Sweet Romance14 min read
The Debt I Chased: A Girl, a Jinyiwei, and the Ledger
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I remember the exact tilt of the sunlight that afternoon, the way it cut through the paper screens in the main hall and painted Dean Burns's back in gold. I dropped the ledger, ran like a wind across the floor, and flung myself around him.
"Father!" I cried, hugging him with all the theatrics I could muster. "Finally back. I've missed you."
"Ah—" He startled. His hand landed on my head as if to chastise a child. "Katelyn—"
"Let me keep hugging you," I pleaded.
A voice from the shadow of the hall said, "Katelyn?"
I froze, arms still around the wrong waist. I turned slowly, and then my breath left me.
The man standing there was carved out of wind and marble. He was handsome in a way that made the world pause: a narrow face, a faint smile that didn't reach the eyes, and a posture that said he had the patience to wait through centuries. His clothing was plain but well-cut. He bowed.
"Miss Katelyn," he said softly.
"Good day," I managed, trying to sound modest. Inside, my head was doing acrobatics. My father introduced him like a stranger-become-family: "This is my cousin from the north. He'll be staying with us while we talk business."
Cousin? I hummed and smiled. My father wouldn't lead me on like that—would he?
"There are two rooms cleaned already," I said to be useful.
"No trouble," he said. "They may share."
"Share?" I laughed in a nonsense way so the laugh wouldn't sound like disappointment. "Why would they share? That's scandalous."
He looked at me for a long time, and his expression changed like weather. For a moment, he was warm. Then duty pulled his face back into a mask.
That was the first day I learned how a man's face could be a lie and the truth at the same time.
I kept busy with the accounts. Our family ran a string of small but steady shops, and numbers were my language. I prided myself on knowing every coin and every hiding place in our ledgers.
One night, my father and that "cousin" left in the morning light for the merchants' guild. I'm nosy; I followed them. I caught only a glimpse—doors closing, secret signs, the hush of men who sold futures and betrayals.
"Father," I said that night when they returned, "what are you and cousin talking about?"
He smiled like a man who knows his secrets are safe. "Katelyn, some matters of business are grown-ups' affairs."
The "cousin" staggered in drunk late one night, clinging to Father. He had been at a tavern. I brought him hot water. He smelled of strong wine and something softer—citrus and incense. When he slept on the blown cushion, his breathing deep and even, my hand went of its own accord to his face. He opened his eyes half dreamily.
"Katelyn," he murmured, and I froze.
"What did you say?" I whispered.
He didn't answer, just clutched at me like a man scared of being alone. I could have done any number of foolish things. I was nineteen and foolishness came with a pretty ribbon.
I undid his buttons with shaky, audacious hands. He made a sound that sounded like surrender. Then footsteps threatened at the window. Father peered in, red-eyed and scandalized, "Daughter—"
He fell back as if someone had hit him. He'd been drunk enough to forget himself, and yet he still tried to save my honor.
"What is this?" I asked when I could breathe. The fellow who'd been my gentle "cousin" stood up, very different: shoulders like a soldier, jaw like iron.
"My name is Dalton Yoshida," he said plainly. "I work for the imperial guard."
"You're what?" I pinched my arms. "My father would not—"
He was already one man and another. That night his two attendants stood outside the room like statues: Felix Lane and Abel Ryan. They were colder than Dalton, but they shared something—an unblinking loyalty that made him sharper, more dangerous.
"Lock Katelyn away," Dalton said quietly the next morning.
"What?" My father and I both blinked.
"Bring her to a safe room," Felix said. "Her knowledge of ledgers may compromise our inquiry."
My father's voice trembled. "She can help."
Dalton's face was entirely the blade: "Very well. She may help for now."
So they let me stay, an odd arrangement: I was a debtor's claimant and, for reasons I did not understand then, also a helper in a secret that smelled like smoke.
"Why is the imperial guard here?" I demanded one night while we were counting a pile of stolen receipts.
Dalton's fingers left a ledger and came to rest on mine. They were cool and precise. "Because some men called merchants have been taking more than is allowed from the land. They hide ledgers. They bribe officials. They eat public grain and call it profit."
"I could have found them," I said foolishly. "I know numbers."
"You would have been seen," Dalton said. "You would have been used. You are my safety net, Katelyn. A girl who knows the books is rare in a man's world."
He spoke like a ruler, but sometimes, when the room went quiet, he said something different. "If you ever want me to pay that debt—" he mouthed once when I slept and I dreamed he was a softer thing.
I am not the kind of woman who falls for a single smile. But Dalton's small gestures—bringing a bowl of hot water, resting my aching back with a lifetime's practiced hand—were the broom that swept my stubborn independence into a tidy corner. He corrected my totals with a gentle pinch. He scolded me like a thief who owns me.
