Sweet Romance16 min read
When the Villainess Refuses the Script
ButterPicks14 views
I woke up to canvas above my face and a voice like a blade.
"Don't pretend to sleep, Hadassah," the woman's voice said. "The Marshal has ordered you presented to the troops."
I sat bolt upright. My hands were cuffed—an iron band around my wrist—and my hair was piled into someone else's neat style. A soldier's cloak had been draped over me like punishment. The mirror across the tent showed a face I had read about a hundred times: willow brows, red mouth, eyes that always seemed on the verge of tears. That face belonged to the villain in the novel. The villain—whose name I had roasted in the comment section—was supposed to be beaten and forgotten.
"This is not possible," I whispered to myself. "I only skimmed that chapter last night."
"Stop stalling!" Lakelyn's voice—thin and sharp as a pin—snapped. The woman who had ordered me up was the queen mother’s attendant in the novel, the one who ultimately did everything to ruin the villain. She smiled at me as if she smelled victory. "Get her dressed. The Marshal waits at the dais. Don't let the soldiers starve for your entertainment."
Two burly maids pushed me forward. I tried to plant my feet and argue, but their hands were like clamps. They plastered white powder on my face until it felt like ice.
"You're not the hero, Hadassah," Lakelyn said. "You never were. I wonder which of the soldiers will be lucky enough to pry you from the king's hands."
The king—Dimitri Fernandez—was waiting on the high platform. He was the kind of man books put on pedestals: long black hair, eyes like carved onyx, a jaw too sharp for kindness. In the novel he was distant and cold. He was also cruel to the "villain" he intended to "punish."
I had read the scene. I had mocked the author in the review thread. I had not expected to be stunned awake with that author's plot in the real world.
"Hadassah, say your last words," one of the maids whispered, sneering.
"Wait," I blurted, though I didn't trust my voice. "I have something to say."
Dimitri's boots were polished to a mirror sheen. He looked over the army and then at me with a gaze that made the marrow in my bones cold.
"You've defeated a person by shouting?" he asked once my words failed and he had me kneel. He was calm but not kind. "Say it, then."
"I—" I swallowed. "Gunilla is not truly a daughter of the Prime Minister. She is—"
My confession was a bluff. It was a trial balloon to buy time. There was a rumor thread in the book, a scrawled note that turned household alliances into steel. The platform held thousands of soldiers and their spears glinted like frost. Dimitri's face darkened.
"Enough." He turned back to the lines of men. "Give her to the troops."
They shoved me down. "No!" I screamed. "You can't—"
Lakelyn laughed, a sound designed to slice. "You begged, you schemed, Hadassah. This is your pay."
I did what any reader with a grudging fondness for self-preservation would do. I grabbed a shard of pottery I'd tucked into my sleeve when they rifled through my possessions earlier. My plan: wound him badly, collapse, and hope death ended this dream. I lunged.
"Stop her!"
Dimitri never moved as a statue of ice would not. He watched my blade glint in the noon sun. When I struck, the shard nicked his throat. Red bloomed on my palm.
He was still alive. My hands were seized. He looked at me with surprise for the first time: not contempt or calculation, but—something like astonishment.
"Do you know how foolish that is?" he said. He sounded almost amused. He did not shout soldiers to cut me down, though I expected nothing else. He had me thrown into the crowd, and then, like a wave, the army swallowed me.
I ran blindly until my feet bled. I slept under a tree where wolves howled and woke with the taste of iron in my mouth. For two nights I wandered. For two nights I cursed my choices.
On the third day I was caught because I ran out of luck and out of hiding. I should have killed myself rather than return to the man I had cut. Instead, I warmed to the thought of one final insult: if he must live, let him nurse the wound I made.
They carried him back to camp. He was pale and still. Evan Pierce, the physician who had patched a dozen men, shook his head when he saw the clean slash across Dimitri's abdomen.
"Simple stitches will not hold if there's internal damage," Evan muttered. He had a steady hand and a kind face, the kind of face I later learned belonged to people who comforted traitors and heroes alike. "We must sew carefully. If you have any skill—"
I froze. He turned to look at me, and the whole carcass of my plan leaned toward hope and terror. "You did this?"
"No," I lied. "But I read a book. I know some stitches."
Evan looked at me, measuring dishonor and desire. "Help me, then."
