Face-Slapping10 min read
"I woke as the fragile daughter — then I blew her world apart"
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"I am awake," I croaked, and the copper mirror gave me a false smile.
"I thought you would sleep longer," Half-Summer said, fussing with the sleeve at my wrist.
I pushed my hair back with careful, tiny fingers. "Half-Summer, tell me straight. Who has been taking my gifts?"
Half-Summer bowed, eyes wide. "Miss Elsa, Miss Margherita brought Prince Dolan and they went through your room—"
"She took them," I finished, tasting the word like an old belt. "Good. Then she will give them back."
Half a breath later the screen of the outer room slid, and Prince Dolan Huang stepped in like a cold wind. He wore black, and his voice cut the air. "Elsa Roberts, don't trouble yourself. Margherita only ever wanted to help."
"Help?" I put my chin up in the smallest, most fragile way I could. "Prince Dolan, would you be so kind as to tell my sister that taking a gift for your fiancée is wrong?"
Dolan looked at Margherita, who stood white and soft as a cloud and sharp as a knife. She smiled the smile people built altars to. "Your Highness," she murmured, "you are too kind to Elsa."
Dolan's mouth twitched. "If it eases the house, I will speak plainly. Miss Margherita, return what is taken."
"I will," she sang. "Of course I will." Her eyes said something else.
"No," I said, and I did something I had never done in my old life. I smiled like I had practiced in a mirror. "Half-Summer, fetch the list of gifts. Put them in order."
Half-Summer blinked and ran.
"You came so soon," Margherita whispered when she thought no one would hear, but I heard. "You always come back for me."
"You mean Dolan comes back," I said, the words like pebbles. "Not you."
He fixed me with a look that was warm and strange. My chest did the odd little thing it had promised to do when the wish fell through my head in a club months ago. I had wished for someone to love me and pet me. I had never meant a prince.
Days passed in a blur of small scenes and long speeches. I learned how to bend a smile into armor. I learned where the books were kept and who lied. I bought the cheap shops on the rumor that Fifth Prince Ethan Ma's team were selling property. I did it with a grin and coin, because coin is power even when you are a woman who wears silk and fans.
"You're spending all of it," Half-Summer said once, stacking ledgers by the window.
"I am," I answered. "I buy the future now."
I did something else. I played a small trick that the old me — the gym coach who had never bowed for anyone — would have laughed at. I put a sleeping powder on the collar of the robe Dolan would brush by. He collapsed slow as a puppet without his strings. That night he woke gasping in my curtained room, cheeks red with surprise and embarrassment.
"You planned this," he said, trying to say it like he was angry.
"I did," I said. "Now you owe me a favor."
He glared and then laughed, breath hot against my ear. "A thousand favors," he said, pretending to sign his name. "Sign this."
It was an IOU with Dolan's mark. I smiled and signed.
We traded small things like that. He brought me a chest of silver. I bought shophouses on the cheap. People whispered. My ledger grew fat.
"Would you like help with the books?" he asked one night, leaning over a table covered in ink.
"Yes," I said. "And don't say you don't have money again."
He folded his hands and watched me. "I have money. I have a name. I have nothing else I want until you're safe."
I used my new wealth in ways no one expected. When a fever spread through the servants, I did not hide. I quarantined the sick in the cold, unused western courtyard. I ordered lime for the floors. I burned herbs until the smoke made everyone's eyes sting. I paid surgeons. I paid more. "Half-Summer," I told my maid, "bring every blanket. And tie the doors."
Dolan stood in the doorway and watched like a priest at a miracle. "I will tell the court what you did," he said softly. "You saved lives."
I answered, "No. I want to earn my margin. I will help people and they will remember whose hand put food at their mouth when there is no prince to do it for them."
His smile was small and terribly honest. "I will remember."
The city came to us like a tide. When I went out with Dolan to hand medicine to a mother who had lost three children, I took the man's hand in plain view. "You are brave," he said, and the words were a small bell. He took the blame for my meddling and the credit when the emperor needed a face to sell a cure. Father — Chancellor Gustavo Foley — did not know what to do with his youngest. He watched me with the puzzled affection of a man who raised a stray and dressed it in silk.
At the heart of our small courtly wars stood Margherita. She invented soft cries and sharp traps. She laughed while the knife slid. She pushed servants until a poor woman in our house, Chayue, took a fall that led her to the prison, and then she told the world Chayue had been a liar.
That lie had teeth. For weeks, when the ledger showed missing sums, Margherita's handwriting was the seal. She signed receipts with a sly, sure stroke. She tested who would burn when the house caught a small fire in the records room. She watched the stacks go up and smiled.
I collected small things like a spider builds a nest. A torn sleeve. A broken jar with red powder. A bit of rope. A ledger with a smear. I had people who owed me favors — idle watchmen, a magistrate named Yale Dillon who liked good tea. Yale agreed to sit with me in the dim light and lay out what I needed.
