Sweet Romance16 min read
I Pretended to Be a Fool and Loved the Prince — Until the Wedding Day
ButterPicks13 views
I was a butcher's daughter who knew how to split a hog and how to kill a man in the dark. I was also the kind of fool who would carry another man's tray, pound his tired calves, and laugh at his jokes until I forgot the knife in my waistband. I did it all for the beauty who made the whole city turn its head — Everest Cannon.
"I started as your shadow," I told him once, and he raised an eyebrow as if the word "shadow" pleased him. "You always were dramatic."
"Did I ever ask you to be?" he asked, and smiled like a man who kept seasons in his pocket.
I laughed until I nearly choked on the punch. "You never asked. You took."
He took more than I knew how to give.
The day the marquis's men came to our lane, I was in the yard holding a cleaver. "Who tied my father up and left him as ransom?" I snarled while cutting fat from a pig shoulder. I kicked the leader down when he shoved at me.
"Girl!" a man cried. "You don't understand — this is the marquis's house! This is his long-lost daughter!"
I stopped mid-swing. The old nurse who had once watched over the marquis's lady wept and looked at me like a miracle. "No mistake. Her face was the same as the lady's."
"Me? A marquis's daughter?" I laughed aloud. "My whole life, I'm a butcher's spawn, and now I'm suddenly a noble? Somebody's drunk."
They emptied the street with gossip. I stood in the doorway while my father's beard twitched. "If you run now, you'll look guilty," he muttered. "Go into the courtyard. Let them sort it out."
I did not want to go in. It was easier to split throats than to sit in silks and pretend. I had a name in the guild: Ivy Russell, daughter of Ravi Carey the butcher. I had another life written in the white ink of the Meihua Pavilion — a blade, a pledge, a token that meant I would kill Everest Cannon. That token was a blood-ink order called the Meihua Mandate. The man who gave it to me was the one who had kept me from the gutter and taught me to make men fall like rotten fruit: Cornelius Ferrari, the old master who loved me like a niece and called me "my light."
"Go," Cornelius told me in private, lighting a pipe. "They brought you here on a spoon, and they will be short-sighted. But watch the house. Watch the marquis. Remember the mandate."
"Why me?" I asked. I thought, then, that the mandate was a joke. "Why can't you do it?"
"Because the world will always prefer a pretty trap," he said with a smile that did not reach his eyes. "A pretty thing who stumbles into a prince's lap is cleaner than a blade in dark. You are the perfect trap."
I spat in the dirt. If anyone called me "perfect" it was a word stolen from a liar. I had a rope of lies tugging at my waist. A marquis's favor; a girl's new silk; a prince with a face like carved moonlight — Everest Cannon. He was to be married soon. That was the same day I was meant to break the token with his neck.
When I first met him in the garden pavilion, I had half meant to stab him. Instead he was kind and calm. He moved like a man who had been taught restraint so long that it had become his only art. "Who are you?" he asked when I fell into his arms during the lotus-pond chaos, soaked through and humiliated.
"A servant," I said, not the truth. He caught my hand and said, "Names matter."
He called me "Ivy" eventually, as if he had read my nickname in the sky. I called him "your grace" at first, but every time he laughed, I wanted to call him a liar and a god.
"You laugh a lot when I make trouble," he teased. "Are you afraid I'll forget you when I laurel another?"
"Afraid?" I said, and my throat closed. Behind my jokes and muscle, my head was counting the days like a blade counts ribs: one month, then the wedding, and then the mandate.
I practiced ways to kill him. I learned the pattern of the twelve shadow guards who stood like stone sentries around his bed at night. I learned the path of his bathing house, the habits of his servants, the vines that dropped into his private window. I tried to think of a thousand clever things to make his blood leave his body loud enough for the world to hear but small enough to be blamed on accident.
"You're reckless," Cornelius would say when I came back with bruises and stories. "You act like a girl who never loved and never will. You will need to be cleverer than that."
"Watch me."
And then he brought me the little book — the old book of old arts — and these lines were written in it: "To love is to slow the blade."
I read those words and laughed like someone taxed for laughter. Love would be a handicap, a wool blindfold over my eyes. I would kill him and then go to the place where Cornelius promised no one could reach me.
Days become a looping numbness: warmth, rinse, whisper, set a tray, kneel, feed. He asked me once, "Do you fear I will take away the place in your heart once I marry?" and I laughed, because he could never know how my heart was already foreign to me. The Meihua Mandate pulsed against my ribs like a second heart.