The merchants' house that mattered was the Romano estate: Esteban Romano, handsome and stupid in an endearing way, had been my old schoolmate. I still remembered the prank we had pulled in the academy; he had protected me even when he was little more than a boy. When I approached him, he gave me a look that made my chest flutter.
"Katelyn," he said gently, "what are you doing here?"
"Doing my family business," I lied. "Bring your ledgers. Tell me where your father hides yours."
He smiled like a lovesick fool. "If my father hides his books, it's either for pride or for sin. I don't know which yet."
That night we were together in Esteban's counting room. He fumbled, he drank, he confessed small things, and I did something I had sworn I would not do: I used his affection to ask about his father's secrets. He laughed like a boy in a field. "If I had a book, Katelyn—I would give it to you like a red ribbon."
We tumbled, we laughed, and when he slept, my father and Dalton walked in like storm and shore.
They saw me, perhaps, in a compromising light. "Katelyn, that's enough."
I wasn't punished. But I felt like an idiot. Esteban's face when he realized I'd been used to get a ledger from his house—that look is still a sharp stone in my memory.
"Later," he whispered to me, clumsy and raw. "If you want me to be better, wait."
A ledger arrived at Dalton's hands later, and with it came a web. The Romano family had hidden taxes. They had padded their numbers. They had given gifts to the magistrate. Dalton held the ledger and looked at me, and in that look was everything that both scared me and warmed me.
He did not drag the Romano family into the street—at least, not at first. He had plans, patient and cold. The day the purge happened, it was like the sky had been opened.
"We will take them at the market," Dalton said. "We will show what they hid."
"I want to see them pay," I told him.
"You will," he promised.
The market was full. I stood on a bench with a small knot of townsfolk, clutching my father's hand. The sun made halos around people's hair; merchants shouted the day's best fish. It was the kind of noise that could hide an army.
Dalton appeared in iron and cloth, the imperial seal prominent on his sash. His two attendants fell in behind. He ordered a silence with a single look.
"People of this province!" he called. "Hear the charges. These men have taken what belonged to our granaries. They have filled their coffers on the sweat of the people. We have their ledgers."
Ruben Ballard—Ruben who had sat in silk and knife-smiled at community charity—stepped forward like a dog dragged to the leash.
"What is this nonsense?" he crowed, then faltered as Dalton produced proofs and names. The crowd leaned closer.
"You cheated the people," Dalton said simply. "You declared fewer sacks than you sold. You found loopholes, you paid them into secret hands, you called it 'overhead'."
Ruben's face flushed. He had been arrogant for years. Now the style of his arrogance would be undone.
"You cannot do this!" Ruben snapped, and for the first time, his voice cracked. He looked to the crowd for allies. Few hands rose.
"Bring out the ledgers," Dalton ordered.
Felix and Abel produced the bound books, the leaves brittle with ink, the pages smelling of counting-room oil. Dalton opened one in the center of the square.
"Here," he said. "This page once belonged to the market of the willow road. See the code? See the missing grain? Here is where you sold without register. Here is where your official took coin into his sleeve. You called it private trade. You called it initiative."
A young woman in the crowd shouted, "My son's rice was halved last season!"
A father spat on the ground. "We starved!"
I felt a hand on my elbow—my father's, small and worried. The merchants around us shifted. Accusers and accused stared at each other like predators recognizing prey.
Ruben reddened. He tried to laugh. "It's bookkeeping. You can't prove intent!"
Dalton's voice was a scalpel. "We can."
He produced a list of names—officials, clerks, and the signature of one magistrate who laughed with a coin always between his lips. "This magistrate," Dalton said, "signed a list and found his pockets lined with the proceeds."
There was a murmur. People began to call for their due. The crowd swelled like tide. Dalton turned to Ruben. "You will stand publicly. You will turn your ledgers over. You will hand over the goods and all the hidden coin."
"He'll refuse," Ruben blustered, but the bravado had cracks.
"Your sons' deeds are on the page," Dalton said. "Bring them to me, all of you, to the center."
They had not expected the market to answer back. The town's poor and middling folk, who had for years been told to bend, poured out curses and accusations. Some came with receipts, with sacks that weren't empty. A mother brandished a note for grain withheld from her son; a miller produced a ledger with missing tolls. The crowd's mood turned from curiosity to hunger—hungry for justice.
"Take them to the steps!" Dalton commanded. The guards moved. Felix and Abel were precise. They forced Ruben and two other heads of markets to the plaza's stone steps.
"Here we will read the crimes," Dalton said. "Here we will watch restitution."
Ruben's face moved across states. He went from smug to shocked, then to fury, then a kind of pleading I had never seen. "This is a mistake!" he cried. "You can't make me—"
"People," Dalton said softly, "you've worked for this city your whole life. You raised its walls and fed its soldiers. These men hid what belonged to you."
