Sweet Romance14 min read
My Boyfriend Became Emperor and I Became the Orchid's Knife
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I never imagined the worst thing about a time slip would be that my boyfriend came with me.
"You came too?" I blurted as the sedan creaked under new ropes, and twelve hands smoothed silk that wasn't mine.
Logan Duran didn't answer at once. He stood like someone who had stepped into a painting and discovered the frame was gone. He finally said, "I— we— we have to be careful."
"Careful?" I aimed a grin at him and then swallowed it. "You are the emperor."
He looked down at the gold dragons stitched on his robe as if they were bugs. "I'm trying to learn the lines."
"You could have been anyone," I said. "You could have been the butcher's son. Why did fate make you the emperor?"
"Apparently," he said quietly, "fate has no sense of humor."
We were both speechless for a moment. The court lady with the lacquer comb in her hair swept past, and Logan's hand found mine under layers of silk.
"Don't do that," I whispered, selfishly. "You're public property now."
"You're my private problem," he whispered back. He smiled—one of those small, secret smiles that happens between two people who have shared microwave dinners and whole bad movies. "Don't let other people steal our lines."
"You are impossible."
He clutched my wrist like a lifeline. "Whatever this world expects, we'll rewrite it."
That was the first of many promises. It was also the moment the world shifted for me from modern blur to palace clarity.
"Jennifer," a woman's voice said, silky and slow. Laure Gordon—who sat by the empress's cushion like a shadow who had learned to smile—gave me a studying look. "You are favored. Do not mistake the favor for control."
"Yes, Your Majesty." I dropped the right syllables like coins. Inside, my head buzzed with names of strategies and spreadsheets that did not belong here. "I will serve."
Logan drew me into the imperial study. "You can live near me. We will figure this out as we go."
"Live near?" I squeaked. "You mean I move into the same house with your concubines?"
"They are many," Logan said. He chased the bitterness from his face with a ridiculous theatrical shrug. "And they have lovely legs. But, Jennifer, none of them are you."
"Famous last words," I muttered. "I need maps and people's names."
We learned to scribble into margins like thieves marking stalls. For every poem I recognized, Logan scribbled a technical note. For every bewildering etiquette, I translated it back into charts: influence lines, greed nodes, military hubs.
"Where did all these extra women come from?" I complained one night. "There are forty of them. This is like the world's worst subscription model."
Logan laughed and then sobered. "They are not subscriptions. They are alliances."
"Alliances?"
"Political marriages." He pressed his thumb against his forehead. "Old loyalties. Old money. If I tangle them without thought, the state tears."
"Then we'll not tangle them," I said. "We'll give them roles. We'll give them craft. We'll give them respect."
He squeezed my fingers. "You always make things better."
Heart flutter one: He had never been showy with praise, but that night he said my name like a secret on his lips. It felt like warmth through winter armor.
We started small. I bribed a household of palace girls with sweets to find me copies of the工造局 catalog. Logan sat with me as I pieced together a rough plan for an arbalest and for more efficient water control. We taught the palace clerks the angle of a lever and the idea that salt didn't belong in milk. People laughed at us. People listened.
"You're trying to make guns," Logan said, half proud, half guilty.
"I'm trying to give your army an edge," I said.
"You always think of the edge."
Heart flutter two: He folded his hands around mine while we bent over blueprints in a fever of copper pencil. He had never held me like that before; he was no longer just my boyfriend eating ramen at midnight. He was someone who protected a country and a woman at the same time.
We found an old inventor: Emmett Bean. He was a man who had once known the whirr of machines and the idea of patents—this was his face, lined with a life of one decision spiraling into another. He kept one brass thing that resembled a pencil and a small flask of strange black powder.
"Why did you keep this?" I asked him.
Emmett squinted, smiling like a man who remembered his own youth. "Because it was a work that deserved a breath. And because I had no one else."
"Will you help us build more than toys?" I asked.
