Revenge15 min read
"I woke up in her body — and found a baby under the dead moon"
ButterPicks21 views
"I can't feel my own name."
Rain hit the tile like a hand, hard and steady.
I opened my eyes and tasted iron. My throat burned as if someone had scrubbed it raw with lemon. The room smelled of wet cloth and cold skin. Lightning made the world flicker into white, then back into shadow.
A woman lay beside me on the straw pallet. Her face was pale as moonstone. Her belly was gone flat, a crude patch of stitches and blood-dark fabric.
"Is she breathing?" someone whispered.
I sat up. My neck hurt. My fingers were small and, for a terrible instant, I didn't know whose hands those were.
"You're alive?" a voice said close. It was a woman's voice — the guard Jaycee Ahmad. Her eyes were wide. She kept her hand on the baby wrapped at my chest. "You opened your eyes. Miss Jolene—"
"Jolene?" My voice came out like gravel. The name struck me like a bell. Jolene Lewis. A wealthy foolish girl, the gossip said. A little noble lady who laughed too loud and spent silk as if silk were air. Jolene's face hovered in my head like a mask. The rest of my life — the life before this — was Mia Lopez: thirty-three, a sharp mind in the wrong world, a daughter who had been a promise and a bargaining chip.
I remembered the operating table, the cold light, the voice telling me not to move. I remembered a needle. I remembered a blade. Then black like a closed eye.
And now I had opened an eye in another woman's body.
"Who are you?" Jaycee breathed. "Where did you come from?"
"My name is..." I swallowed. I could say Mia. But Mia Lopez would sound like a lie in this room. "Call me Jolene," I said. "For now."
Lightning lit the room again. The pregnant woman's face — Miriam Butler — looked younger than the portraits in the town hall. Her mouth held a gentleness I had seen once in a photograph of a woman I had loved as a child: she had smiled at a lost boy, wiped his tear like he mattered. I realized with a panic like cold water that the son in my arms — the small squirming life who had just cried the loudest, like a promise — was the only link left to that warm face.
"Take him," I told Jaycee. My voice was still strange, but my hands were steady. "Take him away. Keep him safe."
Jaycee's fingers trembled as she took the wrapped bundle. "To the Ning Prince?" she asked. "To Declan Mercier?"
"To Declan," I said. "Find Declan. Tell him — tell him we couldn't keep her alive. Tell him—"
She didn't wait for me to finish. She vanished into the rain like a shadow that belonged to nobody.
Wind threw itself at the temple doors. Two women — old housekeepers — sat in the doorway and whispered like dry leaves.
"They're saying she sat up," one muttered. "The dead sat up."
"The gods are angry," the other said. "Or fools. It's a bad night."
I stood. My neck hurt where a rope had been. A memory came back in a hot flash: my throat under someone's hand. Then the plank step. The swing of a body. They had made a show of it: the rope, the quiet. They had wanted me to be dead because a child was inconvenient and a wife expensive.
I had not planned to be the one to take the child. In my life as Mia, I had been a businesswoman who made numbers obey. I had not known the shape of a newborn. But whatever I had been, I was awake now. Someone had given me breath twice.
I sewed the woman's torn belly with hands that knew how to hold a needle. My palms smelled of blood and iron. I held that wet, folded life against my chest and felt something twist in me like thread through a needlehole.
Outside, the world was on fire with thunder. Inside, I made a promise I had not known I would make.
"Who did this?" I asked the sleeping woman with a voice low as a promise.
No answer came. I folded her hands over her breast and closed her eyes as if they could stay closed. I left the room the way a ghost leaves: light-footed and impossible to pin down.
*
They came in a rush: the whispered news, the pounding feet.
At the Wei estate, I was accused before I had learned to protest. Flynn Davenport — the lord of that grand, hollow house, father in name — arrived with a face that said duty and relief in equal measure. Jolie Ilyin — the new wife with a smile too sharp to soften — walked at his elbow and wore compassion like costume jewelry.
"You will tell me again," Flynn said. He did not shout. He never shouted. He folded his hands as if folding a map. "Tell me what happened. Tell me why my wife is dead."
"She and the lady argued by the lotus pond," an informer said. "Jolene ran. The lady fell in. They dragged her out, but she..." he swallowed, "she was dead. Jolene then... she hung herself."
