Face-Slapping20 min read
My Regent Found a Shivering Rabbit — Then He Asked, “Where’s My Rabbit?”
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I woke to white that smelled like iron and salt and snow. The world was a single blade of cold. My first clear thought was: I am not where I belong.
“I’m awake,” I whispered to the sky, though who would answer me was nonsense. Snow hissed in the trees. My hands — if they were hands — were small, shockingly furry, and useless for anything but shivering.
“You alive?” someone called from the dark. I twitched. A grunt, a curse. Men’s boots in the drift. I pressed my muzzle into the snow and watched a shadow loom.
“Good catch,” a voice said. It sounded like metal and river-silt and quiet temper. Then a larger glove clamped the scruff of my neck and I dangled like a puppet.
I was a rabbit.
“Put that thing down!” a drunk interrupted. “You’ll lose the master’s favor if it’s nothing but a stray.”
“Heh.” The cold voice that had grabbed me made no move to hand me over. “Keep it.”
They tossed me in an overturned carriage and left me there like a found thing. I thought of the metal taste of blood I’d spit out in another life, of sterile lights and the noise of a ship. I thought of hands that fixed bone and hands that broke bone. I thought I was dead and had earned a soft corner somewhere warm.
They didn’t know. I didn’t know. Then the carriage rocked, and ropes snapped, and snow collapsed. I fell, slid, landed with a crash that launched the world into black for a bit.
“I found a rabbit,” Galen Crosby said when he opened the carriage curtain.
He looked like a man who had eaten winter and made it his cloak. Half his face was covered by a gold-and-black mask carved like a dragon’s scale; the visible half was pale and beautiful in an austere, dangerous way. He wore a robe that swallowed wind. He did not smile.
“Prince?” the attendant, Finn Bacon, asked from the floor, voice flat with alarm.
Galen set me on his knee as if I were an odd-shaped jewel. “Keep it quiet,” he said. “A pet in a carriage is a curious thing.”
I thudded my head against his fingers because I could not help it and because a minute ago my whole world had been mud and snow and men. He reacted as if the thud was a favor.
“You scared,” I mouthed in rabbit, which came out as a pathetic, wet squeak.
Galen’s dark eye — the real one — narrowed with an expression that might have been interest. He breathed, and the room smelled of old leather and something floral. “Poor thing,” he said.
He said many things that night. He held me, he wrapped me, he brought me inside a wooden room warm with a brazier. He flinched at the sight of my blood-smeared fur and then ordered a servant to “rub the creature clean.”
“You’re not to go on the bed,” he told the small heap of white fur when he thought no one would understand. “You’re not to shed everywhere. Don’t touch me unless you must.”
“If I could talk,” I thought uselessly.
The first law he set — he liked laws — made a strange little map in the hollow of my heart. If I obeyed, maybe I would survive. Survival was appealing.
“Name?” he asked the rabbit one night, dusting snow from his sleeve. That was how cruel it was: men asked names of things they rescued.
I did not answer. Rabbits do not answer.
Days bled into a strange half-warmth. I learned my boundaries. I slept in his coat fold because it was warmer. I learned the particularities of being small: that a human’s lap is a floating island and that a warm hand can be lava on a good day and a drowning net on a bad one.
“Why do you feed it like a child?” Finn asked once, grinning and utterly unprepared for how intensely the master would glare.
Galen did not argue. He simply smoothed the little thing’s head. “It annoys me less than most people.”
I was small and dirty and terrified. I was also strangely alive. I remembered a medic’s hands in mine from a life that smelled of diesel and iodine. I remembered being a doctor on a ship full of salt and hunger. I remembered being betrayed, drowning, and then waking to a new mouth and a new body and a name I never owned.
Leticia Estes had been a name from before. The first time I heard it in this body was when the man with the noble jaw — the one who called himself by a title I could not place yet — said: “That collar looks like the one I made.”
He reached down and pinched the tender skin at my nape. The tiny motion made me freeze. He smiled as if he had found a small, private amusement.
“Who are you?” he asked the room, voice like a winter branch creaking.
