Revenge19 min read
When the General Smiled
ButterPicks15 views
They called him a savior the day he bent over my broken body and dragged me out of a field of dying men.
"Cruz Omar," they whispered, and when he looked at me with those cold, precise eyes, something in the camp seemed to straighten. I should have known then that the favor was a ledge, not a gift.
"I am Elora," I told him the first clear night I could speak. "You saved me."
"You owe me nothing," he said, but his hand did not leave my shoulder. "Stay where I can find you."
I stayed.
"Don't be afraid," he told me once, as if fear were a child to soothe.
"Why would I not be afraid of you?" I asked. "You wear death like a cloak."
He smiled, as if the idea were charming, then gentle for a breath: "You will learn to like this cloak."
He never had to force me into being close. I followed because I wanted to—because there was a night after the rout when he dried my hair by a single candle and hummed a strange lullaby I had never heard. I thought it mercy. I thought it human.
"Eat," he said that night beside the cot where they left me.
"No." My voice was a thread.
"Cruel food grows cold in the dark," he teased.
I pulled the blanket up to my chin and watched him watch the untouched bowl. His face in the candlelight belonged to the war itself: shadows that moved with the flame. I wanted to crawl into the shadows and be swallowed.
"Are you afraid of me?" he asked softly.
"Am I allowed to be?" I shot back, and my hand found a pillow. I threw it.
He flinched. For a moment the general's rigid composure cracked.
"You think I would eat you?" He smiled an absurd smile. "You think I came back... for you alone?"
"You came back for your hate," I said. "You came back to drink blood and call it justice."
He did not answer at once. He wiped my tears with fingers that had ordered lives to end earlier than their time.
"Today they are innocent," he said, voice even, "but who can say about tomorrow?"
"You're cruel," I said. "You're a sick man."
"Madness is a tool," he murmured. "Effective things are always ugly. You once told me life is one chance—take it. I remember that."
I had only ever wanted to survive. I had never wished another to die for my continued breath. But he had been a corpse in my hands and I had sewn a living man out of him.
"Why?" I demanded, and everything I loved rose up with the question until my chest broke and my voice bled.
He showed no shame. Instead he smiled the smile of someone who has decided a world must be remade.
"Because they might be standing where my enemy stands tomorrow," he said. "Because a blade left half-sharpened will dull the next hand. Because to let roots remain is to invite the weed."
I called him every name I had ever heard. He did not flinch. He folded his arms and leaned back against the wooden headboard like a man who owned the room and its air.
"You are a monster," I said, and he kissed me.
"Do not run," he murmured.
I wanted to.
"Get out," I hissed.
"Cruel words," he said, a lover's voice layered over a ruler's command. "You will be with me, one way or another."
He had killed and called it clearing. He had bought reinforcements with the same currency he used to buy mercy: an absolute, the kind that overwrites any other ledger. The name he had once borne like a badge on his chest—general, liberator—morphed into executioner in the mouths of the survivors. He was both many things, and all were true.
Days collapsed into the same small pattern. He managed the camp like a single mind; his orders came sharp and clean. I learned who he had been in flashes: a boy who watched bodies drown his family's line on the river and then grew patient like winter. He could be absurdly tender and then suddenly brutal as if cruelty were a valve.
"Leave," I said once after waking from that particular dream where everyone I loved returned to me only to be torn apart again.
"Where would you go?" he asked.
"Home," I said.
"If I do not let you," he said, "will you go alone?"
"I will die trying."
He laughed like a blade.
"You put me back in the world," he said, "and I will make sure the world suits me. You will stand beside me."
"Never."
His hands closed for a second like a trap. He had been mine long enough to know my resistances. I had given him the only thing I could—life—and that debt, in his mind, allowed claims.
"Do you hate me because I am whole and you are not?" he asked, eyes sharpening.
"I hate you because you made the world into a lesser thing," I said. "You killed children, Cruz. You burned markets. My mother... my neighbor—"
"Collateral," he cut in. "Useful lessons."
"You are obscene."
He bit the word and swallowed it. He leaned forward and let the rest of the sentence hang in the space between us.
"I will take everything," he said. "You think mercy is a thing to be distributed at whim. I will have what I never had. I was forged by loss; I will own joy where I can."
I wanted to throw up. Instead I left.
When he finally went out of the room, I lay awake trembling until the thin morning peeled itself over the camp. The woman who rearranged my bedclothes stayed for a moment, hands bony and sure.