That night, in a dark tent with the sound of distant horns, I did what the villain in the book would never have done: I took responsibility. I seared the wound, threaded the needle, and stitched with hands that shook but did not fail. The stitches were crooked and ugly, but they held.
"You're back from the dead," Evan said softly when the blood slowed. "Sheer luck and good hands."
Dimitri woke up shortly after, with that cold, searching look. He stared at the uneven thread and then at me, at the ragged white in my hair.
"Who stitched this?" he asked.
"I did," I said. "If you'd cut your own throat, you would have had the satisfaction of not listening to my whines."
He smiled, the first real smile—a small, private thing. It was like a seam in ice. I felt something rise in my chest that wasn't just relief. "You were always reckless."
"And you were always a monster," I shot back, and then regretted it because the playrooms of history prefer a villainess to be only villainous. But he did not snarl. He looked at me with what bordered on curiosity.
"You should not have tried to kill me."
"I should have tried harder," I said. "Now I have to live with you."
"Then do something useful," he replied. "Stay. Help Evan. You saved my life. Consider that your debt."
Those words were like salt and honey—both wrong and sweet. They were, in their cold way, an offer.
Three heartbeats later, while drying a bloody bandage between my fingers, he did something small and terrible: he took off his cloak and wrapped it loosely around my shoulders when I shivered.
"You're not suited to the cold," he said simply.
My breath stuttered. "Thank you," I managed.
That was the first of the little thawings. The next came when he, who never laughed, laughed—soft and sudden—at a stupid joke I made while trying to distract Evan during a long, lonely night of changing dressings. The third came when, on the day he vowed to return to the capital, he asked me, almost offhand, to tie the red ribbon under his helmet for luck.
"Come nearer," he said. "Your hands are steadier than they look."
"Don't patronize me," I snapped, but I reached up. Our fingers brushed. The ribbon took shape in my hands like the small, stubborn knot of something new.
"Don't make it crooked," he said.
"I won't."
The campaign returned to the capital slower than in the book. Our road carried the stink of old blood and the occasional cheer of villagers. News of our arrival reached the palace. There were speeches, banners, and an emperor's face that had weather in the lines. He praised Dimitri's loyalty and valor. He praised discipline and victory.
He also, with the mint of an imperial pen, proposed a marriage.
"Marry to bind peace," the emperor said. "Dimitri Fernandez, to bring stability, why not accept marriage to the Prime Minister's daughter?"
There was a stirring. Gunilla Wells, the novel's heroine and the Prime Minister's daughter, stepped forward like a flower in court, all poise and gentle purpose. She bowed with a deferential grace the court adored.
"You will make our house proud," Dimitri said formally.
He refused.
"The seasons are not here to be tied," he answered the emperor. "There are matters to settle."
The court murmured. The Prime Minister's breath got tight. Gunilla's smile faltered, but she did not cry. The plot in the book had imagined a wedding to follow, fireworks to blind the villain's claims. But in our version, Dimitri was quiet and stubborn. He chose instead to take me, who had tried to end him, back into his household.
I thought for a moment—a dangerous, stupid thought—that perhaps I had made the author wrong. Maybe this world had room for my stubbornness.
Inside the mansion—Teresa Cowan's domain, the woman who raised Dimitri and the fierce hand who had the most influence over his life—my standing was complicated. Teresa loved me—kindly, intimately, as someone might love a stray kept in the house as a child. She socked praise with the same hands that scoffed, but when she favored me, the world warmed.
"Stay, Hadassah," she said when I knelt before her. "You are my daughter in all but blood. The boy is mine, but you are mine, too."
That promise was a blanket. I accepted it.
But not everyone loved me. Lakelyn's eye glittered with boxed malice. She had been plotting for a long time, and I had tripped her off her railings with my foolishness. That was a mistake.
In the weeks that followed, I kept my head down, bandage hands steady, and stitches honest. I did the small jobs the household needed. I watched Gunilla from a distance—the way she laughed once with a page, the way she knelt before the altar—and the guidelines my old brain insisted upon were as clear as before: don't cross the heroine.
Yet Lakelyn changed course. She could not abide that I had survived, sewn wounds, and lived. She began a campaign—a quiet, poisonous siege. She accused me, in whispers that corrupted servants and turned them against me: thefts I did not commit, insolent stares I never gave. At night, I woke to the sound of whispered councils, to fingers pointing.
I had the author’s knowledge and the taste of survival; I also had something else nobody expected: a conscience that grew tired of being the villain. I did not want to be the monster the story demanded. I wanted—ridiculous as it was—to be me.