I thought: I am what I must be. I cannot tell him I am a medic out of time. I cannot tell him I am the replacement of some girl who died in a ditch. I cannot tell him I am both the grave and the thief of a life.
I learned the rules he made were elastic. He would pin me to his chest and call me an idiot and then fold me into a pocket and scold the servants if their hands lingered.
“You’re a strange companion,” he told his steward one night, running a finger through my fur. “Keep it warm, but don’t let it curl into my cushion.”
“Or the master will smother it?” the steward said, amused.
“Or I will,” Galen said very softly. His fingers were sharp. They were careful, and that made me more frightened, if possible, than any brush of cruelty.
When they spoke of politics I listened. I was too small to understand battles; I understood hunger and fear and what it meant to be at the mercy of men who loved their titles more than their children. I learned more about this man every day. He was a regent — someone the court obeyed with the kind of fear used to catch stray dogs.
“You saved the rabbit,” Finn would say to him, eyes bright with a tone that mixed pity with envy. “You did something not half as monstrous as usual.”
Galen would smile a fraction. “Monsters have their uses,” he said.
It was on the river, on a creaking flatboat that smelled of salted fish and old rope, that my life and its rules tilted.
“We will go by the water,” he told his men. “The road will slow us.”
People with knives and black cloaks are never far away from a man with a face like his. The river smelled like a trap. Guards moved like pale ghosts. Even the crew made small, nervous jokes — the kind of jokes that keep hands from shaking until they must.
The world narrowed for me to the size of a paw when men burst in. Something metallic flashed at me. Someone screamed. A blade carved through the air and missed its mark by inches.
I leaped as I always had, a reflex that belonged still to a body where I had run through warfields, a body that remembered how to move without thought. My hind legs pushed me into the attacker’s knee. A man fell like wood.
The man with the dragon mask moved slow and calm as a wolf. He did not flinch as blood sprayed the planks. He did not look away when the assassin’s blade carved his sleeve.
“Who sent you?” he asked later, when the man lay tied and gashed.
The prisoner laughed. “You think I’ll tell you what pays me? I’d rather you slit my throat.”
Galen’s jaw worked. He leveled his eyes at the man like an instruction.
“Hang him by the stern and feed the river,” he said.
Someone went pale. Hearts in the boat clenched. I heard fingers cover mouths. The prisoner went through denial like a house through flames: first a foolish smile, then a steady forgetfulness, then a sudden alarm, then frantic begging. The crew’s reaction shifted from awe to fearful silence.
“Please, please, I’ll tell you—” the prisoner choked.
Galen’s voice cut him off. “Take him.”
They took him. The river swallowed most explanations.
I did what rabbits do when the world was too big: I curled on Galen’s lap. He smiled, barely. He smoothed me like the world could be smoothed.
You have to understand something: when you are small enough to be picked up and stroked, people reveal their edges. Men speak like they are practicing cruelty; they practice mercy like it is a habit to be dropped. I watched them both and learned where the lines bent.
It took only a few weeks for the mask to become an ordinary thing. The court was a clever spider. News traveled. My strange existence — a little white ball tucked into the lap of the regent — became an odd curiosity. Courtiers whispered when they should bow. Men tried to touch me and were chastised. Women sent him trinkets with floral ribbons.
“Will the master keep it?” a visitor asked once. He had silk in his sleeve and a map in his student’s face.
“Of course,” Galen said. He twisted my collar — a bit of woven leather with three little charms that rattled when I moved — and his expression grew very soft. “Keepers must keep.”
Then I saw my own name in a voice not mine. Someone called me “Miss Leticia” because the servants had been taught to. Names are performances here; people wear them for the sake of hierarchy. I did not protest. I did not want to be flung into the web of who I was in the house I had stolen.
And then one night, while the world was muffled in frost and the river wind rattled the shutters like loose teeth, something happened.
We had been arguing — a conversation that had begun as a teasing and ended in a stranger’s quiet: he called me greedy for wanting to be warm and I called him cruel for wanting to be feared. I was, as always, small and furious.
