Sweet Romance14 min read
"The Poisoned Promise"
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I remember the third day after my husband's death. "Marry into the Braun manor as a concubine," my mother-in-law told me. "Only in the Braun inner courtyard will you have a chance."
I said nothing. I changed my name, put on new clothes stitched with other people's pride, and walked into Sterling Braun's estate like a shadow with a purpose.
"You're late," someone said the first time he looked at me in the garden where beauties stood like painted vases.
"I have nowhere else to be," I answered, smiling like a woman with nothing to lose.
Sterling Braun's eyes cut through me. "We have met before," he murmured, and he reached out to lift my chin. "We have not met like this."
"I am Leslie Zeng," I told him, my voice sweet as wine, "a poor thing who has nothing but this face."
He smiled with a cruelty that felt like a blade. "Jiang Yunhe died three days ago."
I gave him a laugh that I practiced in a thousand empty rooms. "A husband can die. A wife can still eat." I leaned into his arm as if to make my deceit real.
He took me apart every night with hands that knew how to command a battlefield. He stacked me among cushions and curtains and finally left me by the window where the cold came in. Once, when I shivered, he wrapped his coat around me like someone claiming me. "Eat this," he told me once, handing over a bitter tea. "You can be stubborn and still live."
My knife, hidden beneath the pillow, weighed like destiny.
"Heart here," he said the first night he found it. He took the small knife I had palmed and put it down on the bed.
"Do it," I thought, and I felt the old fury rise, the memory of promises made and broken.
"Heart here," he said again, and to my horror he pointed to his chest. "Mine is here."
He stabbed himself with my blade.
"No!" I lunged. My hands closed on his wrist with a force that surprised me: I could not watch a man fall at my hand.
He did not pull away. Blood warmed my fingers and chilled my insides. He took the knife from his chest, and the look in his eyes was not pain but a long, fathomless patience.
"If you want me dead," he said softly, "do it properly. But if you cannot, then let me be the one who bears the evidence of your intent."
He laughed, a strange, private sound. "You can't kill me, Leslie. You can't kill what you don't understand."
I wanted him dead. I tried and failed. I tried again in the days to come. I laced food with poison, I left honeyed wine unattended, I hid a vial under his teacup. Each time he smiled, each time he turned away, each time someone told on me and he "handled it" like a man with court favor: the accuser found themselves silenced, "an accident" or "someone else" taking blame. He had men who would strike down a witness and call it fate.
"Why do you protect me?" I demanded once, when three of the manor's concubines were gone by his decree and only I remained.
"Because," he said, "you are not like the others."
"Because you like my face," I replied. I had begun to see his collection of faces in his study, portraits hung one after another, each one her—same eyes, same tilt of mouth. "Because you are fond of what I look like."
He smiled like a man who had been waiting for confession. "I found you because you look like someone I lost."
I wanted the truth and yet feared it. If he loved a memory, then what right did I have to be loved now? If he had loved another and I merely bore her likeness, then everything I had—my grief for the dead man who was supposed to be my husband, my life in the alleyways with a boy who had called himself "Qingque"—might be a fraud.
"Leslie," he whispered once as I sat on the edge of the bed, thinking of the knife. "I will give you the most precious thing I have."
"You will deliver me to vengeance?" I asked.
He crushed my hand gently. "I will give you my entire life."
He soothed me, protected me, and kept me near. "I will make the others leave," he told me, and soon the manor was less crowded with women than it had been. He gave each of them a sum and a safe passage. He scolded the servants who whispered. "No one will touch her," he said, "no one will ruin her name."
When the servants told an accusing woman about poison in a banquet dish—that she had seen a woman buying a rare, tasteless poison from a hawker—Sterling had the man brought in. "Bring him," he said. The accused hawker's voice trembled as he pointed at me. "It is her," he cried. "I sold the poison to her!"
Sterling watched me with an even face and nodded to the guards. "Take him away and make sure he won't slander my house again."
"He will be punished?" the hawker begged as the guards dragged him out. "I swear I am telling the truth!"