So when the palace finally called for a reckoning, for a "lesson" to be made of the woman who had "tried to seduce a prince" and "tried to steal the capital's favor," Lakelyn smiled and set the trap.
"They will have their spectacle," she breathed. "They will know what it is to dare the household."
The day of the public punishment—this is the part the book had never detailed properly—was cold and full of people. It took place in the palace courtyard where courtiers swapped gossip and the emperor himself liked to watch justice on the cheap. The king had returned to inspect and Dimitri stood by, though weak from his wounds, his spine straight as a reed.
Lakelyn led the procession of accusers, and I—because I could not flee—was dragged forth. A hundred pairs of eyes were upon me. My feet had been bound earlier with silver ankle ringtones he had given me—ridiculous, humiliating—and they jingled as I walked. Those jingles, I told myself, would be the music of my last refusal.
"Hadassah Clemons," Lakelyn called, voice high and venomous. "You defied a household of honor. You sought to corrupt our master, you showed insolence, and you conspired with common soldiers. For that, justice must be swift."
There were gasps in the crowd. Men rustled. Women clicked their tongues like shutters.
"Evan," I said quietly, catching the physician's eye in the crowd. "He knows you lie."
Evan stepped forward. "My lord," he said, addressing the emperor, "the woman standing there mended the wounds of our marshal and saved him. I can attest to what she did. To punish her for actions she did not commit is to dishonor the medical oath I keep."
Lakelyn was prepared. She had forged petty proof: a cloth with threads that she swore came from the inner chambers of the Prime Minister's house. She pooh-poohed Evan's testimony and widened the net: "If not for her, the troops would not be pleased. She must be made an example."
I looked at Dimitri. The man who could have ordered me cut down had instead kept me alive. The man who had me in chains now looked over the courtyard with a patient—almost weary—expression. He did not flinch as Lakelyn spread her accusations like sheets in the sun.
"Evidences are thin," Dimitri said, voice carrying to the front row. "But conduct unbecoming of a household guest merits punishment."
He paused, and for a heartbeat I thought—no, hoped—he would look at me and scoff. Instead he said,
"Bring forward those who conspired and name them."
Lakelyn smiled. She expected the public to applaud. She expected the emperor to nod. She expected to which endorse her triumph. But she had forgotten one thing: power is a blade you can use on the wrong palm.
"Those who conspired?" Dimitri said. "Lakelyn Reynolds, bring forth the names you offered."
My heart hammered. "She'll name herself innocent," I whispered. "This is all show."
"Foolish," Lakelyn laughed. "There is proof—"
"Enough," Dimitri said. "Because you wished spectacle, there will be spectacle. We will judge not by whispers but by truth."
He had the guard fetch two servants Lakelyn had leaned on—two women with faces like paper, easily crumpled. They were dragged forward. "Did Lakelyn force you?" he asked.
One looked at him, then at Lakelyn. "We were pressured," she whispered. "Our tasks were ordered. We were promised favor. But we were given punishments until we obeyed."
"A promise of favor for lies," Evan said, stepping close. "Exchange of goods, threats. She bought witnesses."
The crowd shifted. There was a murmur that turned to a roiled suspicion. For a long moment, Lakelyn's smile faltered. Then, the most dangerous step: she stepped forward to deny, to grin, to strike back.
"You will regret this cowardice!" she cried. "I am the household stewardess. I command—"
"Hold her," Dimitri said.
Guards seized her arms. For the first time in months she was unshielded. Her face twitched.
"Bring me the lists!" she shrieked. "You can't—"
Dimitri waved his hand. "We will read the ledgers publicly. Let the servants tell what they were promised. Let Gunilla speak."
Gunilla, who had remained a bright, mourning presence through the argument, stepped forward. Her voice was low but carried. "I came here to see the truth. I do not seek to humiliate, but I will not have falsehood used as a weapon." She didn't accuse Lakelyn with barbed malice; she spoke with a dignity that fertilized the courtyard air. "I asked who brought those lies to me. They were named. I did not press it further because—because I trusted the household. If I was deceived, I must ask for correction."
The reading began. Paper after paper, witness after witness, a ledger of bribes and promises and threats. Lakelyn's voice rose and then broke. She began in confidence and ended in frantic denial. Each name she had promised favor to confessed they had lied for the hope of promotion. Each person she had promised retribution against turned on her. The emperor's eyes narrowed. The crowd watched.