They began to drag sacks from the merchants' wagons. Daltons' men poured the contents on the steps: grain in measured clumsy piles, silver coins clinking, ledgers opened like confessions. Women in the crowd began to count targets.
"Return what you took!" someone cried.
Ruben fell to his knees with theatricalness that had been his trade. A merchant's henchman tried to step forward; Felix struck him down with a rope. Abel took the magistrate's seal and snapped it in half.
"Shame him!" the people demanded.
Ruben's mask slid. For a long time his mouth ran denial. "You don't understand—" he wailed. "I kept the town safe. I gave gifts—"
"You gave bribes," Dalton said. "You took wheat that was not yours, and called it 'management.'"
I watched the crowd's faces turn. Some pulled out friends they'd lost to hunger. Some when they saw the sacks began to cry, some cheered. A woman spat in Ruben's face. A child took a handful of grain.
Ruben's reaction changed like weather. First, he was furious. He tried to smear Dalton's name, cry corruption. "You are led by shepherds from the capital! You know nothing of trade!"
"That's a lie!" Dalton answered. He had a quality then like a blade warmed for use—calm, precise. "But the books tell truth the way the people do."
Ruben's voice became thinner; he pounded the ground with fists. Then he tried denial: "Those signatures—false!"
An old clerk in the crowd raised his palm and said, "I signed them. I signed under order. So did my son. We could not feed our families if we refused."
The crowd hissed. Ruben's fancy clothes looked suddenly ridiculous. He was a man of taste now under a stone cloak of shame.
They forced him to confess in front of everyone. Dalton had them read from their own books. He made the magistrate stand and confess how he had accepted coin for silence. He made other merchants stand as their deceit was read aloud.
The steps filled with people recording names. The crowd shouted, a rolling sound. Photographs didn't exist in our time, but there were people with small sketchers and scribes, and they wrote it down, and those scribes told neighbors who told neighbors.
Ruben, once lord of certain corners of the city, began to crumble before my eyes. He chopped denial like an axe that always hit wrong. His voice turned to pleas.
"Please," he begged, spittle on his lips. "Have mercy."
The crowd hissed. Someone threw a rotten apple. Another spat. The magistrate who had helped him begged the bystanders to remember his family's service, but the people who queued with empty bowls shouted louder. Children clambered over carts to watch a man who had hidden their bread be his own punishment.
"Will you return what you took?" Dalton asked.
Ruben's pleading became bargaining. "I can pay—" he gasped. "Give me time!"
"You will restore grain, coin, and accounts. You will bind yourself to rebuild—public works, schools, soup kitchens. You will assist in feeding the poor for a year. Your goods will pay for what you stole."
His face collapsed. Then the real collapse: recognition. The crowd saw a man reduced. Not dragged to the stocks, not killed, but stripped of the dignity that had been his currency. He had to answer to the people he'd wronged.
"He is bleeding," whispered a woman near me. "He is not dying, but look—he is smaller than before."
Ruben broke in the end. He wept and named names. He begged for pardon from the mothers. The magistrate cried, ashamed. Some in the crowd shouted for a quicker judgment; others wanted to mark them slowly, to make the lesson last.
The public punishment was not a single blow; it was a stripping, a slow unmasking, a laying out of how the wealthy had laced their pockets. The crowd's reaction moved from spectacle to witness. They helped carry the grain to where it belonged. They supervised the counting. They demanded a ledgers board where anyone could check records. The shame lived on in the town stories for years.
Ruben's change of face—triumphant to broken—was not one moment, but many small changes: a shout turned to denial, denial to bluster, bluster to pleading, pleading to bargaining, bargaining to collapse. The crowd watched. They laughed, clapped, spat, and wept. They photographed the confessions into the town's memory.
Later, when the crowds dispersed, Dalton took my hand in a way that surprised me: not with his cold officer's grip, but gentle and certain.
"You wanted to see them pay," he said.
"I did," I said. "You made it public. It was good."
He smiled, a little. "Not for the spectacle, but so the people could see their silver return."
That day Ruben Ballard's power was not ended by a blade; it was ended by being made small in the eyes of the people he had used. His reaction had been a long fall—pride to shock, then lies, then pleas. The crowd had watched and recorded him. The humiliation was thorough and public. I felt a curious satisfaction like a ledger balancing.
After that, everything changed.
Heaven looked kinder to men who stood honest.
Dalton kept me near as he moved through the work of taking records, sealing corrupt officials, returning coin. He was strict. He was tender. He was wickedly good at small kindnesses. I watched him change with me; I changed with him.
"Will you ever pay back my family's silver?" I asked him once, late at night by the paper lamp.
