Rebirth19 min read
Married to a King, Protected by a Little Jade
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I gasp and the river answers with a splash.
"Where am I?" I whisper, tasting river mud and something else—iron and old grief.
My hands are wrong. My hands are soft, nails neat. They do not look like the burned, bitten hands I remember when I died. I blink. The sky is a pale band of gold and cloud. Lean reeds brush my face. A small shape coils at my wrist and turns its triangle head toward me.
"Little Jade." I breathe the name like a prayer.
The snake lifts its red tongue. It is my old companion—the true thing that belonged to my old life. I remember the blast of that last battle, the bright pain, the world folding like paper. I remember carrying my last wish into the dark and thinking, I will not let the bad ones win.
And then I woke up inside someone else.
"I'm alive or dead?" I say the question aloud.
A man's footsteps fall across the path. Voices chatter—one voice smooth and practiced, the kind that buys applause with a smile.
"Raquel? We found you! You ran off at night—crazy, idiot," the smooth voice calls.
The name is not mine. Raquel Browning. The taste of it is foreign, like white silk. But my mouth knows it. My memory uploads: Raquel Browning is the daughter of Sterling Tarasov, a high-born heiress, a famous spoiled thing who married Rodrigo Olsson and then made a mess of everything. Raquel had been reckless, an on-and-off mistress to a flashy actor, Gunner Bray. Her stepmother, Itzel Durand, egged her on. Last night she was supposed to be at an important contest. She disappeared. Rumor says she ran with that actor. Rumor says they were seen in the wilds where the city ends and weeds begin.
I float to shore and stumble out.
"Raquel! Where did you go?" Gunner Bray pats his chest dramatically when I point at the slope. "You fell from the ridge?"
His smile is perfect. He is all light teeth and camera-ready eyes. A scent of cheap cologne and rehearsed charm clings to him.
"I slipped," I say. "I came looking for you."
He relaxes like I have performed my one role well.
"You scared me. Don't run off again."
I stare. His eyes are practiced, bored. "He likes Itzel," a memory whispers—he likes my stepmother, not me. They planned for me to be trapped. He and Itzel were parts in the scene that ruined my life.
The little snake on my wrist lifts and stares at him.
"You have a snake on your shoulder," I say, watching his face change.
He freezes. "What—?"
"There's a snake," I repeat.
His laugh becomes a sharp, thin thing. He tries to slap the snake away and it slips under his shirt like cold fire. He screams as it traces his back.
"Help! Get it out!" his manager, Nathan Gustafsson, yells, diving and flailing.
"Kill it—" I say without thinking. "Crush it."
The actor thrashes. "Kill it!" I shout, then before he can shout again, I punch him in the gut.
He doubles over. "Ow! Ow—"
"That's how," I say, and then, oddly, I sob, cradling his collapsed form like a lamb.
"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, my poor Gunner," I sob, voice soft and false, the old melody of Raquel Browning's act. "I didn't mean to—"
They beat him until the snake tires and slithers out. Nathan greets violence with panic and the actor with theatrical screams. I hold my face and wink at them like a charming fool. They carry him to a car, and I lift my chin like a queen.
Back in the city, Raquel Browning's home is a glass rectangle of wealth: Rodrigo Olsson's estate. It sits behind gates that snap like jaws.
I punch the code, and the gate does not answer. It bites me out. I try again—wrong.
I climb.
"Who goes there?" a guard bellows.
I slip onto the balcony, slip inside, and then smash through the window with grace that is not mine and land in Rodrigo's living room with all the clumsy arrogance of a girl who belongs to money.
Rodrigo Olsson stands in the hallway like a statue carved out of cold. His eyes are black ice. He is invisible and everything at once. He steps forward to look at the wet mess of me and says, "Raquel Browning?"
"Yes," I answer, using the name like a borrowed coin. "I couldn't remember the code."
He folds his arms. "What were you doing out there?"
"I was looking for someone," I say. "I thought you might be home."
He scoffs. "You have no right. Get out."
I move closer.
"You're not going to push me out," I tell him.
He grips my wrist and lifts me by the elbow like a thing he has no patience for.
"Take your filthy hand off me," he says.
"I won't let you toss me," I say and with some raw, forgotten strength I wrap my legs around his waist and cling.
For a moment he is stunned. The man who rules companies and silence has never been upended by a night soil princess in his arms. His eyes are cold, but they glance at me. He is not cruel enough to smash me. He is cruel in a different way: invisible.
