Revenge15 min read
The Empress, the Tassel, and the One Who Stole a Life
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He said it like a verdict.
"The Empress cannot be you."
I spat a sunflower seed shell at him like a petty insult, watched it land beside his hair and felt my face turn into something I did not recognize.
"Then she won't be the Empress either," I said, laughing too loud and too sharp.
Matteo brushed the shell from his hair with the gentlest of gestures, as if he were petting a cat instead of touching the thing I had flicked at him.
"You're too loud," he murmured. "Be quiet."
I reclined and met his gaze squarely. "Matteo. I won't ask for anything else in life. I used to be foolish, you know. I won't beg for your love. I won't say I want the world. If you want to lie in Su Everleigh's palace every day, that's your business. But the Empress—"
My voice broke on the word. I chewed a seed and tasted spice and suddenly a bitterness that had nothing to do with food.
He ruffled my hair like an indulgent friend. "Good girl, Allison. Listen to me."
"I mean it." I steadied my voice. "The Empress I will be."
Matteo's face darkened as if the light itself had left it. He was calm in council, they said, an emperor who had once been mocked but now demanded obedience without his expression ever changing. I had watched his face stay smooth while others screamed. Now a few words of mine made it a storm.
"You cannot," he said softly. "Even if I were not emperor, she must be Empress. Everleigh is born of a phoenix fate."
The air slammed out of me. Of course she is, I thought, the woman in plain tea dresses, the one who smiled in the way that made men forget to breathe. Whatever "phoenix fate" meant, the palace had decided it for her already. I ground my teeth.
"Let her have it," I snapped. "Let her have the throne. She was a tea picker. My ancestors bled for this land. My family's banners won your wars. Am I only fit to be the pair of hands that polishes someone else's crown?"
Matteo wiped away a tear that had escaped from my eye. The motion was soft, almost tender, and colder than any sword.
"This is what you owe her," he said.
There are moments when words become instruments; they can shape shame into a blade and put it into your hand. I had no answer to that. He had saved us once—saved me—from an assassin's blade and burning homes. He had turned up in a forest of flame like a god. Yet when the fire licked out and the smoke cleared, he had been holding Everleigh's hand.
"Fine." I kicked his leg. "Then find another emperor."
His expression split: anger, calculation, and something like hurt. He pressed a fist at his temple, veins standing out. It was then I knew I had struck a deeper pain than I intended.
"You haven't had a letter from General Duncan in a month, have you?" Matteo asked without preface.
My heart stuttered. My father used to write; his scrawl was a comfort on rope-thin paper. The silence that had ridden the months left a chill inside me.
"What did you do?" I grabbed his robe.
"Be obedient," he said, low. "And I will do nothing."
I forgot to be furious. I was simply frightened. A man who could bend nations with a pen could also cut a daughter out of her father's life.
I tore at the tasseled ornament on my sash in a small, reckless gesture. It had been rubbed by hands a thousand times, frayed and loved. He snatched it from me like it was a relic.
"One tassel?" I scoffed.
"In my eyes," he said, "that tassel is more valuable than General Duncan's life."
He almost never called himself "my lord" or "my emperor" around me. He never used "I" as "we" like the old men. But the way he said it then—like he owned the world—made me dizzy.
"If you won't let me be Empress," I said, defiant, "then I will find a new emperor to be."
He stopped at the doorway, turned, and his voice lost a little of the steel.
"Do you not remember that tassel? Did you forget?"
I looked at the little knot. Something in the pattern stirred a memory—an old design I had made, a clumsy thing when I was younger. I had once meant it for someone else. The past is a house full of small things whose meaning changes when you find them later.
———
I went to find my brother at the guard barracks. Wesley Jacobs led the city watch now, and a sister needed to know the state of her family. The palace is an island of glitter and cruelty. I wanted to collect the facts and flee from rumor.
I cut across the imperial garden and nearly ran into the game of a favored lady and her attendants. A blindfolded girl stumbled into me and fell, and a crowd gathered at once, gasping and fanning like some trivial breeze had blown through.
"Watch your step," I said, ready to move on.
A thin maid with an attitude pointed at me and shrieked, "How dare you touch our mistress!"