He nodded, then said nothing for a long time. Then he said, "I thought I'd gone mad to dream in gears again. If the emperor asks—"
"He didn't," I interrupted. "But he trusts me."
"You are brave," Emmett said, and I felt older and younger at once.
We collected tools and designs in a small room beneath an old embroiderer's shop—the Orchid Pavilion, the largest intelligence and rumor network in the city. The gracious old couple who ran it—Freja Bartlett and her husband—had once been spectacular in their small ways and were now spectacular in their vast knowledge. Freja offered me a small nephrite pendant and the keys to their network.
"Careful," Freja said. "Orchid Pavilion is not about power. It is about doing things that the official channels cannot do."
"I don't always want to live in the dark," I said.
"You won't. You will make the dark give voice."
I took that like an oath written in green light. The Orchid Pavilion taught me how to weave lists of names into webs of safety. It taught me to recruit a small band of fighters led by a man named Matias Burns, who had a crooked grin and a steady eye. Matias could read a camp like a ledger.
"You will be the guardian of my secrets, Matias," I told him.
"I will be more than that," Matias said. "I will be your sword."
Heart flutter three: Late on a rainy night, Logan slipped from his golden bed and removed his robe to take mine, which was thin and foreign. He wrapped his coat around me when I could not sleep. He brushed the hair from my face as if by small ministrations he could cancel the chaos. "Don't go without me," he whispered.
"I can't be in both places," I said. "I can try."
"Try," he said. "I will wait."
We learned to be spies and sages both. I toured the province of the south with a small retinue: Jaxon Kuenz, my elder brother in this life and a rough-shelled soldier with a soft mouth; Everett Bianchi, my father; and Matias Burns leading the Orchid Pavilion men. We arrived as strangers and left as a rumored power that made the duck-market whispers go silent.
The south was a country of dry earth and angry men, those men called themselves "rebels" by the government's pen and "justice seekers" by their wounds. They had been taken apart by hunger and placed into shelters whose ledgers looked like lies. I was the woman who could read numbers. I was the woman who could move a ledger and make it cough up silver.
"Who sent you here?" a scarred woman asked me on a hill where the wind had a habit of carrying secrets.
"I did," I answered. "And I bring work. We can fix the dykes. We can put seed in your mouths."
"You are the palace?" She blinked like a question.
"Yes," I said. "The palace and nothing at once."
Her name was Hazel Hansen. She was fierce and could hold a dozen warriors' gazes. She and Matias knew each other from a tangle of past lives; she agreed—reluctantly—to help me.
I taught them how to open a water canal with less manpower and less theft. I found siphons and plans in stacks Emmett had designed. We built a small hand cannon—because one age's steel is another age's thunder; in private we called it my pistol, though it only fired once, and that once rearranged an entire battle line.
The turning points were surgical: expose the graft, return the grain, create local work brigades. We needed local trust, so we offered food for labor. We turned the stolen money into wages. People came because working during daylight meant one fewer night with a hunger noise in your belly.
One of the hardest scenes was in a place called Small An City. The city official there—Hugh Berry—was a man with soft hands designed to look innocent. He had lines in his ledger that didn't match his life. We were angry and precise. I confronted him in the warehouse full of sacks.
"You took their grain," I said plainly, opening his ledger like a wound.
"These are just administration fees," Hugh said. "Taxes, dues—"
"Two thousand taels," I said, thumb in the margin. "Gone."
Hugh's shoulders sagged, the priestly calm breaking like glass. "Madam," he said, "you must understand—"
"This is not mine to understand. You will return it," I answered.
"So you can stage an insurrection?" he sneered.
"No," I said. "I offer you a chance to save yourself. Return the grain. Work with us. Or be tried publicly."
He laughed, and in that laugh was the sound of a man who thought he had pants of made of silence.
We didn't put him in a dungeon. We put him on the plaza, and the town gathered. I had him speak for himself. His voice was thin when the ledger's numbers were read aloud. People shouted and spat. I watched his expression change: from confident to startled, to denial, to pleading.