It was public and it was merciless. Lakelyn's reactions changed like a weathered tree: first proud, then startled, then frantic, then frantic denial, then collapse.
"You're making this up!" she repeated at first, the words flung like stones.
"No," one of the servants said, voice now clear. "We did as she asked. We lied. We punished without cause. We were afraid."
Lakelyn's face went from calm to stunned to scorched. She screamed out accusations, then tried to bargain, then to deny, then to blame others. The guard dragged her forward and she clutched at the ledgers like a drowning woman at driftwood.
"What do you have to say for yourself?" Dimitri asked.
"Forgive—" she began, and then the crowd broke with scoffs, as if forgiveness could be purchased with a small phrase.
"You lied to the emperor," one soldier called out. "You broke households. People were whipped and demoted because you wanted amusement."
Around us, the observers reacted. People who had initially stared now moved forward with their phones—no, not phones, but with the newness of pens and whispers; some shook their heads, others took notes. There were women who spat with disgust, men who crossed their arms, servants who stood straighter because truth had been flung into the air and it made them breathe anew.
Lakelyn's face contorted. She tried to call for the emperor's protection, to whisper treacheries in his ear. But the reading had done something more valuable than rumor: it had corroded her authority.
"Strip her of her post," Dimitri said. The emperor, displeased to have been used, nodded. "Let her stand publicly and answer the charges of coercion and falsifying evidence."
They took away her title. They told of the soldiers she had unjustly sent to punish, of the servants she had tormented. The crowd hissed. Children who had watched the drama smile in confusion; older women crossed themselves. A court recorder stepped forward and read the final verdict aloud.
Lakelyn fell apart slowly. She first breathed shock, then denial, then asked for mercy, then she clung to her own dignity and then she crumbled. She begged the emperor, then staggered and clutched a column. Her behavior followed script: smart to absurd, confident to broken, brazen to apologetic. People started to murmur and some to pity. Others recorded her confession with sharp eyes. A circle of watchers formed.
The judges read their punishments. Lakelyn would be dismissed, stripped of power, publicly shamed by being paraded with the ledgers in hand while servants named every favor she had promised and every lie she had spoken. The assault on my reputation would be corrected; the records would stand.
Her change was dramatic: she who had once smirked with entitlement now gurgled entrely for mercy, then for a postcard. The crowd, once indulgent of spectacle, now looked at her with scorn. A few shouted for harsher measures. The servants who had once cowered now stepped up and named names. "She sent men to lash us," one cried. "She promised me promotion to make me lie," another said.
The circumference around her tightened—witnesses, pens, whispers. Lakelyn swung through stages like tide: triumphant, baffled, angry, pleading, collapsed. She bit her lip until it bled. She knelt and crawled and then folded into herself. Soldiers circled like a ring of wolves, but not one hand struck her. The punishment was institutional: the filing of charges, the public reading, the banishment of power. It was humiliation more than blood, but for Lakelyn that was worse—the removal of her influence was a slow erosion that left her brittle and thin.
And the crowd reacted: some spat, some applauded, some took to writing down the names to avoid future employment. Many women clapped for me, some wept to see a wrong undone. A few courtiers who had once smiled at Lakelyn's lies now blushed and stepped back.
Lakelyn's reaction at the end was the cruelest part: when she finally realized the social death that awaited her, she begged. She crawled on hands and knees before the emperor. She screamed and spat and then mouthed apologies, each one smaller than the last. Her voice changed from brazen to shrill to whisper. The admirements of her life collapsed into a heap.
Dimitri watched it all with an even face. When the emperor turned to confer with him, he winked at me—not with merriment but with an odd softness.
"Look," he said quietly, not to be overheard, "you will not be taken by the great drama of court. But you owe me your thrift, Hadassah. You saved my life once. The ledger-righting is paid for. Learn to avoid being a spectacle."
"Will you leave me?" I asked.
"I will not leave you to the crowds," he answered simply.
That was the second heart-clench. He had stayed, not out of pity or performance but choice.
As for Lakelyn, her punishment was public and full. It was not a single scene of knives and blood; it was a long, precise dismantling of power. She had lived by making people small; now she was the spectacle of being made small. She reacted, at every stage, through all the stages: the haughty smile, the incredulous denial, the wild defiance, the pleading, the hushed begging, and finally the collapse into a small, defeated woman. The onlookers reacted too: some spat, some took notes, some clapped at the truth. That was a justice scene in the modern vernacular: a villain's pyramid crumbling while the crowd watched.
