Sweet Romance11 min read
The Night Before the Wedding and the Thought That Tried to Kill Me
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The night before my wedding, I learned a dangerous secret about people: their private thoughts sometimes leak like steam from boiling water, and for one strange hour I could hear them all.
"This poor girl," the gentle house nurse kept thinking as she smoothed my hair. "She will never use what she learned in the village."
I heard that voice and smiled; I did not understand what she meant yet.
Then, after the ceremony, under the heavy red veil and the carved wooden bed where a prince waited, I heard a voice that chilled me through. It was like a cold current inside the room.
"Find a chance to kill her. Only the dead are reliable."
"Who?" I whispered—with a wet mind and a dry throat.
When the veil lifted and I saw him, the prince in the stories, he was nothing like the gray monsters the rumor had painted. Leonardo Simon was more like a painting who had learned to move. His eyes were distant. The candlelight caught the slope of his cheekbones and seemed to hesitate there.
"The bride drinks," the head attendant sang.
I took the cup, crossed hands with Leonardo, and we drank the marriage wine together.
"It burns," I said. It was my first time tasting wine, and it left a hot ring at the back of my throat.
After everything else left us alone, small Julia—my maid—unlaced the pins and took the heavy crown from my head. When at last I returned to the bed, Leonardo was already sitting there with a blanket folded across his legs.
"I was taught to..." I began, feeling the weight of the old nurse's lessons. "If Your Highness is kind, I will be satisfied."
He looked at me like a line of verse he could not yet place.
"You want a great deal for a new wife," he said, and his smile was a thing with tiny sharp teeth.
I laughed. "You are handsome."
He nodded once. "And you are not bad."
That should have been enough. I climbed to the little daybed he had offered me and tried to sleep. I could not stop hearing the thought again, like an insect trapped under paper.
"Find a time to kill her. Only the dead are reliable."
I stood up so fast I frightened our small household. "Leonardo," I whispered into the dark.
He answered once, then turned his face away.
"I will be obedient," I said, because my mother had taught me to obey, and because I wanted to belong. He said nothing and slid a velvet handkerchief toward me.
"Sleep," he whispered. His voice felt like cold linen.
That night I listened to people as if they were stories told under quilts. The attendant Cole Myers walking the corridor thought, "She is a pretty distraction," and my maid Katharine Romero thought, "A twit who will not know to steal her husband's favor." The world was a low hum of unfiltered truth. I learned that there were many ways to be small and many ways to be cruel.
I did not know then that Leonardo had ways of his own. When the surgeon Benito Freeman examined him in the morning, he said with a worried frown, "He cannot produce heirs easily in his current state."
"That is all right," I replied, trying to sound brave. "We will be content."
He watched my swollen fingertips, and his eyes flicked with a curiosity that felt like a blade. "How did you hurt your hands?"
"I burned them trimming a lamp-wick," I lied. I was clumsy; I did not want him to think me foolish.
In my head, his thought came like a stone through glass. "You think me a child? Fooling me will take more than that."
My hands trembled. For a second I imagined he could read the secret voice that filled me. He told Cole quietly, "No one may know she sleeps on the main bed."
From then on, my life bent between secrets: my new title, the small bed I shared with the man people called Prince or King, and the knife that clinked when it fell from some hidden place under my pillow.
Days stretched and folded. I learned to carry for him when he could not ride. I learned to read and write slowly under his frustrating patience. He mocked me with the word "fool" as if it were a single pet name. Yet there were moments—those golden, small things—that felt like theft and blessing both.
"You are supposed to say 'your servant' in front of me," he chided one afternoon.
"I... forgot," I said, but he only smiled, and for a single second the smile reached his eyes. He wrote my name for me in tidy black ink: "BELLA IVANOV." He would not let me write his name beside mine. "Not yet," he said.
I practiced my ugly letters until my fingers ached. When I slammed the paper down proudly, he reached out and teased my red wrist. "Foolish," he murmured, and the heat that ran through me then was different from shame; it felt like possibility.
First heart moment: "When he laughed when he thought he would never laugh, I felt my chest open."
"You're insufferable," he said, pretending to scold me. "But you are mine."
Second heart moment: "He tucked my hair behind my ear in public, ignoring every protocol in the hall. The room noticed and all of them watched his hands on me."
Third heart moment: "Once when I cried, he pressed a hand to my forehead and fed me a candied plum as though I were a child. His patience was an accident I had not prepared for."
But the palace has rooms that eat trust. One evening Leonardo collapsed as if someone had pulled the light out from under him. Benito tested the cup and said quietly, "Not the cake. The tea. The tea carries poison."
A hush fell. "Who brewed the tea?" Benito asked, lifting his eyes to Cole.
Cole's face closed like a door.
"Seal the manor until we know," Benito said.
