Sweet Romance14 min read
My Guard, My Shadow, and the Moon I Stole
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I am Ginevra Bowman. The house calls me "miss" the way a bell calls a servant: politely, routinely, without thinking. My hairpin clinks when I move; the jade tassel on it sings like a tiny bell every time I laugh. I have money enough to buy anything a penny can buy and no idea how to buy what it cannot.
"I don't want a good man who will bury my life in fine ashes," I told the lacquered mirror once, when the thought of Dalton Bauer came like a hawk over the yard.
"Then don't marry him," my maid said from behind the curtain.
"But I can be forced," I said. "My father says the marriage is already decided."
"It can be worse," Isabelle Roth said. "Or better."
"Better," I said, and the word felt like a secret.
That secret shaped itself into a plan: escape. There were rules, of course. One must have time, a plan, and—this was the hard part—someone who could carry me away while everyone asleep blamed the weather.
"Miss, do we have anyone who can run?" Isabelle asked, pulling a comb through my hair.
"I have money," I said.
"Money buys many things."
"It must buy him."
I wanted more than a thief in the night. I wanted someone who would not pity me, not condescend, not marry me for my name. I wanted a shadow who could cut a path through danger and keep his hands clean of gossip.
He stood in a cage at the slave market like a statue put in a wrong scene.
Saul Clement rubbed his hands when he saw me looking. "A practical man, miss. Useful hands."
"I asked for a dressing maid," I said, already thinking of rope and moonlight.
He lifted the latch. The man that stepped out did not smile. He did not ask where he was going. He only watched.
"Do you do hair?" I asked him, considering him like I would a candlestick.
He set a knife against the bamboo frame. "I kill," he said.
"I can teach you," I lied. "I can pay to learn."
He looked at me as if I were a cold new moon. His name, I later learned, was Elden Serra. He had the kind of stillness that made people think before they spoke. He had hands that knew how to hold a blade, but also how to hold a small child's hand to steady it.
"How much?" my steward asked, counting silver as if adding and subtracting was a way to teach courage.
"Two silver," Saul said. "He comes cheap because he is a trouble. He brings misfortune to those who like him."
"Misfortune?" I echoed, surprised. "What sort?"
"People he cares for die. Old masters, those he trained with. He is a wisp of cold luck."
"Then he is perfect," I said.
Elden's eyes narrowed when I said I would be his mistress. "Will you pay?" he asked.
"I will," I said.
He bowed his head and walked out of the market like he had always belonged to the world where doors open and shut on command.
That first night he mended my hair with rough fingers and a tenderness that made me suspicious.
"You do not like me," I said, testing. "Bring me away."
He did not answer. He only arranged the jade tassel and said, "You should sleep, Miss Ginevra."
I wanted him to say he liked me. I wanted romance like they write in playbooks: cold killer falls for pampered lady, she smiles, they run away together, and finally, an embrace beneath a waterfall. Instead, Elden's silence was a kind of wall I must climb.
"Why do you stare at me?" I asked once, tugging at his sleeve.
"Because you cry like the rain," he said, simply.
"Oh." I blinked. "I cry so well because I have rehearsed."
"You cry because you feel," he said.
That was not the answer I planned for. It unsettled me.
My father, Edward Flynn, thought of marriage as a ledger. "A good match brings silk and influence," he said to me, though his voice was softer than his word. "You are to marry Dalton Bauer on the new year's eve."
Dalton Bauer was handsome in the way rotten fruit shines: bright surface and a hollowness you taste only when you bite. He liked fine rooms and no restraint. He liked the idea of a reputation that made others rise like supplicants. He would trample the things I loved because he would think my astonishment was a cheap catch.
"No," I said. "I will not marry him."
"That is decided," Father said, eyes like iron filings. "He brings the kind of money useful to keep our trade with the northern merchants. It is settled."
So I made a different settlement: I would use Elden.
"I can make you like me," I told him over and over, to the point it sounded like a prayer against the wrong man. "I can make you want to run with me."
He smiled once—an accident in the margins of his face—and then continued to refuse me with the same cold honesty he had used when he took my hairpin out and left me with my hair falling like midnight.
"Miss, you make it sound like a bargain," Isabelle said carefully. "He is a man who has seen worse than our gates."
"I have charms," I said, remembering what the burly old woman at the market—Agn Agneta Burns, a soft-spoken wet-nurse who spun stories like wool—had told me. "She swore by a crooked tree at the city gate that a little blessing will help."
Agn Agneta had offered me not prophecies but the crude comforts of her craft. "People say a strange man will bring trouble. A charm won't change fate. But it may change a man's mind."
So I went to the crooked tree and to Luca Dupont, who sold fortunes and sugar-sculpted figures from his stall.
