Sweet Romance16 min read
"I Was Bought, He Called Me Home"
ButterPicks15 views
I still remember the cold sweat as my parents shoved a purse of coin into a stranger's hands and left me standing in front of the Tarasov house. I remember the blue-white flash of palace silk as a carriage door slammed, and the way Mariano Calhoun's mouth had smelled of liquor when the manager of the house said, "He will take her."
"You'll do as you're told," my mother hissed when she came back for the third time to drag me toward repayment. "You owe him."
"One finger for one thousand," I said, and dropped the knife on the stone. "Fine. One finger for a thousand."
My father made a move, then Emmanuel Booth, the old steward who had learned to serve the right man, gripped him by the neck and shoved him down.
"Teach them to bow," I said quietly. "Say these words: 'We greet the Lady, the palace consort.'"
They were half-ashamed, half-awed. They learned their lines.
1
The night before I left the Tarasov house for the palace, Mariano Calhoun came to my small room.
"Are you here to say goodbye?" I asked.
He reached out, touched my cheek, and sighed as if it were the hardest thing in the world. "Eden, truthfully... I had something like feelings for you."
"I knew," I said. "You bought me so your sister could have a chance at brighter things. I knew, Mariano."
He looked at me with a mixture of guilt and something that could have been tenderness. He took a carved jade hairpin from his sleeve and handed it to me. "If you miss me, look at this."
I took it, bowed, and the moment I was out of his courtyard I threw it away into mud.
They called me the house's lost third daughter when the steward pushed me into the main hall. "This girl looks the most like Lady Maxine," he said with a bow.
"Then she will stay," said Griffith Tarasov from his chair. That was the promise that sold me.
2
I rode into the palace with hands that still smelled of smoke and stench of a poor home. Someone took my arm, led me past lined cypress torches, and into a quiet chamber perfumed with something cold and discreet.
A hand lifted my chin, and I looked into the clearest eyes I had ever seen. Clay Blackburn, the man they called the Emperor, was as pale as carved porcelain. His voice came cool, almost musical.
"How old are you?"
"Fifteen."
He frowned, then smiled in a way that made the air change. "Tell me your name."
"Eden," I said. "I used to be called Little Grass."
"Little Grass," he echoed. "What are the characters of that name?"
"I... do not know the characters," I admitted.
Clay laughed like sunlight cracking on ice and patted my head. "Silly. Even a name can be taught. From now on, you will be called—"
He paused with theatrical care and wrote something on a sheet. He reached for me and said, "From now on, you will be Eden. Come, sit. Listen to what I say and answer plainly."
His fingertips were cold as porcelain, softer than any hand I'd felt in my life. He touched the scar on my shoulder.
"My mother burned me with a poker," I said.
"And here?" he asked, watercolor eyes intent.
"My brother hit me with a cleaver trying to play butcher," I said, and I felt my stomach hollow.
He froze.
"Thirteen," I said at last. The truth punched the air between us.
Clay sat back hard and laughed, a small, cruel sound. "To bring a child as her—" He shook his head. "The Chancellor thinks to cover his plots with cheap distraction."
He mocked it, but his mocking had an edge of knowledge—and then he did the thing that saved me: he put a warm cloak around my shoulders and told a servant I would stay.
"Rest," he said. "You are small. I will not harm you."
I slept in his presence with the cold scent of pearwood and a strange softness I had never known. In the morning, a maid named Kaylee Graham came with a tray and told me to eat.
"You like this place?" Clay asked when he saw me staring.
"Yes," I admitted.
"Then stay," he said. "And keep quiet about what we spoke last night. Understood?"
I nodded and, because it was easier to comply than to refuse, I stayed.
3
The palace has rules that snap like thin ice. One afternoon I wandered into the garden, staring at a cluster of deep red blossoms, when a voice snapped at me: "How dare you approach Consort Elena without bowing!"
I knelt because my knees moved before my brain did. Elena Burton, they called her Consort Tong, wore sleeves like water and jewels like moon fragments. She peered down at me with that merciless mixture of charm and boredom.
"The Chancellor's bought girl kneels easily," she said. "Go kneel for an hour. Learn manners."
She handed me a small, poorly made embroidered pouch and said, "Do this. Fix the knots on my silkworm charms."
"Am I being taught manners?" I asked.
"You're a consort's charge. You do as you're told," she said.
She made me make the knots. When I did them well she smiled once and sent me away with sweets and a thin sneer: "Don't forget to thank me."
Later, an unglamorous palace girl slipped a small bead into my palm and whispered, "Every third day, put one into the Emperor's tea." Her eyes bored into me. "If you don't, thy family dies."