The black-robed attendants bowed to Flynn like they bowed to weather. The words were quick as knives. I felt them in my ribs. I felt the weight of a thousand small plots — a rope, a pond, a running girl. I had to decide whether I would be the girl who let them lay my life down like a broken toy.
I wanted to laugh at their script. I wanted to spit. But my throat was still tender. I had risen in a body that had been strangled. I had sewn a woman back together with my hands. Their script had gaps, and gaps were doors.
"Is that your testimony?" Flynn asked me.
"I was... unconscious," I said. The word slid out. "I woke later. I tried to help. But my throat—"
"You did not try to save your mother," Jolie said. She smiled small and sharp. "You ran away, and you came back to play dead."
My jaw tightened. I had a hand around truth I did not yet know how to shape. I kept one thought like a stone in my pocket: the child.
"Take her away," Flynn said at last. "Bind her. She will answer to the magistrate."
They did not read me my rights. They never had to.
They wanted me taken. They wanted a story with a neat end: a dead mother, a guilty daughter, the house safe. They wanted a clean sweep. They wanted the world to look exactly as they had arranged it.
I remembered my old life, my own cold hands on a surgical scalpel. I remembered how my father used me as a spare part. I remembered the ledger of favors and payments that bought me the right to breathe. And I understood another ledger now: every favor owed me, every promise uttered in the dark, every small kindness measured in gold.
I let them bind me. I let them cut me out of my world like a bad stitch. I would not beg. I would not beg for a life that had not been mine.
"You will take care of my mother," I said to Jolie then, with a voice as quiet as a blade. "If you loved her, bury her where she loved. Do not let her be someone you used."
Jolie's smile didn't falter. "She belongs with the Wei house and its honor," she said.
"We'll see," I said. No one believed a dead girl. No one ever did.
*
The prison was dark and smelled like damp ropes and old leather. I sat on the floor and let rain memory roll across my skull like ice.
Visits came, as they always do for the guilty — sometimes pity, sometimes profit. Grant Hoffmann, the merchant uncle, came first with eyes like an accountant's — careful, worried. Kingston Flowers, the simple young noble who loved his sister like a child, came with a bunch of wet lotus like an offering because children do not understand death in the same way.
"Jolene," Grant said. "What happened? How —"
"It isn't me," I told him. "It's not what you think."
He touched my shoulder like a man who wanted to bless a broken coin. "We will help. I will pay. Money fixes—"
"Money doesn't fix bones that rot," I said. "It won't stitch what they want to unmake."
Kingston knelt, his hands awkward. "Sister," he said. He called me sister the way sun calls morning. He believed without needing proof. He tried to untie the rope and couldn't.
"Go," I told them. "Keep him safe." I meant the child Declan now had. I meant everyone I thought deserved a chance at a name.
A day passed or three songs of the prison bells; time in the dark has no shape. Then a man appeared at the barred door, darker than the room. Declan Mercier stepped in like a quiet storm.
"Who is he?" the jailer asked as if asking for weather.
"Declan?" I said the name aloud. It felt like an animal. He had come like a hand you hope belongs to a friend.
Declan pulled himself to lean like a tree against the door. He had been a soldier, a prince whose record was made of sand and iron. People called him cruel, or shrewd; I called him someone who survived.
"You are alive," he said, looking at me as if perplexed to find the wrong thing breathing.
"It took me two lives to get here," I answered. "One was stolen."
He looked at me for a long time. "You are Jolene Lewis," he said.
"I am," I said. "And I am not. I am Mia Lopez, once. But right now I am a woman who will not let her mother's death be wrapped like a miracle and hidden."
Declan nodded once. "Your mother helped me once when I was a boy and broke in the cold," he said. "She gave me bread and a place to rest. I will not let this end with her sodden in a pond."
"Will you help?" I asked.
"I will reopen the case," he said. "I will not let them bury this. But hear me — you will survive only if you grow teeth."
"Grow?" I repeated.
"Grow sharp." He knuckled the bars. "You die once, and many people call it luck. Die twice, and the world forgets your face. If you want justice, you will need resolve, and you will need allies. I will help. But you will have to choose. Let the dead rest, and live like a weapon to cut the living."
"I will," I said. I had been a weapon before in my own life. The idea of using myself that way felt like coming home.
That night Declan left, but he left a promise heavy as iron on the bench: "Tomorrow I will examine the body."