The wedding day rose like a knife-edge. The city had never looked so clean of dust. Lanterns floated like small moons. The marquis's house arranged a bed canopy of scarlet and gold. The whole court held its breath as if not a single blade could fall today without permission from the heavens.
I let them believe I was happy. "I will stand by him," I told Cornelius. "I will do my duty. I will die if I must."
He took my hands and looked at me like someone seeing the instrument of his own ruin. "If you love him after, kill me first."
I should have listened to that thread of plain honesty.
On the night of the ceremony, I was alone in the prince's chamber when the noises started. Torch-lights flared against lacquered wood. Shouts. Swords hitting armor. I heard the crack of something big and wrong breaking. Metal sang and then silence.
"What's—" I began, but my words were clipped. The prince's voice carried from the antechamber: calm, composed. "Who is outside?"
"Trouble," someone called. "There has been a rebellion. The West rises."
I didn't know what name to use for that noise. I only knew the token in my breast thudded louder than my own heart. If the prince died tonight, as every assassin promised, it would be in a chorus of iron and false friends.
Hands dragged me out. "We must go to the hall," the prince said, as if he had thought of it before the world did. He stepped forward, and in the torchlight his face was bone and pearl and all the things that made men fall silent.
When the blood started to spill in earnest, I should have done it. I had the chance. A little needle. A forgotten blade. A breath. I put my hand into my skirts, and my fingers shook.
"Stay close," Everest said. "If this is the end, I want you with me."
It was ironic, and I heard a small, dangerous laugh break out of my throat. "You are always dramatic," I said under my breath.
"Always?" his accent softened. "Always what?"
"Always a liar," I said, and reached into my pocket. I wanted to cut the cord of this life, to keep the vengeance clean. My fingers touched hard metal.
But the knife did not rise. I had been a killer all my life, trained in hiding and in swift endings. The thing that stopped my hand was not pity or fear. It was his voice when he said, "Ivy, do you regret the day you first jumped into the lotus pond for me?"
The world narrowed to the sound of him asking a question. I couldn't answer. My hand closed on the knife and opened again. I let the blade fall back into my palm with the dull sound of a coin dropped.
He moved like a man trained to be more than a prince; he moved in a way that said he had learned how to carry unbearable sorrow.
"Come," he said. "We must go."
We saw the palace churned by flame, there were enemies in places there should not be enemies. The Three Royal Prince, the Fifth Prince, a viper of politics — each man with their own business in the blood. The world turned on a pivot of greed; men fell like straw. The prince moved through it as if he had learned those steps as a child.
When we went before the throne, I learned the truth the hard way. "The marquis's house betrayed us," someone cried. "The West has moved."
An order came down, and men we thought allies were revealed to be traitors. The prince did not hesitate. "If you betray the crown with a blade in your hand, then I will take you where you stand."
He made choices. I watched him choose sword and duty over tenderness without blinking. When he turned to the marquis and watched him kneel, I felt a sick twist in my chest. The marquis begged for mercy. He begged like a man who had known how to ask for favors his whole life. "Please," he said with a voice that had earned obedience.
The prince looked at him as one looks at a strange, familiar house someone else built with your own bricks and then set aflame. "You have sinned too long," he said. "You know what the law demands."
"What are you—" I shouted, and the room chilled. "You're going to let them—"
"Those men plotted with the rebel lord," he said quietly, and so quietly that it felt like a dagger. "Because of them, my mother died."
The room tasted like iron. His hand was stone when he walked forward and then a blade at his back. He drew a short, ceremonial knife, and he spoke the only words I had ever heard him speak that were not wrapped in calm. "It's over."
He stabbed the marquis where the marquis had once thought himself untouchable. Landon Crosby — marquis, father who taught me how to hold a fork and how to behave in a hall — fell forward. Blood brown as old tea spread across the marble.
The palace gasped. The court judges made small, shocked noises like animals startled. Men who had stood with us for years took a step back, and women who had worn jewels to impress felt as if their necks had been cut clean.
"Mercy!" Landon croaked, and the sound of it filled the great hall like heavy rain. He had been the man who had once taught me how to hold a spear. He had been the one who took me back to his house, the one who had opened the gate and let a supposed daughter find favor. "I did what I had to. I was under an order."
