Sweet Romance15 min read
I Picked Death for You — And Laughed
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I woke to cold wind and the smell of dust, and the sight of a city wall that belonged in a history drama. People in rough clothes moved like shadows. I pulled my thin jacket tighter and told myself one thing very calmly: I had crossed time.
"Crossed?" I said, to nobody who could answer but to the small, familiar ping in my head.
"Transit complete," said the small boy's voice. "Dempsey Karim reporting."
I laughed. "You sound like you're five."
"I am serviceable at five," Dempsey replied, warm and irreverent. "Owner where go, Dempsey where."
"Good. Then keep talking." I could smell smoke from cooking fires and old wood. I could also smell fear. The town looked like a place living its last year before everything starved.
Two men in ragged jackets stepped out of a shadowed arch, eyes like low candles, smiles made of bad calculus. They were the kind of men who thought small towns meant easy chattel.
"Hey," one said. "Pretty thing. Today lucky day."
The other winked. "Don't be stingy, big brother. Look at that skin. Squeeze and it's wet."
"Come on," the first said. "Be sensible. We take now, avoid tomorrow's trouble."
I tilted my chin and let my gaze slide over them like a blade through paper.
"You can pick," I said softly. "You can pick life. Or you can pick death."
They laughed. They stepped closer, confident two men can be when they haven't met someone with time behind their eyes.
"In that case," I said, and moved.
Two thumps, two mens' bodies folded like bad origami onto the dirt. My hands were already clean, fingertips glided along my palm with practiced motions, and I watched a white handkerchief drop and land on a lying man's face.
"Heh," I said. "Still got it."
"Who are you," one whispered as his chest tried to find breath.
"Nobody you should have met," I told them, and turned toward the city gate.
"Grace," I said into my head. I tested my new name aloud. "Grace Denis."
"Grace," Dempsey said in a conspiratorial squeak. "Pretty."
I kept walking.
Outside, people were gaunt—faces hollowed by drought, not by bite, but by lack. I had jumped from a world of walking dead into a world of drying earth. Not ideal, but better than the alternative.
"System," I murmured. "Status."
"Dempsey: System reboot completed. Version: Merchant-Kit 2.0," Dempsey chirped.
A blue hologram appeared only to me. "Personal Panel. Storage: 500 cubic meters. Account: zero," Dempsey read.
"Zero?" I yelped. "What the—"
"Transit energy consumed reserves," Dempsey explained. "Only core remains. But owner still owner."
I pulled jewel boxes from the tiny pocket space I kept folded into the sleeve of my shirt. In the apocalypse, everything is collected like a religion; you keep what you can. Here, a thin silver bangle paid a toll.
"This will get you in," the gate guard grunted after biting the bangle.
"You look like money likes you," I told Dempsey. "Keep tally."
Inside the city, whispers traced me.
"Look at the way she walks."
"Where's her family?"
"She isn't of the city—see the clothes."
"People see what they want," I said to myself. My jeans and short jacket weren't common here. They called me shameless; I called it practical.
At the pawnshop, I traded a thin bracelet for enough silver to breathe for a week. Dempsey's menu opened. Food, tools, basic clothes—locked grey tiles waited for a higher rank.
"How to get money in? Exchange rate?" I asked Dempsey, impatient.
"One copper equals one system coin equals one experience point."
I threw a sliver of silver at the problem and watched Dempsey sing as my level rose. "Level one," he squeaked. "Food unlocked."
"Perfect," I said, and bought the first comfort I had missed: a warm, sweet cup of something that hummed of future comforts.
Outside the teahouse, a gang came barreling from the alley. Over a dozen men, teeth sharp with malice, pointed at me as if I were target practice.
"You killed our big brother," snarled the leader. "You pay."
"Which brother?" I asked, already bored.
"The one you broke by the road. You owe him life."
I smiled. "I choose you to die."
He lunged, and I laughed when my leg swept him into a pile with the grace of a scaled machine. One by one, they flew. People behind barrel stands peeped out. A woman squealed. I stacked them like a child's toy.
"Enough," I said, and walked on. But I kept a note in the back of my mind: in a town where voices can take your honor, reputation mattered.
That night in the inn, I washed hot water over my skin and lay on the tatami. The blue ribbon of Dempsey hummed. My panel read: Level one: Account 1000. Storage: 1000 cubic meters. A sigh of relief; enough meat and grain to make me laugh.