*
The trial — the untrial — was a theater. Flynn stood in the crowd like a man who had eaten the moon and expected it to be his.
Declan Mercier sat like winter, and the assembly fell silent as if snow might listen. The nuns gathered in a tight circle. Old fears stirred. I watched every face as if cataloging chance.
"Bring the witnesses," Declan said.
First came the household maid, a slight woman named Chiran, who had loyally followed the lady for years. Chiran's voice shook but she told the story: "They argued. The lady fell. Jolene ran."
That was the script they had written.
"Next." Declan's voice cut.
"Nimue," a small-nun-child from the pond told the court when her turn came. Her eyelids wavered like a candle, then steadied. "I wasn't at night prayer. I hid in the lotus boat. I saw a man come up from the water. He pulled Lady Miriam under. I saw it. I was too afraid to say."
The room went still like a held breath.
"Who was this man?" Declan asked.
The little nun pointed with a tiny finger. "He was the steward. Tucker Pereira. He came from the house. He had mud on his sleeves."
Tucker Pereira, the house steward and Flynn's lifelong servant, went white as paper. He glared at Nimue with a face like a caged animal.
"You're lying!" Flynn barked.
"There are others," Nimue said. "Later he tied Jolene and pretended she hung herself. I saw him."
The guard faces shifted. In a building built of used lies, a child's truth makes the stones tremble.
Declan ordered a proper autopsy. The state coroner came wielding a knowledge that was clean as steel. Miriam Butler's lungs held no water. Her face bore bruises and finger-marks. Her throat had been squeezed by human hands. The coroner opened Miriam's chest and showed a heart that had not drowned but had been silenced.
"She was smothered, then drowned if someone tried to hide the evidence," the coroner said plainly. "She did not die by accident."
The room dissolved into noise. Flynn's posture blinked and shattered. Jolie's composure stuck like porcelain cracked.
I walked to the center and breathed in the moment like air. "I said she wasn't drowned," I said aloud. "I said it before they cut me open."
"Why didn't you tell them?" Flynn snarled.
"Because I was strangled into silence as well," I answered. "Because they wanted a neat story."
"You accuse me," Flynn hissed. "You accuse my house."
"You set your children to inherit," I said. "You arranged the silence. Tucker acted for profit. Jolie, you who wanted a future, did you think killing a woman would be like trimming a hedge?"
Jolie's face flushed. "How dare you—"
"It doesn't matter what I dare," Declan said. He had stood and walked to the front like a blade sliding from a sheath. "We will ask Tucker to explain himself."
They brought Tucker. He was older, his hands stained by duty. He scavenged excuses like scraps of cloth.
"Tucker," Declan asked, cold as a winter river, "did you drag Miriam into the pond?"
Tucker stayed silent. Then, under the sharpness of Declan's gaze and the child's memory like a bell in his ears, he began to talk.
"It was to keep the house safe," he said, and every word was a confession dipped in fear. "The mistress— she was a risk. The young lady stirred storms. The lady's belly was a bargaining point. Jolie offered money. The lord approved. I did as told. I— I could not see the harm save in the moment. I panicked with power."
"Why kill Jolene?" Kingston whispered.
"Because she might tell," Tucker said. He looked at me then with something like pleading. "We made it look like a suicide."
"Why?" Declan asked.
"For the lord's children," Tucker said. "For the house. For shelter. For pay."
The court closed like a trap around them. Flynn's face lost its human color. Jolie looked like a woman who had been sewn into a mask and forgotten how to smile without it. The house's well-planned excuses fell apart like rotten wood.
"Then you are complicit too, Jolie Ilyin and Flynn Davenport," Declan said slowly, the words like metal thrown into water. "You ordered a life traded for your secure future."
Jolie went white. She pounded a fist into her palm. "We did what we had to! The world is not kind to us either!"
"That is not law," Declan said. "That is greed."
In the crowd people breathed like blown glass. The magistrate was a mouse who suddenly found a hawk in his lap. The law swung forward and took its harvest.
Tucker begged. He begged for money and life, and it was not granted. Declan, who had the power of an angry god in a small man's chest, had him taken away. They said Tucker would die for what he had done. He did, with the kind of quick, terrible justice that leaves no clean edges.
