Sweet Romance13 min read
My Ex, the Dog, and the Warlord Who Fell in Love
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I woke up in a silk dress with a red veil over my face and a stranger's name already in the air.
"Blakely," someone said behind me, low and sure, "come out, my bride."
I could feel the weight of a hundred sets of eyes, and even through the veil I heard the city celebrate. I tasted something like panic, like the aftertaste of too much baijiu, and then some stubborn, private part of me laughed.
"You are ridiculous," I muttered into the veil, talking to myself the way I always did. "I did not agree to this."
"Come out," Jasper Donnelly said again, but softer. "You will make the town sing."
He had a voice like stone warmed by sun. He was half myth in this town — a warlord with more coin and teeth than sense, they said. He had already six wives before me. I thought six was a crowd. I thought I wanted none of it. I thought I could run.
"Why me?" I asked him once, later, when we had to walk beneath banners and through rose petals.
"You make me laugh," he said. "You are not a kind I have collected yet."
I blinked. "You collect women?"
"Like rare things," he said. "But I think you are trying to steal my heart rather than fit into a slot."
"That's theft," I snapped, balancing my feet on the carriage because a bride's shoe was not meant to touch dirt.
He smiled then. For a second he looked less like a warlord and more like a man who had found a particular corner of comfort. It was a small thing, but when Jasper smiled the corners of his mouth drew heat.
"You're stubborn," he told me. "Good."
I did not know how to live as someone's "good" thing. Back home I was a singer in a shabby club. I sang with a throat that could wear dust like perfume and I laughed at anything sharp or shallow. I had a boyfriend once — Hudson — who wore cheap T-shirts and smelled like the house we were going to leave. He had promised that grown-up things would wait. Somewhere between one drunken karaoke and another, we agreed to a ten-day "break," planned a trip that was supposed to fix us. We never made it back to the life we had.
"Jasper," I told him when the fireworks blinked like the eyes of a thousand cameras, "I'm not built for courts. I don't know how to be a jewel."
"You only need to know how to be one to me."
He took my hand. It had the small, rude insistence of someone who did not ask permission to be close. I felt the flush move up my neck. That was my first small, certain shiver.
The wedding was a festival. One hundred tables, red banners, and the music of the city pressed to hear. Jasper drank between tables until his eyes glazed. He fell asleep before the ceremony ended. Someone carried me to the house, and for the first time, in that soft hallway where lantern light found dust and silk, I felt something almost like peace. Jasper's back was broad. It smelled, oddly, like pine.
"Are you hungry?" he asked in the dark.
"I always am," I said.
He put a small cake in his pocket. "If you are, take it," he told me. "New brides must be preserved."
I took it, and we joked like thieves. I asked him, "Of all the types you already had — poised, sultry, fiery, innocent, cool, sweet — what do I count as?"
"Funny," he said, and I could not help the small, bitter twist of my mouth. "You are the funny one."
I almost spat the cake at him.
Days later, with the house still full of wedding noise, Jasper fell asleep drunk and I slipped out like a shadow that had practiced being small. I wanted fresh air, a step without silk, a truth.
I ran into someone else in the courtyard.
"Who are you?" the woman asked, measuring me with her eyes.
She called herself a second wife and announced that the warlord's heart had never left for anyone but a Lady Lin. Her voice was thin and bright like a blade that had not been chewed by use. I listened, and my mouth went dry. The town gossip doubled like a knife in my chest.
"Don't think he loves you," she said. "He loves only Lady Lin. We are all shapes of her shadow."
"Is that how this works?" I asked. "We are all shadows?"
"Take care," she said. "Tomorrow's tea must be hot. Seven parts hot, no sugar."
"Fine," I lied. "I always like my tea scalding."
I tried to get out of the house that night but ended up in the chrysanthemum garden, where a pale figure moved like a reed. He — or she? — had an unsettlingly familiar face: Journi Knudsen. Journi and I had met by accident, two strangers flung through time like bad luggage. Journi had been a skydiving instructor back home and had landed a little crooked here. He laughed and then we clung like two people trying to find a rhythm on a foreign shore.
"Are you also from the future?" I hissed when we found each other behind a screen painted with mountains.
"I am," Journi said. "I came from a broken parachute and a worse landing."
"Thank God," I said. "I thought I was the only idiot left."
We plotted. Journi had jewels tucked in a drawer, small coins he had been saving. "We will run," he said. "Tonight. I'll distract the guards."
"Do not use your charm on the guards," I told him. "You have strange angles."
"I have angles and elbows," he said. "That will be enough."