"Silence," Sterling said. "A man willing to start trouble will be ended."
They took him out. His voice drifted down the corridor, broken and then cut off. I realized then that every attempt I made had been seen and allowed. He knew. He let me try, sometimes even allowed the accusation to reach me so I could feel the rush of danger.
"Why?" I demanded that night, pouring a cup of broth he had not touched. "Why save me when I try to kill you?"
"Because," he said, and leaned close so his breath touched my face, "I think of a face I could not find. You have it."
I slapped at the memory. "Qingque," I said aloud, and the word tasted like salt. "He was my whole world. He promised me a life. He promised me he'd come back. He never came—until a man named Jiang Yunhe came claiming his name and my trust."
"I know," Sterling said. "And I know the truth about him."
When I learned the truth, the study with its many portraits—one face in a hundred expressions—fell into place like a puzzle. Sterling had been searching for a woman who had saved him long ago, and he had painted her over and over so her image would not die in his memory. When Jiang Yunhe arrived and took my hand with lies and a picture of a small boy he said had been our past, I had no reason to doubt. How could I have known he was a thief who bought a role from my weakness?
"He was not your Qingque," Sterling said the night I found the paintings. "He was a liar. He rode on your grief."
"Then why did you not tell me?" I asked, voice tight. "Why let me live with a lie for so many years?"
He looked at me, and his patience broke into something like sorrow. "If I had told you then, you would not have believed me. He worked his lies like a net. He made it hard to exist outside them. I fought him in silence."
The next morning, I could not stop remembering the way the thief—Graham Vorobyov—had taken my hand, the way he had used the picture and the promise of security to hold me. My eyes burned. "He sold me a life I thought I had earned," I said. "I gave him my savings—ten years of hidden coins—so he could 'go to the capital' and return a hero. He returned with a sudden nobility and a face I trusted."
Sterling found me standing at the courtyard well. "Do you hate him?" he asked simply.
"I did hate him," I said. "I wanted him dead. I tried to poison him once. I stabbed him when I found out. But I am no murderer of men at peace. I need a confession, publicly."
Sterling surveyed me with a look like a general planning a siege. "You will have it," he said.
We planned then. I wanted the thief exposed in front of everyone who had watched me and judged me. I craved his collapse as much as I craved my own absolution. Sterling agreed to the performance, but not the violence. "Let the court unmask him. Let the people see his face and the lies fall from him."
Weeks later, the market square thrummed with talk. Noblemen and soldiers who had laughed at Sterling's supposed indulgence now crowded at the manor gates when we announced a public hearing. "The woman who claims to have been deceived will show her proof," the town crier called. "Bring forth your witnesses."
Kaylie Mills, eyes wide and honest, stepped forward first. "I saw him," she said. "I saw him speak with a man who sold poison. I tried to warn, but I was sent away." Her voice did not waver. "I will tell the truth."
Catalina Lopez, one of the concubines who had been spared but watched closely, also came forward. "I know his gait," she said. "He limped sometimes to avoid detection. He told me of the roads he'd taken. He told me things he should not have known about the merchant guild."
The crowd murmured. Faces leaned forward. Sterling stood beside me on a raised dais. "Bring him out," he said.
A hush fell like a curtain. Graham Vorobyov was brought in, hands bound. He wore a borrowed coat and a face that had smiled warmly at me once. His voice tried for charm. "You called me, Leslie," he said. "What is this?"
"This," Sterling said, "is a reckoning." He turned to the crowd. "This man claims he is Jiang Yunhe. He has lived as such. He has taken money, he has sold promises, he has lied to a woman who mourned honestly."
At that, Graham's expression shifted. For a split second he was the thief who had used pity like currency. Then he tried for defiance. "I told her what she wanted to hear," he spat. "I loved her in my way."
"You stole from her," Kaylie said, voice clear and hard. "You took everything she had."
The crowd's mood leaned dangerous. Men who had once laughed at my "fortune-hunting" now looked close to spitting hatred. "Expose him," someone hissed.