But the city had eyes. Two men in black followed me through the market the next day, and one of them had a face like sun through fog. Tall, lean, dangerous in the quiet way people can be when they carry lines of command. He watched me as I hiccuped from swallowing hot milk and then bowed his head in what might have been apology.
"Excuse me," he said, neatly. "I am Santiago Bowman. I—"
"You were staring," I snapped, wiping milk from my lip.
"Sincere apologies," he said. His tone rolled like a low drum. "We meant no offense."
"Then do not do it again," I told him. "My stomach is sensitive."
He smiled. "Of course."
"Sure."
He didn't leave. He walked in, then he stood in the doorway when I left, and he watched longer than a gentleman keeps watch.
"Who is he?" Evert Robertson asked under his breath, when he and his master arrived.
"He's not what you think," Santiago said to Evert. He folded his hands easily and turned away like a man who had already decided things.
"Is she the missing daughter?" Evert murmured to me later, when they revealed that the city lord's household had been searching for a daughter who matched my face. The city had its own stories: a child born in the drought, a rumor of a miracle that broke the hardships for a day, then a child whisked away by a sage.
"I didn't come with a certificate," I said.
"You have the look," Santiago said simply. "Come with us."
Their certainty came with a neat staff and a respectful bow that billowed into the presence of a man who called himself Esteban Castillo—the lord, older, a map of wars on his face. He and his wife, Valentina Butler, hugged me as if I had been asleep and had finally returned.
"Who told you?" I asked as we sat in their shadowed hall, the walls smelling of tobacco and ink.
"Dempsey told us your return," Santiago said, then corrected himself with a twitch. "No—our master told me. He had a vision. We were told to look for you."
"Sent by whom?" I asked.
"By Master of the Order," Esteban said. "He is called, in private, our sage."
When they spoke of me as the child who had brought rain, I felt something strange. I remembered nothing of the gift. I remembered loud sirens and a sky full of falling things. But the idea that I could have borne blessing in another life—a life I had left behind, full of rubble and alarms—was a heavy, odd comfort.
"I'm not sure I want the cloak of 'miracle girl,'" I told them quietly. "I want my feet in something firm, a pantry that's not empty, and a head clear of fake prophecies."
"Santiago will arrange your quarters," Esteban said. "And you will stay in our care while we learn the truth."
I sat and ate. Fruit appeared on the table like a lie made real. "Where to begin?" I asked Dempsey, thinking of stockpiles, of the way my system could buy food by the sack.
"We could supply your city," Dempsey said, pragmatic and chirpy. "Shop setup, municipal distribution. Many experience points."
"That's a problem in a moral wrap," I said. "But I'm not a saint. I will help the people who need it, but I won't make myself a martyr."
"Agreed," Dempsey said. "Owner gets to be kind lethal and opportunistic."
He was right. I used my system to buy silk, grain, and a small store. My space expanded as I paid. Level up twice in quick succession. Storage enough to hide a small army of supplies. My panel lit like a festival. I loved the feeling of buying good things and hiding them in my pockets where poverty couldn't touch them.
“You know how name and reputation can kill a woman here?” I told Santiago one night as we walked the ramparts.
“I do,” he said. “But you don’t seem like a woman to bow.”
We had a pattern quick as a heartbeat. He protected, watched, and did not explain. I kept him at witty short sentences. We fed each other with little barbs and smaller smiles. It was easy to keep him at arm's length until he looked at me in a way that suggested he’d rather carry me than stand aside.
“You should sleep better,” he said once, quiet as snow. “You are restless.”
“I sleep like a soldier in a foxhole,” I said. “I wake at the first sound.”
“You should sleep like a woman in a garden,” he said, impossible and dangerous.
We began to move together into the forest the city feared. The Mist Forest was a living myth—people said the interior was wrapped in a fog that could confuse a cart and steal a man. Rumors of things that ate travelers and of flowers with petals like feathers stuck the way breadcrumbs do.
"People post a task for a flower no one dares find," I muttered as we stood before the guild hall.
"You really think you'll go to the inner ring alone?" Santiago asked.
"Bet," I said. "I like odd risks."
They stared. A squad of Esteban's men—led by a captain called Canaan Blanc—came with us to the forest border. Some went back to tell Esteban the news. A hundred watchers tightened like knots around a single promise: the missing girl was walking into legend.
Dempsey scanned, bright and chirruping. "Forward forty meters: wild root. Right fifty: medicinal herb. Warning: pack of wolves."