"Bring witnesses," he said. "Bring money for travel. Bring proof."
I brought all three.
We chose the high day — Father Gustavo's birthday feast. The whole house would be there: relatives, servants, the chancellor's friends, even the judge Yale and my silver-tongued brother-in-law Braxton Floyd. I dressed ivory and played small and weak in public. I passed a handkerchief across my throat and let it fall wide.
Halfway through the banquet, when the incense hung like fog and a hundred people chewed and watched, Yale stood.
"May I have the master's attention?" he said. The hall quieted as if a warning bell had rung. I stood, hands folded like a portrait.
Yale opened a tablet and projected a list, one by one. "Receipts signed by Miss Margherita for the purchase of silver. Payments made to the brother, Braxton Floyd. Large sums moved at night. Witnesses saw her in the records room."
A murmur rose. Margherita's face stayed calm for a second too long.
"Ridiculous," she said. "This is slander."
"No," I said, and I could feel the room's eyes burn like a fever. "Listen."
Half-Summer handed me a small bundle of letters. I unrolled them and read, voice soft, slow.
"—give me the gift list. I will bring it to the prince. He will support me. He will make sure the father never questions me."
Paper met cloth like a slap. Margherita's mouth thinned. She moved like a doll whose strings were being cut.
Yale spread more pages. "This is the palace's record. See here the transfer to the Fifth Prince's agents. Here the broken jar with traces of camphor and sleeping powder."
Margherita's smile cracked. "Fake!" she cried. "I never—"
"You asked Chayue to stop the carriage at midnight," Yale told her, "and you paid the driver to plant the medicines at Miss Elsa's room. Your hand is on the ledger."
A long silence starved the feast. Someone rose to move, then sat like they had not seen anything. The chancellor's face, if I may be honest, was a small grief.
"Margherita," he said, voice low, "is this true?"
She looked at Father. For a breath she was a daughter. For the next she was a cold thing. "Father, I—"
The first sound was not her voice. It was the shudder of the crowd. A servant dropped her cup. "She lied," breathed someone near me. "She always lied."
Margherita lashed out. "You cannot—" Then she dropped, because a servant handed a small lantern to a page and the page walked to the hall's center, turned it, and the projected image on the screen was a diary, open, with her handwriting.
"She wrote this," Half-Summer said it as a knife.
Margherita's expression moved in a quick, ugly flight: shock, then fury, then denial. "This is fake. I am your daughter. I am the future prince's wife. This is a scheme."
"Bring the man who bought the record," Yale demanded.
They found Braxton standing at a table of empty cups. He went white and tried to run. Four servants held him.
"Dolan," I said softly. "Would you say something?"
He rose as if his name pushed him up, walked to the table, and placed my signed IOU before the crowd. "Dolan Huang here," he said, voice steady like iron, "signed this. I owe Miss Elsa twenty thousand taels. I did not buy those shops to trick her."
Gasps. Phones — well, people didn't have phones in the old time, but hands moved like capturing instruments: scribbling, eyes wide, tongues tasting.
Margherita staggered. Her face crumpled in a way years of practice had not taught her to hide. For the first time she was a small animal. "No," she whispered. "You can't do this. Father, stop them. Stop them!"
"Margherita," Father said, and his hand shook, "come here."
She refused. She tried to keep the mask. "I will give every coin back."
"Stand," Yale ordered. "Kneel."
"No," she said, the word a knife. "You — you'll bring everyone to shame."
"Shame?" The room laughed, hard and cold. "The shame is your making, not ours."
They made her kneel on the carved floor in front of the long table where meat glistened and wine cooled. Servants tensed like birds. The chancellor's men stepped aside, but their faces told a thousand careful things. One by one, faces in the hall moved in toward the spectacle: cousins, distant wives, merchants who had given loans, the judge, and the guards who had brought papers. A crowd that would gossip for years.
"Tell them, Margherita," I said. "Tell them why Chayue died in the prison loft."
Margherita's face went pale as boiled rice. "I — I never—"
"Tell me why you pestered the kitchen with special broth that would make a child sick," Yale pressed.
She stammered. "It was — it was to test loyalty."
"Test?" The words echoed.
She broke then. Tears came like small, noisy stones. "I thought I deserved the life— I thought if I made others small, I would be big."
"Big?" Father said. "I raised daughters, not thieves."
Her pride fell out of her mouth in a slow, wet sound. She began to shake. "Please," she begged, voice high and thin like a glass. "Please, Father, don't ruin me. They tricked me! They—"
"Who tricked you?" I asked. I kept my voice low and terrible.
"No one," she said. "No one but me."
Her denial turned to sobs. The crowd smelled blood and they pounced. A cousin spat, "You ruined Chayue!" A merchant whose gift had been stolen snorted. People who had eaten at our table moved away as if from a sickness.