"From the moment you stepped out of that house last night," he says, "you're not of my name. I sent the divorce papers. I don't want you."
"You can't throw me out," I whisper. "We're married."
He shakes me off and says, quietly, "You have until the divorce is signed to decide whether you want to leave with dignity."
Then he goes upstairs to his bathroom and disappears like a judge.
I stand dripping in the hallway and count the chandeliers.
"You're married to Rodrigo Olsson?" the housekeeper whispers.
"Yes," I say. "But I'm staying. They can't make me disappear."
They watch me with the kind of fear you show a small animal you do not want to bruise. Later I find the wardrobe and the sea of white clothes and the secret little things Raquel loved. My fingers are foreign in her life. I learn a costume of patience.
Phone rings. Itzel Durand, sweet-mouthed, calls and coos, "Raquel, darling, will you have lunch? Your stepmother wants an outing—"
"I'll be late," I say and smile. "I'm busy."
"You are you making trouble?" she asks.
"Not at all," I purr. "In fact, I like Rodrigo more than—" I let the lie float.
He is back in the house later. He wets his hair and walks past the wardrobe with a robe. He sees me messy and knotted and he looks like a man who never planned for me to be anything but ornament. His lip curls. "You are making a spectacle."
"Am I?" I say. "They're trying to hurt me, so I'm hurting right back."
"You're always foolish," he answers.
I go to the bank then. Itzel's card is heavy as a grenade with money. I try to withdraw it. "This card is not in your name."
"It belongs to my stepmother. I can take it," I say.
"You are the wrong name. We need ID. We need proof."
"No one asked Aria when she took money?" I ask. The teller sneers a small city sneer.
"Please leave," they say.
I step out onto the sun and find that large men in suits have been sent like chess pieces. But I am not as weak as my past life. There's a thread in me that remembers poison and how to untie it. There is Little Jade, and there is the stubbornness that survived where I once did not.
It is time to use it.
I flash my borrowed beauty around the VIP room. Guards straighten. The bank manager fidgets when Rodrigo's name is said into the air. Suddenly doors open. I sit in a velvet chair and my stolen smile turns into armor.
"You are the wife of Rodrigo Olsson?" the manager asks as if to a painting.
"Yes," I say.
"Prove it."
I do not have the papers yet. So I do the only thing I can. I speak his name like a blessing.
When they fumble with the forms, I let them have it: I mock them. I let them see the lie unfold. And Rodrigo comes, with the terrifying tilt of a man in charge.
"Is that her?" he asks without greeting.
"Yes, Rodrigo. We have a problem," the manager stutters.
Rodrigo's look cleans the room of lies. The man who insulted me a thousand ways with a single angle of his jaw shrugs into action and the bank apologizes. They hand me access. They open a vault. The world that used to slam doors in my face opens because of him.
After this I spend money like a reclamation. I call my stepmother's bluff by taking the small fortune she handed me and making it visible. I raise my head and decide: if I must be Raquel, I will rebuild her in ways she never dared.
Gunner Bray's manager, Nathan Gustafsson, curses and makes arrangements. Itzel is furious. But her whispered anger is a thing that builds.
She plans, and places, and sets dolls in a room that thinks it's empty. She hates me for being alive in her daughter's skin. She hates me for being the one who will not cooperate.
She tries to push me into the gutter. That evening there is a plant set, a poison, a folded paper with numbers that mean death. But I know how to smell the scent of dark work, because my old hands learned that. I find the small fabric doll in the kitchen, wrapped like an arrow.
"This is a trap," I say when a maid finds it and shrieks. The household gasps. Rodrigo's men prepare to burn it. I stop them.
"You burn that and you doom him," I tell them.
"What do you know?" someone sputters.
"Everything," I answer. "You have a curse here, a thing tied to a birth date. They meant to use it."
They do not believe me. But I will make them.
I kill the plants that will carry a small death, only to make sure the trap is nothing but charred cloth. They are clumsy—these small people who thought themselves clever. The guards are scared. The maid whose hands tremble is named Mabel Schumacher, a pretty, jealous young woman who used her malice like lipstick.
When Mabel tries to lie, I let the house feel the truth. "You will learn what it means to be hunted," I tell her.
"You threaten me?" she cries.
"Do you want me to show you?"
She will be shown.
The way I prove someone is guilty in this world is by performance. The world wants spectacle. So I give it spectacle. I will not be quiet. If they use a curse, I will strip it and show them the face behind it.