He put his mouth to my forehead and said, "You asked for people, not silver. I will give both."
"You call that bargaining?" I teased softly.
He smiled with a closed mouth. "I'm promising."
I had my father's savings missing when I returned home. Dean was old and worried. He looked at me like a lighthouse looks at night—solid and small.
"It's gone," I said. "A thousand taels."
"Who took it?" he asked.
"Dalton," I said before I could stop myself.
He inhaled as if he'd swallowed a knife. "He borrowed it?"
"Yes."
"Then bring him to me," Father said. "A debt is a debt."
So I went to the capital to take it back. The road was bright and long and full of the sound of cart wheels. I arrived at Dalton's house to find it a modest place, not a manor. I had imagined a man with debts being rich; the truth was that Dalton had a different poverty—he lacked comfort, not coin.
"You're here for the silver," Dalton said when he opened the door.
"Yes," I said. "You promised. It's been a year."
"I have reasons," he said. "Worse: I have secrets I could not tell until now."
He explained about the palace: the short leash of the throne, the trickery of the ministry, and the hidden ledgers of the state that only a few could touch. "I was punished," he told me quietly, "so I could continue to work undercover. I lost my rank and my pay. I used what I had to finish what I started."
"You could have said so," I said. "You could have asked."
"In my foolishness," he said, "I wanted you to come. Not for the silver, but because I hoped you would choose me."
I felt my face hot. "And if I had not come?"
He came close enough that his breath feathered my cheek. "I would have waited and repaid you in ways you would not let me."
He smiled then, not like a soldier but like a man. He touched my fingers, and something clicked in my ribs like a latch opening. "Let me repay you," he said. "A thousand taels, and—" he hesitated—"and a promise that I will stand by you."
"You promised to be my debt," I said, half trembling.
"Your debt, your consolation prize," he answered, and kissed me then—a small, fierce thing. When he pulled back, his eyes were soft and delighted.
I laughed then. "You are impossible."
"I know," he said. "And yet."
We were so ridiculous and proud. The next months were a slow, sweet thing. Dalton went back to his duties, now restored in rank because the emperor had seen proof of his loyalty. Esteban Romano, ashamed and better, sold half his goods to feed the people he had wronged and began honest trade. My father breathed easier; the debts were repaid. Ruben Ballard became a story told in the market as a warning. His public humiliation was complete: he had been asked to give everything back, to admit his crimes on the steps, and to watch the town that had once honored him feed itself with what he had hidden.
"Why stay with me?" I asked Dalton one night as we walked beneath a sky thick with a thousand small, indifferent stars.
He stopped and took my face in his hands, his palms warm and sure. "Because when you ran into my life, you didn't take my silver—you took my truth. And my truth is that I am yours."
I let out a breath that might have been a laugh. "You are dramatic."
He shrugged, grinning. "Only for you."
There were many small moments that made the wide tapestry of our life: the time he corrected my accounts and found a mistake only he could detect; the time I teased him and he blushed; the time he rode out in rain to fetch a special spice I used for our family's jams. There were three moments that carved themselves into me like coins stamped with names.
The first was when he, who never smiled for others, smiled the same crooked private smile he reserved when he thought himself alone, but he gave it to me.
The second was when we stood in front of the market's new ledger board and read the public names. People pointed at us—some jeered, some blessed. Esteban's eyes met mine, and he bowed once. The shame that had been around our town grew thin.
The third was in the palace. We had come to hand back official records; the emperor, having seen us at work, laughed like a man who'd lost a thing and found it. He called Dalton to the court and said, "You have balanced the scales."
On the day the empire thanked him, Dalton took my hand in public for the first time.
"I owe you one thousand taels," he whispered into my ear as we walked away from the emperor.
"No," I said, pulling the coin pouches from my own satchel. "You owe me people, but all I asked for was you."
He kissed my forehead. "Then consider it paid."
We walked back to the small house where everything had begun. A ledger sat on the table, a quiet thing. I opened it, and a slip of paper fluttered out—the little note he'd left the night before I fainted in the palace: "If you ever want me to pay that debt—"
I folded the paper and smiled. "You've always kept your ledgers right," I told him.
He laughed, and that laugh became our sound. The public punishments, the hidden ledgers, the market's roar—these remained as proof that justice could be done, and also proof that a man who once hid his hands in pockets could learn to hold an honest woman's.
The last thing I did before bed that night was tuck the rolled-up account book under our mattress. It smelled faintly of the spices my mother used to sell. I pressed my face to it and felt the world settle—like a bell's final ring.
"I will always keep your account," Dalton said in the dark.
"You better," I answered, and rolled into sleep with my head full of ledgers, of names read aloud in the market, of a thousand small repayments.
And in the morning, when the sun found the paper screens just so, it warmed the room into a secret only we owned.
The End
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