Sweet Romance12 min read
I Was Supposed To Be a Pawn — Then He Loved Me
ButterPicks12 views
"I can't believe he accepted her," someone hissed nearby, sweet venom in every syllable.
"After all the waiting? The ceremony? How dare she stay?" another voice chimed.
I smiled, only a small, flat smile. "Let them talk," I told myself.
"They say she begged at the gate for seven nights," a woman snorted. "She only wanted his closeness. Everyone knows the Celestial Lord's weakness is beauty."
Their words were knives, but they were not new. I had come from a world that already showed me my lines: the story called me a disposable actress, a named extra whose purpose was to be broken and boiled into a cure for the heroine. I remembered how it ended—my limbs stripped for alchemy, my bones ground into remedy.
So I practiced indifference.
"She doesn't seem jealous," a girl near the hall said.
"Of course not. She's a minor. She should know her place."
I walked out of the hall and let them watch me. Let them think my heart was an empty shell. Let them talk.
A red-sleeved figure bumped into me.
"Did him taking a disciple ruin your day?" Ruben teased, the blade of his grin as sharp as the grass blade he twirled between his teeth.
I blinked. "It's none of your business."
"You always say it's none of my business. Yet here you are, making a face."
I bristled. "Go laugh with your friends."
"Come," he said, and before I could refuse his warm hand seized mine. "I know a place."
We flew down to the city, to lanterns and laughter and a hundred riddles strung like stars.
"Let's bet," Ruben proposed with the casual cruelty of someone who knew me well.
"You want to bet with a woman who never loses at lantern riddles?" I folded my arms. "Do you forget me so soon?"
"Then I'll take my loss like a man." He moved his mouth like someone who believed his own charm. "If I lose, I owe you one favor. If you lose—"
"Fine. Keep your pride. I always win."
Ruben set his face into his best mock-martyr look. "If I lose, I'll owe you anything."
"You can't marry me with that," I shot back, because absurdity always felt like the child's defense against heartbreak.
We played, I won, and Ruben sulked in purple-faced defeat as he performed the punishment of promising a favor. People laughed and pointed at the red sleeves and the stiff, proud posture he'd been forced into.
"Don't you dare use that to blackmail me into marriage," I warned.
"I'm not that stupid," he said, looking sincere enough that my chest eased.
Days went on. I kept away from the Celestial Lord—Julian Winter—the man everyone called the celestial frost. He had a presence like a winter morning: clear, distant, impossible to warm.
Then, one morning, I found him alone in the quiet pavilion, playing a slow game of chess.
"You haven't returned to your sect?" he asked without looking up when I stepped closer.
"Oh?" I dropped into the seat opposite and poured myself a cup of tea as if it were my right. "Afraid the mountain will be poorer if I steal your resources?"
He glanced at the tea, then laughed softly in a way that startled me. "This is your true face, Beatrice."
"I haven't had to play at being delicate," I said, and perhaps I felt a small flicker of relief in admitting it.
"Don't get used to being pampered," he murmured, and the cold in his voice made the room small.
"I won't," I promised.
He left me with a warning: "If you grow lax, there will be consequences."
That very night, I woke early and made pastries. Peach pastries, my secret to muting his severity. He never liked sweets, but certain things seemed to melt stone. I hoped what I made might do that.
"More than one person likes those treats now," Ruben said when he took a bite. "You'll have to start charging."
The days shimmered like a dream: small kindnesses, the thunder bird that followed me like a shadow—petulant and wild—pecking at suitors and giving me a ferocious kind of protection. I named it Little Thunder, because it sounded like the bully near the village who chases my heart into stuttering.
Then there was Isabel Olivier. She appeared as if from a bloom of silk and sunlight, all measured smiles and bright eyes—cloud-soft and dangerous. In a heartbeat Julian accepted her as his disciple.
"She used to cry in front of him," someone whispered. "Her father once asked for protection. He couldn't refuse."
And the terrible thing: she smiled at me with sugar-sweet softness and called me "sister." She told me she came to apologize for the rumors.
"Why would anyone think you took my place?" she said with false innocence.