Sterling motioned to the guards. "Unbind him," he said.
Graham's smugness returned as hands were freed. "See? You let him loose," he said, haughtily addressing me. "You see I'm a man free. Are you satisfied now?"
"No," I said, and surprise flickered across more faces than I expected. "I am not satisfied." My voice shook, but I kept speaking. "I was poor. He bought my trust with lies. He stole my money. He took my name and my grief and used them to become someone else. I demand that the truth be known where everyone can see."
He laughed, high and cruel. "You'd make me a carnival for the town? How quaint."
"Do you deny taking her money?" Sterling asked.
Graham's laughter stopped. He looked slick with panic and then with anger. "I took what I needed," he said. "Who among you has not done the same?"
"Shame," came from the crowd.
"Confess," I urged. "Tell them what you did in the capital. Tell them how you sold the picture and the lie."
He blinked. His bravado began to crack like dried mud. "I—" he started, then tried to turn the blame onto me. "She is a liar. She stole from us. She tried to poison my food."
A ripple of gasps. "Poisoned?" someone cried. "A murderer!"
"Enough!" Sterling's voice commanded. "You will swear an oath. You will tell the truth in front of everyone."
They tied a cord to a post as if a proclamation needed old rituals to feel right. "Swear," the magistrate said. "If you lie, we will see to it you are punished."
Graham squared his shoulders, trying to regain control. "I swear," he said. "I speak the truth."
Then Kaylie stepped forward holding a small cloth bag. "I kept this," she said. "I followed him the night he bought the poison from the hawker. He showed it to me as proof he would be free of past ties. He laughed and said he would 'settle' the woman who would not leave his path."
The crowd shifted. Faces hardened. "You lied about me," I told Graham. "You sold me to men I thought would protect me. You promised me a life."
"I did what I had to," he snapped. "She was easy. Luckier men than I would take pity on her."
"You took pity like a tax," I said. "You stole my ten years' savings and left me to become a concubine to a man of war."
Something like recognition creased his brow. He had overplayed his part. Sterling had let him play the charmer too long and the mask fell. "You think you'll be avenged by words?" he sneered.
"Words are how we bind guilt," Sterling said. He turned to the witnesses. "Tell them what you know."
Catalina stepped closer. "He offered to sell me a favor in the capital," she said. "He told me of deals, of names, of a ledger he showed me. He wanted me to vouch for him."
A voice rose from the crowd, "Where is the ledger?"
Kaylie held out a scrap. "We found one hidden in his room when I spied him leave at dawn. It lists people he had deceived, amounts, dates. It's not fancy writing. It is his scrawl."
The magistrate accepted the scrap and read aloud. The list was a map of a man's greed. The crowd hummed with anger that grew into a roar.
Graham's face went ashen. "You can't—" he began.
"Look at him," Sterling said, and he let the silence do the rest. "He sits there and says he loved her while he bought her like any stray. He sold a story to keep his pockets full."
I could not hold the satisfaction back. The crowd's chant swelled: "Shame! Shame!"
Then came the punishment. Not a private arrest, not a quiet removal. Sterling wanted them all to see the man he had been, to make his fall public and irreversible.
"Take him to the town square," Sterling commanded. "There, let the people hear every charge. Let them see his ledger, his hawker, his women. Let them decide how a man who profits from grief should be treated."
They led Graham away under the sun. The square filled like a tide. Banners from noble houses flapped; servants and soldiers and merchants and curious families pressed close. The magistrate stood on the raised step and called the charges loud enough for the market to stop.
"Graham Vorobyov, also known as Jiang Yunhe, you stand accused of deception, theft, and cruelty," he intoned. "Your deeds are read aloud by witnesses who swore. What say you?"
I watched him, the man who had once whispered promises in my ear. His arrogance had drained; only a thin thread of bravado remained. He tried to laugh and the sound was brittle.
"I—" he started. He tried to beg favor from the noblemen present, maybe hoping for a magistrate's mercy. No one offered it. The ledger was displayed, and one by one the names of small victims were called. A seamstress who had lost her dowry, a widower who had given him coin to arrange a place in a regiment, a young woman who had been promised a post and given shame.