"Rest," she said. "You need it."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Chiyo," she said. "I came with the camp. I was pressed to serve. Don't make a face, child. I tend. I mend. I do what must be done."
She moved like someone who carries shame with a shawl and also wears it like armor. When I saw the faint bruises at her collar, the thread of her laughter that kept cutting through the ache of her voice, I understood without asking: the camp took certain kinds of women and called them necessary.
"Why do you stay?" I asked her, pinning on the question like a button.
She smiled in a way that felt like apology and resignation both.
"I stay because I have to eat," she said. "I stay because men without home still want to be soothed. I stay because a woman in my place is safer with them than without. Please don't sound shocked. The world is full of small trades."
I cried alone that afternoon and found my hands making garments with chattering speed. She left me a bundle of spare clothes and a look that was equal parts pity and counsel.
"Take good care," she said.
"I will," I lied.
---
Weeks passed like brittle leaves blown in a wind, and one slow crisis fed another.
"More women arrived," Chiyo whispered to me the morning we found the new cage of girls.
"They're carted like beasts," I said.
"I know one of them wants you to take her sister," Chiyo said. "She begged."
I did not ask how many begged to us. I only knew pleading faces and children with snot-streaked cheeks inside wood cages that rattled as the soldiers laughed.
"I will try," I promised, the hollow of my chest trying to mean the words as I did them.
"And you will fail," Cruz said from the doorway. He had the look of a man disappointed at misplacing an object he did not need.
He had been in the room when the carts were locked outside. He had been in the planning chamber when orders were written and camp money was exchanged for human bodies. He had been everywhere that mattered.
"These girls will go into service," he said. "They are part of the requisition."
"Not all of them," I insisted stubbornly.
He watched me with that neutral expression and then, in the short way men with power do, permitted one rescue.
"One," he said. "Pick one."
I could have picked any. I picked the little one who gripped her older sister's sleeve and would not let go.
"What is your name?" I asked the child when I knelt.
"Mia," she whispered.
"Will you come?" I asked.
She blinked like a dawn, and then like a child she nodded.
She slept in the corner of my room and woke to the sound of someone singing as if that possibility of a different life was a song a person could learn.
"How old are you?" I asked her the first day she seemed steady.
"Seven," she said. "I want to learn to braid."
"You will."
She taught me to string a ribbon through a braid like she had seen in a stableyard once. Teaching her made me small and tender in a way I had thought impossible while Cruz smoked and ordered men to be better killers. I began to make a small life under the shadow of the camp, and in the middle of it he would step in, and then step out, and then reappear like a storm.
"Will you let her?" he asked me one evening at the edge of the camp. We had ridden to the market and returned late, rain staining the streets.
"Let whom?" I said.
"Your heart," he said. "Or your recklessness. I cannot tell the difference."
"Why do you care what I do with my mind?" I shot back.
"Because you will be mine whether you accept it or not," he said. "And because there are things I cannot bear to lose."
"Then take them," I said. "Take everything. It will not give you what you want."
He laughed like a small fire.
"Then I will teach you," he said. "You will learn to want the same things I do."
I wanted to drive a nail through his jaw and rip the laughter from his ribs.
---
The night the labor began, chaos swallowed a narrow house behind the prostitutes' quarters.
"Help!" someone screamed.
"Keep back," barked a soldier.
"I won't," I said, running.
Inside, the girl they called Kaliyah lay laboring, and the sound that came from her mouth was part animal and part prayer. Her body was open to the world, ragged from work and fear and blood.
"A midwife!" Chiyo cried.
"We have no coin!" someone wailed.
"Find a doctor!" someone else shouted.
"They are not ours to call," came an older soldier's voice.
I felt the world tilt. The men who could call in favors could also close their ears. They had no heart for certain kinds of cries.
"Who is in the way?" a voice demanded.
I looked up to see Cruz standing at the door, lantern in hand. He had the stunned look of a man who had been awoken mid-thought and handed a new problem. For a moment I thought he would step forward and take command of the violence, of the rescue. For a moment—but only that long.
"Do something," I ordered.
He moved and his hands were sure, not of muscle but of law. He ordered a set of guards with a word. "Bring the healer," he said.
He took command with the same ruthless, practical grace he used on the field. He made men move, and they obeyed like cogs in a well-made clock. They found a young doctor from amongst the camp's surgeons, and the doctor came with calloused hands and a quiet face.
"Leave the child be," I whispered to Kaliyah as the doctor checked her. "Try to breathe."