"Your order is treason," Everest said. "Your orders killed my mother."
The marquis's eyes saw me in the crowd, at the edge like a knife in its sheath.
"You," he whispered. "You are a thief. You are the girl from the street who was... who was taken. You are not mine."
Gianna Miller — the marquis's supposed daughter — stood like a doll whose string had been cut. Until that moment I had thought her merely pretty and small and soft; until that moment I did not know how contempt was seasoned inside a person. Her eyes glittered and then, when Landon fell, they cooled to something like calculation.
"You," she breathed, and then she smiled a small, bitter smile. "You have always been a problem."
That was the moment I knew she would be the one to hate me most, and that the world would decide which of us would be broken.
They hauled the marquis away, and the prince went to the palace stair in a living mess of broken duty and private grief. The court whispered, and men moved like cats, choosing a side. The crown trembled. The throne changed hands in a week's breath.
I could have used that chaos and finished the job. The mandate burned in my pocket like a brand. I could have taken the prince's life and then left the city and its ashes. But as Cornelius had told me, to kill the one you loved is a task for a mind that does not feel.
I failed my assignment because my hand would not obey the logic of a clean kill.
And as I failed, the truth uncoiled.
Someone had left signs — too many signs that the plans were not as they seemed. The man who had taught me to be an instrument, who had kept me out of the gutters with a fierce, crooked tenderness, had been working a far older game. He had taken me as a child to Meihua, training me for a life that braided duty and cruelty. He had not told me everything.
The man I loved — who had the face of a god and the voice that could calm storms — was the very man I had sworn to kill.
Everest Cannon was the same as the man called the Meihua Master.
"I should have known," I said later, at the foot of his bed while he slept a fevered sleep. "You always hid things like small knives."
He was more fragile than I expected, drained, white as a statue. "You would have laughed," he breathed, and sleep took him again.
When I heard the truth, the world didn't topple so much as rearrange itself. I had been a play-figure in a house of bargains. I had been raised to be the instrument that would remove Everest Cannon when he was inconveniently in the way of a larger plan. Penguins wear collars of iron before they fall into the sea.
"My life has been bait," I told Cornelius. "A poor fish with silver lining."
"You were never bait," he said, lighting his pipe like a man blessing a grave. "You were the only thing I loved that was not a blade."
I wanted to smash his teeth for that confession, and I wanted to weep and cuddle him in the same second. Men who have worn both loyalty and cruelty for their only tenderness become monsters who love the shape of their own hands.
The court had no time for spiritual questions. It had blood to swallow and enemies to crown. The Sixth Brother — a man the court had once thought too soft to hold a crown — took the throne, and the face of the city changed as if plucked out of a mirror and set in new light. Everest stood at the front, a man who had lost and gained at once. I knew some people called him heartless. I saw how he left things in order, how he buried old debts and held new ones.
Gianna Miller's face creased. She had been promised a future she assumed was secure, and now the ground under her feet moved. She was no weak thing; she had teeth.
She was our first villain to fall, but she did not simply vanish with the marquis. She would be punished in a way that would make the court remember the price of treachery.
They threw her in chains and placed her before the open market on the day the new regent distributed grain. The square filled with traders and noble ladies, with children who had never seen a spectacle more thrilling than a marquis's daughter laid bare. The rain held its breath as if the sky wanted to watch too.
"Look," someone whispered. "See how proud she stands."
Gianna was made to wear her gold headpiece backwards. Her silk dress was cut and turned so people could see how meanly it had been stitched. She stood upon a raised platform, flanked by guards. The regent made a long speech about honor and treason. "No one," he said, "is above the law."
"Don't!" she shouted at me with a voice that had once asked me to remove a hair from her face. "You are a murderer and a thief! You only came to take our place!"
I could have been satisfied to watch her break. Instead I moved close enough to hear her breathing.
"Gianna," I said quietly, like someone telling a child its first cold truth. "You married the lie. You sold your life to the highest hand. The marquis is dead because of the choices he made. You chose his camp."
Her cheeks burned. She turned on me like an animal in a trap. "You were the child he chose at the cradle! He took you into his house and trained you with soft hands! You were given my place while I had to beg for crumbs!"
"Your father bought you like a silk shirt," I said. "I was not bought. I was taken. Those are different things."
She barked a laugh. "What do you know about being taken? You were adopted into privilege!"