"There's more than one side to this war," Rodrigo says one night, watching me lay out little jars of dust and dried root like crayons of danger. "Who are you, really?"
"I am the only honest thing in this body," I answer. "And I will not let you die because of what others want."
He says nothing and goes about his schedule—the company, the men, the chess games where columns of people are sacrificed. But he watches. I see it sometimes—a look that hovers between interest and irritation. He is complicated by the fact that he does not enjoy being loved; he does not enjoy being owed.
Then the very game Itzel wanted—the one that would pin me down and make the world laugh at a beautiful fool—plays out. A hospital call: Sterling Tarasov, Raquel's father, is gravely ill. He looks like dried paper. Now, everyone who wears a smile thin as glass walks in. Itzel cries with fine art. Her sister, Mabel, waits to be useful. The world is full of people who show their faces only when the cameras are on.
In the room, I sit across from my father. He is a dry husk. "I will fix this," I whisper. No, it is not true. I have a trick and a knife and a knowledge of things culturally outlawed in the city. I have Little Jade. And I have a memory of poison.
I lean over and carve a small sign into his skin with the fruit knife. Little cuts, ritual strokes. Blood beads and the room presses close. Rodrigo watches, stiff and taut like a bowstring pulled.
"Get away!" the nurse sobs.
"No," I say. "This is the only way."
The blood pattern crawls, writes itself into the skin. The skin quivers, and something that lived beneath the skin convulses like a caught animal. The man thrashes. Two, three times I repeat the pattern. My heart pounds. The feeling is mechanical and, for a moment, I see my old home—ashes, faces, the screaming of the wrong kind of saints. I press until a small silver flash of Little Jade's head glints.
The worms in his flesh—the red spots like tiny volcanoes—began to climb. They rush to the cut like children to bread and vanish into the snake's little mouth. The man relaxes. He will sleep as men sleep who have been repaired.
Rodrigo's hand comes to find mine and hold it. "You are dangerous," he says, voice small.
"Yes," I answer. "I learned to be."
A week later the city smells like scandal. Odd things happen in Rodrigo's businesses: funds vanish, bank ledgers sit like open wounds. I sit with Rodrigo in his study and say, "The money isn't disappearing. It is being eaten."
"You are saying someone is using money-fang magic," his CFO jokes. But he does not laugh. He sees the truth.
"We will see the source," Rodrigo says.
It becomes my job to search the soft underbelly of top floors and bank vaults and find whose hand grows greedy. I am an ugly, pretty woman running my thumbs along ledgers, opening safes, smelling the faint chemical tang of a money-gu (a gu that eats currency like ants). I find a trace and it is not a bank, not a manager, but a small, nervous name: Nathan Gustafsson had been bribed, but the real hand is more shadowed.
I am not the only person who watches. Itzel's moves seem intentional, and yet too obvious. Gunner Bray is obviously impulsive. His manager is a panic machine. But it is at a charity gala—one of those glossy evenings where smiles are worn like jewels—that they choose to celebrate in public. Itzel will host, gunner will laugh, and Nathan will drink and make a mistake.
I've woven my little trap. I have friends in small, crooked places. One of Rodrigo's men, Phoenix Graham, gives me a camera inside the gala: a lens where I need it in the middle of the crowd. Rodrigo stands off to the side like a king in a bad suit.
The lights dim. The band plays a safe love song. I walk into the center, and I speak.
"Good evening," I tell the room, using my voice like a blade. "I have a story. It is about love, and theft, and the faces the rich wear."
People laugh politely, then still.
"Do you remember a snake on a shoulder?" I ask.
The band falters. "What—"
"You remember a woman who fell in the night?" I say. "You remember a card that paid for silence?"
A camera feeds live across the room. The gala is streamed. The city's eyes are suddenly on us.
"Do you remember the little doll?" I ask, and I hold up the charred cloth doll that had been stuffed with curse soil and the small birth date pinned like a razor.
"Raquel," whispers Itzel, and I hear a dry rustle like the flare of a dress.
"Mr. Gunner Bray," I continue. "Do you recall the night in the hills, the river? Do you recall the scream?"
He tries to smile and finds his mouth dried.
"You are not the hero of this story," I tell him. "You are an actor in Itzel Durand's game. You were promised a buffer and gifts and sudden money. You went to the wild to seduce and harm. You are a liar. You are a coward."
He laughs, then chokes. People who loved him gasp.
"Is that true?" Itzel hisses, a venomed pearl. "This is calumny."