Then the other blow followed: public shaming. Letters were read where Jolie had plotted quietly with Tucker. Flynn's handwriting promised favors; Jolie's signatures glittered like poison. Witnesses who had been bought with small comforts were found and named. The household's supporters either vanished or told lies that splintered when set against evidence.
I stood in the center of the room like a woman the fire had changed. I had someone who believed me. I had a prince who cut through lies for the cost they were worth.
"Your house is ruined," Declan told Flynn. "You will lose your titles, your lands. We will make sure no one ever trusts a Davenport line with responsibility on its head again."
Flynn's face collapsed. His knuckles whitened. Jolie's composure cracked into a sound like broken crockery.
"Take them away," Declan said.
They were led away in shame. The crowd hissed at them like a pantry at rats. I felt a cold peace.
"I will, however," Declan said to me privately later under the battered shade of the nunnery wall, "be responsible for the child."
"I will not let him live as a secret," I said. "He is Miriam's blood."
"Then he will live with me," Declan said. "Call him whatever you like." He hesitated, then smiled like a man who'd thought of a small mercy. "Santiago Farrell."
"That's a soldier's name," I said.
"May it make him brave," Declan said.
He turned and left me there, rain gone and the sun brittle and bright as a coin. I had survived and I had a promise. But the world is not healed by one triumph.
*
The spectacle at Flynn's ruin was a public unraveling. Jolie and Flynn were stripped of honor and privileges. Land titles were reassigned. They shrank as people laughed in that dangerous, clean way people laugh when a superior falls from a height. I watched. Each laugh felt like a small stone thrown at an old portrait and I smiled quietly.
But the job wasn't finished. The child would need safety, a name, a place to grow with no whisper of what had taken place. Declan's offer to register him as his ward and give him the name Santiago Farrell was, in the strange new logic of the world, a shield.
"You will let him call me brother," Declan said with a small grin when we went to visit the child in Declan's house. "It will be easier for me. And for him."
"Brother," I said. The word felt strange, tender. "Very well. Brother Declan."
The child looked up at me with eyes that held no history and a trust like a blank page. I kissed his forehead. He smelled of milk and warm safety. I wanted to press my cheek against him and memorize everything: the swell of his jaw, the nape of his neck, the small line near his ear. I wanted to keep him like a talisman.
"Send him with a nurse I trust," I told Declan. "A woman who knows the world. I will visit."
"You will also learn to change the way the world voices its rules," he said.
I laughed, but there was steel in it. "I already know most of the rules that matter."
Declan and I argued in small ways and large ways after that. He pushed, I pushed back. He wanted me in his house; I wanted the child outside his web of titles. In the end I accepted a compromise: Santiago would grow in Declan's household, but with boundaries I set. He would be Declan's charge, but not Declan's heir. He would be my brother in name, and I would be his sister in guardianship.
There is irony enough in being the woman who had tried to die and became the guardian of the generation to come. I kept thinking of the old life — the ledgers and cold spoons — and knew that revenge is rarely quick and never sweet. It is a long accounting. The people who had taken Miriam's life and tried to bury her would feel the slow unspooling of all they'd sewn together.
My first act after the public humiliation was not violent. It was legal and low — a spending audit of the Wei household, letters, names of subordinate men who had been paid to keep mouths shut. I had help: Declan's men, Grant's ledgers, Kingston's simple but solid love. The paperwork was a web that grew teeth.
Jolie's father had lent her money; he lost his patience when his daughter's schemes became a liability. Flynn's creditors gathered like crows. Land was sold off under pressure. Noble friends cut lines of credit. Shame is money's shadow; it follows those who pay for reputation.
Then there was the social end: public readings of accountability. Names were spoken aloud. Men shuffled. Women who had laughed at Miriam's rumpled kindness now looked down at their sleeves and pretended there was a splinter. People like to forget their past cruelties. They like to look up and pretend the light at the top is their doing.
I ensured there would be no forgetting. I invited witnesses to read, and I invited those who had been bought to say what they'd done. The world turns on small admissions. One by one, the tapestry of the Wei house unraveled into confession.
At the end, when Flynn was led away to exile and Jolie to a convent where her smiles would be watched, I walked into the orchard where Miriam had once sat and where the new grave lay beneath an almond tree. The flowers had already fallen, a soft rain of white on black earth.
I knelt at the border of the mound and smoothed a palm over the rough stones. Santiago — the boy who had no knowledge yet of what we'd done for him — reached up and took my fingers. His small hand around mine was a claim and a compass.