"You do not understand," he said. "I needed—"
"To feed your children?" someone in the crowd barked.
"My brother's debts!" Hugh cried. "I—was saving to pay a ransom for his son's freedom!"
A night in that crowd and his explanations melted into the cold. He was sheer, raw shame.
"Return the funds or the township will not buy your words," Matias said into the hushed wind.
Hugh dropped to his knees and began to name names, names that were the threads to people above him. He begged with all the self-preservation of a man who realized his hands had been caught in the silk.
The crowd recorded his humiliation by word and witness. They beat their fists on the stands in applause when the sacks returned. No jail had the sting that public loss of dignity did. Hugh's pride, broken, was worse than any chain.
That small, public unmasking taught me the power of witness. It also made new enemies.
Laure Gordon—the empress dowager—was a shadow who petted puppets. She kept influence like coins in a clawed hand. Her enmity crystallized into strategies, a cold, patient thing. She had perched herself behind the throne as regent when the country leaned and found a system that suited her: tight control, a network of nobles in green robes, private fiefs of riches that cushioned any blow.
I had offended her by being visible and useful. She understood visibility. She owned it.
"She will not let you live comfortably," Logan said one night. He had read her moves like cracks in ice.
"She thinks she owns empires," I said. "Someone who thinks she owns the map will be dangerous."
"Then we'll redraw the map."
Logan's idea was to force laure out into the light. He asked Cruz Harris—our left chancellor, a man who flowed calm like water—to help. Cruz had been skeptical of me at first but learned to respect the math of my plans.
"You want to bring a ruler down?" Cruz murmured. The chancellor's face was all composed grammar. "That is perilous."
"I will not do it without evidence," I promised. "I will not ask you to risk honor."
He agreed, because he believed in systems and I had shown that I could make a ledger clean.
We found the pattern in her favors. Laure had contracted with certain housekeepers, certain incisions in the treasury that were polite in paper but screaming in blood. She had given grants to families who paid no taxes. She had kept a private fund for 'care' that bled towns dry.
"How do you expose someone whose shadow is always longer than her person?" Freja asked, sitting by the window, looking into the gardens like she was checking the sky's pulse.
"You make the sun come up when she can't move a fraction," I said.
Cruz arranged an audience. He worked in whispers. Logan polished his manner like someone making temple vows. We set a public ceremony to celebrate the harvest, a festival to invite the provinces—and the harvests had been largely saved by our work. The city itself made one large public repayment ceremony, and I used that to lay my net.
We had witnesses from the south—Hazel, Matias, Jaxon—arrive and stand in the front rows. Emmett and Freja sat in the back. The crowds teemed like bees. Laure sat in her chair with a mask of silk, expecting the usual rituals.
"Your Majesty," Cruz said into the open square. "We gather to commemorate recovery. Let us give thanks."
A chorus of silk and nails. Laure smiled. She had never been so comfortable.
"Before we begin, there is a petition," I said. "From the people of Small An and the border provinces."
Laure's smile thinned like paper in the rain.
"A petition?" she feigned surprise. "Who would dare—"
"Those who have names," I said. "Let them speak." I raised my voice so it traveled the ropes and stalls. "And let them show their ledgers."
The ledgers I held were copies of those we had audited. Hugh's confessions were not the only ones. I read aloud the names and amounts. For each name I read, a man from the provinces stepped forward. For each amount, the crowd hissed.
"Her Majesty," I said finally, with all the nerve of a novice sorcerer, "has a private purse that comes from public levies. We demand accounting."
Laure's face was a mask dropping. "You lie!" she snapped.
"Word and ledger do not lie together," Cruz said, and the chancellor's tone was a guillotine.
"You will account," I told her. "Or be accounted."