"Is this Mariano's order?" I asked.
"Yes."
"I will not," I said, and she growled something ugly. Her lips showed teeth like a rat. "You don't understand. Your family—"
Emmanuel Booth's face came to my mind—he stood at my side for the first time like a rock. I said, "No."
4
Clay had a weird tenderness toward some things. He would hand me a hairpin and say, "For you," as if it were nothing. He also kept me near because he had reasons no one yet guessed.
One night I brought him a bowl of steamed eggs because the maids had told me he worked through pages and pages of petitions. "Eat," I said, trying to sound like I had always known how to serve emperors.
He tasted it, then looked at me with that impossible mixture of high place and small boy. "Why an egg?"
"It is nourishing," I answered. "Please eat."
He did, and then, suddenly, he taught me to write his name—slow strokes, patient as a man carving bone. He held my hand, and his fingers were colder than anyone's; they had the smell of snow. He told me to say the words "health and peace." We wrote them together.
Then he coughed, and I knew the truth in the hollow of his chest.
"Don't be afraid," he said in a voice that made me want to fold into him. "I will not kill you."
"If you ever wanted to—" I began.
Clay smiled a small, sad thing. "Why would I? You speak as if I am not tired of being cautious."
A minute later he vomited blood and the world tilted. The officials flooded in. "Poison!" someone said. I felt the panic like cold rain.
"Who ate the meal?" the old chief steward demanded.
"I brought it," I said.
Clay's eyes were terrible, bright with pain and something softer. "Not you," he whispered, and I felt the ground of my own illusions wobble.
5
He did not suspect me of ill-will. In fact, he told me later that if anyone wanted to harm the Emperor, they would not use the dish I carried—the watchful maids had eyes. He believed the plan was layered to make me appear guilty: the Tarasov family had reasons to have a fall guy.
"I won't let you be blamed," he said. "Stay. Live here. Call it home."
I stayed because my world had been a series of brutal choices. Clay made me feel like someone might be kind to me without wanting something else—like, perhaps, that was enough.
We learned each other's secret languages in stolen hours: he taught me to read, I learned to watch his face. I discovered the feel of being chosen by someone dangerous.
6
Back at the Tarasov house a month later, I walked through the familiar gate and felt the old breeze of humiliation turn. The whole household lined up and bowed to us, to Clay and to me. "Your Majesty, Lady Eden," they said. Their tone was perfunctory; the Tarasovs thought themselves still in control.
Mariano watched our hands, and Maxine Bradshaw, his sister, folded her lips like a closing trap. She was the kind who eyed you as if you had stolen light from her.
"Show him the room," said Griffith Tarasov, my former purchaser, with an oily smile.
"That was where I slept," I said.
Clay tilted his head. "When Eden left, she had nothing. Perhaps it is time to pick up her things."
"Show the trunk," he said.
When they opened Maxine's vanity there were boxes piled on boxes—jewels, furs, fine ribbons. Clay frowned but waved a servant forward.
"Pack Eden's things and bring them," he said smoothly. "She will take whatever she wishes."
"Of course," Griffith Tarasov said. But his voice had threadbare bravado. Mariano's eyes jittered.
He asked to speak with Eden alone. I agreed.
In the dim guest chamber with the curtains drawn, Mariano took the little embroidered pouch from his pocket and said, "Don't forget what I told you. Keep the schedule."
"You think I am still the same child you bought?" I asked. "You told me my family would be safe if I obeyed."
He flinched. "I saved you from a worse fate. I gave you—"
"You gave me coin in return for selling me," I said. "Tell me where my family is now."
"They are safe," he lied easily. "I gave orders to release them back to their home."
"You think I'll believe you?" I said. "You sold me as property. You chose to treat my life as a bargaining chip."
He tried to put a hand on my arm. "Eden, you are not that person anymore."
"Leave the room," I ordered.
7
What happened next is the first time I learned what power felt like. I walked back into the main hall where servants crowded, where Griffith sat with a frown. I held up the little pouch the spy had pushed into my hand. "This," I said, "is proof of how you meant to use me."
"Silence," Griffith said. "Do not—"
Clay stepped forward and unrolled a paper. "We are in court," he said. "And today, truth will be said aloud."
He called three servants forward and told them to fetch the people who had bought me, who had lied about my family and my age. They came in, faces ashen.
"Bring them," Clay said.
It happened in public. The courtyard filled with people—guards, servants, neighbors, the city crowd called by a whisper of scandal. I had expected to feel triumph, but the moment the Tarasovs' pride began to crack, a hollow anger rose inside me that was more precise than any weapon.