I clapped. "Good. Wolves. I like roast wolf."
A silver wolfpack met us in the dim of the first mist. Their eyes were a green like old coins. Santiago's blade found necks when needed. My hands struck out with the twin pulse of wood and fire—the small, raw magic thrummed like muscle under my skin. I could make vines spring and curl, and I could make a small flame kindle. The wolves fell, and the pack leader lowered his great head. He did not always behave like a beast; his eyes nodded respect. I let them go.
"You should not be so easy," Santiago said after the fight. "I don't like how your life looks like it can end so quickly."
"I know," I said. "That's why I carry a knife."
We went deeper. The fog thickened, ten steps, then six, then two. Dempsey's voice became a quick map in my ear. When he squeaked "Gold-lotus ahead!" my heart jumped like a trapped animal.
"Gold-lotus?" I breathed.
"A miracle plant," he explained. "Full medicinal yield. Live-saving."
In the black mouth of a hidden pit, the soil folded, and I fell. Santiago fell with me and caught me. The earth stitched behind us.
"What was that?" Evert hissed from above, frustrated.
"A trap," I said. "Or a test."
We found an underground tunnel that smelled of cold and history. At the bottom, a bright lake lay like a secret. In it, gold-lotus bloomed, dripping cold light. I almost wept with hunger to pick it.
"Careful," Santiago said, his voice small.
A purple fox bounded from the shadows—a little living jewel with clever eyes. It took my offered roast fish and then flicked its tail at me with the kind of arrogance only foxes invented.
"You're mine now," I said to the fox when it jumped into my arms like it always had been.
Santiago glanced at me as if he wanted to comment on the ownership of foxes and hearts. He kept his thoughts folded.
We found a house like something from a different planet: a bamboo cottage, a garden, a secret library. In the study, a book lay open on "Phantom Step"—a style of footwork that blurred the air into a hundred shadows. I ran my fingers over the diagrams. The book hummed like a power.
"Teach me," I said.
"Do it with me," Santiago said, steady as a bell. "It suits you."
We learned slow at first. His hand at mine when the step skewed, his breath when I stumbled. The days slid like birds.
When we returned, the city was warmer in my bones. Esteban's house became mine and my voice—husband of patience—turned to the business at hand.
"Supply the people," Esteban said. "If you can, do. But don't let yourself starve."
"I won't," I promised. "But a store clerk must be paid."
So I set up a small shop: sacks of rice, cured meat, canned goods that came from my system like magic. I sold at fair price and pocketed enough to feed more than a dozen homes. Rumor spread. Later, when the gang who'd once preyed on the weak tried to sell a story to the magistrate, they were too late. Names do not live kindly in a town where a woman can break a man's neck and get away with it.
There was a man—Merrin in their slang—who had built a quiet fief on the breadcrumbs of other people's misfortune. He thought he could claim whatever he wanted. He had friends in low places, a leash on petty judges, a taste for children's funerals. The law fingers him, but he was clever.
"He's been profiteering on famine," I heard someone whisper at my stall.
"Canaan, prepare a list," I told Captain Canaan. "Collect witnesses. We do not lynch. We expose."
He bowed. "Yes, madam."
We gathered evidence. We found papers hidden in Merrin's chest—letters with numbers and names. We found ledgers that recorded soldiers' rations siphoned away. We found mothers who had been bought off with little coin and a big lie.
"Make them speak," Esteban said. "Bring them before the market, where everyone can watch."
On a wet morning, the market was full. Baskets, children, the smell of soup from a hundred kitchens. Merrin stood tall on a crate as if his arrogance could lift him away. He swaggered in a tunic too clean for the season. When the first witness came forward, a woman whose eyes were sunken with a husband's absence, Merrin's face blanched.
"You accuse me?" he hissed. "You, a beggar?"
"You stole my husband's rations," she said in a voice hammered hard by grief. "You signed for them and sold them. He starved."
"Preposterous!" Merrin cried. "Liars and thieves! I am a man of honor!"
"Then look," Esteban called, and Canaan lifted out a ledger ripped from Merrin's chest. "Here. These are your signatures. These are the rations allocated."
Merrin paled as a dozen sets of handwriting—soldiers' own—were read aloud. The crowd murmured. A woman pulled out a scrap of a ration ticket, and a little boy cried because his food would not come.
Merrin's friends tried to shout him to safety. He spat and sneered and reached for the guard's hand.
"Stop!" I said.
