Revenge15 min read
I Woke Up the Villain — Then Saved Their Love (and Stirred the Palace)
ButterPicks12 views
I knew the exact chapter and paragraph where I was supposed to kneel, beg, and die.
"Clayton—no, Emperor Fielding," I mouthed under my breath as the carved beams above me watched. "You have read the same book as I did."
"Camilla Simpson," the Emperor intoned from the dragon throne, "Jiang household is cruel, immoral, and plotting to murder the heir. Take her away."
I had been reading last night. I had, against my better sense, finished this particular guilty-pleasure novel. I knew the salt in every line, the predictable twists, the exact point where the heroine's lover would be betrayed. How absurd to wake up inside it.
"Your Majesty," I cried, rolling my forehead on cold stone in the practiced way the book said I should, "I beg mercy. I truly know nothing."
"All the evidence is here," Fielding Bergmann said. His face was carved in ice. "You still claim ignorance?"
"I don't—" I gasped. "I don't know that the Empress engineered the abortive drug—"
"Silence." His voice snapped like a whip.
From the bed, the true heroine—Clara Hamza—sat up as if pulled by a thread. Her face had been the one I cried for last night; in the story she was pure and broken. Fielding rushed to her like the book had promised. She slapped him. I stifled a laugh I didn't mean to make.
"How could you? You promised to keep him safe!" Clara cried.
Fielding's jaw tightened. The palace seemed to shrink around his fury. "Drag her out," he ordered, pointing at me.
Guards covered my mouth and hauled me through the corridor. I choked out, "Dog Emperor, you won't die easy either."
Two hours in the cold dungeon, my head buzzed with a thousand lines I had read. It was ridiculous—me, the petty villain in the book, crushed between the queen and the throne. Except I wasn't the same person the book had painted. I had my wits. I had memory. If this was a script, I was going to ad-lib.
"You call that the end?" I muttered when they came to take me again.
"Clayton—Fielding has questions," said a voice I recognized: the same precise, curious tone that often labeled villains in novels. He smirked at the idea of problem-solving through force. "Drink."
A goblet was pressed into my hands. "This is poison," Fielding said, theatrically. "Drink it."
I blinked. The book's version had the heroine confess as I died. So much for fidelity to plot.
"Before I go," I said, "may I say a few things?"
"Say them," he allowed.
"You are a consummate suck-up, you know," I said. "Lick and keep licking, and you'll have nothing left."
I drank.
And waited for my lungs to shriek. Nothing happened. Fielding leaned over, fingering my jaw like a scholar checking a specimen. "Who told you that made you brave?"
"Old tricks," I said, and, seeing his surprise, decided to keep the show going. "This is no poison. It's—" I cast about for something plausible. "It is a charm wine. From the western regions. Every full moon... it acts in curious ways unless the bed is shared. No cure known."
He stared at me, then laughed in that dry way rulers often do when someone irritates them.
"Fine," I continued, seizing the moment. "If the potion is unbreakable, then you must drink it too. So neither of us can run."
He raised an eyebrow. "You want me to—"
"Just a sip, Your Majesty."
He hesitated. Then, in a move that would have been far more comfortable if I hadn't meant to grab the rest, he closed his mouth over the goblet.
"Who told you—" he said through his teeth.
"You've been barren with suspicion all week," I said. "I don't want to die, and I don't want you to. Besides, there's no point in two corpses. Drink up."
He swallowed the remainder in a stiff chain of movement. I moved like a shadow and tipped the goblet to his lips, forcing the last drop down him.
He choked.
"Camilla," Fielding breathed, eyes dark and fierce. "You will tell me everything."
I smiled like a conspirator. "I already told you one thing. Now—"
He paused, fingers tightening—then, with a small, maddening curiosity, he did the unthinkable. "From now on," he said slowly, "I will raise you from concubine to consort. You will live in Zhonghua Palace."
"Is that an offer or a death sentence?" I asked.
"It is a game," he said. "Remain entertaining."
I had a million reasons to hate him and, inconveniently, a few reasons to enjoy being alive. I agreed to play.
*
"Do you want a chicken leg?" I asked, collapsing on the bed and glaring at my new maid, Maggie Barton.
"You always think about food," she said, grabbing a towel.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I like being alive because of the chicken legs."