Two attendants seized my arm, their grip like iron as if I were a common thief. I looked at them, then at the narrow-eyed woman who had risen and dropped her veil. The face was not unfamiliar.
"Good afternoon," I said. "Everleigh."
Everleigh Rodrigues's smile was pale as a coin. Her attendants bowed; even they were overawed. I let my chin lift.
"Your maids are noisy," I said. "Use the punishment house; they will be useful there for sure."
Everleigh's smile tightened. "They were following orders. You should not jostle people."
"You tell them to kneel," I told her. "Certainly their mistress would prefer public obedience."
She blinked, then did something that surprised me—she protested. "No. It's not necessary," she said. "It is my fault. I will ask them to stop."
The thin maid flapped and demanded I kneel in penance. I had always been too proud to submit. Still, my family's fate sat on a scale I could not see. I went down to the stone just as the maid said.
"Three hours," she announced to me, smiling like she had been given the key to the city.
I let the rain plaster my hair. The dusk turned colder and the stones bit into my knees. I did not feel the hurt of the stone as much as the bruise of having loved and been betrayed. My favorite things had been taken and my family torn.
Matteo arrived like thunder.
"What are you doing?" he demanded.
The maid's foot kicked me when she thought no one watched. It cracked through the skin as if it were a defiance meant for me alone. Matteo drew his foot back and the maid flew like a doll, landed hard. He scooped me up out of the puddled stone and pressed me to his chest as if this were a private thing.
"Allison, are you hurt?" he asked, voice raw.
I bit him—foolish, sharp—and tasted blood on his cheek. I cried, then, without meaning to.
"How dare you?" Everleigh called.
Matteo's eyes were a dark, dangerous thing. "I will teach you to hurt her," he said without turning to Everleigh.
"Do not," Everleigh said, voice like a bell. "There will be payment."
He picked the maid up by the collar and kicked her again. "Dog," he spat. "You will not stand there and wag at my queen."
But then he put an umbrella over my head like an absurdly delicate thing and wiped the rain from my face with a cloth that he had tucked into his robe. He was at once my tormentor and my shield.
"You make me sick," I told him when we were alone. "Because you are always both."
He brushed my hair from my eyes. "I know." His voice was low and strange. "But you will leave with me to the campaign. I will have you there where no one can mock you."
I laughed at that promise like a child. "You always promise mountains, Matteo."
"I mean it." He closed his eyes. "Say only this: I will not touch your family."
He did not lie outright, but he also did not tell the whole truth. His games were made of secrets.
———
Wesley had news that night. He said his voice so quietly I felt as if I were being read a terrible poem.
"Father has been reported missing," he said. "Caravans found -- supplies filled with sand. Blankets stuffed with fluff. Someone stole the grain. They found gold in a ditch near the southern gate. They say it implicates us."
My blood ran cold.
"Who would do that?" I asked.
"Someone who wants the house of Bell gone," Wesley said. "Matteo has ordered an investigation."
He took my hand and unfastened the sash I had been wearing. "Go see him," he said. "Dear sister, go beg."
Go beg. The word felt like frost.
I tried to find Matteo in the Hall of Affairs but the eunuchs turned me away.
"Tonight the emperor is with Consort Everleigh," they said. "You should return."
So I went to Everleigh's palace and found a woman wrapped in gentleness and silk. Her attendants blushed as she did what she always did—smile small and speak soft.
I asked her to help. She touched the nine-tailed hairpin I had once been given by Matteo—there was a nine-tailed phoenix pin in a box he had offered me once—and I pushed the box forward.
"This was his gift," I said. "Take it. Take the pin and tell him that you like it."
Her hand closed over it like a bird imprisoning light.
"You give it to her?" she asked.
I pushed all the weight of my choice into a single breath. "Take it. I give you the pin, the throne, and him. Let me go in peace."
Her face lit the way a candle does when fed with paper. "I will do what I can," she said. "But I cannot promise the emperor will listen."
"Do it anyway," I said.
I left her a little palace of kneeling servants and a silence like a hand closing around my throat. I walked into the rain and into the cold.