He was not enough. We tried. Guards came, lights swept the walls, and I nearly made it to the outer wall when soldiers found me. I tripped on a stone and the coins in my ankle pouch spilled loud as confession across the path.
"Stop!" a voice barked. "That bag contains stolen goods."
Jasper stood there with a gun on his hip, even the moonlight respectful of his silhouette. He asked me to come, and the world shifted. He picked me up and carried me like an armful of weather.
"Are you trying to run?" he asked, and his face was something I could not name.
"Yes," I said.
"And yet you trip," he said.
"I have a talent for it."
He laughed for the first time in a way that warmed me. He moved past the coins without so much as glancing; he only pulled me close and said, "You are mine for tonight."
He tucked a key into my palm before he left, a heavy, old key. "This opens the family's treasury," he said. "If you are tempted to run, go there first. Pick what you like. But do not run in panic. If you must take something, choose what matters."
I stared at the key. It was absurd to have trust like that in a stranger. But I kept the key.
A week passed and then a band of thieves broke into the house. Arrows whistled. Flames licked the yard. In the scramble, someone pushed a masked man into the room where I waited with a tub of water. He grabbed me. I thought he would take me. I thought worse things.
"Let her go," shouted a voice.
I heard an arrow thunk into the wall near my head. A second arrow grazed the curtain and knocked a hair from my braid. The world became a narrow tunnel. I felt something hot sink into my hip and a flash of agony.
"Blakely!" Jasper bellowed, and his voice tore the night's skin. "Hold on!"
He carried me like he had when we were newly married — strong, wordless, bone and pine. He told the men to leave. The leader of the attackers was a mountain man named Yahir Bradley. He had a face like smashed rock and a tired sort of justice. He and Jasper exchanged curses and then went to war.
I woke up later with Journi's sweating face bent over mine.
"You're alive," he said, in a voice that had been made of hope and pain in equal measure.
"So are you," I answered.
Jasper came back with blood on his sleeve and a key tucked in his pocket. He sat at the bedside until the fever left me. He was gentle in ways that surprised my memory of warlords.
"Will you marry me for real?" he asked one night, voice small like a child's.
I wanted to answer honestly and say, "I don't love you," and then run, but the truth that kept shivering at my ribs was different. He fed me, he sang me odd little songs from a world I did not understand, and he refused to let others talk at me like I was a thing.
There were moments that made every small organ of me leap. Once, a cold wind came midway through bed-making. Jasper shrugged and took off his overcoat and put it over my shoulders.
"You're freezing," he said simply.
Another time, I was terrified at dusk in a market. He reached for my hand without a word and steered me through the crowd.
"You are mine," he whispered once, when fireworks had died to embers.
"Do I get a say?" I asked.
"Every time you say no, and then yes," he said, "you mean more."
I felt my face heat. These were the small stolen seconds that lodged warm in me.
Then came the worst day.
Someone served dog on a platter.
"Seven-wife's dish," one servant announced in the courtyard. "Chef's specialty."
"Dog head abalone," another chimed with pride.
I had heard whispers before. I had not connected the cheap H-buckle leather collar I once bought for a laugh to anything more. I had not known Hudson had followed me through worlds. I had not known that things could bend in this way.
They told me later, around the tomb, that the dog had a collar with an H buckle. Someone laughed — cheap fashion is immortal. I fell against the shallow grave and wept until my throat was raw. I had not meant murder. How could a break-up become a funeral?
I found out who ordered it. Grey Peters, the steward who kept the books and the secrets, had a neat smile and agendas like blades. He had stood by the kitchen door and shrugged while servants misread a command. He had not told Jasper, and he had not told me. He had watched the city gossip shape itself around me and he had fed it like a hound.
He had to be punished.
I demanded a public reckoning.
The square was filled the day we decided to bring Grey out. Jasper walked ahead with a calm that was like a blade wrapped in silk. I walked beside him, my skirt muffling my steps. The city lined the street. They had come for the entertainment — to see a warlord's court — and then, perhaps, to watch a woman break.
We stood under the lanterns. Grey Peters was led out in chains that bit his wrists raw. He tried to look like the wronged man, which was perhaps the worst lie for him to wear.
"Grey Peters!" Jasper called. "You have numbers in your ledger. You also have a tongue that lies for power. Explain to the people why my guest's past was put to a pot and served."
Grey's face was smooth now. He bowed low as trained men always bow. "My lord," he said, throat clear, "I made a misstep. A dish was misnamed. I did not know the source. I obeyed orders."
"Whose orders?" Jasper asked.
"Orders from above," Grey lied. "From those who thought a lesson needed to be taught."