He leaned close.
“All the fuss for such a small thing,” he said, voice rough.
“I—” I tried to say I had been someone else before. I managed a kiss instead because the body wants what it remembers: human skin, human breath, and a sudden desperate search for proof that I could be more than fur and fear.
Our mouths met like an accident. I tasted metal and snow and the faint bitter of medicine. My chest tightened. The world reeled. I felt my bones unravel and knit.
When I opened my eyes I was human.
I sat stunned on a blanket, heart punching like a trapped bird. My hands — real hands — trembled. Fingers that could hold syringes and stitch flesh suddenly felt clumsy holding a ribbon. I pushed my hair from my face and found thick dark hair, long and damp. For a dizzy second I could have cried with the crooked joy of it.
“How—” I said. I heard my voice and it was mine: an instrument tuned to stubbornness.
Galen’s expression cracked open into something like wonder. Then he laughed — a raw, small laugh — and grabbed my wrists as if to prevent me from floating away. “You are bolder than your shape,” he said. “You are inconsistent and clever and impossible.”
“Who are you?” I asked him, because being human rewired my hunger for names. I deserved to know who had been flattening the world and making rules for a small creature like me.
Galen looked at the collar at my throat — the one with three small charms he’d noted — and then at my face. His fingers flicked along the leather, and for a moment his hands were not the hands of a ruler but an artisan inspecting his own work. “Who is this girl?” he murmured. “Where’s my rabbit?”
I did not have time to answer because the world delivered a crisis: the regent’s court was never safe and the city never slept. We returned to the capital, traveling through fog that smelled like bread and rumor. I kept switching between fur and skin; each transformation came with a wet, dizzying nausea if I so much as brushed blood. The pattern revealed itself slowly and ugly as a scar: blood near me, a stain on a cloth, a reflected smear — if I saw it, my body said No and changed me.
I learned how to hide. I learned how to become human when night needed courage and rabbit when the world needed me to be small and safe. I leaned into being an observer with both the scars of my hospital life and the instincts of a soldier. I worried about policy; I worried about every man who looked at me like an object. I worried about the man with the mask and his temper like a bell.
And I learned more about my old life stolen body’s family while I could approach them in a woman’s form. The name they used in the world was heavy: this body had been the favored daughter of a house that looked like an open book full of inked lines: Cedric Keller sat at the head of the house and had once been brave. Now he seemed a ledger man.
“Your second daughter is dead,” someone said once, like a bell. It was the fact the city had been rehearsing. “They hung a cloth and set out a coffin. The dowry has been reallocated.”
I had been that “second” once. I had been drowned in a bargain.
I found them the way wraiths find ruins: through whispers, through the staccato of courtiers’ tongues. The woman who had replaced my life — the one who smiled with a mouth like a knife when she thought people weren’t watching — was Susanne Gentile. Her daughter, the one who had smiles and hands that loved to bruise, was Katherine Kelly. They were small, clever, and practiced at appetite.
“Where has your sister gone?” Catherine — Katherine — asked provocatively when we met in the garden under the pretense of reconciliation.
“She is dead,” my father said with a voice that was used to ordering horses and men. “She was unwell.”
“You sound so… bereaved,” Katherine said with mock tenderness. “Is that what a father feels?”
I could have snarled. Instead I placed my hands on her arm.
“You knew,” I said softly. “You told someone to take a child out of the city.”
Katherine’s lashes fluttered. Her voice turned sweet as poison: “Who told you that? You’d poison your own reputation with such talk.”
I was learning to play their game. I was learning to turn the court’s appetite against them.
“You sold her,” I said. “You knew what would happen.”
Katherine smirked. “You are talking like a ghost. A dead woman says such things.”
“Not dead, then,” I said. “And not dumb.”
My soul had been iron-tempered in another life. The physician in me fixed limbs and then took care to aim at the soft parts. I had tools I could use in this age: lies, evidence, timing. I set about stitching proof together as clean as sutures.