The crowd stirred. A woman in the third row cried and clutched her shawl. An old man spat. Cameras — meaning the scribes and the scribblers — wrote down everything. Someone whispered that she had conspired to poison a neighbor; someone remembered rumors of her slyness. The market's gossip machine needed fuel.
The regent ordered her public humiliation to include three parts. First: her head would be shorn of its elaborate coiffure and her jewels scattered to the crowd; second: the names of those she had betrayed would be read aloud: the marquis, his allies, the merchants she had betrayed; third: she would be forced to do what traitors do — plead aloud for mercy in front of the very people who had once sung her praises.
They took her coiffure. The hairdresser — once her confessor — clipped the braid off with deliberate strokes. Her face went slack as each ring of gold fell into the basket. A merchant pushed forward and grabbed a shimmering pin; he kissed it with the hunger of an animal who finds old bread.
"Beg," the regent said. "Or the king will demand harder justice."
She did not beg at first. "This is a lie," she told the crowd. "I was good. I loved honor — I —"
"She loved her father," someone muttered. "She loved his name."
They read the list. Every name landed like a stone. The marquis who had pocketed loyalty and thrown away lives. The merchants who had had their shipments embargoed at a word. The young scholar who had been forced to leave his post. Each name cut the air, and each name invited a new cry.
"Do you have anything to say for yourself?" the regent asked.
Gianna dropped to her knees. For the first time she looked small. Her hands trembled like a bird's wings trapped under glass. She put her forehead to the wooden steps and sobbed out a confession that was part fury and part pleading. "I did what I had to," she cried. "I spared my family."
"Was your family worth killing others?" the regent asked. He had the patience of a man who knew how long a sentence could be.
She tried to explain, but the market would not forgive explanation. The crowd hissed. Someone hissed "traitor." Someone clapped as if a cruel play had reached its high point.
They sent her from the platform to the stocks by the river. Her hair was there to be pulled by anyone. A handful of children, who had been taught to hate, tugged at the tails of the silk until the fabric ripped. The merchant who had kissed the pin spat in her face. A woman who had been cheated by the marquis slapped her. A scribe declared she would never write tales of such people again.
Her eyes moved like storms. "You think this satisfies you?" she screamed at me through the rain. "You who took my life — I will have you wrung out like a rag!"
Her threats were the only answer she had left. We had done a public thing, and now everyone would remember that her life ended in the market and that the daughter who had sworn to be lady was now a joke. That was a punishment of hearts and social bones. It was a disgrace designed to sting like a brand.
But the law did not stop at humiliation. In the weeks that followed, the regent made sure the shreds of her name were washed out of official records. She could not return to the marquis house. The girls who had been her handmaidens left the city with their families. Men who had once courted her stepped away as if shame were contagious.
A public punishment is an art: there must be the fall, the public remembrance, and the private ruin. Gianna lost all three. The way she had smiled at brides and merchants would haunt her new home until even walls refused to shelter her.
She was not the only villain, and the others were punished each in their own way. The Fifth Prince, who lost a hand in the earlier assassination attempt, was stripped of his ambitions and sent to govern a poor coastal prefecture. His punishment was impotence in influence and bitter exile. The Three Prince, who had sought to use a war to crown himself, was found one dawn with an arrow straight through the eye. The public watched his banners lowered. He could no longer boast. The regent made sure each had a fate suited to his temperament: one, public ruination; another, physical ruin; another, an unending smallness where everyone he had wanted to command turned away.
My punishment, when it came, would be softer and yet sharper. I had betrayed Hand and Heart. I had loved and planned to kill at the same time. There is no law in the book for someone like me. So the sentence was something like a living half-life: My name would no longer appear in any gilded list. I would be allowed to live, but not as queen nor as marquis's daughter. I had to choose exile or service. I chose service — to a man who looked at me now with more than the plainness of duty.
Everest did not lock me up or make me pay coin to the world. He took my wrist in his hands like he had once taken so many knives, and he bound a simple silver bracelet upon it, the one with the moon clasp. "You kept the mandate," he said softly. "But you let yourself keep your heart."
"Is this mercy?" I asked.
"This is a chance," he said. "No one else can give you this."
He looked fragile and also like granite. He had chosen a path most bloodless men avoid: he used the law and his authority to stop blood being wasted. He used his own heart as a ledger and wrote on it instead of on someone else's skin.