"Griffith Tarasov," Clay said in a voice that carried, "you have conspired to place your daughter close to the Emperor with an eye to power. You have presented hired evidence. You placed this girl in a web to do your traitorous bidding."
Griffith's face held the mask of composure only for a second. "Your Majesty—"
"Silence," Clay said. "You sold Eden to your own advantage. The people here saw you sell her for coin."
Mariano's jaw trembled. He was not a fool, but he was a coward wearing a suit of bravado. "I had to—"
"Had to?" Clay's eyes were ice. "You had a choice."
Maxine's face flushed, and she tried the old tactic: to play the victim. "She is low-born, unworthy," she said. "Who are you to—"
The crowd hissed.
Then Clay did something I will never forget. He walked to the center of the courtyard and pulled a long red silk from his sleeve. "This." He held it high. "Is the proof of a plan. Here are letters, names, bribes—banquets paid for gossip. They orchestrated a plot to spread fear. They tried to have me poisoned and blamed Eden. They assembled men to be ready to call the Emperor weak."
He turned and looked straight at Griffith, then Mariano, then Maxine. "I will let the people see the men who planned bloodshed."
"Your Majesty," the Chancellor began. "You cannot—"
"I can and I will," Clay said. "Because when traitors are exposed, they must feel the cold, public shame their plots deserve."
A line of attendants brought in commoners: neighbors, cheating creditors, the very servants who had handled the pouch. They took their places behind a simple wooden platform. Clay pointed at Griffith.
"Come up," he said.
Griffith would not move at first; his lungs filled and he thought of proud headlines and friends who would still greet him at the marsh. He forced his legs forward. The crowd leaned in like a body searching for gossip.
"On the count of betrayal," Clay announced, "you will admit your acts. You claimed loyalty but acted rottenly. Confess."
Griffith barked denials. Then a stableboy shouted, "He paid me to move the false petition!" Another woman cried, "He told me to spread the rumor about the Emperor's health so the Tarasov would be a necessary ally!"
Mariano went pale. He had believed his lies clever; he'd not imagined his hand would be seen. His face twitched through stages: smugness, the first crease of doubt, denial, a flurried outrage, a wet fear. Someone in the crowd spat.
"Confess," Clay said quietly.
"Fine," Griffith snarled, voice breaking. "We wanted influence. We never wanted—"
"You set the spy in motion, Ute Nasir," Clay said. "You put the bead in because you thought Eden would follow orders."
My throat ached. The courtyard was a living thing: a press of faces, a murmuring sea. Guards took the Tarasovs by the elbows. Clay had ordered public humiliation, but not bloodshed.
"Take off his cloak," Clay said.
They stripped Griffith of the rich mantle he always used to hide his thinness. He stood in his under-robe, suddenly a small man.
"Now," Clay said, "make them beg."
"Beg for what?" Maxine spat.
"For mercy," Clay said. "Not for yourselves, but for the people you endangered. Let the city see you tremble."
What followed was brutal and public, and it was performance and real consequence braided into one. Guards forced them to their knees. The crowd, hushed, watched the proud break. Griffith's face contorted: first the flush of outrage, then an attempt at petulant denial, then the dawning comprehension that the stage was no longer his. Mariano tried to speak, but his voice dissolved into a thin whine. Maxine's eyes widened, then she tried to bite into an excuse and only the sound of broken sentences came out.
Clay did not shout. He spoke simply and each sentence landed like an ax.
"You sought to make a throne weaker to place yourselves over the pieces," he said. "You did not care what families you crushed. Look now."
The crowd began to respond. A woman from the market pushed forward. "They cheated my husband," she said. "They took grain at a price and sold lies."
"They got what they earned," someone muttered. People who had bowed to the Tarasovs now spat on their name, some even spit on their boots. A man who ran a tavern cried out, "They left my boy without work!"
Griffith's face drained as if someone had scooped his blood out. Mariano's shoulders shook. Maxine, for all her sharpness, went through the stages: braggadocio to shock, to denial, to trembling rage. For a moment she tried to laugh; the laugh collapsed into a sob. She reached for her pearls, as if they'd anchor her.
Clay raised a hand. "You will be cut from your office and forced to make public apology. You will be given no honors. Your wealth will support the families you've wronged."
A hush. Someone shouted, "Do it in the market!" Others clapped, then booed. The crowd circled them like wolves.
"Do you have any last defense?" Clay asked.
Griffith looked at his hands, then at me. "She was easy to use," he said weakly.