It took weeks. I hunted men who remembered the caravan that had left the city in snow. I found the ones who had been loathsome enough to traffic bodies. I listened to the gossipmongers. I converted half-truths into testimony. I learned how to look like someone who had been wronged and how to be a woman dangerous enough that a courtier would blink.
Then the wedding day came.
It was a feast dripping with lacquered gold and arrogant smiles. Everyone who was anyone had gathered because a royal marriage is a theater and a courtroom and a slaughter all in one.
I wore the dress my grandmother — Margarete Ferrari — had insisted on giving me because she understood that some decorum hides knives. It fit like armor and like a mirror. My heart beat like an animal in a trap.
Katherine stood near the dais, her belly showing the smug certainty of pregnancy. Susanne hovered like a proud hawk. Cedric sat stoic as a ledger.
Galen sat on the dais, half masked, a ruler who had the last look at everything.
I stepped forward with proof in hand. I had threads of a confession, a servant’s testimony, and the names of men who had been paid. I had blood on a cloth that matched a bootprint from their stable. I had what they could not easily deny.
“I demand you listen,” I called, loud enough for the carved tiles to blink. “I demand the truth be heard before the vows are sealed.”
Heads turned. A murmur ran like wind. A noble’s face was the only thing that could not be surprised by scandal because they paid for it. The court’s breath was a chorus.
“Leticia Estes,” Susanne cooed, attempting the pity she had used at council. “You are ill to interrupt a wedding.”
“I interrupt because I have been murdered,” I said. “Or at least, my life was stolen and replaced.”
A cold laugh went around the hall like a tasting spoon. “How dramatic,” someone hissed.
I held up a folded scrap of embroidered linen. “This is a servant’s handkerchief found in the caravan that took me. It bears the crest of Cedric Keller’s manor.”
The hall gave a sound — a rippling, then sharp intake of breath. Cedric’s cheek tightened. Susanne’s smile thinned.
“You will produce witnesses,” a minister whispered, thinking of court. “You must have witnesses.”
I did. I had men who remembered the caravan full of white sheets and the whispers of men who had been paid. I had a midwife who had been bribed in motions that should have been secret and a record of a list of payments that matched the household ledger. I had Finn Bacon’s reluctant corroboration — he had been the one to find me on the river and he had told everything he could remember when I pushed him.
Galen stood very still. His face was half- hidden, but I could feel him like a tide.
“You will all deny this,” I said. “And you will do so with the assuredness of liars. But you will not deny the ledger entries.”
A clerk in the corner — Raul Brewer, who had worked long enough in men’s households to be tired of secrets — came forward with the papers I needed. He had been careful; he had not been friends with them; he had been careful because he had been paid to be careful. Raul set the papers before the assembly. Men bent to look.
For a moment the world stalled. Then Susanne — the woman who smiled as if it cost nothing — laughed and the sound that came out of her mouth was small and useless.
“This is a forgery!” she shrieked. “Ridiculous! Who would believe a creature like you?”
Galen rose. He did not shout. He did not need to.
“Let them speak,” he said.
I had planned the spectacle, the names, the facts. I had not prepared fully for what the court would do to witness the collapse of a household. They circled us like birds. Courtiers thrust faces forward like claws.
First came disbelief. Susanne’s expression went from confidence to annoyance to a practiced confusion. She reached for another mode — outrage.
“How dare you!” she wailed. “My husband—”
“—bought a corpse,” I cut in. “You bought a life you did not earn.”
Cedric, who had been a man with the patience of ledgers, changed as if someone had turned a page. His color worsened. Sweat flickered his temple. He looked at his wife with a combination of bewilderment and the first thin spark of fear. The men who had depended on his quiet rectitude felt a small tremor.
Katherine — Katherine, who had taken another woman’s fate like a tablecloth — tilted her head and laughed until the laugh got clogged.
“You are impudent,” she said. “A trickster’s daughter.”
“I am the daughter you had stolen,” I said. “You sold me like an old horse and you thought no one would notice.”
I laid out the evidence. “You hired men to take me away in the snow,” I said. “You bought silence with silver. You told lies to a grieving city. You tried to pass off my death.”