"Please," she kept saying.
"Enough," Cruz told the men who would have forced their way, "get back."
"She is a whore," one snarled.
"She is a human being," Cruz said.
The words made the man look small. It was the simplest act—protection—and in that room, for once, his protection was on the side of life. I wanted to trust the moment, but a cold place inside me stayed steady.
The baby came with a keening like breaking glaciers and a small, furious grip curling around a finger.
"It's a boy," the doctor breathed.
A sob rose in the room, raw and relieved. The girl Kaliyah wept in ragged, overwhelmed waves. I thought I might finally allow myself a little tenderness.
Then officers brought more problems: the men who had been trying to claim the house were hauled in. They were drunk and stupid and wanted bodies for idle moments. They were the type who thought violence entitled them to everything.
"Who gave you leave?" Cruz demanded of them, and his voice was a blade balanced on a scale.
"Orders," one muttered. "We were told—"
"By whom?" Cruz demanded.
"By no one," the soldier said, eyes ducking.
I watched Cruz's jaw. The man who killed to prevent imagined future betrayals now sat on the edge of a bed where a baby wailed and said, "Enough of your petty thefts."
"Apologize," he told the men, and they did, mumbling.
When the night had ended and the child slept in a small, filthy basket cleaned by Chiyo's steady hands, Cruz took me aside in a hush.
"You cannot leave," he said again, tender for a second and then hard as iron.
"Why save them and take everything else?" I said, anger burning bright.
"Because some things are practical," he said. "Some lives are leverage."
"You're monstrous," I said.
He closed his eyes for a fractured beat.
"I am not a monster," he whispered. "I am necessary."
The words sounded like a confession and a command in one. He was both apologizing and making a claim.
"Then be necessary for something less cruel," I said.
He smiled without humor.
---
Reinforcements came two days later in the form of a man who carried himself like a tide. His dark hair was cropped and his armor was plain, not carved with laurels but worn to work.
"Julian Oliver," I breathed when I saw him.
"Elora?" Julian's face unbroke into a surprised smile. "You are here?"
"I am," I said, and he looked like someone who had found a familiar shore after a long voyage.
Cruz's face hardened when he met Julian. Tension rolled across the courtyard like heat.
"Julian," Cruz said, formal.
"You look well," Julian replied, as if the accusation would be polite.
I tried to explain; my voice tangled. "Julian, there are women—"
"I know," Julian said. "I have heard of your camp."
His voice had the slow, steady pace of someone who collects evidence and then acts. I watched my chance.
"Please," I whispered to Julian later. "These girls—one was taken from her sister. They were trapped."
Julian's brow tightened. "Where are they?"
"In the pens," I said.
"Show me."
He found the cages and the faces inside them like a map. The men in charge minimized it, called them requisitioned, necessary for morale. Julian looked at their faces and then at Cruz as if trying to read a code.
"You did this?" he asked. He did not shout. His voice had the careful authority of a man who holds a ledger.
"It is war," Cruz said. "Requisitions follow."
"There are laws," Julian said. He opened his palm like a judge handing down small justice. "You are not above them."
Cruz's jaw clenched.
"These are my people," Cruz said finally. "My camp. My decisions."
"Did you sign for them?" Julian asked.
"I did what I had to do," Cruz replied.
Julian walked the length of the pens and spoke to the girls one by one.
"What's your name?" he asked a woman with tired, haunted eyes.
"Jasmine," she whispered.
"How many of you are there?"
"Too many to count," someone said.
Julian did something I had not expected: he did not order their release. He began to turn the camp into a courtroom, and his method was patient and slow and precise.
"Who is responsible for the requisition orders?" he asked.
"Anyone," muttered an official.
"Bring me the ledger," Julian told a clerk.
The ledger came, heavy and dusty. Julian flipped the pages like a surgeon.
"There," he pointed slowly. "Name, signature. Orders go through supply and requisitions. This is administrative, Mr. Omar."
Cruz flinched. He had counted on the fog of war; paper and signatures were not his enemy. Julian read the names and traced the pencil marks as though he was reading a confession. He did not look at Cruz but the room turned his way like a tide.
"You cannot hide from records," Julian said quietly.
"You're making a show," Cruz said, voice low.
"A show that returns stolen things," Julian replied.
The camp buzzed. People were curious and terrified. Some soldiers eyed Cruz with a new caution; rank does not always immunize a man.
"You will release them," Julian said.
