Sweet Romance12 min read
The Princess Who Learned to Act — and To Survive
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I woke with my hand burning and a maid kneeling on the floor, her face the color of shame and fear.
"How dare you hit me?" I said, because a princess must look offended even when she is the one who struck first.
"I—" the maid stammered. "My lady, forgive me."
A man in white walked toward us, his hair neat, his clothes as precise as a soldier's march. He had a pleasing voice and a face people paused to look at.
"This is not befitting of a princess," he said politely.
I straightened. "Who told you to look after my servants?" I arched a brow. I was supposed to be the cruel supporting villain of the book I had fallen into. I had to act.
He bowed, still smiling. "It was a mistake."
For a moment I froze. The name rolled in my head like a stone in a quiet pond—Gabriel Friedrich. In the book, Gabriel was my favorite door-guest, my exploiter and my doom. He was gentle like a knife hidden in a silk sleeve.
"Don't you dare plead for other women," I spat, trying to sound superior.
Gabriel only smiled. "Yes."
I breathed out. I could feel the audience around me tilting. Of course they were surprised—the princess who had always been proud and cold suddenly showing softness. Good. Keep the part.
"Come," I said, dragging Gabriel with me. I would steer the scene back to where I needed it—before he met the true heroine, before he learned to love her.
We went to the garden where water curved like a silver ribbon. There, Gabriel had already guided a girl to a pavilion. The girl—Catalina Day—sat quietly as if she owned every small breath she took.
"Why are you tending to her?" I whispered, tugging Gabriel's sleeve.
Gabriel let my hand go and laughed softly. "I look after her for you."
That should have been the line that made everyone hate me in the book. But I was not following the book exactly. I had read the pages where I died and wanted a better ending.
"Don't touch her," I said, trying to feign jealousy. "Come with me and have fun."
He agreed like a good actor. "Yes."
We walked to the pavilion by the bending stream and took our place at the head of the gathering. I drank the flattery like sugar.
A blue-clad young man sneered, mocking Gabriel openly. "You do not belong here without a proper birth."
Gabriel's fingers clenched. I couldn't help myself. I threw a cup at the man’s face. "How dare you? My guest is not for your tongue."
The hall went silent. The man begged. Guards dragged him out. My face was cold and proud; the audience whispered. Gabriel did not judge me. He was looking at me as if I were a fragile toy he could choose to take or break.
Later, in my carriage, Gabriel dared to tease. "Are you not having your hair done?"
"Of course," I lied and sat upright. I could play proud and generous. "Gabriel, I like you. I have liked you so long and never knew how to say it. From now on you should know—someone loves you, and that someone is me."
He smiled in a way that did not believe me. I didn't care. I wasn't trying to win his heart for love; I wanted control. He lived in my house. He had no place else. Helping him climb the ladder would keep him near me. I wanted his gratitude to be mine.
"Will you be my friend?" I asked, softer this time.
Gabriel's voice was low. "Yes."
I had succeeded in the first act. I could live the rest like a princess who loved and was loved back.
Days passed. I watched him from the balcony. Gabriel's eyes drew to others sometimes, but mostly to me. I pretended not to notice. But when the palace celebrated the emperor's birthday, and a new face—Catalina Day—arrived to greet the guests, I found myself stepping between them like a jealous moon.
"Are you saying the princess should stand aside?" a man in blue said.
"Bring him out!" I said, voice high enough to silence the hall. "Five strokes of the cane. Let it be a lesson."
The guards moved. People gasped. I felt a thrill go through me—the power to command, to shame, to show the world what being favored could do. Gabriel watched me, inscrutable. Later he came to my side and picked a petal from my sleeve, his fingers cool and gentle.
"Did you enjoy tonight?" he asked.
"Of course," I lied again, meaning it only partially. "Will you come back with me?"
"Yes," he said. "I will."
We walked toward the carriage, but at the gate I saw Adam Rodriguez standing, delicate and pale as moonlight. He smiled and bowed like someone made for poems. He clicked the place in my chest where I felt something complicated.
Adam's cough was like a bell—soft and worrying. He was the brother Gabriel could never outshine in honesty and in the family’s affection. When a child tripped and Adam slipped into the pond, I did not need to think. I waded and pulled him out.