When the story's version of justice rolled over the Jiang household, I made sure I had eyes on timelines. The Empress—Mercedes Patterson—had long used her post to meddle and to poison. Doyle Dickinson, the chancellor and head of the Jiang clan, had more than one secret. Fielding thought the proof was in his hands; at first, they found nothing.
"Either you lie or the evidence is gone," Fielding told me in the imperial gardens one day, leaning over a carved balustrade.
"I'm not lying," I said, watching a swallow carve the late sky. "Maybe you are looking in the wrong room."
"Enlighten me, oh wise one," he said.
"Find Doyle's study. There's a hidden compartment in the writing desk. The book said it was found in a week. Maybe you dug too soon."
He's ruthless; he also is thorough. He searched again. They found what I said: letters, ledgers, and a map showing forbidden deals with the Eastern merchants—a direct link to treason.
"Bring them before court," I said. "Let them stand in daylight."
And so it began: the slow, careful unravelling. Fielding, who had once thought of me as an annoyance, now used my memory as a tool. I rubbed my hands together.
"Is this what you meant when you marshaled me?" Fielding asked. He stood taller now, eyes burning with a new, cold sort of justice.
"I'm helping you, and I'm helping them," I told him. "Mainly because I know what will happen if they live."
Fielding hooked an arm around my waist and pulled me close. "You are—" he began.
"Don't say anything flattering," I warned. "You will jinx it."
He pretended to bite back a smile. Somewhere inside his chest I saw something not entirely hostile.
*
We assembled the court on a bright morning. The sun struck the golden tiles and threw shards of light across the courtyard. The whole capital seemed to be there: ministers, palace maids with braided hair, soldiers with spears held like stakes. The air smelled of incense and metal. I wore my plainest robes and a small, insolent grin.
"Bring them," Fielding ordered.
They came in chains. Doyle Dickinson walked with the measured step of someone who had always expected mercy. Mercedes Patterson—the Empress—was led in with ceremonial decorum, but her face everything but surrender. Her supporters looked pale, mouths tight as stitched leather. I watched the crowd—hungry, expectant. They had been waiting for a spectacle.
"Empress Mercedes," Fielding said, voice carrying like thunder, "you stand accused of treachery, murder, and the corruption of the realm."
"Traitorous words," she spat. "You have no proof."
"Do you deny this ledger?" Fielding lifted a small, stained book. Doyle's eyes darted, then hardened. "These are accounts of shipments, double ledgers, payments to foreign soldiers. Here is evidence of withheld grain destined for our northern army. You poisoned a woman to prevent her from telling the truth. Explain yourself."
Mercedes's face wavered. For the first time, doubt creased her eyelids. She went cold and then fiercely defiant. "This is false," she said. "You are a jealous man who blames me, as always."
"Silence," Fielding ordered. "Let the witnesses speak."
An elderly kitchen overseer shuffled forward, trembling. "My lady," he croaked, "the sacks were lighter than before. We counted them many nights. We were told to mark the rest for 'emergency stores' and to never speak."
"Look at him," Mercedes cried to the crowd. "A lie from a hungry man!"
"I will not have more lies," Fielding declared. He turned to Doyle. "Doyle Dickinson, did you sign these orders?"
Doyle's face, usually the calm mask of governance, cracked. He stared at the ledger as if it were a mirror reflecting his own guilt.
"I—" he began. "Orders came from the Empress."
Gasps rippled through the crowd like wind through dry reeds.
"You—" Mercedes shouted. "You would betray me?"
Doyle bowed his head. He swallowed and then, in a voice that rattled like a dry bone, admitted, "I followed orders."
For a long, suspended second, the courtyard held its breath. The Empress's face paled to the chalky hue of porcelain. "Lies," she hissed. "You will not—"
Fielding stepped forward. "Because your treachery endangered our borders and our soldiers, because you attempted to silence Clara Hamza—by drugging her food in secret—we condemn Mercedes Patterson to be stripped of rank and title. Her household will be disbanded. Her assets will be seized by the crown."
"But—" Mercedes screamed—not a plea but a physical fracture of pride. Women around her began to cry, some in shock, some in secret relief.
"Not only that," Fielding continued, "but for your part in funneling resources to foreign arms and for the deaths tied to your orders, you will be brought before the people."