"No," I say. "You told him who to meet. You set the trap. You paid to make a woman die. You believed a little more blood would buy you influence. You forgot that we hold proof."
I press a button. The screen behind me blooms with faces and whispers and, finally, recorded audio: Itzel's voice, hissing comfort into Gunner's ear in the dark. The camera reveals messages on Nathan's phone that show transfers and threats. There are hospital bills and whispered promises.
A silence slams into the room like rain.
"You're lying!" Itzel squeals. She glances around and people take steps back, some reaching for a glass to hide their hands in it as if an invisible accusation might pass through.
"We have emails," I say. "We have recordings. We have Nathan's transfers. We have witnesses and—"
She laughs, then her smile splits and the laugh breaks like brittle sugar. "This is illegal!"
"Yes," I say. "You paid to kill."
The crowd moves. Cameras tilt. People take out phones. "They wanted me dead," I say softly, and the room listens to something made of knife panes: a long, steady file of evidence.
Itzel's face drains; the warmth leaves her cheeks. Gunner's breath comes quick. Nathan's hands tremble as he sees the scrolling bank records. "I didn't—" he starts.
"—tell yourself you didn't," I say.
For the next half hour Itzel collapses through every stage of a bad person's collapse: smugness, confusion, outrage, denial, numbed betrayal, greed for excuses, then despair. She gropes for lawyers, for friends, for people who will hold her hand. The crowd—rich people with polished faces—watches like a hunt.
"You're finished," I say.
She lurches like a puppet whose strings are cut. Men take photographs. Women's handbags open and phones come out. Appalled whispers produce their own wind. "Shame on you," someone says, but shame has shifted under the stone of evidence.
Gunner's face changes from offended to hollow rage.
"She lied!" he screams and then, when the eyes settle on him and his manager stands accusingly, he realizes he is not a star anymore; he is a broken talent.
The security men do what security men do when the show is over: they list the offenses, they take names. But the hurting is now in public.
Itzel collapses onto a sofa and will later be escorted by officers in polite suits who feed her to the papers like a snack. Nathan's transfers become illegal acts. Gunner misses a thousand contracts. They all have their own end—different and harsh. For Itzel, the night's punishment is not only arrest; it is being stripped publicly, in front of cameras and people she once toyed with, of the face she used to borrow. People point. A woman she thought was loyal turns away. She tries to beg in the bright lights and finds herself mocked. "You wanted me to take her out," she had told someone earlier; now her pleading echoes like a child's in a hall built for empire. Those who watched begin to film her with their phones. Some clap; some stand unspeaking. Her face moves from arrogance to denial to a rawness where she becomes small. Her voice cracks; she stumbles into denial and then a raw plea.
"Please," Itzel says, standing up, hands trembling. "I—"
"Why did you do it?" I ask. The microphone records her. It keeps everything.
She cries, then laughs like a broken clock. "I—" she gasps. "We were desperate. I thought—"
"You thought that if she was gone, you would be free," I say. "You thought that if Raquel bowed, you would be queen. The way you used him—" I gesture at Gunner—"you used a young man's love like a coin. You sold him what he wanted: stolen power."
They watch as her façade peels. Gunner tries to steady himself but his manager pushes him past the cameras. Later, an angry mob of online viewers writes scathing threads, finance partners pull deals, and the media have a field day. Itzel's tone goes from pleading to collapse into begging. She tries to beg for mercy and then clutches her face and says, "I didn't know what I'd do."
The cameras keep rolling. "You did," I say. I watch her reaction morph: pride, then shock, then denial, then bargaining, then humiliation. People around her whisper with satisfaction. Her social circle drains like water from a hole. The man in charge of her family network takes his phone and walks away. The woman who promised to be her friend gossips a line about how Itzel once laughed at the poor. People record. Some stand. Some sit. A few applaud in a cold way. The city eats her.
It is punishment. It is public. It is exactly what the bad ones fear: exposure.
Gunner Bray is not spared. When the leaked chat finds him arranging motel rooms and alibis, the public turns savage. Fans delete. His sponsors pull out. The videos of him drunk and terrified circulate. He realizes how fragile his world was: it was a house of mirrors that melted under the sun.
I watch their faces—the slippery slide. Itzel tries to bargain with a bank account and a few favors. "I will pay, I will give money," she begs.
No one wants what she sells. Money is blood now.
"They used you," Rodrigo says quietly as we leave the gala side by side. His voice is cold, and I can feel his fingers curled around mine like a promise or a contract.
"What now?" I ask.