"No," Cruz said. His temper flared like a torch thrown into dry grass.
"Then I will hold you accountable," Julian said. "You are a commander under law."
"You are an idealist," Cruz sneered.
"I am a man who reads deeds," Julian said. "And I will not let blood cover paper."
Cruz's face hardened the way iron hardens under hammer. He stepped forward like a man ready to use his height.
"Do it then," Cruz said. "Try. See what you win."
Julian's response was slow and like a weight dropping.
"Bring witnesses," he said. "Bring the girls. Bring the men who took them. We will resolve this in front of the camp."
And so they did.
---
The punishment began at dawn in the main yard. The camp gathered, curiosity drawing them like moths. The tents formed a rough circle, and in the middle Cruz stood like a king without a court.
"I want to speak," I said.
"Not yet," Julian told me, and then to Cruz: "You will stand and you will answer."
Cruz's pride was a rope; it tightened and snapped in corners. He walked to the center with the posture of a man used to command.
"Report," Julian ordered.
A whisper ran through the crowd. The girls filed in first, faces white and frightened. They clustered around Julian like broken birds seeking shelter.
"You took us," Jasmine said, voice shaking but clear. "You said it was the will of camp. You said we would work and be safe. They took us and sold us to houses without names."
The men who had accompanied the capture were called forward. Their eyes darted like trapped animals. One man, a sergeant with a scar across his jaw, had the nerve to say what I had heard the night of Kaliyah's labor.
"We took what we were ordered," he said. "We followed orders."
"Then who ordered?" Julian asked.
"Orders are orders," the sergeant said.
"Where?" Julian demanded.
"From supplies," the man stammered.
"Name," Julian pressed.
"Sergeant Mora," he said.
"Write it down," Julian said. "Record the chain."
The sergeant wrote, and the pen scratched in a thin, dishonest circle. Julian followed the scrap like a detective and kept unwrapping the spool. One by one, men who had been small other days were dragged into light by the ledger. Names met signatures. Orders folded into one another until they landed at a single place: supplies, then camp command, and then the hand that had signed too many things into motion.
"Cruz Omar," Julian said, voice steady, "you signed these requisitions."
Cruz's face flushed a color that frightened him. He had thought paper would be warm with his power and forgotten this—numbers can bind you where swords cannot.
"You can't do this," Cruz said. "You are cruel to do this to me. These are decisions of war. I made a judgment. I—"
"—made a collection of women and sold them," Julian said. "You made them nonpeople."
The crowd stirred. A soldier spat. A woman screamed. A child began to cry. People began to pick their sides like folk choosing and wavering in a market.
"You are a leader," Julian said, speaking to the camp but looking at Cruz like a surgeon naming a wound. "You were given men to protect—not to possess. You misused authority."
"Spare me your lectures," Cruz snapped.
"Look at them," Julian commanded, and the girls stood up, one by one, and told their stories. They described the carts, the faces, the orders. Each story was a small weapon. Each testimony pricked at Cruz's composed flesh.
"How many did you condemn?" one woman demanded. "How many were sent away? How many were... lost?"
"I did what I must," Cruz said.
"To what end?" Julian asked.
"Endings are necessary," Cruz replied.
"Is that why Peach died?" someone cried out.
Peach. The name hit him like a stone. People murmured. The camp's memory was a ledger; you cannot cut a name from it and not bleed.
"She was innocent," I said, voice steady despite the shaking in my knees. "So was the old man, Li—" I stopped. I had changed the name in my head, but the camp's ears had already taken it up.
"Who will speak for them?" Julian asked.
"I will," Mia said. The child I had saved stood small and trembling with her braid in hand.
"You cannot," the sergeant hissed.
"She saved me," Mia said. "She brought me food. She put a ribbon in my hair. She died—"
"Silence," Cruz thundered, and for a moment he tried to use the old cloak.
"You will hear them," Julian said.
"They are witnesses," someone else said. "We were ordered to take. We signed. We did what we were told."
"You did what you were told," Julian replied quietly. "And you kept count. So did he."
Cruz's hands went to his belt like a bird to a branch. He wanted the sword. A man who had known death as companion wanted to control its proximity.
"You betrayed people under your watch," Julian said. "You made the camp into a market. You turned our duty into your desire."
"Is that what you call it?" Cruz hissed, eyes glittering. "To keep the camp safe?"
"Not safe," Julian said. "Perverted."
The crowd, which had been quiet like an ocean waiting for the tide, found its voice.