The hall was a living thing. The courtiers gasped. Some crossed themselves. Some looked away in that way one does when stepping into a puddle unexpectedly. The groom’s face turned an odd color; the royal family shifted like reeds.
“Would anyone like to deny it?” I asked.
Katherine’s face tightened. Then she did what cowards do: she accused me instead. “She is crazy,” she said. “She is a liar and a thief. She plots to ruin us.”
“Denial is an old art,” Raul murmured. “But paper is dead honest.”
Hands snatched for paper. Fingers read sums. Voices changed. I watched Susanne’s mouth open and shut. She moved through the stages: smugness, then the flush of being caught, then a cruel denial, then raw pleading. Her eyes flicked to her daughter as if seeking a mirror.
“Not true,” she hissed. “Not true!”
My father’s face crumpled into something like a ledger cleared for bad debt. He had been composed and patient, but now worry walked him like a dog.
“Son,” Margarete Ferrari — the matriarch who had never worn cruelty for show — whispered to him so only he could hear. “You have a choice.”
He did not answer properly. He looked at the assembled nobles as if expecting them to aid him. They looked back with interest that was mostly survival.
Galen cleared his throat like the sound of closing a box. He let the room feel the quiet that precedes a verdict.
“Let the witnesses speak,” he said. Finn Bacon stepped forward, looking small and awkward and honest. He told the story of the river, the carriage, the fallen roofboard. Raul Brewer read the ledger. The midwife — a woman who had spent her life between birth and secrets — said what gold had bought her silence.
The court shifted from rumor to proof.
Then it became theater.
Susanne’s face collapsed in the open way of someone who has been rehearsing crimes and suddenly discovered they were without an audience. Her hand flew to her throat.
“No! That is—” She swallowed. Denial shook her tone. “You will see, that is falsified. This is—”
She had the last trick — the one every cruel woman has: to unleash a monsoon of pleas.
“Forgive me!” she cried suddenly, barking like a woman who had swallowed glass. “Forgive— Please! I am sorry! I did it for the house. Please—”
And that was the moment the court took its temperature and found the wound and then pressed.
The crowd’s reaction changed in stages, the way tides retreat and return.
First: silence, stunned that a household like ours would be unstitched on a wedding day. People’s mouths hung open like traps.
Second: a ripple of whispers — “My God” and “How could they?” and “They admitted?” The air turned hot as a pot, everyone simmering with their private appetites.
Third: outrage and fury. A young officer spat into his sleeve. An old woman clutched a rosary and began to weep with righteous sound. Someone in the back started to laugh, a cruel, thin thing; others followed, at first whisper-laughter that became a chorus as the scale of the crime settled in.
Fourth: some began to applaud as if applauding a spectacle. A few people took out paper to mark the moment — clerks who always put scandal under ink like a pressed flower. Others pushed to the front to see the reaction on the faces of those who had been allowed to keep quiet for so long.
Susanne’s face had gone from color to a greenish gray as denial curdled into terror. She staggered forward and dropped to her knees at Cedric’s feet in a motion at once supplicant and theatrical. The regent watched. The groom flinched. The musicians stopped playing mid-aria, as if the instruments themselves could not bear to continue.
“Please!” Susanne wailed. “I can fix this! I can— I will pay what you want. Don’t— please, don’t ruin my daughter! I’ll give— take the jewels, take the estate —”
She became babbling supplicant: “Please — we were afraid — he forced us —” Denial turned into a frantic script: “It was his idea,” she mouthed, pointing with a shaking finger at Cedric, “He told me to—”
Cedric flushed, then went white, then a terrible, animal anger moved through him. “You liar,” he said. He looked at her — the woman who had become more of a ledger than a wife — with something like pure contempt. Then his voice broke because rage and fear are a poor pair.
“You sold my child,” he hissed. “You sold her.”
Susanne’s eyes bulged. “I thought— I thought—” She began a cascade of denials that ran into a wall. She tried to stand and they pushed her down; the court would not allow it. Her hands clawed for the hem of a robe like a drowning thing.