After the public unmasking, life in the mansion adjusted. I was permitted to live under Teresa's protection. Gunilla—who could have delighted in my fall—showed me nothing but measured sweetness. Evan told me to stop overworking; Jasper Brandt, the cook-soldier who had once risked his life to fetch me a pan in the night, fixed my ankle bandages and refused to let me carry heavy loads.
Dimitri and I—by degrees—built a strange routine. He remained stern in council and fierce in command, but softer in private. Once, in a lull between audiences, he took a small, ordinary hand-mill from the table and ground coffee beans with such concentration that his face—usually carved of stone—looked boyish and content.
"Why do you do this?" I asked.
"For something small that is mine," he said, and then, quieter, "For something that no battle can give back."
I told myself to be practical. I had come into this book as a villain, but I had, by small acts, become more. I sewed because the lives depended on it. I lied because the truth was a blade. I stayed because leaving would not fix the hands tied to me: Jasper's maimed fingers, Evan's tired nights, Teresa's hopeless love for a son that had cost her everything.
One night, when the moon was a neat silver coin, Dimitri took me by the shoulders and looked at me without armor.
"Do you regret railing at the story?" he asked.
I swallowed. "Only the parts where the author thought women are objects."
He laughed—a short, undeniable sound. "Then tell me, Hadassah, do you wish to write your own ending?"
"I do," I said.
He reached up and, for the third time in our odd relationship, did something he had never done: he smiled in the way that made my chest ache and then leaned in and kissed my temple as if it were a promise.
It was not a grand vow. It was not a wedding. It was an inked little thing he tucked into my palm: his word. The kind of thing men used to barter kingdoms.
And then the ritual of daily life returned: healing, cooking, small tolerances. I learned to patch uniforms and mend torn banners. I learned that power is not only in the crown but in choices—about whom to feed, whom to pardon, what ledger to sign.
At court, Lakelyn's disgrace turned into endless gossip. People pinched their coin purses together, whispering that someone else had paid for their promotion, that some small woman had been kept from ruin by stubbornness more than by justice. The world had a new cozy story: a villainess who had refused the script, a marshal who had shown a fissure of tenderness, and a woman of the house—Teresa—who had softened.
Near the end of my first year there, at a small family dinner with rice and a slab of roast, Dimitri leaned across the table and did something absurd.
"One more thing," he said.
"What?" I asked, hoping it would not be another command.
He took the small silver key, the key he had at first kept in his palm as if it were a guillotine's lever, and placed it in my hand. "For the bells."
My hands closed around the cold metal. It was heavy with meaning. "You always plan to punish me with music," I said.
He smiled, genuinely. "Or remind me that when you go, I will hear the silence. I do not like silence."
I pressed my forehead to the key. The bells jingled softly on my ankles. The sound was no longer humiliation. It became a metronome for afternoons and afternoons to come.
"Stay," he said.
And I stayed—no longer the villain in a single chapter, no longer a plot hole for the author to patch with cruelty. I stayed and mended, and sometimes, in the quiet between stitches, his hand would find mine and stay.
The ending the book promised was cruel and neat. My ending is crooked and loud. It has kindness tucked into pockets, stumbles and stitches visible to anyone who cares to look. It is mine.
When the sun set behind the palace, a man who had once tried to see me as a thing of punishment smiled at me because I had wrapped his cloak around my shoulders. He called me by the name the world knew in fiction, but he made it his own. I tied his ribbon, and he promised nothing grand, only that he would not let me become nothing.
Later, when the court played gossip like a lute, Lakelyn's story remained the most satisfying—because she had deserved exposure and because the crowd thrived on justice. But in the private spaces where long nights give way to shorter days, there were three small moments that convinced me I might not be the villain I once read about:
"I like how you fix things," he murmured when I returned his old, bent brooch.
"Because it's satisfying to see the seams hold," I shot back.
He reached for my hand then—no grand gesture, only a warmth—and for once I let go of the book's ending and found something like a beginning.
The silver bells on my ankles rang softly when I walked through the courtyard the morning before we finally left for a quiet estate away from court. Someone heard them and smiled; someone else cursed the sound. I loved them all the same.
This is not the end the author wrote. It is the end I am writing, day by day, stitch by stitch, choice by choice.
The End
— Thank you for reading —