"Who are those above?" I heard my voice, thin and trembling. "Who in this house eats what they did not ask for? Who in this house thinks death is a lesson?"
Grey shifted. The crowd leaned forward. Lantern light carved lines on faces. A woman near the front hissed and clutched her shawl.
"You knew the owner of that collar," I said. "You saw the marking. You saw the cheap H. You thought to hide it. Why?"
"Because the city was talking," Grey said. "This place needed silence."
Jasper's hand moved once and Grey flinched. He had no space left.
"You gave them silence at the price of a man," Jasper said softly. "You took a woman's past and made it dinner. You took a girl's ache and made it a joke."
Grey tried to laugh like a man who must plead. "It is policy."
"Policy?" Jasper's voice tightened. "Policy that serves the powerful? You will tell every table why you did it. You will name the person who swore to kill a memory instead of a rumor."
Grey's mouth opened and closed. The first sound that escaped was a pitiful, small denial. He said, "I was protecting this house."
"No," I said. "You were protecting your place within it."
Then Jasper did something I had not expected. He let me speak.
"Look at him," I told the crowd. "He has measured the worth of people by what they eat, by whether they fit the right kind of pattern to please a man who collects women. He sees us like cards in a deck. He took my boy and made him meat."
A ripple of noise moved through the crowd. Someone clapped, uncertainly. Someone hissed. Old women spat.
Grey went from smooth to pale to desperate. "I—" he started.
"Say it," Jasper said. "Say why you did not tell me that there was a dog."
"I thought it would cause a scandal," Grey said. "I thought she would be laughed at. I thought to fix the embarrassment."
"Who told you to fix an embarrassment with a life?" rows of faces asked.
Grey's composure finally cracked. He began to babble the names of towns, of merchants who had brought strange gifts, and the longarged pressures of keeping a warlord's house "honorable." People started shouting. "Shame!" echoed. Black-haired children pointed and laughed. A woman took out a small mirror and began to film.
Grey moved through stages of a dying animal. He denied, he lied, he pleaded. "Spare me," he begged. "I had children. I have debts."
"You had a choice," I said. "You chose this. You will unburden yourself now."
Jasper stepped forward. He did not touch Grey roughly. He only took off his own brocade sash and wrapped it around Grey's neck like a judge would a stole. "Because you betrayed trust," he said, "you will not be allowed to hide in the ledger room. Tonight, you will sit in the street and recount, table by table, what you did and why. You will apologize to the family you wronged. You will be empty of position."
The crowd breathed as if they had been holding it for days. Grey's eyes widened.
"You will stand where the cooks stand," Jasper continued, voice like weather. "You will be handed the lowest bowl. You will taste the shame you arranged. Then, when you have said the names of those who ordered you to hush, we will decide your fate."
People gasped. A child whispered, "He will be stripped." Another voice answered, "He will be forgiven, perhaps, if he speaks honestly."
Grey's face fell from pretense to raw terror. He had believed the ledger would protect him. He had not believed the people would gather to watch him crumble.
They made him sit at the place where poor men sat. He was given a bowl of the food he had once ordered burned into history — a lowly stew. Jasper stood while he ate, and I stood beside Jasper. The crowd watched. Grey ate in silence, and as he swallowed his pride with the food, he began to speak.
He named names. He named a councilman who had wanted obedience, a relative of the house who whispered bargains in Jasper's ear, servants who had been promoted for staying mute. He named himself and admitted the lie: that he had misread a command and had then invented a story to cover the error because it seemed easier than owning the shame.
When it was done, a hundred people had watched him go through the change I had demanded: arrogance to apology, pride to terror. Some wept. A few spat. Someone snapped a picture. Jasper, quiet as always, had Grey carry the scrawled confession out to the gate to post for all to see.
The crowd's reaction changed slowly. At first, there were murmurs of satisfaction, then anger, then a hush as the weight of names hit the paper. Some of the older women nodded. "At last," one said, "he spilled what he ate."
Grey's face crumpled. He fell to his knees before me, hands clasped and dirt on his knees. "Forgive me, madam," he said. "Forgive me."
I looked at him. I felt my grief like a raw stone under my ribs. I thought of the collar, the cheap H buckle, the way Hudson liked to wear things for jokes. I thought of his laugh. He had been eaten because someone wanted the house to look perfect. I had been turned into gossip because a man wanted fewer problems.
"This is not forgiveness," I said. "This is a reckoning."
The people who had gathered saw something change inside Jasper then. He did not use a sword. He used the crowd, the truth, and the fear of a man who thought himself safe. Grey left that afternoon stripped of rank and given the job of scouring the courtyard for a month. He cried. He would be watched. People would not let him hide now.