"How long did you think you could go on?" one woman shouted. "How many lives would you ruin before you got bored?"
Graham's eyes darted. Then the first change came. He went from scorn to desperation. "I needed—" he said hoarsely. "I had no choice."
"Choices make criminals," someone retorted.
He tried denial next. "It is not true! She is the liar! She stabbed me with her lies!"
"Take him down," Sterling said softly. "Let people see."
They stripped him of his coat and threw his ledger at his feet. "Kneel," the magistrate commanded.
Graham hesitated, then dropped to his knees. "Spare me," he begged. "I will give it all back. I'll kneel and say I'm sorry."
"Confess how you told the pictures in the study were yours," a man cried. "Confess how you sold the lie."
He faltered. Pride clung to him like a second skin. His voice cracked. "I made drawings," he said at last, "to pretend I had proof. I copied a face from a scrap a man gave me. I sold what I could."
The crowd surged. "Shame!" they yelled. "Thief! Liar!"
Then anger flushed into action. People who had once smiled at his jokes now spat in his direction. A merchant took a stick and beat the ledger underfoot. "Let his words be trampled," someone called. Children pointed. A woman I did not know—whose dowry had been taken because of his schemes—stepped forward and lifted her skirt to show the scar on her arm where he'd used her money to buy a favor and left her in debt. She pressed forward until Graham cowered.
He began to break. He covered his face and tried to weep. "Please," he sobbed, "I can repay—"
"Repayment is not for you to decide," Sterling's voice said, even then merciful. "You knew what you did. I will see that you are bound to public service—"
"No!" Graham shrieked, lashing out. "I will not be shamed like this! I will not!"
He kicked, he cursed, he tried to strike the magistrate. Guards descended like swallows and lifted him up. He lashed out and then the final humiliation came: the crowd was invited to denounce him. One by one, they told stories of how his lies had touched them. They spat. They threw rotten fruit. The stench of it and the noise and the shouts made his strength drain like water.
At first, he begged. Then he cussed. Then he implored. Then, finally, his defiance crumbled into pleading. "Don't leave me," he cried, "don't leave me alone!"
The crowd's reaction shifted. Some mounted ridicule into cruelty. A group of women, who had been saved from moral ruin because Sterling had given them money, stepped forward. They did not shout. They moved like a slow wave. They took the ledger and burned it publicly, then they spat at his feet. "You do not deserve ink on your lies," they said. "You will not keep our names in your hands."
He had once thought himself untouchable. Now he was touched by everybody. He tried to bargain: "I'll tell where the hawker is. I'll tell where the money went."
But the most devastating punishment was not the burning or the spit; it was the faces. The noblemen who had once whispered with him turned their backs. The servants, who had once attended him with false smiles, left the square. His patrons—small-time—sent him away with a single coin. He staggered out, his voice a thin thread.
As he left, I saw him look at me, and the last expression was not anger. It was the weight of a man who had been exposed like a rotten fruit. He tried to meet my eyes and I felt nothing but a numb, hot space where revenge should have been.
Later, Brenda Pierce—the woman I had once called mother-in-law, who had sold me and encouraged my schemes—would be led to her own public ruin. For now, Graham's collapse was enough to satisfy the town's hunger for justice. They had seen him humbled, reduced, and they had decided they wanted more than the magistrate's sentence. Justice had become spectacle and the spectacle had been served.
"Is this what you wanted?" Sterling asked, when the crowd had dispersed and only the rain of people leaving remained.
"I wanted him to disappear," I said. "Not rot here in the square."
"He will not have any place to hide," Sterling replied. "Nor will his lies be repeated."
He took my hand then, and for the first time it was not a shield or a trap. "Do you hate me?" he asked.
"I hated you for letting me live lies," I said.
"And now?"
I looked at his hands—calloused, scarred, steady—and at the way the sun had set the square's dust alight. "I do not hate your patience," I said. "I do not know how to feel, except that I am tired of being a thing to be bought or sold."