They found a small, crumpled note the way beaten men are left with notes: a forged command bearing Leonardo's name. The ink was precise; only someone who had copied his hand could do it.
"She could not have written his hand," someone whispered—"unless she wanted him dead."
The thing that broke me then was not the fear of losing him. It was the way Katharine—my appointed maid, the one who steamed my hair and braided my ribbon—met my gaze and then bent her head with such practiced sorrow that I thought my ribs might split.
"Who gave the order?" Leonardo wheezed, looking at me.
"I—" I tried to explain. "I didn't—"
The paper was a blade in the room. Cole and Benito argued in low, hard voices. Then small details stitched themselves together: a hurried messenger, a whisper from a northern prisoner, a coerced hand. Eventually a name came to the surface with the slow certainty of oil on water: the woman who had polished my shoes and learned my letters had not only mocked me behind my back—she had helped forge a way to end Leonardo's life.
She had reasons. She said them flat when they hauled her into the main hall, yet she looked at me with eyes that never fully met my own.
"You let me live," she said. "I serve you. I thought it was the only safe path."
"You let him die," Leonardo said, his voice a paper-thin cutting thing.
"You must not let her go," Benito whispered to Leonardo, who looked older than his years at that moment.
I know the rules: when there is a villain, the world must see them fall.
The hall that day filled. Courtiers came from a dozen rooms; the servants pressed forward like a tide. The emperor sent two ministers, and Marco—Mariano Donovan—sat in the high seat like a carved statue, his jaw slack with the anticipation of spectacle. They brought Katharine to her knees at the center of the marble floor. Her wrists were not bound; they were clean as if the hands that had ordered the lies still wanted to be presentable.
"Speak," Leonardo said.
Katharine's voice was small at first. "I was given orders. The orders were to make you die on the road. If you were dead, the northern families would be paid back. I was promised my family's safety."
"You forged his seal," Benito said, showing the paper. "You wrote in his hand."
"I copied the hand," she replied. "I copied it because the man who came was strong and he frightened me. He promised we would all be saved. He said the prince—" Her voice faltered, then she said more clearly, "—said he had a plan to return his people's lands. He said he had the prince's friends behind him. He lied."
"Why did you leave the dagger near her pillow?" Leonardo asked. "Why let her find it?"
"Because I thought she would die quietly. Because I couldn't watch otherwise." Katharine's face was dry. "I wanted to make sure the blame would fall on you. I thought if you were dead, our story would be tied to your fall and no one would look for us. I was wrong."
"Wrong is a small word for treason," Mariano Donovan announced from his seat. "You have conspired to murder a prince and a sovereign's brother. The law is clear."
A ripple of gasps and whispers spread through the crowd. I wanted to stand, to shake her, to press my palm to her collarbone and demand my life back. Instead I pressed my fingers to the hem of my sleeve and let the dark inside me boil.
"Show them her face," Leonardo commanded.
They dragged in those who had been complicit: an old woman from the north whose lips were raw from a whip, a courier with ink under his fingernails, a soldier who had once sworn allegiance in a lower court. Each new person brought a new confession, and each confession was a tool. Katharine's story opened like a map. Names pointed to other names. The court's silence grew loud with the weight of proof.
I remember how the crowd watched Katharine as a different thing happened to her: first she seemed certain—her hands did not shake—and she spoke calmly. Then, when one of the accused named a captain who had sold poison openly in the border markets, her mouth tried to deny it.
"I did not—"
"You said you'd take my life!" the captain spat. "You said if I did not help you, you'd leave me to the warden."
Her face went white. She cried out, a sound in the vast hall, as if the air itself had slapped her.
"She is crying," a lady-in-waiting mouthed to her neighbor. "She must have a soft heart."
"Her soft heart killed a man," the neighbor said, and their voices threaded through the press like knives.
The spectacle turned from argument into theatre. Minister after minister demanded the mercy of the crown, and the emperor, who sat above all of us, watched as if weighing pieces on a chessboard.
"You betrayed your mistress," Leonardo said finally, with all the warmth he had kept like an ember. "You betrayed me. For what? A promise? For a story?"
"I was afraid," Katharine said. "I had nowhere else."
Her plea was thin. The crowd did what crowds do: they reached for a shape to hang their condemnation on. Someone spat. Someone recorded with a small device the way people these days record betrayal. Servants took out their phones and the clack of shutters sounded like a rain.
"Then why should I not have her head right now?" Leonardo asked me.
"No," I said, because I could not demand a life even if she had tried to take another. I was not a queen of vengeance. I was simply the woman who had learned to hear the truth and now had to decide what to do with it.
"A public confession," I said out loud, surprising myself. "A naming. Let the men who ordered this be named. Let the world see the route."
So the court forced a confession. Under the press of testimony, Katharine snapped. Her composure broke into the pieces everyone had been waiting for: denial, then hissing, then cursing, then begging.