"You're here because he chose you," I replied. "I can't blame him for a favor."
She reached for my hand, and I remembered the ending I'd read in my other life. Panic tightened in my chest.
"Do you think he loves you?" she asked quietly later. "Or me?"
"He saved your life once," I said. "You are his disciple. You're under his protection."
"Then I owe him," she breathed. "I must repay him."
Her words were a suicide pact made of courtesy. I tried to laugh, but there were nights I swallowed my own dreams and tasted iron.
"Ruben," I said one night, "help me. Pretend to court her. Show them all a performance."
He looked at me, pity tender like a petal. "Would that fix what you really want?"
"I don't know." I swallowed. "But I can't do nothing."
We never executed the plan. Instead, I took to mischief. I put hot pepper into her pastry—only a little—to make her pink and surprised at some petty humiliation, to give myself the satisfaction of being seen. It was childish. I was childish.
Julian found me with the secret recipe and the mischief undone. He looked at me, a hint of anger in his cold voice.
"Are you trying to make trouble?" he asked.
He punished me by making me care for Little Thunder—an angry, electrical bird with a temper for gods. It zapped me a dozen times a day and I cursed the justice of fate.
"Get used to it," he said once, so faint a smile I thought I imagined it.
The season turned. There was a contest among sects on Piao Miao Peak. My father Hugh Williams and my brother Liam Duncan came to watch. People lauded the Celestial Lord in white, and Isabel stood like a shimmer at his side—her silk like sunrise.
Ruben nudged me. "She's like a peacock today."
She took the crowd. When the event ended I went home, the bells inside me wanting to ring, but I found only suitors lined up like ridiculous offers—painted young men and photos of remote nephews. My father said, "Don't hang on one tree. There are many branches."
My twenty-first birthday arrived. Gifts piled high. Ruben gave me a frost-forged short sword—small and elegant. I started to like him more honestly. He seemed to be the only man who could be a small harbor against the tide of my life.
Julian's gift surprised me: a thunder bird, awkwardly supervised, gliding to perch on my shoulder. Little Thunder sniffed the air and then followed me forever after.
I began to breathe easier. Little Thunder spared me, but the world around me stumbled and scattered. The Piao Miao sect's wards were tested; monsters burst from old seals and the sky bruised with ill omens. We learned later that a forbidden artifact had been stolen from the Celestial Lord's mountain—something Isabel had moved.
We went into the wilderness. In a cavern of rotten breath and shadow she confronted me, gleaming with hatred.
"Do you think I wanted to be abandoned?" she spat. "You took him. You took everything."
"Isabel," Julian's voice came from the lip of the cave like a wind that should have been gentler. "You mustn't do this."
She laughed a laugh that had teeth. "If I can't have him, then no one will."
"I won't let you hurt her," he said simply.
"You won't stop me," she said, and lashes of her whip cracked like promises.
We fought. I thought then that revenge would be so clean as to straighten and set everything right. I swung back, grabbed her whip, and for a moment I was the victor.
"You always were a brat," she hissed, and in a desperate motion she aimed at the empty air and then toward the abyss. "If you can't see why he chose you, then fall. Die and know how I suffer."
She tried to push me off the cliff.
I did not expect the world to tilt. I fell, cold wind a blade at my face. There was a terrible detail that never existed in the text I had read: when the earth gives, even time tugs.
Then Julian moved.
"Beatrice!" he called, and as if the world itself consented he reached, breaking something ancient and quiet.
He took my weight with a single movement, hearing himself between heaven and rock—and for a moment the vegetation held its breath.
"Go," he said to us both. "I will stop this. Stay back."
"But—" Isabel screamed.
He did not look like the cold statues that sometimes pretended to be men. For the first and last time, he looked like someone who loved with a kind of terrible heat.
He turned to face the break in the world where the seals had been torn. "If the barrier must be mended, I'll mend it," he said.
"No!" I begged.
He smiled at me with a softness I hadn't seen. "Then live," he whispered.
There is no way to be fair when someone chooses themselves as the hinge upon which others' fate turns. He offered himself into the seal, his flesh folding toward the stone, until a light—white and blinding—sealed the rift with a music like a bell. The mountain took him.