"You will hear a truth, little one," I told him. "You will hear what they did, and why some people can be terrible. But you will also learn what it means to stand for others."
He cooed and slept in the brightness like a small sun.
Declan stood a moment away, his silhouette like a man the world had not yet managed. "You didn't go easy," he said.
"I don't do easy," I replied. "I do right. I take what I must."
He smiled as if to the world itself. "Then we are dangerous in different ways."
We buried Miriam where she had loved to walk. The ritual was small and human. Kingston wept openly and clumsily. Grant laid a ledger with a ribbon on the grave as if even numbers could be love. Declan placed a wreath and said nothing. He kept his face lined by wars I'd never seen.
"I will make sure he never thinks blood decides fate," I murmured.
"You will teach him fear of cruelty," Declan said. "You will teach him to be wary."
"I will teach him courage," I said.
Later, alone, I walked the path back through the orchard. The moon rose thin and sharp. The air smelled of wet earth and the shadow of almond blossoms. I touched the bark of the tree and felt its old patience.
Revenge had not been the sweet thing I had imagined. It had been slow and precise. It had taken tongues and numbers and the willingness of people to speak truth. It had been ugly and necessary. I had watched people fall like rotten fruit and felt neither glee nor peace, only the cold satisfaction of righting a ledger.
My life — my second life — was no longer only mine. I had pledged myself to someone who would live into tomorrow regardless of bargains. I had tied myself to a boy who would call Declan "brother" and me "sister."
That night I took the child and sat by the grave. Rain made the soil drink. I whispered the story into his sleeping ear with the soft cruelty of a woman who had learned the worst and decided to teach against it.
"I will keep you," I promised. "I will not let men like them decide who lives and who dies. Your name will be Santiago Farrell, and you will know the truth of where you came from and who loved you before you could walk. You will live well."
He breathed in sleep and warmth. His small fingers curled around my thumb like a knot sealed.
In the morning Declan left for the council with a new weight in his chest, an old soldier with a child's name on his honor. I stayed behind and watched town life return to its complex, ugly charm. People talked and lied and loved in the same small, scuffed streets. I had lived twice and been given a chance to reshape a life.
"Are you going to be satisfied now?" Kingston asked later when we walked along the river.
"Not satisfied," I said. "Just busy. There is the child's future. There is the ledger of the house to settle. There is the memory to keep clean."
He took my arm like a brother. "Will you marry?"
I laughed, a small bright sound. "Not for now. I have a child to guard and a life to carve."
"Then I'll keep the lotus for you," he said.
"You will keep everything you can," I answered.
We walked back to the town. The sun had risen calm and clear like a good coin.
At the edge of the orchard I paused, put my palm on the trunk of the almond tree, and for the first time in maybe two lives let myself imagine a future where I was not counted as a cost or an afterthought.
"Live," I told the tree and the child and the memory of Miriam. "Live and be better than them."
Santiago's little fist tightened around my thumb as if he understood. The world was a ledger I would spend my life balancing.
The rest of it was long and not pretty. I built a network of small mercies. I taught Santiago the names for things and how to be brave. I made sure the shade of the almond tree would always be his first playground.
And in the quiet hours when the city slept and the orchard breathed around us, I would stand there and think of the strange miracle: how a woman who thought she wanted to die woke instead to stitch lives back together and to spit cold justice into the faces of those who would buy their future with another's death.
It wasn't a happy ending. It was a real one. They had stolen a life from Miriam. They had tried to bury a child and a daughter. I had followed each thread and unknotted every lie. I had refused to be the corpse they needed. I had learned to be a living reckoning.
The final thing I taught Santiago before he could run was a simple sentence.
"Remember this," I told him one dusk, the orchard a bowl of shadow and moonlight. "Stand up for those who cannot. Tell the truth when it is hard. Be kinder than they taught you to be."
He blinked up at me and smiled as if the words were a game.
"Promise me," I said.
He wrapped both tiny hands around my finger and made a sleeping promise.
I kept my promise to Miriam. I kept it to myself. I kept it to the boy who would grow.
One would think a life like revenge leaves no room for love. But love found its shape in small things: a child's laugh, a ledger paid back in full, a grave planted under a tree that remembered a woman's name.
"Live," I had said.
And I would live. I would live to make their world less cruel.
The End
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