He paused, and I understood the next move before he spoke. This was the punishment the book had hinted at but never fully described—the ritual fall that would humiliate them publicly and strip the Empress of every illusion of power.
"By imperial decree," Fielding said now, voice like a bell, "on the steps of the main square at noon, you will be stripped of your empress robes, paraded, and your crimes read aloud. Food and valuables from your home will be given to the families of the soldiers who died. Those who aided you will be punished according to their guilt."
The courtyard erupted with a mix of approbation and a savage, satisfying buzz. People shoved forward, some whispering praises, others clawing for places closer to witness the spectacle. I felt my heart prick and also my mouth smile.
Mercedes lunged at me then, with the kind of animal arrogance that had carried her for years, trying to strike. Guards seized her; she struggled like a caged tigress.
"Let her go!" she shrieked. "You cannot do this!"
"Watch," Fielding said quietly. "Let the people decide."
At noon, as the bell struck twelve and the market vendors paused in the middle of their shouting, they marched Mercedes onto the square. A scaffold of silk and wood had been erected—ornate, shameful. The chancellor Doyle was led beside her, face empty with shame. The crowd packed in like a living sea, every head turned.
"Stand!" Fielding commanded from the balcony. He looked down with the quiet, iron authority of a man who had finally found his mark.
"Mercedes Patterson, you stand accused," the herald intoned as the crowd hushed. "You are guilty of treason, the poisoning of a subject, and embezzlement causing the death of our soldiers."
Mercedes spat, red as a wound. "You puppet! This is your doing—"
"Silence!" Fielding's voice sliced the air. He gestured to the guards.
They began to strip her of the ceremonial robes—each ribbon and embroidered layer pulled away and offered to a steward who would later deliver these to bereaved families. The crowd hissed and cheered in turn. For every embellishment removed from her body, a story surfaced—an order signed, a villager starved, a grain sack diverted. Doyle's name came up again and again as he confessed the precise entries he had altered.
Mercedes's temper dissolved into incredulity, then fury, then the brittle shell of fear. She clutched at a handmaiden for support; the handmaiden released her as if scalded. People shouted for mercy, for blood, for fairness.
"How dare you," Mercedes cried. "You will be disgraced, beaten, flayed!"
A woman in the crowd—whose brother had died at the border—pointed at Mercedes. "My brother bled because of your orders," she yelled. "My children do not sleep at night. Tell me how to forgive that!"
Doyle's knees buckled. He vomited into a basin. His confession had turned him into a hollow man. The crowd did not pummel him; public scorn is a different weapon. Men who once bowed to him spat and turned away. His friends did not step forward. He was alone.
I stood on the fringes and watched faces change. The Empress went from regal to ragged, from loved to loathed, in the span of a few public breaths. Phones—no, not phones, but fingers pointed and clerk scribes begged for every word—scribal notes thickened like a storm. Children laughed and older women wept.
Mercedes dropped to her knees and, for the first time in years, opened her hands to the public. "Mercy!" she cried. "I was protecting the realm!"
"Protecting with treachery?" someone shouted back.
The spectacle ended not with a public execution—Fielding was not a petty tyrant—but with stripping Mercedes of all status, seizing property to repay the dead, and banishing Doyle Dickinson to a remote governorship where his name would mean nothing. The crowd, ravenous for scandal, dispersed with a heavy satisfaction.
Mercedes's collapse afterward was the saddest part. She had railings to clutch at and courtiers who kept their distance like superstitious animals. When Fielding passed near the fallen Empress, he did not lift a finger. Instead, he met my eye for a fragment of a second—an unreadable flicker.
"You wanted this," he said later, hands tucked behind his back, tone flat.
"I wanted them stopped," I said. "I wanted the soldiers to have grain. I wanted Clara safe."
He stared at me a long, measuring look. "You were dangerous," he muttered. "Only a mad woman would push this boldly and survive."
"Only a reader," I said.
*
Punishment over, the palace rearranged itself like a beast getting used to a new limb. Clara and Gabriel's bond grew. I played messenger, confidante, and occasionally a meddling midwife of love. Gabriel—General Gabriel Corbett—was more storm than man, but he had a few soft habits.
"Camilla," he said once, voice rough like sand, "why do you risk so much?"
"Because you two deserve a chance," I said. "And because I read the ending and it was unfair."