We carried his body a long way. Later, we learned he had become the new living seal, a statue of flesh and stone to hold back those ancient things. People called him a saint, a sacrifice, a deliverer.
Isabel's deception came to light afterwards. She had stolen the artifact to draw forces to our doorstep and then planned to make Julian pay by exposing him to impossible choices. She had hoped to bind him to her through obligation. Instead, she had promised ruin.
She had not counted on the world's taste for justice.
The tribunal was held in the main square, before every sect and every person who had come at the summons. They had a scaffold of pale stone, and the weather was mercilessly clear, as if the sky wanted witnesses.
"Isabel Olivier," the high arbiter said. His voice rolled across the square like a tide. "You stand accused of treason against every living soul here. To open a seal, to revel in the unleashed horrors, to cause death—these are crimes of the worst kind."
She was brought forward, hands bound, and her face wore the mask of righteous rage.
"I did what I had to!" she shouted. "He abandoned me! He favored her! I suffered for him!"
"You used forbidden means," the arbiter said. "You sought power through pain. For that, you will be made to remember."
They stripped away the silk of her rank, and the crowd leaned in. I watched people I had once thought cruel now hold their breath. The world had quieted to listen.
"Let the punishment begin," the arbiter said.
They dragged her to the central pillar—the old magistrate's column where traitors had once been scourged. They bound her upright, and placed a crown of iron at her brow, not to crush but to make every word she said ring on metal.
"Why do this in public?" she spat at me. "What pleasure do you take in this?"
The crowd's murmur rippled like water. The punishment was not torture for cruelty's sake. It was exposure—worse in its way—because it showed the truth.
"First," the arbiter intoned, "she will walk the street of names."
They paraded her through the market square where vendors had once sold their wares. "Look," the crowd was told, "at every face you have wronged."
People wept at the sight of those who had been injured by the demons she freed. A woman stepped forward, scarred, who had been trapped in the forest that night, her child still missing. She spat at Isabel, who tried to step away. Her dagger clattered on the dusty stone; her eyes were wide, then small.
"Second," the arbiter continued, "she will sit upon the bench of lies."
They made her sit where liars always sat, while witnesses climbed the dais and told, in full voice, everything they had seen: the theft, the whispers, the charm, the trickery, the attempts to shift blame. Each voice was a hammer. Isabel's face shifted from anger to incredulity to a gaunt, forced denial.
"I did not—" she began, then stopped. People around her began to murmur evidence: "You met the dealer at dawn." "You bought the binding wax." "You tested the seal's strength."
Her mouth moved like a puppet that had lost its strings. Her eyes, once bright as a star's, failed. The crowd recorded every accusation; some took out brushes and wrote the account on slates for the record.
"Now," the arbiter said, his voice low, "we give you what you sought: a mirror."
They brought forth a polished disc—old as the mountain—that reflected not only a face but a thousand little truths. In its silvered skin, Isabel saw herself as the ruined shell she had become: the proud disciple who had traded mercy for obsession; the woman who wanted a man to owe her everything; the girl who had paid nothing for the lives she broke.
She stared into it and first faked a smile, then clutched at the iron collar, and her facade crashed.
"You think me a monster," she cried at me, wild-eyed. "You are the one who made me like this!"
A child nearby shouted, "She used our harvest as bait!" and others nodded and talked of small cruelties that had become a mosaic of betrayal.
As I watched, the change in her was terrifyingly human: the blustering arrogance dissolved into disbelief, then into denial, and finally into a raw, ugly collapse. Her knees buckled. She reached for the crowd as if for mercy.
"Stop!" she begged. "Please—no judge would sentence me to this! I didn't mean—"
People who had loved her as a bright pupil now looked away. The ones who had whispered gossip now stepped forward and told of her spiteful texts, her midnight bargains, the way she'd smiled while bargaining for other people's suffering.
At one point she looked right at me. The silence between us was as loud as thunder.
"Why did you report me?" she rasped.
"Because you needed to be seen," I said.