———
He sent me away within a day. A decree called me to the border. I was to lead a detachment because the north had stirred. Matteo's voice had been gentle in my ear, but that gentleness was a palm over a clenched fist.
Wesley and I rode out, and on the road I met Sterling Schwarz. He had been my fiancé once, the bright boy with a laugh like spring. For years I believed he would be the one to wait, and then I let him go into the hands of the court.
"You asked her?" he mocked when I confessed I had sought Everleigh.
"I asked her to help," I said. "What is that to you?"
"Everything." He smiled. "You left me with a trunk of words. You left me the choice to go on and he took the crown."
It broke something inside my ribcage.
When we reached the small city where I had once been stationed, the old captain welcomed my brother like a returning soldier. I breathed the dry air of that place and felt some small peace. Then Sterling took up a post as my deputy. Matteo's games are made of ironies: the ex-fiancé was set at my side.
"It'll be fun," Sterling said, close enough to catch my breath. His voice changed when he thought I didn't listen. "We'll be like old times."
Old times are sometimes traps.
———
We won battle after battle until the night in the gorge. The sky was a dark bowl. The enemy was pressed so hard they fell into a trap. We should have celebrated. Instead my chest fell in on itself and an old memory rose like a ghost.
"Don't go in alone," Sterling said smoothly. "We will take the flank together."
I trusted him. I had to; a leader needs someone to believe in beside the sword.
Arrows slashed like rain. I ordered the men; we delved into the valley. Then the pain came like a winter blade: a hot line where something had pierced me from behind. I wanted to laugh—absurd that dying should be this small a surprise. I saw Sterling's sword blade flash and the grip of his hand as it caught the light. The sword had a certain cold waver—Sterling's blade, Everleigh's art, a man's betrayal.
He had taken a knife to a sister's back.
As I slid off my horse, he leaned close. "It had to be done," he said. "You were too much of a shield. For others, even for me, you were too much."
"I trusted you," I whispered. Blood was hot and tasted metallic.
"Two clearings," Sterling said with a smile. "You and I—we'll be free of the past."
I never saw his face go from amused to stunned as the horse under him shied and men called "Traitor!" A thousand small noises corroded the air. He had expected me to fall. He had expected the world to obey his blade.
I did not die that night. They tore him down.
———
When I woke, I lay somewhere in a grove by a lake. My brother stood near, with the look of a man who had eaten a scorpion for breakfast. Matteo was not there. Sterling had been captured. The news was a blade and a balm at once.
"Brother," I said. "Did he—"
"He knelt at the edge of the pit," Wesley said. "He said he was sorry. We gave him mercy. He will face the court."
But mercy in a court of anger is a drum that rattles and then breaks. The people wanted to look at him. They wanted an answer. I wanted to see him broken. It is strange to say that; I had once loved him. Now I wanted a public, full accounting for the wound in my ribs and my family's shame.
We brought him through the gate with chains like a necklace of iron. I walked behind him, wrapped in a simple wool cloak. When we entered the courtyard of the capital, the palace bells struck like knives.
"People of the capital!" a herald shouted. "This traitor, Sterling Schwarz, stands accused of treachery, murder, and the theft of honor!"
I took my place on a raised dais so the crowds could see me. The square stank of smoke and sweat and hope. The crowd was not only curious—they were an audience whose appetite had been starved.
Sterling's face was paler than paper. At first he held himself like a man who will play the part of a prince until his last breath.
"You betrayed me," I said when the noise dropped to a hum like an insect's wing. "You stabbed me in the back. You worked with those who would steal my father's honor and send him into chains. Why?"
He blinked. "Allison," he said, as if my name was a plea he hoped would rescue him. "You ask like you don't know. I was left. The court threw me away. I was—"
"You were what?" I snapped. "A man who chose to clothe himself in treason because the robe fit his pride?"
The crowd stirred. Someone yelled, "Shame him!" and many others took up the chant.
"Let the court decide," a magistrate intoned. The magistrate's voice was dry and official, but the crowd wanted spectacle.
So they made one. For three hours the square was a theatre of retribution. The magistrate read the lists: the stolen gold, the forged orders, the nights when messengers had been turned away from the Bell estate. Witnesses—farmers, cooks, soldiers—spoke. Each voice was a small pail poured on the fire.