He pointed at me. "You—"
"—are not the smart one," I finished for him. "You thought pockets could hide what the people demand. You think a breadline will forget your name? You counted on fear."
The crowd turned their full face on him. Men who had once drank at his table now spat in the dirt. "Sell us what you stole!" they called. "Give us back what you took!"
Merrin's expression crumpled from grease to something like fear. He looked at the crowd as if at a sea of teeth. I walked onto the crate, the rough wood rocking with my weight.
"You stole food for profit," I said, loud enough for every ear. "You ate while others starved. Tell us why."
Merrin's mouth opened and closed like a fish. "I—" he stammered. "The market—"
"The market? For what? Luxury? For silk? For your table? For bribed officials?" I raised my voice. "You took life for a coin."
"No—no!" He shook his head. "You—you don't understand."
"Do you think I don't?" I said. "Do you think I couldn't go to your home tonight and burn that ledger? Do you think I couldn't make your name a curse?"
His bravado failed like a curtain with a tear. He pounded his chest. "I have connections!" he shouted. "I will deny, and my friends—"
His voice fell away as one of his own lieutenants, a hulking man who had once bragged about bullets and bones, stepped forward. "You lied," the man said. "You promised extra coin and lied. You sold the food and pocketed the silver."
"In public!" someone shouted.
"It's all here," Canaan said, and held up the ledger. "And the receipts. And the names."
"Give us back our food!" a woman cried. "Give us our ration tickets! Give us our son's bread!"
Merrin's eyes darted. The crowd closed and closed like a fist. A hundred hands reached for him—not in violence yet, only in the desperate demand for answer.
He folded. It was not a noble collapse. It was humiliation: the swagger left and ran. His face became pale, then red. He tried to deny, then admit, then plead.
"You're making a mistake!" he begged. "I was ordered—"
"By whom?" I asked. The question was a lever.
"You—" he pointed wild-eyed at no one.
"Publicly!" a woman said. "Tell us the names."
His mouth made the shape of guilt. "I don't—"
"You knew the price," I said. "You chose greed."
At that, the crowd changed. The same faces who had once smiled at Merrin now turned into a choir of accusation. "Shame!" they called. "Shame!" Someone began recording on a crude lens, someone else raised a paper and held it like a judge's gavel.
I stepped back and let Esteban speak. "You stole from my people," he said, voice like iron. "You will return all. You will hand over your assets and food stores. You will be publicly humiliated so that every soul in this town knows your face and remembers your crime."
Merrin's head bowed. He did not resist. The town needed a warning, and in the public square, warnings take flesh.
They made him thaw out everything he had. Crates, sacks, lists—he opened them as if doubling rope. The food was redistributed. The crowd watched him kneel. First his friends left one by one, siding with survival. He shook and begged.
"Forgive me," he croaked. "Please—"
"We watched," the first woman said. Her voice was steady. "We kept silent because of threats, because your men smiled coldly. But now we remember. Remember this day."
Merrin lost color like failing paper. He paced like a caged animal.
"Now, say these words," Esteban told him. "Repeat them."
He stammered. "I stole from the people I promised to protect. I lied. I sold their rations."
"Say it!" the crowd chanted.
"I stole," he said. The words fell from him heavy and flat.
"Say you repent publicly," Esteban demanded.
"I repent," he said.
"Say you will return what you took and never profit from hunger again."
"I will return everything," he whispered. "I will return…"
The city recorded him. Someone placed a mark on his forehead with ash so every citizen could recognize him. It was not a permanent brand, but it was shame made visible.
He dropped to his knees. "Please…"
He crawled and filled sacks with grain. He knelt in the dirt and let women place bread in baskets before him. He begged them to accept what he gave. People recorded, gossiped, spat and finally accepted what was returned.
At the end, Merrin looked like an unmade man with no friend and a chest like a hollowing drum. He had moved from arrogance to petulant denial to a pleas that could not be received. The crowd watched him shrink.
"Is that enough?" someone asked.
"No," I said quietly. "He must know the pattern of his shame. He must watch as children who were hungry today eat—because he is the living proof of greed's fall."
They tied a length of ribbon on his arm, a flag of disgrace. He asked for mercy and got a sentence: the next six months he would work in the storehouses he had once looted. He would be publicly tasked with delivery, with tending, and with teaching those who might follow his ways that hunger is not a market.
He begged and went. The town recorded the moment: his fall, his repentance, his servitude. People watched and filmed and spread the story across town to the next barns and the next city. The shame lasted.