The reaction was swift, ugly, and public.
Under the weight of witnesses and ledger entries and testimonies, the house collapsed in audible snaps. The crowd’s judgment fell like a gavel. A chorus of disbelieving gasps, then shouts, then the clapping of hands as if to punctuate a newfound truth — the house of Cedric Keller, once secure, shredded in a day.
People began to take sides. The young men who had once tipped their hats now crowded through to film the spectacle in the only way they could: scribbling notes and stuffing small scraps of paper in their pockets like proofs for bar-rooms. Those who had owed the family favors now shifted uncomfortably, realpolitik overtaking affection.
At first Susanne’s reaction moved through the classic arc: smirking, dissembling, shrieking, then pleading. “You are lying,” she said, voice turning brittle. “You are lying!”
“You are vile,” Katherine whispered at first, then louder: “She will slander us to ruin our house!”
Her voice cracked. Then the sound of live shame — the one that starts in your veins and sets the skin cold — began to climb her face. Suddenly Katherine’s fingers found her belly and went white with fear.
Galen watched it all with an odd expression: amusement rolled into hunger and then into control. His hand tightened around my wrist, but not roughly.
“Bring them to the steps,” he said to the steward.
A dozen men hauled Susanne and Katherine forward like rags. They were dragged up to the carved dais where nobles sat like judge-shaped stones. Galen made them stand in the courtyard so that all could see. The court gate yawned and courtiers pressed forward, pressing faces to one another like a chorus. Messages would go out; the city would clamor. The regent liked theater.
It was then that their act broke. Katherine’s lip trembled with live fear — not mere performance — and she made three steps toward her mother like a child toward a lifejacket.
“You lied,” I said. “You left a girl in the snow to die for your ambition.”
Her reaction was mechanical at first: denial with a practiced sweetness. Then shock straightened her spine. She faltered, the lines between her rehearsed face and true hysteria eroded.
“Liar!” she shouted. “She’s insane.”
“That is enough,” Galen said. The words had the sound of a sword drawn.
The court demanded punishment because courts always did. We do not let such things settle quietly. We string them out like meat to let the public appetite gnaw.
Galen’s voice rang like a bell. “For those who betray family for gain, the law must display a remedy fit for the offense.” He looked at Cedric and then at the crowd. “Public humiliation will teach certain lessons.”
The punishment came slow and precise like a surgeon’s operation. Susanne was dragged into the square and forced to kneel on the cold stones. They took away her finery until she had only her body and the thin cloth of humiliation. The courtyard filled: magistrates, courtiers, servants, even the priestly men whose faces were like folded paper. They circled like vultures.
“Look!” someone cried. “Behold the woman who sold a child to the road.”
Susanne first reacted with defiance, then fury, then a purple patch of denial: “You see falsehoods! I was only trying to—”
“One by one,” a magistrate intoned, “we list your offenses.” He read them as if reciting a ledger: bribery, trafficking, bribery of guards, falsifying documents, attempted murder.
Her face drained. The crowd’s tone changed from curiosity to verdict.
“Shame!” an old man cried, and it passed like a contagion.
They made her stand on a small platform in front of the doors where passersby spat and laughed. The magistrate ordered that she be paraded by the main road on a cart with a placard naming her crimes — a device that stripped dignity until it was nothing but a hollow echo.
Katherine sobbed. “Mum—” she pleaded, then fell entirely apart, her posture crumpled like paper. “We were told— we were told,” she kept saying, but the crowd’s anger had teeth now. Someone in the back threw a rotten apple and hit the back of the carriage. People started to chant in a low dangerous rhythm.
Cedric stood on the dais, face pale and furious. His voice was cracked with shame when he finally spoke. “You thought you could do this and go on, live on with the gold. You were wrong.”
Susanne’s transformation was brutal to watch: proud woman, smug conspirator, hysterical liar, then naked in confession and pleading. She fell to her knees and prayed — not to gods; she prayed to the crowd. “Please! Don’t—” her voice shredded. She begged for mercy and for her daughter’s sake she tried to bargain and bribe. “Forgive me. Forgive me. I’ll give the jewels. I’ll—”
Her words became a tangle. People hissed. The magistrates’ steeds thudded. Someone in the crowd began to chant, a low rhythm like a heartbeat: “Shame. Shame. Shame.”