"Don't film this," she cried as a dozen cameras trained on her. "You won't understand. You will say I am a monster."
"Say it," someone shouted.
"Say what you wish," she answered, and then, with the ferocity of someone who had been starved for dignity, she turned her face to the crowd and spat a name at Mariano Donovan that made the hall lean forward.
"Mariano Donovan," she said. "He sent us. He promised us safety. He said the prince would be an instrument."
Mariano's face registered the first real shock I had seen in court that day. The emperor tightened his hands. "Is this true?" he demanded.
A pause like a held breath filled the hall. The ministers exchanged glances. It was not a little thing to say a nobleman had plotted regicide.
Mariano rose as if wounded. "This is an accusation," he said, pale but composed. "I demand proof."
"Proof will be the men who sold the poison," Cole said, pointing to the soldier who had been mentioned. "Follow the chain and you get a ledger."
"Then follow the chain," the emperor ordered.
They did. Records were produced. A mid-ranking officer cracked and named names. Under the pressure of being in the light, Mariano's alliances frayed. He started to speak next: denial, then anger, then finally an ugly laugh.
"You will hang me for a rumor?" he said. "You will undo ten years of courtcraft because a servant speaks truth?"
But the facts lined up—ledgers, cash exchanges, whispered orders—and the emperor's hand moved like a general closing a circuit. Mariano was stripped of title that day. His guards turned on him with the casual cruelty of men who prefer not to be reminded of their own hands.
Katharine watched him go. Her face finally changed into something I could not ignore: a small, fragile relief. When the crowd roared and threw words at her, she did not fall. She kept her chin up as if someone had taught her to be a stone.
It is not a pleasant scene to recall: the triumph, the humiliation, the way the crowd chewed at a person until there was only confession left. But it changed much. People who had thought themselves invisible found themselves visible. The captain who had trafficked poison was trundled out beneath a guard's arm. The ledger pages were burned in public to mark the victory that came from the exposure.
After the burning, Benito came to Leonardo and said, "There will be consequences, but the immediate poisoners are known. We will remove them from the field. The prince will recover."
They led Katharine away to a place that was neither a prison nor a home. They called it a convent of service: she would be stripped of rank, given to a workhouse, and publicly assigned a life of service to the families she had harmed. Some said it was too light a sentence; others said anything more would have made a martyr of a frightened woman.
When the crowd dispersed, the noise of judgement left my ears ringing. Leonardo took my hand in a way that had been rare, and for the third time that month his smile loosened and settled into something like belonging.
"I was meant to convince myself you were a fool so I could keep you near," he admitted later in the quiet of our chamber.
"I am not fool enough for that," I said.
"You are my greatest trouble," he replied, and then leaned across the table and with a small, ridiculous motion took a piece of my own osmanthus cake from the saucer and popped it into his mouth.
"It will never be as good again," he said, and that was another kind of peace.
Time knit itself slowly after that. Leonardo's body mended with the right herbs and the right care. Benito and his teacher Graham Gibbs found the strange deerbind herb in a tense scramble at the mountain temple. I learned that cataclysm had a price we could sometimes pay, and that mercy had a cost we must carry.
When I lay helpless at the temple for a while, certain memories scattered like birds, and I feared I had lost the way home to myself. Then one day, while the sun painted the courtyard amber, Leonardo knelt and said, "Come home, Bella. Come with me."
"Will you still call me 'fool'?" I asked, with a stubborn note in my voice.
He smiled and let one of his rare, full smiles bloom. "Only when you deserve it," he said, and lifted me like a child.
The dagger that had fallen under my pillow that first night stayed hidden in a drawer for a long time. The osmanthus cake recipe—my first honest triumph—lived in a small book he kept on his desk. The deerbind herb—strange and delicate—sat tied in a paper in the royal apothecary like a memory of the nights we had both almost lost what we had.
We learned to take small gifts through the day. Once, when a winter wind bit us both, he wrapped his coat around me even though he complained and called me "small tyrant."
"You're the sort who turns a palace into a home," he said once, tracing a thumb across the brown rim of my cup.
"You're the sort who teaches me how to call you 'husband,'" I replied.
He laughed then—soft and wholly his—and the room felt like a secret we shared.
When the story settles in my chest now, it is not the poison nor the dagger that lives there most vividly. It is the quiet moments: his hand over mine at the table; the way he read my awkward letters and wrote his name beside mine at last; the night he ate a bit of my cake and pretended not to care, and the moment he called me "now and always" in his awkward, private way.
Sometimes at night I still think I can hear a thought float across the room—the small guilty murmur of a maid, the impatient hum of a minister—but I have learned which voices to answer and which to let pass.
And if one asks me what single thing kept us, I will point to three little things: the paper on which he wrote my name; the flap of a small, folded herb tied with red string; and the osmanthus cake that tasted like forgiveness.
The End
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