Then it happened. It happened like floodwaters finding a new channel. The old supporters who had warmed themselves by Laure's breath watched their handwriting appear in my stacks. They whispered. Their whisper turned to a murmur, to curses, to pleas.
"How," Laure said, the silk thinning, "dare you—"
"Because you were hoarding what should feed mouths," I answered. "Because the rains came and more sicked to the ground. Because men are dying while your gold sits warm."
She looked as pale as old paper. For the first time I saw fatigue on the iron in her smile.
"Is this performance?" they called. "Is this rebellion?"
"Look at the ledgers," Logan said, and the emperor's voice was clear and final, because it echoed from the dragon chair. "We have brought the numbers to the court."
Laure did the old thing: she denied. She accused. She summoned guardians. She called for those who would move swords. For a second, I thought the palace might fracture into knives.
Then the crowd asked for action. They would not let a woman compound grief with gold. They wanted restitution. People began to chant numbers. They wanted their rice. They wanted accountability.
Cruz stood and read the facts, the accounting, the checks from the treasury that linked Laure's account to officials who had siphoned. It was a net woven from paper and witnesses and rage.
And then the climax: Laure was asked, by the court, to step down from her regency and answer charges.
She refused. She screamed. She called the charges blasphemy.
"Then come down," Cruz said. "Come down and face them."
She laughed at first, but the laugh fell to a little sound like a twitch. She looked around at the faces she had bought and found that some of them had already started to step away. When the first of her keepers removed a ribbon she had given him in public, the sound was like paper tearing.
"Do it," someone in the crowd said. "Do it now."
She had never been forced to step off a dais, to stand in a plaza without a silk cape. Hands trembling, she rose. Her step was slow. The public had never seen her feet. I felt oddly protective and furious at once.
They made her stand on a platform where others had been celebrated. The clerks read aloud a list of the items she had taken: coin by coin, grant by grant, a ledger of favors. Each item had the name of someone who had starved.
"So this is what you gave to the people you loved," I said, because I could not be quiet. "Or did you merely keep the joy for yourself?"
Her eyes glittered wet. There was the first human sound she could not buy: shame. It purged like a storm.
She tried to compose herself. "You are treacherous children," she spat. "You would tear down a mother."
"She is not your mother," a woman from the provinces shouted. "She is the one who starved our mothers."
Laure's face contorted, then smoothed. She made a bargain with survival: gasping for breath, she offered to repay in public, to retire from governance, to accept exile in a place framed by a house and a court but not power.
And then, public humiliation: they removed the empress dowager's pendant, the silk with the dragon motif, and placed it into a chest that would be locked by public seal. The crowd hissed with joy. They applauded with sounds that were like knives but not lethal—like harvesting the rot to make room for new seed.
I watched Laure's reaction unfold: first cold haughtiness, then disbelief, then denial, then fury, then begging, then a crumpled childlike plea. People recorded the moment in memory. They gave her no mercy in their retelling. It was a punishment that did not require chains: the loss of power was the pain she had dealt others reversed back into her.
Many bystanders wept with justice in their eyes. Some took out carved flutes and played slow, almost giddy songs. Others spat at her sandals. A few older nobles looked away, ashamed. The clerks wrote the ledger into the public record. Laure's allies melted like sugar in hot tea. Laure herself trembled and finally fell at the feet of the very peasants she had ignored, wigged hair hanging, face flushed with an anger that had nowhere to go but inward.
"You will pay what you took," Logan said, and he stood like a man who had been remade out of small domestic things and large responsibilities.
It was a long spectacle. It was more than 500 words in the hearts of people: it was a punishment that involved tears, shame, and the crowd's rising voice. Laure looked small and naked in a way that no assistant or gold robe could fix. People who had once curtsied at her name now called her by her given name in a tone colder than winter. She staggered through the rituals and was escorted to the old abbey where she would live under watchful eyes and small freedoms but no influence.