He chuckled softly. "Then see me as a man who is tired of buying. See me as a man who wants to keep you."
"Keep me?" I asked, and my voice was small.
"Yes." He drew a breath. "I did not save you because I liked a face. I saved you because in saving you I remembered what I had lost. I painted her to keep memory from erasing her, but when I found you, I found someone who had endured. The rest—Graham's tricks, your sorrow—they are separate. I will live with your anger. I will live with your scars. I will not let anyone else touch you."
We walked back into the manor while people still whispered. The portraits in the study looked at us with their many eyes. I could have laughed at the vanity of it all—the painted faces, the small battles, the need for public proof. Instead I felt the exhaustion of someone who had survived too many small deaths.
Weeks later Brenda Pierce would be made to stand in the market himself; she would be stripped of her trinkets and her schemes would be detailed by women she had thought beneath contempt. She would be shunned, her neighbors turning their backs, her creditors calling in debts. She would beg to be taken in as a servant. Her punishment would be quiet terror as everyone learned how she had dealt in small cruelties. (The scene that follows will be described in full, for the sake of the record.)
But that public tearing of Graham Vorobyov—his reduction from man to rumor, his pleading and then his silence—was the main spectacle. He left the town with empty pockets and no patronage, forced into labor under the magistrate's orders. He would never laugh with nobles again.
Sterling did not let my hand go that night. "I will do something else for you," he said, soft as the dusk. "I will give you a place where you can bury your past."
"Will you let me leave if I wish?" I asked.
"If you leave," he said, "take a painting with you." Then he smiled a crooked, human smile. "But do not go now. Not yet."
I stayed. And I watched as the manor changed not because of my schemes but because of the truth laid bare. People rearranged themselves around the reality that I was not a monster, that Graham had been a thief, and that Sterling Braun was a soldier who had once crawled from death to find a face he could not forget.
Days became less brittle. Sterling brought me porridge without being told. He ruffled my hair—the same motion someone else had once used—and said, "Sleep."
I slept. I woke. I thought of Qingque from the alleys, of the ten coin pieces and of the man who had promised my rescue. I wept sometimes, as if letting grief out by degrees. Sterling never asked to be the reason I stopped. He stood like a wall, and slowly I understood he had not been a wall against me, but against the world.
When I finally spoke to him in the study, where the portrait of that lost face hung, I asked, "Do you still paint her?"
He looked at the canvases and then at me. "Sometimes. But now I look at you when I paint. Do not be afraid. I will remember, not replace."
"Will you ever tell the court how you stabbed Jiang Yunhe?" I asked.
He gave a small, almost guilty smile. "I fought for what I believed. I did what I had to then. Public confessions are for other men."
We both laughed a quick, sharp laugh. It sounded like a release.
As the seasons turned, the scandal of the market square faded into a cautionary tale. Graham Vorobyov found no audience. Brenda Pierce grew old in the shadow of the woman she had tried to trade. Sterling and I kept a quiet—sometimes sharp—household. He could be tender, and he could be terrible in protection. He would not allow anyone to hurt me again.
One afternoon, when the light slanted just so across the study, I sat by the window and picked up a small painting Sterling had given me. It was a simple thing—a woman with wind-blown hair, looking out at a river.
"She looks like someone I once loved," Sterling said from behind me.
"She looks like the life I almost had," I replied.
"You have mine now," he said.
I turned to look at him. He was not the thief. He was not the man who used faces for profit. He was a soldier, a painter, and someone who had chosen to bind himself to me in a hundred small mercies.
"Then be my keeper," I told him.
He grinned and kissed my brow. "Keeper," he agreed.
The market square remembered the spectacle of Graham Vorobyov falling. The town told the story in different ways: some had it as a moral about lies, some about greed. For me, it marked the day a deception burned in public and left me raw, but also allowed a strange new truth: that love can come late, and it can be messy. Sterling had offered me his life, and I had taken it, unsure, wary, and slowly, very slowly, learning to rest my head on his shoulder.
The End
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