"We close their lines," he says. "We shut the people out who helped them. Nathan will go to trial. Gunner will lose friends. Itzel will lose everything."
He is merciless in business, and in this he is merciless in justice.
But the city is not clean. It never is. Another day a fire breaks out at a rival's establishment—clouded, covered, then hushed. I sit in Rodrigo's study and tell him, "They will come at us again."
He looks at me with the faintest of something like fear. "Then we will strike first."
It is a war of hands and secrets. I had come back to this life with nothing but fury and a small snake. I had promised to keep a ghost from being forgotten. I had promised to use the second chance. I did not know then that another kind of life lay behind Rodrigo's cold eyes—the life of a man who will burn the forest to save a single seat.
In the weeks that follow we take down the networks that fed Itzel and Gunner. Rodrigo uses law, money, and men. I use the old tricks—the smell of plants, the way villages treat curses, the little science of making certain things visible. Together we are not helpless.
It challenges me in ways my old life never did. Here, there are consequences and lawyers and public cries, but there is also the head of a man who can order a city to look away.
There are moments when he surprises me. He sits with me at night and listens to me say things I cannot tell anyone else—the night my village burned, the way my hands shook as my mother told me to run. He will not say he believes me. But when I fall asleep on his shoulder, he does not move to push me away.
We are not lovers in the easy way. Our hands sometimes find each other like two plants leaning toward sun. He is tight and careful; I am wild and noisy. He holds my wrist one urgent evening and says, "Swear you won't play with small fires for show. We are burying war under our steps."
"I won't," I say.
We begin to weave a strange thing: trust by necessity. I teach him to see the small signs: the way a man avoids eye contact when a book is missing from his shelf; the way a gardener plants a borrowed seed in a corner.
One day I find proof of a much larger plan: a plot to set Rodrigo's company up by controlled burn—insider sabotage that would scatter his power. The owner is a distant uncle: a man with a soft voice and steel teeth named Alejandro May. He is crafty, but his cunning is clumsy when you know how to read a ledger and smell a lie.
I gather everyone in Rodrigo's study. "He meant for a fire to destroy our assets," I say. "He rang deals to make us bleed. He is small and mean. He will be humiliated."
Alejandro blusters and denies and tries to buy time. But people in power do not like to be blamed. His reputation cracks.
We have a court of sorts at a public shareholder meeting. I stand and speak. The shareholder crowd leans in. Rodrigo slides a folder across the polished wood. It is full of the names and the hush money.
Alejandro's face changes. He sweats. He loses the stage. The board votes. He is stripped of influence.
Punishment is not one size. For Gunner it is public ruin. For Itzel it is the slow crumble of friends. For Alejandro it is professional death.
But this is not enough for me. For the women who helped with curses and who assaulted us, punishment must be felt. Mabel Schumacher, who tried to throw me under the bus by feeding lies into the staff, finds her life exposed. I pronounce her guilt in Rodrigo's main hall, in front of the staff and the man who calls her family. She had taken money from the staff chest and blamed it on me. She had smeared blood on a sheet to claim I conjured monsters.
"You took the money," I tell her as she squats like an animal. "You burned the things to have a show. You lied."
Faces gather. "Shame," she starts.
"Shame," I say, loud enough for it to split glass, "is only a mask for guilt. Real consequences are better."
The housekeeper takes Mabel's purse. Rodrigo's team places the stolen amounts into repair funds. Mabel is fired publicly at the parlour table. The staff, many who feared her, hum in relief. She screams, then pleads, then tries to bargain. The audience is mixed: some look smug, some uncomfortable. She hands over receipts and proves she took more than one thing. Her world unravels. She tries to call her cousins. They do not answer.
Mabel's pride shrivels before the cameras. She had thought herself safe in the net of wealth. Now every finger is a suture tearing out. She goes from defiance to tears. "I have nowhere," she wails. "I have no one."
They video her reaction. People share it. She is ridiculed. But she is also in pain. I watch her crumble and feel nothing like joy. I feel the old hot sickness of being alive a second time and having to take a life in a way that bends a world.
Justice and cruelty hang close together. I do not like it.
But there is one final thing I must do. I must save my father from the poison that was put in his blood. I must expose Itzel in court and make her answer for the plan to use a celebrity to cover a crime. The trial will be long and loud. The punishment—public, humiliating, and precise—will be more than enough to break them.
Inside the courtroom, lights are hard and the air smells of coffee and old paper. I stand at the front. Itzel sits, pale as a boxed rose. Camera lights make the air heavy. People who once bowed to her sit on the bench and look like children.