"Shame!" someone shouted.
"Traitor!" another called.
Men spat and a woman stepped forward and threw a small cup at Cruz's boots. It splashed and the general's face tilted away like someone who had been scalded. The sound of that cup against leather was a trigger.
Cruz's expression changed then, as if the mask had shifted. He moved from the fury of a man who controlled to the panic of a man who had lost control.
"You will regret this," he snarled, but his voice had the tremor of someone suddenly very small.
"Regret is yours already," Jasmine said. "Look at what you took."
They took his honors. Julian had the camp's officers lift the banners that marked Cruz's rank. They were removed from his tent and given to those who had lost more than jewelry: to the families of dead men, to the women who had suffered, to the old gardener who had watched his neighbor disappear. The symbols of authority were parceled out as restitution.
"Cruz Omar," Julian said, "you will be stripped of the command that allowed this. You will be tried and judged by camp law. You will face the people whose lives you auctioned."
The general's face went through vertigo: he had expected a quiet fine, a private shame, a letter sent and the matter closed. Instead they did not only strip him—they made the stripping public, ceremonial.
They removed the sash that marked his command. It was a soft, ceremonial moment and everyone watched. When it fell, silence cracked like glass. They bound his hands with a sash the camp had used for draping curtains, and then a woman—the same who had lost Peach—approached with a small cloth. She took the cloth and wiped his face, leaving a smudge of ash across his cheek.
"Looked like mercy," she whispered, but when the crowd began to mock and call his name, when they spat and hissed and made a place for him small, it was not mercy at all. It was judgement. It was the people's voice.
Cruz's face shifted in public like an actor discovering new lines midplay. He tried to smile at first, then to cry, then denial, then fury. He tried to bargain—threads of command still in his voice—but Julian would answer him with cool law and the camp's officers with steady hands.
"Confess," Julian said simply.
"I did what I had to," Cruz repeated like a mantra.
"Did you order Peach's death?" Julian asked.
"She was collateral," Cruz said, and the words were ridiculed like a hollow drum.
Around him the camp's people turned, tweets and murmurs forming a chorus. Someone took a small whipsocket and beat it against the pillar of his tent in a rhythm that called to old superstitions.
"Go away," he finally whispered to the crowd.
But the punishment was not only to be stripped. It was to be visible. Julian ordered that Cruz stand in the yard for three days and nights, without tent, in the sun and the wind, to hear the people he had wronged tell their stories. Each morning they would bring a token of what he had taken and lay it at his feet. People brought braid, brought a child's small shoe, brought a faded ribbon and a lock of hair. Each small thing a memory. Each a needle.
"Remember what you took," a woman said as she dropped a small wooden toy at his foot.
On the second night he attempted to speak with me. A rope of soldiers kept him from doing anything beyond a few paces. He looked smaller under the open sky, the moon making his jaw look like a brittle cliff.
"Elora," he called.
I stood at the edge of the circle, hands clenched, Mia close at my skirts.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked, and for the first time the man asking sounded frightened in his own bones.
"Because you stole their lives," I said. "Because you would have stolen more. Because you believed your hatred justified trampling others."
"Don't you see," he whispered, "if I don't do this, they will do it to me. I am protecting people I care for. I need... control."
"Control is not protection," I said. "It is possession."
He reached toward me, a small, trembling, ridiculous human gesture. He wanted to touch me and have that mean anything. The crowd laughed softly, and the sound broke him.
He had been the architect of an awful plateau—one man making decisions in the name of security—and now the plateau had broken under his feet. He could not appeal to reason or to law; the law had found his signature and his men found their courage to speak. In public he was seen for what he had done.
His unravelling over the three days was complex. At first his face was proud and stoic, a mask that did not believe the crowd. Then he tried anger, and the crowd answered with spit. He then pleaded denial until his voice grew hoarse. He attempted to call in favors; officers refused, not wanting to be implicated. He tried to bargain with smiles veiled as regret. An officer took his hand for one second and then let it go. He finally begged, then whimpered, then planted a face of stoic silence as if stone could withstand the rain of testimony.
On the morning after the final night, Julian announced the sentence.
"You will be relieved of command," Julian said. "You will return the pay and adjust, as best we can, the losses. You will live under the watch of the camp until reparations are made."
The people cheered like a small child freed.
Cruz's face folded, not into submission but into a grief that was all his own. The sort of grief that is not about repentance but about a thing recognized as gone.