"You want love?" Luca asked without lifting his head from the little sugar rabbit he was carving.
"I want escape," I said.
"Those are cousins," he said. "Two silver, one fortune."
He gave me a little packet that smelled faintly of mint and something else—something sticky like spring.
"Is this a medicine?" I asked.
"Not really," Luca said. "It makes the drink taste better to the one you want to please. No refunds."
"Noted," I said, and I paid without argument.
The plan was messy in the kind of way the best plans are: it took many tries, each small foolishness a test.
"Do you like my cooking?" I asked him the first night I tried to win his stomach.
He looked at the blackened stew pot with suspicion. "You poison then?" he asked.
"I boiled it badly," I confessed. "But I've tried."
He took a bite and frowned, but the next morning he had painted a perfect set of vegetables and left three neat bowls for the household. He corrected my clumsy way of slicing candied peel and taught me a way to hold the knife that made my hands look less like a maid's and more like something steady. I had tried to make him soft by feeding him. He made me sharper by teaching me how to hold a blade.
"Is that what you wanted?" he asked, one night on the roof when we watched the empty moon.
"To be taken away," I said. "To not become a miser's mantle on some man's arm."
"You will become something," he said. "Not a mantle."
He refused me even as I coaxed and confessed and wore down his stubbornness like a file on metal. He flinched when I leaned on him; he fled when my hand came too close. I learned his boundaries, and then I learned to step just outside them.
One night I tried the sugar Luca sold me.
"Eat," I said, offering him a rice dumpling at the edge of the roof.
He looked at the packet, and then at me. "You are sure?"
"Of what?" I asked.
"That you are not hungry for more than food."
I had expected suspicion, not poetry. He ate the dumpling and then—without ceremony—picked up the torn corner of my sleeve and put it in his pocket as if to keep it safe.
I had practiced being fragile. I had practiced being coy. I had planned to press close, to lean my weight enough to make him notice. But when I did, he pulled away like a man who had been burned and had learned his lesson well.
"Don't climb on me," he said, flat as winter.
"I wasn't climbing," I said, pouting like the heroine in those books.
"You used to cry to make men bend," he said. "You cry like a season, Miss."
"Then what do you do when someone sits on the roof beside you and looks like a knife?"
He was patient but not soft. He kept himself like a locked box. Sometimes, I thought I had turned the key by being obstinate; sometimes, he would say something small that made me see the distance between our worlds.
"You could run with me," he said one night, suddenly. "Leave before the feast."
"Now?" I asked.
"Tonight." He glanced away. "This is the night my master will be drunk and the streets soft. We can be like wind."
"Why now?" I asked.
"Because the man they want to marry you to will be telling tales in a noisy room."
I had expected him to say he loved me, or that his life had shifted. He said a plan. It was enough.
We escaped under a veil of white clouds and lantern smoke.
"Do you know how to go?" I asked as we slid down the back stairs.
"No," he said.
"Then why do you go?"
"Because you will be hurt if I do not."
He always said things like that—short sentences like commands. And so I let him pull me into the dark like a small, stubborn animal.
That first night away, we slept under a rooftop that smelled of cold rice and river. I woke at dawn and found he had shaved a thin line across his palm as if to measure the length of keeping a promise. The line bled silver into the napkin. He refused to let me clean it.
"Don't," he said. "I'll mark it myself."
He had a way of protecting me that never pretended softness. He kept his hands square and his eyes sharp. He taught me how to tie knots and how to twist a blade to break a lock. He also taught me how to look at the moon.
"Your name is like moonlight," he said one night when the city slept. "Ginevra. Like a thin disc that keeps the dark honest."
"That is a pretty idea," I said.
"It is also foolish," he said.
Even after we ran, even after he settled into the role of a guard who refused to be more, the others still whispered. Dalton Bauer prepared for the wedding as if nothing had happened. He drank wine with his friends and strutted in front of the mirror of his rooms as if he had already bought the right to my life.
"You cannot just run," my father told me one evening as if he had read a ledger and found no ink for my vanishings. "You are a Bowen. You are the face of our trade."
He did not understand the way being a face felt like a costume.
We tried to be invisible for a while. I learned how to keep books and count bills, to run the silk business like someone who intends to inherit it. Elden—my shadow—remained in the corner, still as if carved by ice. He never smiled at my triumphs. He only tightened his hand when someone was rude.
It was at the festival of lanterns that everything peaked.
"You look as if you own the stars," a passerby said to me, watching me frame a lantern like an empress. "Who is that lucky man?"
I nearly laughed. "I do not own the stars."
I did not want a crowd to collapse into the story of our running. I wanted a quiet life. But the world is never quiet for those who steal their own fate.