"Seen for what I am?" she whispered, a laugh that sounded like falling glass. "What I am is nothing. He loved me. He loved me, and then he chose her."
"You chose a way that killed him," I said. "You used an old bargain to draw monsters. You set him a test that could not be passed."
She staggered. "You knew—"
"I knew what the story said," I said, truth like a stone in my mouth. "I came from a book that told me how this ended. I tried to change it. You—" I could see the old me, furious and small—"you tried to remake him into some debt collector of the heart."
Around her people spat, whispered, and some even filmed. The cameras were merciless. Someone waved a hand. "Let the record show."
She fell into phases of reaction. First the sharp cruelty: "You liar!" she screamed at me, trying to summon control. Then confusion: "How could he—" as if a man could be a ledger rather than a living heart. Then the slow crumbling: she covered her face and sobbed, because the crowd had become a mirror she could no longer deny.
"Would you like to ask for mercy?" the arbiter asked, quietly.
She reached for words and found only ragged breath. Then she started to howl, a long animal noise, a child with no shelter.
"They escorted her to the Pillar of Memory after all this," someone commented beside me. "They'll force her to watch images—every life troubled by her actions."
"She will rebuild," another said, bloodless. "Or she will watch them rebuild and carry that weight forever."
When the punishment ended, it wasn't with cheers. It closed with a hush and that awful compassion that comes when a crowd is not sure whether to pity or to punish. People left, their steps making a soft rain.
Isabel's humiliation had the slow cruelty of a story being read aloud in front of a room full of people who had once loved the villain.
She, who had chosen self-importance over life, was made to sit in a city that no longer honored her. She slunk away after the tribunal, head bowed, the iron collar gone but not the stain. The crowd's whispers followed her like birds.
Later, when I saw her again—bound upon a pillar, tended but not freed—she looked at me with an expression that was two parts hatred, one part pleading, and all of it utterly broken.
"I wanted him to see me," she whispered. "I wanted him to love me."
"He did," I murmured, and the truth was both a balm and a blade. "He loved you enough to save the world. He just couldn't be the man you demanded."
She crumpled slightly, like paper burned at the edges.
The world moved on. We buried him with music that tasted of stone and rain. People spoke of his sacrifice for years, and someone placed a stone likeness of him at the mountain's lip—a living statue that would hold the seals as long as it could.
Ruben and I married in a simpler way than I had imagined. He held me as if we were fragile things treasured: careful, stubborn, and fierce. We shared jokes about Little Thunder stealing the wedding cake.
"You used to hate me," he said once, while the courtyard held a hundred paper lanterns. "You were always too proud to fall into kindness."
"I was only afraid," I answered. "Afraid of dying in a book's spine."
"You survived anyway," he said. "That's worth a festival."
On the day we wed, people cheered. Latched with laughter, my father kissed my forehead. Liam clapped until his palms were red. Isabel was not there—few wanted to see her still—and yet the memory of her made the space of my joy more complicated.
I kept one thing on my pillow: a peach pastry, now a talisman of small victories. Little Thunder curled on my shoulder, now tender as a kitten. And somewhere on the mountain the statue of Julian Winter stood like a promise and a wound both.
Sometimes, when the day folded into night, I would find a single crabapple blossom placed at my window in the morning—Julian's small, quiet language that desire and devotion could be expressed without possessive cruelty.
"Do you remember," Ruben would say, tucking the blossom into my hair, "you bit me on the cheek that night you left the peak?"
"I still think you looked like a blushing shrimp," I would reply, and he would laugh into my hair.
There are losses you do not get over. There are people who will not return. But there are also people who will teach you how to be wanted without being owned.
And so I lived, carrying the memory of a man who became a seal so others could sleep. He was never mine to keep, but his last glance, the quiet favor of a frozen smile at my face, stayed like a warm coin at the bottom of my pocket.
I learned to treasure small things: a pastry not poisoned, a thunder bird that learned gentle, a man who chose me for being me.
And when winds came from the mountain, I would stand at the window and watch his likeness carved into stone, and laugh a little at how very human my life had become.
The End
— Thank you for reading —