Margherita fell forward and hit her face on the floor. Her make-up smeared like wet clay.
"Stop her," someone screamed. "Get her away."
They dragged her out, and the street outside filled with people. They surrounded Margherita as if she were a spectacle. Laughter, cries, whispers: "She took gifts," "Look at her hands," "She cried when I gave money." Half the city smelled the fall.
She went from defiance to pleading. "Please," she screamed, "please do not put this on me. I will give back every tael. I will kneel at every door. I will—"
"Get up," Dolan said. He stepped forward and lifted his hand in a strange, new kind of power.
He did not touch her with violence. He only let the light fall on her. "Margherita," he said, and his voice had iron in it now, "you hurt people. You lied. You poisoned a servant. You burned books. You hid the ledger. You gambled with other people's lives."
She sank to her knees again, the sounds of the crowd a hundred knives.
"You will stand trial," Yale said. "There will be no pardon from me." He called two scribes to record every name. "And you will return what you took."
Margherita's denial broke like a thin shell. She begged. "Please, please, forgive me. I will—" Her plea grew thin and small, losing power with each word. People in the crowd began to sing the names of their wrongs back to her. "You stole my son's dowry!" "You told my wife to let the bread burn!" The calls were small cruelties that made a long drumbeat.
I watched, hands still and small, and let the scene close like a book. I had wanted proof, and the proof had bled out into banners and curses. I had wanted her stopped. The throne of my father had been shaken. The ledger sat on the table, open, there like a mirror of truth.
When they led Margherita away to the big hall where records were kept, she fell to the floor and begged on her knees, voice cracked. "Please, anyone, don't leave me. I will beg the prince. I will do anything."
"Beg from the people you hurt," Dolan said quietly.
Her tears fell into the wood like small coins. The guards tightened their hold. Men pointed. Women watched with cold faces. The feast continued in this new mood, with morsels eaten like penance.
Afterward, people would say the video — the sketch made from the judge's notes — ran through the city for a week. People would say she was ruined. She knelt on the long rug until a court made its decision, until father looked at her with a face older than any of us.
I did not dance on her ruin. I sat with Half-Summer and traced the shapes of a new ledger. "We did it," she whispered, eyes bright with small danger.
"We did," I said. "But this is only the first knock on the door."
Later that night, Father stood by the window and whispered my name. "Elsa," he said, old and earnest, "I was blind. Forgive your old man."
"I already have," I lied. Then I smiled the small smile of someone who had learned how to weigh power. "We will set things right."
I kept my word. I opened schools on the shops I bought. I paid wages to the people who had been cheated. I taught the guards what quarantine meant. I gave the money needed to bury the dead properly. People came to me with children. Dolan came, not with commands, but with his hand warm and real.
And Margherita? The public punishment had left scars. She begged and was shunned. People spat when she passed. The city closed to her as if a curtain had dropped. She lost her place at the table.
Months later, the court decided: she would pay back a ledger's worth of goods and resign her household privileges. She would apologize publicly and serve under the magistrate in humble work. Her face had no masks left. She asked for mercy every morning; the city already decided the sentence.
I never raised my voice with joy. I simply moved my pieces, one by one, until the house felt safe to me.
"You could have left," Dolan said once, fingers at my chin.
"And be loved by no one?" I asked. He kissed my forehead like a man and a friend. "No. I am not fragile anymore."
I learned to put one foot in front of the other like a woman who had once carried weights for a living. I trained with a teacher named Isaac Jorgensen in the old square, practiced slow hands and calm breath. I ate when I wanted. I kept ledgers and bought more shops. People came to work for me because I paid them fairly.
When the city finally forgot the sound of Margherita's cry, they began to remember other things: the clinics I built, the lessons on quarantine, the inns cleaned, the houses that did not leak. Dolan smiled like someone who had held a comet in his hands and watched it not burn.
"Stay," he said to me one evening as lanterns bobbed over the river. "Stay and rule with me."
I looked at him and then at the river. "I stay," I said. "But I rule my own house first."
He laughed and kissed my hair. "I will help."
Half a year later, at Father's birthday feast, the house was quiet and safe. People ate well. The judge Yale sat with his tea and nodded. The shops thrived. And Margherita? She worked in the records hall, hand inked and head bowed, a pen person who could not meet my eyes.
I had wanted a soft life. I had wished to be cared for. But being cared for was not the same as being small. I had used my soft body once as armor; now I used my mind as a blade.
"Thank you," Half-Summer said, fingering the edge of a new ledger.
"No thanks," I answered. "We did what was right. That is enough."
She smiled and bowed like a true maid. "Miss Elsa, the people will speak of your name."
"Good," I said. "Let them speak. Let them tell what a woman can do when she refuses to be a victim."
And when night fell and the house hushed, I closed my eyes and let sleep come. The mirror stared back at me, but this time it reflected not a sad girl but a woman who had taken everything back.
The End
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