm from a fight, panted beneath a stitch in the curtain.
"Why is he here?" I asked Vince through clenched teeth.
"You do not want him dead," Vince said. He was always more honest when he seemed least so. "If you kill him, everything changes. If you let him live, everything also changes."
I did not know if let or kill was wisdom. I only knew I did not want to stand alone.
08
There was one night when the palace smelled of rain and iron. Men in black broke through the courtyard. Gideon struck like a northern wind, throwing himself over me, dragging me through a web of blades. Tomas's men rushed in with trumpets and a company of armored knives. I remember stepping, a sword kissing my shoulder, blood hot and instant.
We escaped with a scar and a souvenir: a silk square that told us who had sent the killers — a mark that led to a house of games where people sold themselves to forget things and to remember them sometimes at the same time.
Inside, under a roof of song, I found the proof and another truth: Vince had been poisoned by choices that were not wholly his. Carsen had bribed, cajoled, and prepared. The web had been cast for me, and the bait was my body and my heart.
09
We made our counterstrike. We struck back into halls where lacquered covers hid knives and where old men in soft silk thought they could command tomorrow by the way they ordered dinner tonight.
I grew colder. I learned to enjoy the slow appalling pleasure of seeing schemes unwind.
One evening, a court assembly filled the Hall of Mirrors. I walked in, arm linked with Gideon, and as the foreign envoy stumbled and sneered that I was "only the courtesan," Gideon released my hand and I stepped forward, drawing a silence like a drawn blade.
"I am Lesly Diaz," I said into the hush. "Former princess and present woman. I love a eunuch. I will marry him."
The hall exploded with voices. He met me then with a look so fierce my knees nearly buckled.
"Marry me?" he whispered.
"Marry me," I answered back, in the only place it would make them all watch.
The room watched. Carsen's jaw tightened. Vince’s face was a storm behind a pane of glass as he, too, watched the world rearrange itself.
10
The punishment had to be public. The court lived on spectacle. If you wanted to ruin a man completely, you took him where his pride lived and you removed it.
I pushed for them to be shown, not killed, but stripped of devotion and power before the eyes that had fed their arrogance. I wanted them to be recognized as what they had truly been: thieves of lives and truth.
It happened on a morning bright as a blade. The square outside the hall was filled with people. Flags flapped; the rain of yesterday had polished the world to show. The accused were brought, handcuffed, not by captors from a foreign army but by their own allies. Carsen Webb walked in with a face like a stone mask; Lane Otto, the prime minister, had not expected this morning; Tomas Mariani stood at the edges, soldiers in his shadow.
I stood with Gideon on a raised platform. Vince stood aside, his hand wrapped in nothing but his own restraint. My voice shook and held at once.
"Murder," I announced, and the word fell like a pebble into still water. "Betrayal. Corruption. You did not act for country, only for your own wealth."
They protested in small sharp breaths and then big carted protests, but each word we said had proof. The crowd smelled the truth like wind tells of rain.
Carsen smiled at first. "This is theater," he said. "You have no proof."
"Do you remember the silk?" I asked, and a hand held up the silk with the house mark; the house where plans had been measured in coin and sleep. "Do you remember the letters?" Gideon held up scrolls from hidden cache. "Do you remember the men who fell on your orders for the sake of agendas? They remember."
Carsen's face first showed amusement, then disbelief, then unease as the scrolls were read aloud. His arrogance thinned into something else — the first crack before collapse.
"Is this enough?" he barked, as if bellowed truth could change the facts. "You who were a courtesan, what right—?"
The crowd hissed, and where there was awe once there was derision. Someone in the back of the crowd spat. A child cried. Eyes flicked not with curiosity but with judgment.
"Look at him," I said, and the guards threw a cloth off Canvas boxes to the floor. On them lay things Carsen had thought secret: tokens, titles bought and sold, the ledger of those he had sold their silence. "He sold men to silence. He sold death."
Carsen's face went from slate to wax. He had been smug; now he reached for denial: "You lie. They were traitors."
The first reaction was anger. He lashed at our words with speech. Then came the second: the attempt to charm. He tried to smile to the crowd, telling them old alliances, the name-dropping of names that were supposed to secure him safety. When that failed, we watched the stages of his unraveling: denial, outrage, flattery, and then—finally—panic.