"Why did you do all this?" a voice asked.
"I trained myself this way," he whispered. "It was how to survive."
"You survived by turning others into tools for your survival," Julian replied. "You made camp law an extension of your appetite."
He was led away with no pomp. A boy who had once been a corpse now shuffled toward a diminished place in the world he had tried to own. People watched and some threw at him the small tokens of their scorn—a rotten fruit, a cracked bowl. Others simply turned away.
Later, when the tendons of the day relaxed into an exhausted night, the girls who had been freed gathered at Chiyo's small house. They mended rags and compared scars. Kaliyah's child slept with a little cotton under his cheek. Mia braided hair and laughed in a way that reconstructed something I had thought I had lost.
"Did you see him?" Jasmine asked.
"I did," I said. "He looked less like a general and more like a man who had been found out."
"He has always been cruel," Chiyo said. "This does not fix what he did."
"No," I agreed. "But it made it visible."
Julian found me near the back, where the light was thin and the air smelled of cooked broth.
"You did very well," he said.
"I did what I could," I said. "It was enough."
"For now," he said. "Bigger things remain."
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
He took off his cap and rubbed at his forehead like a man who still could not quiet the world.
"We will try to put laws in place," he said. "We will try to keep ledger and sword in balance."
"And if they fail?" I asked.
"Then we come back and do again," he replied.
I had thought crisis was a place to be endured, not reformed. Julian made it sound like work.
That night Cruz did not speak to me. He was kept under watch and his eyes were hollow and full of a part of him I had seen only when he thought no one could see. I pity him like one might pity a burned animal.
"You will not leave?" he asked finally, voice low.
"No," I said. "I will not be part of your triumphs."
"You will always be with me," he said, soft.
"I will not be with someone who eats others for future safety."
The camp grew quiet, and all at once the plain of the world seemed rearranged into an easier geometry. There were people I could trust and things I could fix. There remained danger. There remained greed. But there also remained witnesses and ledger and small mercies.
I kept the white porcelain bottle he gave me the night he stumbled into my room, drunk and wrapped in someone else's perfume.
"Take this," he said. "For pain. For when you are hurt."
I held it in my palm sometimes and thought of the way his hand had trembled. The bottle was small and plain, and its lid fit like a promise.
When spring arrived, we buried nothing grand. We mended more than rags. We taught the girls to read the ledger and taught the soldiers the names of what they had taken. We did not pretend to fix the world in a day. We learned to hold each other accountable, even in tiny ways.
"Do you remember," Mia asked one afternoon while braiding my hair with a ribbon, "the song you heard when you were sick?"
I hummed a fragment and she laughed, delighted at the strange sound.
"It kept you alive," she said.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe it meant more."
Julian left the camp months later with civically minded orders and a promise to return. Chiyo remained with her small house and a watchful eye. Kaliyah's baby grew into a boy with his father's stubborn jaw. Jasmine found a place at the market. Mia learned to sew and then to read. The camp's ledger was no longer a shield for the powerful; it became, slowly, a place where paper could hold somebody's name and not let it be erased by appetite.
Cruz came back once to plead and to rage. Men do not stay small in the presence of someone's anger. He returned and the camp simply turned its head and the rituals of accountability took place. He was allowed to exist but not to command. He sat in the yard for an hour and watched us sew like we were making the world back into itself.
"Why do you keep the bottle?" he asked me one day without approach, in a low voice that suggested he had learned how to be small and quiet.
"To remember," I said.
"For what?"
"For the night," I said. "For the danger. For the way you thought you could buy the world with blood."
His eyes burned with a complicated grief that had no name.
"Do you hate me?" he asked.
"I hated what you did," I corrected. "Hate is a heavy word for someone you once saved. I will not let you take that either."
He smiled at that like a prisoner receiving a small kindness. He patted his own hands like a child and left.
When the wind came that day it smelled like cut grass and the low promise of rain. I wound my fingers around the white porcelain bottle and set it on the small shelf above the sewing table. The little thing was a memory and a warning both.
I do not know whether men like Cruz can change. I only know that making a wrong visible is the first step to limiting it.
"One day," Mia said as she tied yet another ribbon, "I want to be a woman who makes other people safe."
"Then you will," I said.
"Will you stay?" she asked innocently.
"Yes," I said, "I will stay for now."
I put the lid back on the bottle and felt the tiny click like a small victory. The sound was private, but it tethered me.
The End
— Thank you for reading —