"Thank you," Adam said when he recovered, handing me a cloak. "Stay warm."
I felt small and proud at once.
Gabriel arrived soon after and his smile cooled like morning frost. "You were cold," he said, draping the cloak over my shoulders.
"Why would you care?" I challenged.
"Because I do," he said.
The simplicity of those words—"Because I do"—settled like a coin in my chest. I let myself take it.
We married a short time later with drums, silk and roses. Gabriel folded his head in a bow that looked real. He looked at me differently in the wedding chamber: less an instrument, more a person who had chosen.
In the universe I remembered, Gabriel had used me to climb. In my world, I wanted to change that: to make him my partner, my protector. He taught me small things—how to sit with scrolls, how to accept a cup of tea without spilling. He also had a darkness that hummed under his gentleness.
Later I found out why. The emperor—Saul Escobar—took a liking to Gabriel and asked him to handle delicate matters. Gabriel was not the soft man I had first thought. He could be as cold as a winter blade when he needed to be.
We lived in our small world of domestic tenderness and public duty. I learned that the best power is not used to punish the weak but to unmake the schemes of the strong. I learned also that love did not always look like poetry. Sometimes it looked like a man who arrived with a door open, and sometimes it looked like a man who saved you from a throat's knife.
But trouble never sleeps. Catalina Day—she was cleverer than I had thought. She had been taken back to her noble family and married to a powerful prince—Boyd Fernandez, the Sixth Prince. The court's gossip turned quick and sharp as a wind.
One evening in a crowd of cheers and lantern light, I watched Gabriel and Boyd together. Catalina stood beneath towering banners while Boyd smiled with the kind of hunger that made the air sour. She moved through the crowd with the new rank and the dangerous eyes of a lady who thinks she owns everything.
That night, when the palace bells tolled, it was not just celebration; it was a chessboard moving. Boyd had ambitions. He had the appetite for more than titles. He had men, swords, and the arrogance of someone who thought a throne merely slept and could be woken.
"What are you planning?" Gabriel asked me quietly as we walked past the throng.
"To keep what is mine," I said without thinking. "I married you. I will not be a bargaining chip."
He tucked his hand under mine. "Be calm. Let me handle it."
He did handle it, in ways I had not expected. Boyd's ambition sprouted into movement—troops shifted like shadows, the city hummed with whispered orders, banners changed hands in the night. The court fractured.
When Boyd marched on the palace, when horses stamped and torches drew large faces on dark walls, it was the most terrible night of my life.
"I will not see you taken," Gabriel said, voice like iron as his men pushed through the palace gates.
"You won't?" I asked, breathless.
"I will not let them take you," he answered.
There was a moment—a breath—where his hand tightened on mine and I believed with the childish prayer of a woman who expected to be sheltered.
Boyd and his men burst into the inner court with the brazen confidence of those who think the world owes them all things. He stood tall, his robe still immaculate, his face set in a smile that did not reach his eyes.
"Stand down," Gabriel said, not raising his voice. Men froze like water.
"We will not kneel to this weak court," Boyd called.
"He calls you servile," Boyd said to me—his words like knives. "You are better."
I felt something hot in my chest at his insolence. "You will not harm the family of the throne," I told him.
He laughed—a sound that sounded like a bet on me losing everything. "The throne needs a new lord. You are paper. I will not kneel for paper."
A sword flashed. A guard moved. Gabriel's line stepped in like a curtain closing a stage.
The attack broke across Gabriel's forces and the palace guards like surf, and then it was over—because Gabriel had planned like a man who had counted every breath. Boyd's force was cornered, his men captured, his banners cut and dragged into the mud.
They bound him and hauled him to the great hall. They brought torches and the people gathered like a tide. This was to be a public hour—a punishment that would unmake him in the eyes of the city.
The hall filled with faces: noblewomen clutching hands, soldiers standing quiet, servants pushing forward on tiptoe. I sat at the imperial dais, my hands white with the edges of my dress. Gabriel stood a step down, face calm as a knife's edge.
"Boyd Fernandez," a herald intoned. "You are accused of treason, of raising arms against the imperial house, and of attempting to seize the throne."
Boyd stood imprisoned in rope and shame, his chest heaving, eyes darting for a way out. He lifted his chin with a stubbornness that had been his first sin.