"You have lied," he said, but his voice cracked. The first murmur of doubt became a chorus. "I am innocent!"
Guards slammed the iron cuff tighter. Someone in the crowd shouted, "Shame!" Another called for the law to take them completely.
"Bring his partners," I ordered. Those men were brought, each more frightened than the last. One by one their expressions crumbled under public view. Lane Otto tried an explanation but found his words wandered and thinned. He tried to cower behind protocol; it did not help. The audience was merciless.
I watched them as their faces turned color, as the street whispered and recorded them with small devices of rumor: some yelled, some sang, some took out small slips of paper and tore them as if to say the paper of their names deserved nothing. People who had laughed with them last week now paced and whispered like predators sensing easier prey.
Carsen, before they dragged him off, looked at me with a new sort of fear. He sought pity at the edges of the crowd but found only cameras and hands pushing forward in hunger for a spectacle.
"Forgive me," he called in a voice that finally had heat but no substance. "I did what I thought the court needed!"
"Do you hear them?" a woman cried from the crowd. "You used us. You hid behind our needs and took more than you could justify."
Gideon did not respond with rage. He stood and spoke softly into the press of shouts. "You cannot rebuild trust by hiding; you rebuild it by truth."
The crowd roared at this aphorism as if it were script. The judges pronounced him guilty that day of conspiracy and abuse. The punishment was shaming by design: public seizure of title, forced confession in the square, and a procession where each of his misdeeds was named aloud. People who had once bowed refused to meet his eyes. He had been toppled by the very crowd that had enriched him.
I remember the moment he broke. He had tried every face — arrogant, amused, cruel — and now panic unmade him. His voice went thin. He wept ugly, animal cries. For a moment he clawed at the guards as if to get to me, to make me somehow the thing that had done this despite my part in it. "Lesly, you will pay," he hissed, and the crowd booed.
"What do you expect?" I said to him as he was dragged. "That I would forget? That I would stoop to do nothing while they took everything from me?"
The punishment was not a single blow but a long unspooling. People who had once saved him looked away. One by one, his allies were asked to give back what they had taken or become exiles. The crowd's reaction cycled: disbelief, then relish, then a wary silence as they watched the men who had seemed invincible become small and ordinary. Photographs were taken. A child cried out, "Is that the man who took the good jobs?" and the sound of a thousand small reckonings rolled like thunder.
Carsen's change in expression — from smug to pleading to raving to collapsed acceptance — told the story better than any prosecutor. It was not merely legal punishment; it was the world's turning its back. For those who lived for faces in the court, to be forsaken by the faces of the crowd was ruin enough.
A man in the front row spat. "You took our bread," he said. Another knocked off his hat. "You thought yourself beyond reproach."
The event lasted like a slow season: speeches, names, acknowledgments, cries. When it was done, the men were led away humiliated, and the crowd dispersed with the lightness of those who had been offered justice on a morning like any other. I stood with Gideon, wet with rain and exhausted with the effort of it all, and found Vince at my side, pale and still and oddly whole.
"Did you expect any mercy?" Vince asked.
"No," I answered. "I expected to be watched. I expected to be tested. I expected to survive another way."
He held my gaze without bending. "You survived because you meant to," he said.
11
They were punished, and the city wrote of it for weeks. I did not gloat. I had what I wanted: the men who had struck first were called to account. But punishment is a cool light; I had wanted something warmer: a safe place, a life small enough to hold my heart without every small stray knife finding it again.
We were married in rain and rumor and a million eyes. The crowd watched us leave on a litter like a procession of strange gods. I learned to sleep with Gideon's breaths next to me like fire embers. I learned his stories of being small and unseen and what had taught him to be savage: a childhood on cold boards, hands that had learned to bargain for a meal. I learned the edges of his loyalties.
"Do you love me?" he asked, one night, raw with devotion.
"I love the life you gave me," I answered. "I love that you kept me when others would have traded me for favor."
He held me like a claim.