He blinked, surprised into a small smile that warmed his stern face. "You are strange, but brave."
He once folded my hand inside his, briefly, while thanking me for a letter. His thumb brushed my knuckle like someone who had been taught to be gentle. For one breath, the world narrowed to that contact. Later, when we discussed the northern supply lines, he watched me with an intensity that made my stomach do odd things.
Fielding, despite his cold, had his private moments. He would occasionally ensure my meals were replaced with better fare, as if he could not bear the idea that my stomach might be empty. He moved closer when storms rattled the palace eaves. Once, when the moon was thin and the palace silent, he placed a small porcelain vial in my palm.
"Keep this," he said. "It is the last of the antidote."
I looked at him. He had not asked for thanks, but his small act was a promise.
"Don't drink it in my name," I teased.
He allowed a tiny rise of humor at that.
There were other heart-stopping seconds, tiny and human. Once, after a council where Fielding spoke for mercy for a captured enemy band, he walked me back to Zhonghua Palace. Rain had started, and he draped his cloak over my shoulders without a word. It was such an ordinary thing, but my chest tightened. He rarely did ordinary things.
Another day, Gabriel left me a silk ribbon on my table with a curt note: "For your hair, in case you decide to be foolishly brave." His handwriting was blunt but not unkind. I tied it to my wrist and looked at it like a talisman.
The book—if it were a book—had thought I was meant to die and be forgotten. I was proving it wrong in small, irritating ways.
*
Time moved with a curious sort of momentum. Clara's pregnancy—no longer a secret—anchored much of our plans. She was pale but remarkably strong. When she slipped into melancholy, Gabriel would stand like a stone beside her. Once, watching them, I felt an odd, fierce protectiveness tighten around me.
"You will be fine," I told Clara one afternoon in the private garden.
She looked at me with those large, ocean eyes. "Camilla, you gave me hope when I had none."
"You keep him alive," I said. "And he will keep you, if you let him."
"I will," she whispered.
Of course, where there is love there is also danger. A western princess—Isla Cleveland—arrived as part of a diplomatic mission, and my memory screamed a warning: in the book, she admired Gabriel and he was led away by foreign fate. I found myself watching Isla with a hawk's suspicion. She was gracious, with small refined hands, and a gaze that lingered too long on Gabriel. I followed my instinct and, in a small, anonymous way, saved her from a drowning accident. She seemed touched but later barely mentioned it. I kept my fingers crossed.
When the time came, the palace almost forgot how to be calm. Fielding had already tossed advantage to the winds by considering Clara as Empress because of the child's alleged bloodline. The old court factions rose like angry wasps. Yet, by now, people knew there was not only cruelty in this court; there were those who would stand and call out wrongs.
The day when everything came to a head, the great hall was full: ministers, generals, cloth merchants, girls who sold roasted chestnuts outside. The sun burned through the high windows, painting the floor with gold. At one side, Clara sat with Gabriel, pale but resolute. On the other, Fielding commanded attention with the simple, dangerous gravity of a man who had learned how to make the world obey.
"Clara," he began, voice soft but steady, "will you accept being Empress?"
Her fingers tightened on Gabriel's. She glanced at me, the secret messenger, and then back to Fielding. "No," she said, quiet but absolute. "Not for me."
The hall gasped. Even the chandeliers seemed to hold their breath.
"Why?" Fielding asked.
"Because I will not be used as bait," she said. "Because the child in my belly is not a throne. It is a life. I do not allow it to be a pawn."
The room exploded in confusion and anger. Fielding's face hardened as if bitten. Schemes unspooled and shorted. The Emperor had wanted power and a wife he could control; Clara's refusal was a blade.
Gabriel rose. "We will leave. We will find a place away from this."
Clara squeezed his hand. "Not now. But I will go with you when the child is born."
The crowd murmured. A faction called for the Emperor's head; another called for calm. Fielding looked at me across the hall, and something like pity—or maybe something harder—glinted in his eyes.
"Order!" he bellowed, and they fell silent.
He spoke then, not as a judge but as a man. "If any man or woman in this hall has one shred of treason, speak now."
No one moved. The palace had been purged, but it still trembled.
"Then who will go with them?" he asked. "If you will leave, then leave. The realm will be safe by your leaving."