The wedding day was chosen by custom and the calendar together: the seventh moon. Dalton arrived at my house like a man stepping into a banquet. He wore a smile practiced like a mask.
"Miss Ginevra," he said, bowing. "You will be the jewel of every house I enter."
"You flatter easily," I said, though my fingers clenched around the hem of my robe.
He had allies: two men who had always smiled when a woman fell. He had threatened traders who owed him silver. He had even paid Saul a favor. But he had one failing: vanity meant he wanted the world to watch him triumph.
That is why I chose the public.
"Are you certain?" Elden asked me as I adjusted my robe in the bridal chamber.
"Yes," I said. "Not because I want him hurt, but because I want the truth to be the thing that wakes the city."
He hesitated like someone choosing the shape of a wound. Then he nodded. "Very well."
We did not meet at the main gate. We did not storm the room. We went where the marriage contract must be delivered: the great hall where the contract would be read aloud and where merchants and neighbors would stand to see a fortune exchange hands.
I walked in, in my marriage robe. Dalton sat like a king, the groom's laugh already loose on his lips.
"Miss Ginevra Bowman," the contract reader began, the room hushed along like a lake inhaling. "We are gathered to declare the joining of—"
Dalton lifted his head and smiled at the crowd like baked moonlight. "Today we shall..."
Elden did not wait for a cue. He stepped into the open, and for the first time that room saw him without a shadow to hide him. He wore no finery. He carried only a small slip of paper—one of many things I had given him to keep safe. His voice did not tremble.
"This man has lied in public and in private," Elden said. "He has bought favors and sold promises. He has taken what he wanted from women and left them with shame."
"I'll have you know—" Dalton started, and then the room moved like a wave to watch the spectacle.
"You will have nothing," Elden said. "You will have this," and he laid a tray of documents on the desk—receipts, a list of prostitutes' lodging rooms, ledgers of bribes, a half-dozen names of men who owed Dalton favors and had sent receipts to his account.
A hush fell. Some women gasped. Some men shifted. The contract reader kept reading, as if his voice were a tool for justice.
"Dalton Bauer," Elden said, "you promised fatherly men and merchants honesty in trade. You traded honesty for debauchery. You came here asking to make Ginevra your wife. You are not worthy."
The room started to hum, like a swarm stirred up.
"These receipts prove you coerced men to silence you," Elden said, sliding another piece of paper forward. "These show payment to those who kept favors for you. This shows your debts. This is the ledger of who you used to buy loyalty."
Dalton's face shifted rapidly: pride, then confusion, then the beginning of a flinch, and then anger.
"What is this?" he snapped. "Forgery!"
"Then explain why your signature is on these receipts."
Dalton tried to laugh. "You dare—"
"You dare nothing," I said, stepping forward with a voice I had not used before in public. "You dare what every vulgar man dares: you take what you do not own and call it conquest."
There were murmurs. People who had once bowed to Dalton straightened like men recalling the taste of bread.
Dalton rose to his feet. "This is slander! I will sue—"
"For what?" I asked. "For men to name you? For women to stop pretending you are a gentleman? For the ledger to show what you are? No. For you, Dalton Bauer, the market will see."
"People—" Dalton tried to hold onto the crowd, but his bravado was like a warm robe in winter: when you stripped it back, you saw the bones.
Elden reached into his sleeve and pulled out a small, sealed packet of letters—letters from women Dalton had tried to coerce, with their names, their trembling ink. He read them aloud, slow as law.
"To see you treated like merchandise," one woman wrote. "To see you take our honor for laughter."
Another woman wrote: "We signed nothing. We were paid in coins and promises. We wish to bind you by name."
The murmurs grew into noise. Faces turned toward Dalton like clocks all choosing their second hand. The merchants who had eaten at his table shifted, and those who had owed him favors began to count the price.
"Boy!" Dalton shouted at Elden, as if he could strike the man with his voice alone. "You will pay for this!"
"I already paid a price," Elden said. "I let you court my mistress." His voice did not raise. "But the city will decide."
At that, a woman from the crowd—a seamstress I had once purchased bolts from—spat on the floor in front of Dalton. "You always took with insults," she said. "You never gave."
A merchant who had once received a brush-off from Dalton's arrogance shoved a ledger forward and said, "This is proof that Dalton lied for contracts. He took from my tubers and promised returns he never gave."
The room unfolded into accusation, and Dalton's expression mutated into a fear that refused to be swallowed.
He turned to my father. "This is false! You defend this—"
"Your paper is yours," Father said slowly. "But my daughter's honor is not your paper's coin. If these are true—"
"You won't have that honor now," Dalton cried, sweat appearing across his forehead as the crowd leaned in. "You will ruin me!"