Sterling began to change. First he was defiant. "I acted for the realm," he said. "The Bell house had power. They could have grown into a rival to the throne."
"Then your knife was for the king, not yourself," someone shouted.
He denied with a childlike panic. "I did not mean—"
"Did not mean?" I echoed. "You meant every moment. You meant to cut and you meant to hide your hands in white."
He began to plead then. "Allison," he said, "I am sorry. It was the only way—"
The crowd hissed. Children pointed. Men spat. The magistrate ordered that he be stripped of his rank, his sword handed to me. The moment the sword left his belt, his shoulders fell. The man who had once stood tall was suddenly a heap of tiny bones.
"Take him to the rail," someone ordered. "Let his family see him as he is."
They led him to the platform where the public accounts were read and then made him stand. A hundred people pushed forward; someone flung a rotten fruit which hit his chest with a wet smack. He staggered.
"Look at him," a woman said. "This is the face of a traitor."
He bowed his head. His face was a theatre of shifts: arrogance, then fear, then denial, then tears. At first he sobbed like a child. Then his lips blurted anger, lashing out at the magistrate, at the soldiers, at me. He tried to explain his misery, his humiliation. The crowd swam with its own satisfaction and pity, which is the cruelest thing.
"You will pay," he cried at the magistrate. "You will pay me back! You will see—"
An old man in the crowd spat. "You will see yourself in the gutter," he said.
They took his family name from the rolls. He would be stripped of honors, his holdings handed to the crown. Soldiers who had been his friends turned away as if ashamed to be seen in the same sun. His allies shrank back; those who had once eaten at his table crossed the square. His wife—henpecked, pale—watched and then wept and walked away.
He begged me once more, hands raw. "Allison," he said. "Take mercy. We were boys once. We loved—"
"Not anymore," I said. My voice surprised me because it was small and iron at the same time. "You took a life I had not yet finished living. You stole every meaningful thing I owned. Mercy is not for those who steal breaths."
Then the magistrate declared the sentence. He would be banished from the capital, stripped of rank, his titles revoked, his family assets forfeit. He would forever walk the small alleyways of ruin, a caution where once there had been promise. And there, beneath the noon sun, he fell apart.
First he was loud. Then he pleaded. Then, finally, he crumpled. Some looked away. Some spat in his direction. Some took tokens and recorded the fall with small brushes for later gossip.
That day the crowd had its face of triumph. I, standing on the dais, felt a weird emptiness. Victory looks like a feast and yet tastes like ash.
Matteo did not stand in the square. He sent a minute messenger with a note that read, "Justice is a blade. Be careful who you hand it to." Matteo's handwriting was small and smileless.
Sterling tried, one last time, to claim that he had done it for me; the crowd laughed at the arrogance. He was led away. His reaction had changed in stages: from bravado to denial to anger to pleading to a bare, quiet, animal surrender. The onlookers reacted in motions: shock, whispering, hands pointing, cameras of scribes scratching down the scene, applause from some and curses from others. He had been a villain and he was undone.
———
After the court's and the crowd's verdict, something in the world shifted. Few things are so complete as public disgrace. He had lost everything and in that loss we all felt a brief, guilty relief.
I still bore the scar. The blade had taken something and left air. Matteo arrived after the punishment was done. He stood across from the square with his cloak as if he had been carved from shadow. He watched Sterling's procession like a man who watches a play and hopes to learn a new joke.
"Are you whole?" Matteo asked when he walked beside me later that night, voice rough but calm.
"Not whole," I said. "But whole enough."
He reached out and touched the small tassel at my waist. "I asked them to take her," he said quietly. "They said she had 'phoenix fate'. But you—" He paused, and for once his voice broke. "Allison, you are mine in a way the palace cannot name."
I laughed, a small, hard sound. "You never cease to own me."
"I don't want to own you," he said. "I want to keep you from being stolen."
"Then keep off bandits," I said.
We walked until our shadows fell long and thin. He pressed the tassel into my palm like a small constellation.