Afterward, people followed us and told stories. They made poems where she was a fallen willow. They took photographs in carved wood (not the kind we know) and wrote songs in markets. People cheered. It was messy and satisfying and absolutely terrifying for me: I had become an instrument of justice, and that responsibility felt heavier than any gold.
That punishment changed the course. The courtiers who had hidden behind her found new patrons. Some fled. Others committed to reform. The state began to feel less like a private bank and more like a public thing.
But punishment breeds consequence. Laure's allies would not simply vanish. They slunk into corners and planned. They would trade their shame for new tricks.
One of the worst aftermaths was a scheme by a counselor named Roberto Schaefer. He was a man of polite phrases and wolf patience. He tried to undermine our new policies with fake petitions, with slow approvals and enticing contracts. We met his plots with speed. We exposed his double-ledgers as well, with testimony from the provinces and the old ledger Hugh had begun.
"Roberto," Logan said when we finally brought him into the square, "why did you hide the truth?"
Roberto's shoulders collapsed. "I thought I could buy peace," he whispered.
"Peace?" I said. "You bought someone's hunger."
We left him with the choice to rebuild the charities he had hollowed out by effort or to be stripped of his rank. He chose the first. He would spend the rest of his life putting weight back into the scale.
Laure's downfall had a ripple: gardens replanted, hunger met with grain, a small gun in the hands of a conscript that kept marauders at bay. We had pushed the needle of a country. It hurt to do it. It was deeply human.
Later, Logan and I stood on the palace steps and watched the sun fall.
"You looked at me when I bent," he said.
"I looked at you when I fell." I leaned against him. "You came with me."
"I waited at a lot of crosswalks," he said, smiling like a child who had learned a new math. "But this is the first time I've had to wait for a country."
We laughed and held hands.
That night, in the bed we shared, he offered me a modest ring he had found in the palace crafts—an iron band with a tiny etching.
"I want to mark that you're mine," he said simply.
"I don't want to be owned," I said.
"Then be mine by choice," he answered. "Be mine because you are the only one who makes me laugh during audits."
He kissed me, and it was a small, private thing that tasted of almond pudding and seventy odd studies. I felt safe, not because the world had softened, but because the two of us had learned to stand beside the government like a small stubborn rock under floodwater.
We rebuilt more than a dam. We rebuilt trust in pockets. The Orchid Pavilion kept secrets that mattered and traded to keep mouths fed.
Not everyone was grateful. The Empress Dowager's supporters tried petty rebellions. Roberto tried to buy trust with donated art. Hugh had to work in the public storehouses under oversight. But the worst was behind a locked gate where Laure sat and watched the yard like a woman who had lost her name.
The things that were unique to us—the pencil and the shaky lead marks on the imperial letter, the little pistol Emmett made that slept under my sash, the Orchid Pavilion's whispers, the almond tofu Logan loved to save for me—all of them became anchors for the life we had made here.
"Will we ever go back?" I asked one night, as we walked through the cold gardens.
Logan's eyes softened. "Maybe. But even if we don't, I choose to be here. With you. With this country."
"I choose it too," I said, and for once the future didn't feel like a trap but like a room we could furnish.
There were mistakes and betrayals, and there were small triumphs. There was a public punishment that emptied a treasury and filled mouths. There were long negotiations where we turned enemies into workers and grain into wages. And there were gentle nights when Logan would brush a crumb from my cheek and claim that the empire smelled like tea.
We worked and we loved with the same reckless habit. The Orchid Pavilion's pendant hung under my clothes like a secret heartbeat. The pistol slept warm at my hip like the promise of a thunderclap. The pencil marks on Logan's letters felt like a trace of home.
Once, long after Laure was taken to her abbey, a woman who had been a concubine approached me.
"You did what no other woman dared," she said. "You made the public listen."
"You sang louder," I answered. "You sang along."
She smiled, and as we walked through a courtyard of lanterns, I felt something I could call peace.
And that was not the end of anything. It was the beginning of a map we could both read.
The End
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