He stood before the market with the weight of his crime like a mound. When the people turned away, his face was cracked; his voice was nothing. And in that crowd, someone—an older woman—clapped once. Then another. Word fluttered like flags.
"Good," Valentina said softly beside me. "Let it be a lesson."
I nodded. "People watched. He confessed. He will work. He had his dignity taken."
"He will remember," Esteban said. "And if he tries again—he will not have this leeway."
Merrin's ruin satisfied a town. It also satisfied me, in that ugly, clean way that a justice done in public cleans the air.
That night Santiago found me on the parapet.
"You did not have to do that," he said. "You made him into an example."
"He made himself," I said. "I gave a place to voice."
He took my hand. "Then let me be your witness. I don't want to cross you, Grace."
"You could, if you must," I said. "But it's better when you don't."
He bent his head. "I don't intend to."
The months that followed were built like a ladder. I expanded the store into a supply line when it became clear half a city could be kept alive by careful purchasing. Dempsey shivered with delight as my account grew. I bought grain, seeds, tools; I gave away some and sold some at modest prices. People stopped clawing at each other in the streets.
At home, the family started to bloom. The three brothers—Gage Delgado, Brandon Barker, and Thierry Koch—took their gifts with a grin. I opened a vial from my pocket and offered it to them like a foolish child offering candy.
"Drink," I said.
Gage laughed and tossed it down. Brandon took a reserve and guzzled. Thierry sipped, and then the air around them shifted. Flames flicked at Gage's fingertips. A small gleam appeared in Brandon's hands like metal forming itself. Thierry made the air humm, and a wind lifted a cup.
"You're playing with them," Valentina told me, shocked into a laugh.
"No," I said. "They chose to drink. They chose to be better."
Gage looked at his hand and smiled like a boy at his first toy. "I can make light."
Brandon stared at a blade he didn't have and then a short sword blinked into his palm for a heartbeat before fading.
Thierry laughed, "I feel like flying!"
"You idiots," the father scolded, half-fired and half-loving. "You are going to wake the whole city."
"Good," I said. "Wake the city."
Santiago sometimes watched me with a look that folded a thousand letters in a heartbeat. Once, when a woman had threatened my stall with the knife of a desperate man, he moved like a shadow and took the knife between palm and leather without a sound.
"Why do you stay?" I asked him once over tea.
"Because I'm needed," he said. "Because I want to learn you."
"You don't say things like that," I scolded, grinning.
He did not answer with words then. He took my hand instead, the touch a gentle law. I felt it all the way down to the places I thought I had hardened like old timber.
There were days the business made me laugh aloud. There were other days when nightmares mixed with the hum of Dempsey's voice. The town began to trust the little store with its fair weights. I kept a ledger not to track profit but to track who went hungry and who did not.
And when enemies came—ones with sharper suits or blunter weapons—the town had a way of making them small. We set up a market tribunal that could deliver public humiliation and restitution. We did not execute in the square. We made them return what was taken, confess, and work. The city learned to settle with the law of light and the law of arms.
At night, when the lanterns winked like tired stars, Santiago would find me on the balcony with Dempsey curled inside my collar like a cat. He would bring two cups. One for tea and one for nothing, a place to sit. He used his hands in the quiet of things—repairing a cracked bowl, rubbing a rope, adjusting a knot—small tasks of care I had no name for.
"Do you ever think about going back?" he asked once, "to whatever you left?"
"Yes," I said. "Sometimes I dream of emptiness that wasn't hungry but was full of cameras and cold. Then I wake up, and there's bread here."
"Then stay," he said simply.
I did.
Because staying meant more than shelter. It meant that a woman could be fierce and kind. It meant a fox could curl against my chest and fall asleep. It meant Merrin could be punished in public until he could remember the tradeoff of greed.
And more than that, it meant the little mechanical voice in my head, Dempsey Karim's squeal, had built me a life that smelled like warm bread and rain waiting to happen.
It was not perfect. It was not holy. But lying under a roof of stolen sleep and honest work, I tightened my hand around the pocket watch I'd found in the bamboo study—a small brass thing that had ticked in the moment I woke under the city wall. Its tiny second hand whispered in my palm, a little mechanical heartbeat like a promise.
"One day," I told the watch. "One day we'll know what it is to set right the world that thought us disposable."
"One day," Dempsey agreed, soft as a child's prayer, and it felt like the truest thing I'd heard all week.
The End
— Thank you for reading —