"These charges are false!" he cried, voice high.
"Stand down," Gabriel said quietly.
"Who gave you the right?" Boyd shouted. "I am a prince!"
"You are a prince," Gabriel said. "You were given duty, not lawlessness."
The emperor's seal was produced and laid upon the table like a verdict's shadow. I watched Boyd's expression shift—a flicker of surprise that he was handcuffed not only by rope but by his own misjudgment.
"Bring forth the witnesses," Gabriel ordered.
A score of men were summoned; a cloth was whipped off a map with the lines of Boyd's planned march. Captured orders lay like fallen leaves. Each blade, each name, each instruction was proof.
"They will be shown," Gabriel said. "Every man who rode with you will confess. Not because they wish to, but because the law is clearer than ambition."
Boyd's face moved from arrogance to anger to something that looked dangerously like fear.
"Do you deny these papers?" Gabriel asked.
"Fabricated!" Boyd spat. "I—I'll—"
One by one the men Boyd had bribed were brought forward. Some wept. Some spat on the ground. Some begged for mercy. The hall leaned in. The city's breath was held.
"How could you?" a noblewoman hissed from the front row. "You brought knives to the emperor's own table."
Boyd's eyes searched the crowd. He found no friends. He snapped like a cornered animal. "You say the throne is weak. You were weak!"
The spectators murmured and then a ripple of disdain ran through them like wind over dry grass. A child in the crowd pointed. A servant's lips curled. Someone began to clap slowly—and then others joined, a hard rhythm of scorn.
Boyd's face drained slowly as the crowd turned. He went from sharp dignity to a hollowed man who recognized that faces he had expected to bow would instead look away.
"You sought to seize a house not given to you," Gabriel said. "Do you have anything to say in your defense?"
Boyd's voice weakened. He tried to call on names, to invoke favors and debts. "I had counsel. They—"
"They followed you of their own will," Gabriel interrupted. "You gave them promises of glory."
"Glory is earned," Boyd snapped.
"Not by cutting people's throats," Gabriel said. He signaled and a bench was placed. "The city will hear your confession."
The crowd pressed closer. Someone tossed mud at the banners Boyd had once unfurled. A few in the back began to chant the older slogans of justice. A boy climbed a pillar and waved a cloth as a mock flag. The sound filled the hall—a public ritual of unmaking.
Boyd's voice began to break. He moved from denial to a thin chant of excuses, then to blaming advisers, then to a raw, human seeking for a way out. He shouted names, he begged the crowd, he turned to his captains who now avoided his eye.
"Is that how you thought the world would end for you?" Gabriel asked gently. Close enough to be deadly but soft enough to be humiliating.
Boyd looked at me—there was a sudden, dreadful hope that I would bow or beg or send some secret messenger. My face stayed like frozen marble.
"Your father..." Boyd began.
"Your father will stand with his name, or he will not," Gabriel said. "This is not about family honor. This is about a man who chose to break laws and harm people."
A hush fell. The crowd's mood turned from curiosity to hatred. They saw, in Boyd's shaking hands and thin air of bravado, the truth: a man who thought himself destined for a crown was just a man who had bought men and expected time to be his servant.
"Let him speak!" a voice cried suddenly from the crowd. "Let him say why he thought treason was his right!"
Boyd's face was chalk-white. He tried to gather himself. "We starved in court while others feasted," he said, his voice small and suddenly human. "I promised a new order."
"A new order by blood," Gabriel said. "Not by law. You thought your sword was the court's law."
The crowd leaned forward. Men whispered. Women whispered. The air felt thinner, as if a roof had been removed and the sky was seeing to it.
Then the sentence came—not from the emperor directly, but from the weight of the people's mood and the state's steadiness. Boyd would lose rank, property, and privilege. He would be paraded publicly in a mock coronation of shame—his banners dragged and burned, his advisors forced to kneel and beg, his name struck from the rolls. His house would be opened for the city’s ridicule.
The humiliation was designed to be public and complete.
They led Boyd up a raised platform in the square outside the hall the next morning. The city watched. Gabriel stood beside the throne steps like a sentinel. I sat wrapped in a mantle, my heart an aching thing as I watched the man who had tried to take my life with politics now be unmade in the sight of everyone.