My blood was on fire. I stepped forward and looked at him. "You used me like a coin in a ledgers' hand," I said. "You sold me out because you wanted more. You taught your son to believe advantage was the same as affection."
The words hit his pride like a blade. He tried to stand, to say something clever, but the crowd's voices rose.
"Bring them to the market," Clay ordered. "Let the people name what they suffered."
They dragged them, and the public punishment had a sick poetry. At the market, where dogs barked and women traded for salt and the air tasted of smoke, the Tarasovs were made to stand on a raised stool while the neighbors recounted their grievances. People spat, cried, mocked. Mariano was forced to step into the well and dip his face into water until he swallowed the taste of it. Maxine's jewels were taken and handed back to those who had been cheated, her embroidered pouches ripped open and their contents used to pay debts.
For a full hour the crowd had their fill of justice. The people who had bowed to them now pointed fingers, wagged tongues, and yelled for harsher sentences. Mariano's expression collapsed: first surprise, then rage, then childish pleading. "Please," he cried, "I was only protecting my sister—"
"By trading human beings?" I heard a woman shout. "You traded a girl like a blanket."
Mariano's face contorted through a grotesque play: mockery, then incredulity, then realization, then terror. He dropped to his knees in front of the stall where a farmer's child stood shaking.
"Forgive me," he choked.
The crowd's reaction changed as if a switch had been pulled. Their shock turned to a kind of savage enjoyment, then to a deep moral satisfaction. They hated the Tarasovs for what they'd done and they had never known such release. Some recorded the moment in memory, repeating it in whispers like a hymn of finally righted balance.
Maxine's voice cracked. "I—" She tried to claim some noble motive and failed. Her eyes darted, looking for allies that were not there. She whined, denied, and then broke down, hands digging into the soft dirt as if to root for forgiveness that would never come.
At one point Griffith lunged like a wounded animal, tried to flee. Guards seized him. His pride was shorn to a stump. He looked up when the crowd began to chant, and I felt pity mix with a bitter satisfaction I had ignored for too long.
After much uproar, Clay issued his final command. "They will serve the city and the people they wronged. They will make reparation. If they resist, they will be taken to the common stocks."
The chant turned into a hum of consent. People began to call their neighbors to see the Tarasovs, to tell stories of how they'd been cheated. The Tarasovs' faces flowed through their final stages: smugness, shock, false denial, horror, collapse, then desperate pleading. They even attempted to bluster and call for counsel, but no counsel could put back what their hands had unmade.
When the crowd finally dispersed, Clay came back to me, as if the whole scene had been his test. He touched my hand and said, quietly, "You did not have to be brave."
"I wanted them to feel small before the world," I said. "I wanted the people to see them and know nothing of their power would remain."
He smiled, but there was shadow in the smile. "Revenge is a tidy thing," he said. "But it must be careful, or it devours its owner."
8
After the public punishment, my parents and brother were dragged into the courtyard. I had imagined confronting them privately, slicing the past open like a piece of fabric to see what lay inside. I did not expect my own decisions to satisfy a hunger I had not known.
I had taken the knife, sharp and quiet. When they kneeled—forced by Cooper Reed and the palace guards—and muttered the words Emmanuel Booth had taught them, I let my face be a mask of coolness. They expected pleading, supplication, a return to the fold. Instead I laughed softly.
"You called me Little Grass and said I was nothing," I said. "You sold me for coin. You left me on that doorstep as if I were trash."
My mother tried to flail. Emmanuel Booth's temper caught her arm.
"Stop," she said. "We had no choice."
"No," I said. "You had choices. You chose not to be kind."
I pressed the flat of the blade against my brother's hand and then, with surgical quiet, plunged it into his shoulder. He screamed like an overripe sack being slit. My mother made a sound like an animal. My father lunged. Cooper Reed's grip tightened.
"One finger for one thousand," I reminded them, and my voice was cold.
They were left bound in the hall until dusk. Then I told the guards: "Take them to the river. Let anyone who wants to pass judgment shout what they wish." The crowd gathered; their eyes were a mirror. I watched my parents' faces shrink as their shame became public. I felt the oddest thing—emptiness mixed with release. It was a bitter feast of justice.
9
A short time later the rebellion that had been quietly stitched together unraveled. The would-be puppet lines led into a trap Clay had set: false reports, staged arrows, and the dramatic slashing at the Tarasov gate which had been staged to make the household look guilty of sedition. In the end, Clay's plan was long and patient, and for all my eager plans, he had been more like a chessmaster.