12
The price of our kind of power was blood. We did not escape that. Families lost everything. Vince gave up his claim to a simple life and walked into ruin and service and a thing like redemption. Carsen walked away with the scars of public humiliation and exile, and his face remained a map of the cost of ambition.
There were negotiations and bargains that turned the map of the nation. People were made to answer. Tomas Mariani commanded troops with the crisp voice of someone who had always expected to be obeyed. Lane Otto gave depositions and took the blame like a man trying to salvage his name. Dario Dickinson — aged, crooked, a man of many names and fewer loyalties — stayed in rooms with whispers that sounded like treaties.
Vince and I watched the court rearrange itself. "You were right," he said once, quietly, hand on my sleeve. "About the way power moves. You taught me how to see it."
"You taught me how it can be loved," I said. "Do you think I was ever only a pawn?"
He smiled a faint smile that would have been enough if we had less at stake. "You were never a pawn."
13
There came a day of reckoning beyond the square. In the great hall, where banners once boasted other names, we staged a judgment. Not the shallow spectacle of humiliation, but a serious, public accounting with the soldiers present and men who had looked the other way when things happened.
Carsen stood in front of the crowd again, but this time he had no mask. He was a man whose hands had been judged by others, and he had learned their verdict.
I watched his change arc like the closing of a tide. There was a moment when hope might have come if he had chosen differently, but the choice had been made years before. He had bartered so much of himself away that the world had nothing exquisite left to take.
He fell to his knees and asked for a mercy I could not give. "I did what I thought would save the house," he said. "I thought if I built walls no one would take any more."
"You built walls," I said, "and you sold the people inside as though they were brick."
The court recorded every word, and the soldiers nodded like accountants and the crowd murmured like an opening sea. He was sent to a remote station, stripped of title, and made to return what he had taken from small houses. They were to live with what they had done. That punishment — slow, public, restorative in measure — was something the square cheered. It was not blood for blood; it was an unmaking, a re-education.
He looked at me last, for a long time. His eyes moved through shocks of regret. "You were always dangerous," he said. "Not because you broke laws but because you loved truth even when it hurt."
14
We left the capital. Vince rode at the front with his own small force. Gideon walked by my side, stolid and elegant, and for the first time in years the future felt possible. We took an isolated province and made a small court of our own; I learned governance, something I had sneered at as a child. Vince taught me strategy; Gideon taught me patience.
"Will you stay?" Vince asked in the garden one night, where the moon had been picked clean of clouds.
"I will," I said, and heard the truth like a bell. "Because I love a man who chose to be brave for me."
He kissed my forehead, and Gideon smiled in his private way. There was softness, sure as morning.
15
In the years that followed I taught myself mercy as much as I taught myself to be cruel when needed. I signed decrees that fed children. I punished those who had loved power more than people. I married the eunuch who had clung to me through rain and blade, and he bent the world so gently my heart learned to trust the touch.
When a messenger once came with news of Carsen Webb, then a diminished man, begging for counsel, I listened and said, simply, "Any person who has learned enough to be honest deserves a chance to be useful."
He washed his hands of the old court and became a thorn against new injustice in far-off places. That was a punishment that left him alive but changed.
"Do you forgive me?" Vince asked once on a veranda where wind combed the sugar maples.
"I forgive what was done," I said. "I cannot forgive that which will not speak to me honestly. But I accept you."
"Then stay," he said. "Stay with us as an ally and not as a ghost."
He did.
16
Sometimes, at night, when I woke to Gideon's breath and the quiet of fields instead of flags, I remembered the hall where I had once demanded a husband and the one where I had become one. I had been a princess, a courtesan, a prisoner, and a queen of a small, hard place.
"I am not the same girl who wanted to be a bride on a stage," I told Gideon once, tracing the scar at his throat. "Neither are you the eunuch who feared his own shadow."
He smiled. "I have always been what I am. Now the world sees it."
He was right. The world had to learn to see things through the fissures we had cut. I had loved Vince, had hated those who hurt me, had forgiven some and punished others. I had married a man the world did not expect to call husband and made a home where neither shame nor title could undo the way we held one another.
That is my story: of stage and sword, of laughter and blood, of a public unraveling that left men humbled, and of the small private mercies that saved two stubborn hearts.
The End
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