Then the final collapse.
She dropped to her knees and began to cry with real noise, a sound that was not acted. Her shoulders shook, and for once there was no craft, no measured crying. She whimpered and begged and called on any god she could find. A dozen phones would not have captured the nuance, but every face there saw the arc: smugness, shock, denial, collapse, pleading. Faces in the crowd recorded it with their eyes.
Someone started to clap, slowly, as if to mark the end of a performance, then accelerated into a rhythm of approval. Others shouted for harsher punishment. Men who had once bowed to the family spit as if it tasted foul now. The chant rose.
Katherine, who had a child in her belly that may or may not be royal, fell to the ground and pressed her face into stone. She sobbed for a while and then, as the crowd’s appetite threatened to devour her, began to beg for small mercies: spare me my child, spare me my name.
Her reaction followed the cruel arc: she had been smug; she became stunned; she denied; she begged; she asked. I watched each stage burn across her countenance like oil on water.
Cedric’s face hardened into the silence of a man who had lost everything but the ledger — then softened. He stepped forward and did what men do to salvage a name: he placed himself between them and the crowd and took the first blow of public shame for the family by issuing a formal apology, promising restitution, and demanding legal restraint on his wife and daughter’s movements.
The crowd buzzed like insects. Some clucked with satisfaction. Others grumbled that the punishment was too mild. But the show had made its point: a household that trades flesh for fortune could no longer hide its ink.
When it was over, the crowd drifted away like a tide. People told the story in a dozen new versions by night. Some retouched it with romance; some sharpened it with scandal. The boy at the bakery shouted it at the top of his lungs. The river seemed to hum.
Galen — who had watched with that quiet amusement pressing at the edge of cruelty — leaned down and took my hand in his big cold fingers.
“You did well,” he said softly. “You used a bedside manner I did not expect.”
“I used a scalpel,” I said. “And I made the incision.”
He smiled, a small dangerous thing, and pinched my cheek like an owner might pinch a beloved animal’s ear, half tender, half possessive. His fingers brushed the collar at my nape and tightened.
“Who is my rabbit?” he asked again, and the question no longer felt like a joke.
I looked up at him, at the man who could break houses, and answered honestly.
“I am Leticia Estes,” I said.
He regarded me like a man who had found in a play the moment a character suddenly is revealed to be the protagonist used for the entirety of the drama.
“You’ll stay,” he said, voice rough with approval. “No more wandering under other skins.”
“I won’t be a pet,” I replied.
He laughed then, utterly — an unmusical, human sound that made the edges of his mask tremble. “Not a pet,” he agreed. “A thing that belongs to me.”
I thought of the cold road, the men who had sold and lied and the ledger that burned with their proof. I thought of the river and the man who had ordered a body fed to the fish. I thought of the collar with its three little charms. I thought of the moment when a human mouth and a rabbit mouth had found one another and changed everything.
Outside, the courtyard quieted, but the city would not stop talking. I had taken a life back and forced a family to eat its pride. The crowd had watched the hunger of a house and decided on a remedy.
Galen pinched the little collar again, like an artisan counting his stitches. The charm jingled once.
“Who is my rabbit?” he asked one last time as if asking perhaps to hear the name again.
I smiled then, a dangerous, greedy smile that belonged as much to the woman who knew how to stitch wounds as to the rabbit who knew how to hide.
“Right here,” I said. “The one you keep in your pocket when the world gets too loud.”
He nodded as if this answered everything. He reached forward, not like a man conquering a thing but like a man tucking something precious back into place. His fingers brushed the soft skin at my nape and this time he pinched with the gentleness that comes only from knowing you possess something rare.
“Good,” he murmured. “My rabbit stays.”
I felt the tiny charms clink and knew, in a way that was steady and dangerous and absolute, that this particular collar would remember us both.
The End
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