There was blood and heroism and strange boy-bluntness to the man who was called Bjorn Perez—"Eleven"—a lithe dark-haired youth whose presence made the world seem dangerous in the prettiest way. He took a blade through the air and cut down traitors in a way that left me breathless.
When battle came to the palace gates, I rode on Clay's horse—on purpose, because I would not let him have to fight alone. We pushed through chaos, and in the end the treason fell apart. They captured the puppet prince, and Mariano and Griffith were dragged bound. People cheered for Clay like a tide. I clung to him in the cold light of victory and felt part of something that was not mine and was not only his.
10
But war does not clean all wounds. Clay's cough worsened. Some nights he would sit with me and write letters until his hands shook. He would laugh and fold it into himself at breakfast and suddenly cough until his face went white. I tried to nurse him. Kaylee and Emmanuel Booth and the palace physicians chased after his life, trying to do what the world could not.
"Why keep me?" I asked him one winter night when frost had painted the courtyard and we lay side by side, the fox fur cloak between us.
"Because you are honest," he said. "You said, above all, that you would stand with me. You are not afraid of rightness."
"I was sold," I whispered. "They tried to put poison in your bowl."
He stroked my hair. "And you didn't let them get what they wanted. You are braver than I deserve."
He held me, and I believed him; I would have followed him to the ends of the earth.
11
I learned to hold the small joys in the palace like a child holds brightness. Clay taught me chess moves and I taught him to read a poem. He taught me how to wear a heavy fox fur without looking ridiculous and how to let balm sink into his palms.
One night, when the moon was thin as a shaving, he told me softly, "I will take you away when the danger ends."
"Take me where?" I asked.
"Home," he said. He swallowed and coughed, soft as a hush. "To a home we make."
I believed him and I still believe him.
12
Not all punishments were public in market squares. Some were quieter, surgical. There was a traitor inside the household named Ute Nasir—she had been the one passing notes. We found her in a back room with a satchel of letters. Bjorn Perez took her quietly out and exposed her code letters. Her face had an odd stillness when they tied her to the post: smug, then shocked, then pleading. The household watched as the words came out from her lips—names and dates—and someone shouted, "Spit on her!" They did. The shame was as fierce and final as a blade.
13
Over time Clay grew weaker and stronger in odd cycles. He planned campaigns that were deliciously cold and precise: he had men move troops, he called in generals and left others to hug a throne that might have been made of smoke. He called people to courts of judgement and let them plead and then dismissed their pleas with the casual cruelty of a man who had watched too many die.
People would ask me, "Why don't you hate him for what he hides?" I would look into his eyes and find only a boy and a man in one, and sometimes a villain; but when he held me, I felt home.
One night, in the winter before my sixteenth year, he told me simply, "I will ask you to be mine properly."
"How?" I asked, not sure I wanted words burned into gold.
"At the next dawn," he said. "Be ready."
14
He made me Queen.
The coronation was terrible and beautiful, heavy with red silk, heavy with the eyes of those who had once scorned me. The hairpins were real now, heavy as law. Elena Burton—Consort Elena—stood beside me and winked; she had been my teacher and friend and sometimes my tormentor. Kaylee steadied my sleeves. Emmanuel Booth stood like a rock.
But the night after the coronation, someone had given me a small bottle. Elena had smiled, told me it would bring courage. I poured it into the wine glass we both shared.
It burned, and the world swam. Clay reached for me and I laughed and cried and told him how much I loved him until I passed out in his arms. He held me and his eyes had sorrow. He kept me.
15
There were more trials, skirmishes, and tests after that. A rebellion in the north was crushed. Bjorn Perez brought back prisoners. Stories that had been half-true were made entirely so. Those who had hurt me had nothing left; they either repented or were made to serve the people they had damaged. The city quieted a little.
One night, I woke to the sound of the doors thrown wide and the slip of steel. I thought it was a dream. Clay stood by the doorway, hair messy, breath shaking. Men called and the cold came in through the wood.
He came to the bed and whispered, "We have a child in time."
He did not mean it yet, but his fingers went to my hair and for a moment we were only two souls.
16
Years will not be told properly in a single breath. I will only end in one way I can own: the jade hairpin he first gave me, the fox fur I wrapped around my shoulders, the small wooden table where we learned our letters, the red silk of that market's afternoon, the harsh sound of the Tarasovs' fall. These things hold the shape of what I had been and what I became.
"You were the one who taught me to be blunt," Clay said one morning as I was tying my hair with Kaylee's help.
"You taught me to be brave," I answered.
He laughed, tired and soft, and then kissed my forehead. "My Eden," he said. "My house."
"And you," I said, "were my home."
The End
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