"You wanted me gone," I say, simple and sharp. "You wanted to take my life. You wanted to trade my skin for power."
"It wasn't—" she tries to stammer.
"You called me a fool then," I say. "You said I had no sense of loyalty or money. You believed you could play god."
The prosecutor lays out everything: emails, bank records, the doll, Nathan's transfers, Gunner's messages, the eyewitness accounts. Itzel tries to reach for sympathy. The room is a bowl and her voice is a little stone thrown in it.
"How do you feel now?" an audience member asks during a break. "How does it feel to have your face strip itself from you?"
Itzel tries to answer and fails. The jury hears the cry of her womanhood collapse. She becomes public property in that small way: everyone reminds her of her past pettiness and counts her sins aloud. Her husband turns his face away. Gunner shrinks and the public eats him.
The punishment is not just legal. It is social. Her friends unfriend her. Her donors turn their checks to other hands. She stands in the center as a small person everyone knows is finished. She gets the progression of losing power: sneer, disbelief, denial, bargaining, a little prayer, then collapse. She begs. The cameras do not stop. The world she made is empty of comfort.
They all fall apart in front of me and the city. It is public. It is raw. They are made smaller than they were.
When it is over, I walk home with Rodrigo. He looks at me and says, in that crisp voice he keeps for emergencies, "You have a curious hunger for recompense."
"Better to feed it here," I tell him. "A knife in the dark is a coward's whisper. A light in a hall makes everyone see."
He looks at me like he is deciding whether the light is an asset or a hazard. "We will settle this," he says.
Days fold into a strange new life. I go to the office and find pockets of questions: who am I, really? I am Blair Eriksson in a life that holds the name Raquel Browning, wife of Rodrigo Olsson. I sleep under his roof sometimes, on cold nights. He is kind in small, peculiar ways: he leaves a cup of tea, he fixes a broken hinge, he reads for hours without interruption. I find that under the cold there is an uncommon loyalty, a thing that will hold steady like a stone in a river.
There are more fights to come. The city is not clean. There are men who would take our dead and sell it for ten years of stock growth. Alejandro tries one more half-move. Gunner loses everything. Nathan loses his freedom. Itzel loses faces. Mabel must leave the city.
For me, there is one last task: I will honor my old village by sending money, by preserving the memory of those who died. I will also learn more—read old scrolls, listen to whispers from hidden places, and keep Little Jade at my wrist.
"Will you stay?" Rodrigo asks one night, quiet as rain.
"I might," I say. I close my eyes and feel the remade flesh of my hands warm against his.
Outside, a wind hums across the city. It is the kind of night when masks peel and the true faces are smelt like fruit. I keep my snake close.
I am alive by mistake or miracle. I am someone else's shadow and my own head.
"Keep Little Jade," I say, leaning into his chest. "Keep the snake. Keep the promise."
"I will," he says.
Later, when things are quiet, he pulls the small, coiled green thing from my wrist and sets it gently on his own. It twitches and then settles, as if it likes his hands.
He says, "You gave me something important and didn't ask for it back."
"Then it's yours for now," I say.
He makes a small, rare sound that could be a laugh. "Do not make me regret it," he murmurs.
I smile, which is not Edwardian or polite. It is a real smile.
The city will throw other stones. There will be months of quiet and shock and the slow repair of broken things. I will not be a perfect woman. I will drink wine and tell small lies when needed. But I will not be their toy.
One night not long after the big public storm, I step into the garden of Rodrigo's house and press my palm to the cold marble. I whisper the name of my old home and watch the moon move over the little green of Little Jade's back. I hold the snake and the living memory of one life against the other.
I think of the day I died and the dark that folded like cloth. I think of the people I have punished and the people who need mercy. I am not the same as I was.
I am Raquel's hands, Blair's memories, Rodrigo's wife by law and a wild thing by will. I keep my snake warm and the city wary.
I learned to keep life by being cunning, by choosing when to fight in the light and when to keep a secret. The lesson my dead self taught me is simple: if you can stand in someone else's shoes, you can make them fall. But you must never become the one who laughs at the fall.
I step back into the house and close the door.
This marriage? It is a strange bargain. He keeps his empire; I keep my life. In the silence between us, the little snake curls.
"Tomorrow," I say, "we go find the last names on the list."
"Tomorrow," he agrees.
We do not promise forever. We only promise the next dawn.
The End
— Thank you for reading —