Clara stood. "I will leave."
That was the end of the scene the book had promised me—blood, rebellion, fires. But I had learned not to trust predictable endings. I had learned that people could choose better than the author had planned.
When dawn came three days later, Clara and Gabriel were gone. They walked to the northern gate in plain cloaks and no fanfare. They kissed once at the gate, private and warm, and then disappeared. The city breathed as if a storm had passed.
Later, in the aftermath, Fielding called for me. He stood in my chamber, hands clasped behind his back, and for a long time said nothing. Finally he murmured, "You kept them together."
"Because I could," I said. "And because the author was lazy."
He looked at me then, very direct. "You have broken the plot."
"Someone had to," I said.
He didn't smile, but his face did loosen. "You are still dangerous."
"And so are you."
He reached for my hand and then stopped, the touch teasing the edge of something we both refused to name. "Keep the vial," he said. "And be careful."
I tucked the porcelain bottle into my sleeve and, in a small, insolent voice, said, "You should stop eating so much chives. They stick to your breath."
He raised his chin like it was the cruelest insult or the funniest joke. "I will remember that."
As months passed, the palace settled into a new orbit. Fielding learned to rule less by suspicion and more by stubborn fairness. The Jiang house was dead and scattered; Doyle sent away; Mercedes ignominiously vanished into exile. The people settled down, and sometimes, when the moon was thin and the guards were lax, Fielding would bring me tea and not say anything about the throne. He would, however, look at me with a softness that belonged to a man who had learned to measure the weight of another's life.
Clara and Gabriel sent letters—sometimes poems, sometimes practical complaints about wood stoves. They asked nothing of us. Once, a small silk parcel arrived with a ribbon tied in Gabriel's blunt hand: "For when you are foolish and need a bit of bravery." I tied it to my hair and kept it when I walked through the palace gardens.
And whenever the world seemed too big or the plot too fixed, I would prop a small sign outside Zhonghua Palace: "Fortune-Telling. One coin." People laughed and queued up, and I would tell them what I knew—mainly that their lives were not bound to any author's whim, only to their hands.
One night, under a sky the color of old ink, Fielding came to my window.
"You were right," he said softly.
About what? I asked without moving my lips.
"About not being small. About making choices."
I tasted the words that might have become a promise and smiled. "Then you'll live better because of it?"
"Yes," he said, and then, with a tiny, almost childish cruelty, he added, "And you will stop calling me dog emperor in public."
"Make me," I said.
He laughed—a low sound like a lock clicked in the dark—and for a moment the palace wasn't a place of plots and punishments but of two people who found amusement in one another's insolence.
When I finally closed the book—no, not literally; I had no book to close—the world had altered in small, stubborn ways. The Empress had been humbled in a public spectacle. The chancellor had been exiled. The lovers had escaped. The Emperor had softened and ceded a sliver of power to mercy. I had discovered that the worst roles could be rewritten, that villainy could be an actor's costume.
At the end, as I cleaned the tiny porcelain vial and placed it back into its little silk pouch—an object that had altered life and game—I whispered to myself, "If anyone ever writes another ending for me, they'll have to do better than make me die for drama."
Fielding joined me at the window and watched the moon. "If they do," he said, "we will rewrite it together."
"Not a bad plan," I said, and slid the vial into his palm. He turned it over as if testing a new coin.
"Remember what I told you," I said.
He looked at me, face softened by moonlight, and for once did not wear the armor of an emperor. "Less chives," he repeated.
"Exactly," I said. "Fewer chives, more mercy."
We both laughed and the sound was small and human in the vast cold palace. Later, when the night cooled and the guards changed, I tucked the silk vial into my drawer, next to a ribbon from Gabriel and a small, folded letter from Clara. Those were my evidence—not of treachery but of what I had done.
This story does not end with a promise that everything will never go wrong. It ends with a small porcelain vial and a moon that has seen too many plots. It ends with me, Camilla Simpson, who refused to be simply the villain in a book. I kept the lovers safe, I watched the guilty fall, and I hissed in the Emperor's ear.
"One more thing," I said to Fielding as we turned from the window.
"What?"
"If you ever scheme again," I said, "I will write you into a comedy."
He smiled, and it was the kind of smile that meant trouble and fondness in equal measure.
"Then write well," he said.
The End
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