He lunged toward the stack of documents. A friend tried to grab him. The friend slipped, and the great hall erupted.
"Seize him!" cried a man whose ledger had been ruined by Dalton's negligence. They pulled Dalton down and pinned him for a moment—long enough for the men who had been his allies to melt away like wax.
They dragged him to the courtyard, in front of every neighbor who had come to see the marriage. The lanterns swung. The crowd thickened like grain in a sack.
"Do you hear them?" a woman said. "They have names."
"They have my debts," Dalton shouted, flailing.
"They have your face," Elden said. "One of these men sold you words; another bought your shame. Do not ask the city to forget what you bought it with."
A circle formed and people started to talk, loud and sharp. Some spat. Some called for fines. A man from the trades council took Dalton's collar and read aloud his transgressions, as the council recorded them: unpaid debt, coercion, forced hush-money, and other crimes that did not necessarily belong in the law, but belonged in the cleansing public.
I stood at the side and watched Dalton's bravado crumble. At first he pushed and screamed like a trapped animal; then, when the men who had once laughed with him refused to reach, he began to plead.
"Forgive me," he said, voice small. "I'll pay. Please."
The crowd was merciless. Old friends shook their heads. Women that he had mistreated gathered at the edges and pointed.
"You thought no one would look," a woman told him. "You thought money was a veil."
People took their phones—no, their small hand-drawn notes, their sketches of the ledger—turned to the door, and told others in the market alley that Dalton Bauer had been unmasked.
He tried to speak to me, and I let him for a moment as if for amusement.
"You were mine," he gasped.
"You bought me with my father's silver," I said. "You thought my silence was your property. The city says otherwise."
They demanded his public apology. They demanded he return what he'd extorted. They demanded he stand on the public steps with a rope in his hands—a symbolic rope—and say aloud his sins. The tradesmen calculated a fine that would take his pride and his pace. For the first time, he understood scandal would not be paid for with a smile.
He crumpled. He bit his lip and said things like "I didn't—" and "it was only..." and finally, "Please."
The crowd's reaction changed in shades: from shock to outrage to a sad, cold vindication. Some wept. Some clapped. A boy pointed and laughed. A woman snapped a cloth to dry her hands and kept her eyes steady.
Dalton's face broke. He tried to explain. He tried to bargain. His allies left him. People recorded his shame with their eyes.
"Everyone," Elden said quietly to me later, when it was done. "Did you expect more violence?"
"No," I said. "I wanted him seen."
He touched my fingers and the jade tassel whispered. "It was worse," he said. "And better."
Dalton was not dragged to prison. The trades council fined him three times his annual income, and the public shaming forced him to sell his city's bonds to repay what he had stolen in reputation. He would live—some men do—but he would live known.
That was punishment enough for the city to feel better. It was also the end of him as a suitor in the eyes of decent people.
Afterward, when the crowd thinned and the lanterns swayed, I found Elden standing where the moonlit line met the shadow. His hand found mine without words. He was not tender in the way the poems promised. He was present.
"You saw it," he said.
"I saw what I needed."
"You will not forget," Elden said. "You should not."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because memory keeps monsters honest," he said.
We married later, quietly and without public trappings. The city still had things to say, but the ledger of our life had changed. I took over my father's trade with his blessing and his grumpy advice, and Elden stood at my side like a shadow who had finally learned to shine.
People kept telling me my life was a tale of escaping. They said I turned a sharp man into a husband and a hollow man into a subject of scorn. I laughed and told them the truth.
"I tricked him," I would say. "I used a fool of a fortune and a dumpling. I lied about poison and borrowed courage. But he was never entirely mine."
One night, years after the public shame that broke Dalton, our silk loft smelled of warm thread and newly cut paper. Isabelle set out the day's ledgers. Luca Dupont still sold sugar at the fair, older and kinder.
Elden took the jade hairpin out of my hair and held it up between us. The tassel caught the lamplight and flickered like a small moon.
"You keep this?" I asked.
"I keep all things you leave behind," he said.
"Even the ugly sugar rabbits?"
"Especially the ugly sugar rabbits," he answered.
I laughed and wedged the tassel back into my hair. "We will go to the moon now," I said.
"Yes," Elden said, eyes soft. "We'll go. I will carry you to whatever moon you choose."
He kissed the knot of my neck, quick as the hush before a storm. The room smelled of thread and sugar and the small bravery of people who learn to trust.
That night, when the moon rose crisp and full, I traced my thumb over the hairpin and thought of the crooked tree where Luca had sold me a packet that smelled like spring. The world had been loud and cruel and petty. But we had cut a path through it—together. The tassel chimed. The moon shone. Elden Serra, my shadow, slipped his hand into mine, and for the first time in a very long while, I did not have to cry to be seen.
The End
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