He had been publically unmade, and the way he changed — cocky, to defiant, to terrified, to broken — was what I had wanted as an audience. I stood there and watched him go. The crowd scattered like scattered seeds and life continued.
After Grey was humbled, Jasper came to me and sat on the low wall of the garden. He leaned his forehead against mine.
"You were brave," he said.
"I was furious," I said.
"You're both," he told me. "Good and terrible and honest. I like that."
He pressed his lips to my temple. It was small and warm and human. I thought of the thin, sad collar Hudson must have worn when he wandered into the wrong world. I thought of teams who could mistake a life for a problem to be fixed. I thought of how Jasper had gathered the city and scratched out a man who would have let him eat another's past for the sake of appearances.
I forgave myself then. A little.
Healing came slow. I had burned holes in my pride and in my past. I dug a small grave in the back yard and put the cheap H-buckle belt and a curl of hair into the earth with a handful of soil. I held a clay cup of wine and we sang — Jasper's baritone a deep river, my voice a rough bird. Journi hummed a strange, steady chorus. Yahir, who had been fierce in battle and honest in peace, stood off to the side and nodded like a man who had seen strange things across mountains.
"Why did you stay?" I asked Jasper one night as we walked the lights of the market.
"Because," he said, "you are the most restless thing in my house. I like unrest. It keeps me sharp."
"You wanted me," I said.
"I did," he admitted. "You do something to the place. You make it less empty."
It took us time. There were small, honest heartbeats. Once he tied his scarf around my shoulders when I complained of a chill. Once I found him in the market buying pastries because I had said in passing, "I miss my city's sugar." He had a way of noticing small needs.
We had ridiculous dances. I dragged him into a silly modern exercise once and he followed like a gull following a boat, arms awkward and earnest. I laughed until I bruised.
"I am not funny," I complained one night under lanterns.
"You are funny for me," he said. "When you laugh, the house breathes."
When I thought I would drown in the small waves of city life and the people who had followed us slowed like tide, I tested him.
"Will you keep me if I ask to leave?" I asked. "If I ever say 'give me a way out', will you hand me the key and stand aside?"
He hesitated. His jaw clenched.
"No," he said at last, and his voice was the raw honesty of a winter light. "I will not stop you. But I will not be the one to show you to the door. If you go, you go. If you stay, decide with me."
That was the safe answer. It was honest enough to be true.
A festival came and we went together, and I rode on his back as he carried me. Under the fireworks, I felt something bloom like spring in frozen ground.
"Did you ever love me?" I asked him once, in a rare moment of reckless honesty.
He looked at me for a long time. "I think I did before I knew you," he said. "Now I know the person who is funny and fierce. How could I not?"
He was not a man of many words, but his hands said the rest. He changed bandits' laws so Journi could go dance in the central square. He ordered the house to stop preparing strange recipes. When Grey came back to scavenge a career, minimal, watched, Jasper had him assigned to plant and tend a new garden — men could learn humility like digging soil, Jasper said.
Years slipped like a ribbon. We grew into each other. I wrote songs that no one from my old city would ever hear, about a man who smelled like pine and kept small keys. I learned the language of silk and how to tie a good knot. Journi learned to cook. Yahir turned kindly.
Sometimes, on the low nights when the moon was small, I would unwrap the old H-buckle and slip it into my hand. It had been cheap, but it had belonged to Hudson. Once I thought he might come back, as if the universe had misplaced him only for a while. I planted the belt and a curl of hair. I planted memories.
The ending of this strange chapter was not a grand promise. It was a small thing. Jasper and I stood in the back room of the house where I had first been carried. It smelled of pine and old paper. He put a hand on the little brass pocket watch I had kept from the life before.
"This watch," he said softly, "ticks for your songs. When you write, it will keep time."
"I will write for you," I said, and it was not a bargain.
We had rebuilt a life from the ruins and the laughter. I would not say it was perfect. It was messy and bright and very, very human.
One winter morning as snow lay soft on the roofs, a small, battered parcel arrived at my door. Inside was the cheap H-buckle belt — a relic the postman found somehow — and a notebook. Inside the notebook, I found a story I had once tried to write, a story of a warlord and a singer and a dog that became a memory.
Jasper sat beside me and read the last line aloud, and he misread one word and said it wrong in the softest, most private voice.
"Blakely," he murmured, "we will keep your watch wound."
I smiled. That was the ending I liked: small, particular, and no one else could fold it into another story. We kept the H-buckle hidden in a drawer like an answer and let the watch tick.
The End
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