They dressed him in his finest robes and then stripped him layer by layer, until he stood shivering in coarser cloth. They took his banner, the emblem he had shown as his right, and tied it to a pole. A rope dragged it through the mud; a child spat on the fabric. The crowd hissed and laughed.
Boyd moved from anger to pleading to a final, defeated silence. He looked at faces that had once promised him service and saw only contempt.
"Look at him now," someone shouted. "Where is his greatness?"
"He chose a throne no one gave him!" another cried.
They made him kneel while the magistrate proclaimed the charges and the people's answer. They forced him to renounce his claims in a voice that cracked with shame and cold.
He begged for mercy. He tried to call for names. He tried to say—"I was made to believe—" but the words died under the weight of the crowd's contempt.
When they paraded the burnt banners through the square and tied them at the gate, a chorus started—not a song of joy, but of quiet retribution. People who had been silent for years came forward to tell their stories of wrongs Boyd's house had done; their voices stitched together a tapestry of deserved fall.
Boyd's chest heaved. He looked up and found Gabriel's face in the crowd: not triumph, not glee, just a cold, terrible calm.
"You wanted the throne," Gabriel said softly in a place Boyd could hear. "You tried to take it."
"I thought—" Boyd started. Then the words collapsed.
People photographed, whispered, pointed. The noblewomen removed their fan covers and looked. A child stole a ribbon from Boyd's robe and tied it to his own hair as a mockery. The men who had once sat under Boyd's orders spat and walked away. His captains were made to kneel and beg in their stained armor, their pride in tatters.
When it was over, Boyd was left on the steps, a man hollowed and open like a book with all the pages torn. There was no rope, no final twist. The punishment was different. It was not death—it was the slow, public death of reputation.
He had fought for a crown and received in return the quietest of executions: being seen, without power, by everyone who had ever mattered to him.
He crawled from the square like a defeated animal, his eyes red, his hands cut from the binding. He tried to call my name once, but I was gone from the crowd, behind the windows, fixing my dress.
I felt nothing like joy. The city had been spared blood. The law had been asserted. Gabriel had won, but the price had been high: nights of fear, the bloodless faces of wounded men, the hollow sound of guards marching into places they had never thought to break.
When the smoke cleared and the banners were burned and the city went back to its daily small cruelties, I found Gabriel at my side, voice as gentle as the hand that had pushed the cup to my lips the first morning after the wedding night.
"You were frightened," he said. "I thought you might be."
"I was," I admitted.
He held my hand, a grip that said he would not let me fall. "You will not have to," he promised.
We had not simply married. We had lived through a near collapse of everything. In that room where the guards kept watch, with candles guttering, he leaned close and told me, "I don't want to lose you."
"Then don't," I answered simply.
He smiled. "I won't."
And for the first time in the life I had taken from pages, I believed a promise.
This was not the end of courts and whispers and the slow, difficult work of gaining trust. Gabriel would still be precise, still sharp in the corners. I would still have to act, to play at times the part I had chosen. But we had weathered a storm together—the kind that makes a marriage not an accident but a deliberate act.
I had learned the other thing a princess must learn: power is not cruel because you take it. Power is cruel because you do not know what to do with it when other people reach for it.
In the end, Boyd was stripped of rank and paraded. "Public punishment," the law called it. The crowd watched as his pride was broken in the square. People took pictures with the banners. Gossip rang clearer for years. But it was the watching—the faces of those who had once cheered him—that stayed with me as a record.
I sat with Gabriel afterward, my hand warm in his.
"We will need to be careful," he said.
"Always," I heard myself say.
He looked at me then, wholly, and in a voice soft as linen he promised, "I will not let you be the ending of any story you do not choose."
I let him say it. I let the words settle like a lamp at my shoulder.
Life, after all, had grown complicated. I had once wanted purely to act, to make people believe me. Now I wanted something else—to live, to have someone beside me who would not use me, and perhaps in time, to forgive Gabriel for everything he had done for power. Or for me.
The road ahead was raw with possibility and danger. I would keep my part—my proud head, my hauteur—but I would also keep what felt like a piece of warmth. I would be the one to hold the script and yet write some lines myself.
And so the story kept moving, not toward the old ending but toward a new life. I had taken the stage—and learned how to survive it.
The End
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