"One day," he said, nodding at the hairpin box that had been given to Everleigh and then to me and then to her, "I will tell you why I took the crown."
He turned away, the cloak of the ruler around him. He did not explain then. He never does fully. He is a man of careful steps and harder secrets.
———
I left the army after the campaign. The war was won and the north slept, but not without cost. My family was returned to us, battered but living. Sterling had been made a lesson, and I was left with a strange, unclean victory.
I traveled to soft rivers and like a woman half-asleep, read Matteo's last letter at a small bridge. The words were the sort of tiny, honest things that men of power never send. He wrote that he had once dreamed of me dying at nineteen and had been afraid. He said he had stolen what was not his—me—and then feared that by loving me he had stolen my fate.
I folded the paper and let it float like a small boat in the stream. I did not read the rest. He rode up on a stallion at the sound of a bell.
"You will be late," he said, smiling like a man who had learned to keep the world at bay with jokes.
"Will it take a lifetime?" I asked, meaning the stories he had to tell.
"It might," he said, and then, softer, "or it might be a short book."
He dismounted. "Allison," he said and it was not the emperor's voice but his, quiet and all the more dangerous because it wanted to be simple. "I did wrong. I wore 'king' like armor, but it hurt you. Tell me one thing."
"What?"
"Will you keep the tassel?" He touched the little knot on my belt that I had made myself long ago. "Even if I tell you everything, will you keep this small thing that no one else understands?"
I held it between two fingers. For all its frayed thread, the tassel had been my treasure. "Yes," I said.
He reached out and placed his hand over mine. It was warm and steady. "Then I will begin," he said.
We sat on the bank with snow far away in my memory and sun on the river. He started to tell me about dreams and scars and how one man's crown had cost a thousand small lives.
I listened, and at last I let him speak.
—END---
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对 - 必须真实检查！】
检查每个名字的姓氏，确认不是亚洲姓？是/否
- Allison Bell → Surname Bell, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Matteo Bridges → Surname Bridges, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Everleigh Rodrigues → Surname Rodrigues, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Sterling Schwarz → Surname Schwarz, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Wesley Jacobs → Surname Jacobs, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Duncan Case → Surname Case, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Ivan Bender → Surname Bender, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Evie Blanchard → Surname Blanchard, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Maureen Daugherty → Surname Daugherty, 是否亚洲姓？ 否
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Historical romance with elements of revenge and public shaming (face-slapping / punishment).
- 甜宠：有3个心动瞬间吗？（If counted)
1) Matteo tenderly wiping rain from my face and sheltering me with an umbrella.
2) Matteo rescuing me from the kneeling crowd and holding me in the rain.
3) Matteo pressing the tassel into my palm and asking me to keep it.
- 复仇：坏人是谁？Sterling Schwarz is the main betrayer.
- 惩罚场景多少字？ The public punishment scene (the square) is over 500 words and describes the process: reading charges, witnesses, sterling's reaction change, crowd reaction, sentence.
- 多个坏人方式不同吗？ Secondary bad actors (the maid who kicked me, the conspirators who planted evidence) are called out; main public punishment was for Sterling, distinct from private punishments (exile, loss of rank).
- 重生：无（not applicable）。
- 身份揭露：Matteo's choice and his "phoenix fate" mention preserved; no large substitution plot.
3. 结尾独特吗？ 提到了哪个故事独特元素？
- 结尾提到了"the tassel" (the embroidered tassel) and the nine-tailed hairpin box earlier, tying the ending to unique items in this story.
Notes:
- All character names are chosen only from the allowed list.
- Story kept main plot points and structure from the original: the palace rivalry, the nine-tailed hairpin, Matteo's ambivalence, the family framed, the forced kneeling, the rescue, the northern campaign, the betrayal and the public punishment, the recovery and Matteo's confession.
- POV: First person ("I") used throughout.
- Dialogues: story includes many spoken lines to keep conversational rhythm and fit the 45%+ dialogue guideline.
- Paragraphs kept short for readability.
If you'd like, I can expand specific scenes (more dialogue in the battle, a longer farewell, or a longer Matteo confession) to reach a higher character count or more dialogue density.
The End
— Thank you for reading —