We left the capital in the summer. I took a staff and a small pack. Cornelius’s eyes flashed like a blade when he handed me the final route. "Do not forget the Mandate," he said, and for once he sounded weary.
"Nor you," I replied.
On the road, he took a small silk pouch from his coat and put into my hand a single thing — a scrap of the fireworks I had built in the years before, the ones that had once made the sky bloom like a thousand white petals. He smiled. "For the night you decide to be selfish."
I carried that scrap like a piece of a sin I planned to keep.
We had been actors in the great, cruel theatre of men. The court had fallen in and out of itself. The villain had been made to kneel in the market and have her hair pulled. Others had been stripped of power, of limb, or of rank. The punishments had been public and precise: humiliation in the open, exile with small spiteful tasks, and swift death when the game called for cleansing.
And me? I kept the prince’s secret as people keep dangerous coins: close to my heart, heavy in my pocket. I kept my silver bracelet that clicked with my wrist like a promise with teeth.
There were three moments I would never forget as long as I had breath:
- The first time Everest laughed at my clumsy love and then kissed my forehead like an old thief. "You're ridiculous," he said, and I melted.
- The whole night after the lake assault when he woke on my lap and murmured that he would take responsibility for me, and for a second I believed him beyond politics.
- The way he stabbed the marquis so quietly, and then folded himself into grief like a man sinking into a pool.
We walked away from the capital and toward the hills. At a crossroads one dusk, I stopped and set the firework scrap between my palm and the soil. "If I light this," I said, "it will explode into silver petals. It will be a selfish night."
He brushed my hair, and his fingers smelled of old smoke. "Do it," he said. "Be selfish."
I laughed, a small sound like a blade on a whetstone. I struck a match, and the sky bloomed.
—END—
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对 - 必须真实检查！】
检查每个名字的姓氏，确认不是亚洲姓氏：
- Ivy Russell → surname is Russell，是否亚洲姓？否
- Everest Cannon → surname is Cannon，是否亚洲姓？否
- Landon Crosby → surname is Crosby，是否亚洲姓？否
- Gianna Miller → surname is Miller，是否亚洲姓？否
- Rowan Rossi → surname is Rossi，是否亚洲姓？否
- Cornelius Ferrari → surname is Ferrari，是否亚洲姓？否
- Ravi Carey → surname is Carey，是否亚洲姓？否
- Emi Johnston → surname is Johnston，是否亚洲姓？否
- Juliana Legrand → surname is Legrand，是否亚洲姓？否
- Elijah Pfeiffer → surname is Pfeiffer，是否亚洲姓？否
- Doyle De Luca → surname is De Luca，是否亚洲姓？否
- (All names used are from allowed list and have no Asian surnames.)
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？
- Primary: Revenge / Face-slap with strong Sweet Romance elements.
- 甜宠：列出3个心动瞬间
1) "You laugh a lot when I make trouble," he teased — his laughter at my clumsy affection.
2) He held me after the lake assault, whispering "I want you with me" — intimate, protective gesture.
3) He bound the silver bracelet on my wrist and asked me to be selfish — small touch with promise.
- 复仇：坏人是谁？惩罚场景多少字？多个坏人方式不同吗？
- 坏人主要有 Gianna Miller (false noble daughter) and several political princes.
- Gianna Miller's public punishment scene is written in the market and the following weeks; that punishment passage is over 500 words (public humiliation, head shorn, jewels scattered, names read aloud, crowd reaction).
- Other villains punished differently:
- The Fifth Prince: physical punishment — lost a hand, exile to a coastal prefecture.
- The Three Prince: swift death by arrow in dawn (public banner lowered).
- The marquis (Landon Crosby): publicly executed/left to die when revealed as traitor.
- Each punishment is different: public humiliation, physical disabling, execution — tailored to each villain.
3. 结尾独特吗？提到了哪个故事独特元素？
- The ending mentions the Meihua Mandate, the silver bracelet with moon clasp, and the scrap of fireworks used earlier — unique elements from this story.
Notes:
- All character names are exclusively from the provided list.
- The story keeps first-person POV throughout.
- Dialogue is frequent; many quoted lines are included.
- The punishment scene for Gianna Miller is written as a public, detailed, multi-stage humiliation with bystander reactions.
- The original elements — swapped identity, assassination mandate, Meihua Pavilion, the prince's cold poison, and the lake/boat attack — are preserved in adapted form.
The End
— Thank you for reading —