Chapter 58
JINGYI
Drowsiness tugged at her, eyelids growing heavier with every passing breath. But she knew the first rule of head trauma: no sleep on the first day.
So she sat up against the bed’s headboard and watched the candle burn halfway down, its wax pooling in a soft ring around the base. Spine straight, despite the throb in her skull.
Cautiously, she touched her temple. The wound had been freshly dressed. Less swelling now. No nausea, no slurred speech. Vision steady, memory intact. Her fingers paused at the bruised ridge, assessing pressure, tenderness, responsiveness.
She closed her eyes, just briefly.
The dark rushed in—damp, fetid, heavy. Her breath caught as the memory of the dungeon tightened its grip, but she didn’t pull away. Instead, she reached for him. The gold of his hair. The blue of his eyes. Steady. Certain.
He became a tether. A light.
The panic ebbed. It didn’t disappear, but held at bay.
Four turns of the clock had passed since the court gathered.
The echo of Bertrand’s sentence still lingered in her ears.
Alexander had stood frozen in that breathless moment when the king’s voice rang, restoring the honour of a House wronged for more than two decades.
Her lips tugged into a smile before she could stop them.
He’d looked so dazed, so unmoored, when the court swarmed him at last. The lords who’d once kept their distance now pressed close with praise, recognition, admiration.
Everything he’d ever wanted.
He’d earned it, deserved every single moment of honour and glory, more than anyone she’d ever known.
But where did that leave her, now that it was all over?
She opened her eyes. Her fingers drifted to her sternum, pressing gently as if the ache could be massaged from her chest. Her head throbbed again—insistent, warning her this wasn’t the moment for making big, irrevocable decisions.
Not while her thoughts still swam and her body strained just to keep upright.
The knock at the door had her looking up.
“JingYi?” came Adelise’s voice. “May I come in?”
The Tremorian princess had checked in every two turns of the clock.
JingYi tried to answer but her throat clenched around the effort, raw and swollen from where Tedric’s hands had crushed down.
A painful breath, then another. She touched her throat briefly—two fingers pressing the side of her windpipe, checking for tenderness, bruising, the tear in the surrounding ligaments.
It would be days before she spoke without pain.
Her voice, when she finally found it, was a rasp. “You may.”
The door opened, lantern light from the corridor spilling into the room. Adelise stepped inside, carrying a small tray, a shawl draped hastily over her shoulders. She looked like she hadn’t slept either.
“I brought you a cup of broth, and a hot cloth for your throat.”
“You should ask a maid to do this,” JingYi said.
“Oh, shush. I’m happy to do it myself.” Adelise peered at her. “Any dizziness?”
“A little, but no vomiting. My speech is intact, lucid. I can recite the ingredients for the Decoction of the Eight Pillars Beneath Heaven’s Meridian, if you like.”
Adelise snorted. “Please. How would I know if you even got it right? Now, if you quoted The Twelve Rules of Comportment for Well-Bred Tremorian Ladies, I could vouch for your mental faculties.”
JingYi couldn’t help but laugh, though the sound rasped in her throat and cut short with a wince. Adelise handed her the hot cloth, and she pressed it against her neck, holding it there until the sting began to ebb.
“Is there something else I can bring you?” Adelise asked, voice casual. Then—lighter, more pointed: “Or someone, perhaps?”
JingYi glanced up. Her heart, traitorous thing, quickened at the thought. Adelise smiled knowingly and eased onto the edge of the bed.
“Lord Wulfbane is outside,” she told her, voice low. “He came shortly after you returned. I told him to wait and give you time to rest.”
JingYi’s throat tightened. “He should rest. His leg, and he took a hard fall—”
“He doesn’t seem to care,” Adelise said, soft as steam rising from the cup she now offered. “Whatever pain he’s in, he deems it less important than being out there.”
JingYi accepted the cup and stared at the closed door. A dozen emotions stirred, all too loud beneath her aching skull.
“He held you all the way to Niewberg,” Adelise added. “Refused to let anyone else touch you at the cave. Wouldn’t release you, even when the pain had him grinding his teeth.”
JingYi looked down at her lap. She tried to not feel things but the warmth, and the bittersweet ache, seeped in anyway.
“It was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen,” Adelise continued, half-laughing, “when he dove to catch you. He carried you himself after, growled at Lord Reave’s men for trying to help. Reave had to order them all away.”
When she still didn’t speak, Adelise prodded gently. “Will you not see him?”
Her fingers curled inwards. She wanted to see him, to drench herself in his arms, his warmth, his scent. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. But letting herself care too much, too soon, might make it harder to think clearly.
And there were still things she had to think through.
Carefully, she said, “I know what that moment earlier meant for him. His name restored. His honour returned. That kind of triumph draws everything toward it. The right future.”
“You are his future.”
JingYi smiled. “That might have been true, once upon a time.”
Silence stretched between them, until Adelise rose to her feet. “Drink the broth, I mean it. If you’re going to be stubborn, at least do it on a warm stomach.”
JingYi brought the cup to her lips with a murmur of thanks. Adelise crossed to the door. With one hand on the handle, she hesitated.
“We all have oceans between us and the ones we love,” she said, her voice quieter now. “But look closely, he’s been swimming toward you this whole time.” She glanced back and winked. “When you see him, you’ll understand.”
Then, she slipped out.
JingYi held the cup between her palms, let the steam brush her face, then drank in slow, measured sips. The broth warmed her, but her eyes strayed again and again to the door.
Gingerly, she got out of bed and went to open it.
As Adelise had said, Alexander was outside, sitting on a chair in the corridor—arms folded, the injured leg stretched out before him. His hair was damp, darker at the temples where moisture still clung. He’d changed into a plain black tunic, open at the throat, and a pair of black breeches.
He rose the instant she stepped into view, as though the sight of her jolted something loose in him.
She felt him taking her in—the ache at her temple, the throb of her cheek, the tender ring around her throat.
His expression didn’t shift, but she saw the subtle betrayals of a body when the mind recoiled.
The twitch of his cheek. The clench of his jaw.
But she also knew, now, his anger was not directed at her—never her, but the man who’d done this to her.
“You should be in bed,” he said.
She glanced at his thigh, noting the stiffness in the way he braced himself. “I could say the same of you.”
“I’m fine.”
He would say so, even if his muscles were screaming. She knew that now—how thoroughly he’d trained himself to endure, to conceal. Pain wasn’t something he admitted. Not when it still felt like weakness to him.
They were alike in that, too.
She tilted her head toward the room. “Come inside. Let me check your injuries.”
His brow furrowed. “I won’t have you spend your energy on me, not when you’re wounded yourself. I stopped by the infirmary earlier. One of the palace physicians patched me up.”
“Still,” she said, gentler now, “I’d like to see. For myself.”
His eyes flicked to hers, and something passed between them—wary, searching. She held his gaze, steady as she could, even as her pulse skittered.
She wasn’t sure what this was—this insistence, this ache to close the distance, even just for tonight. But she didn’t want to lie to herself, not anymore. Not pretend her concern was anything less than real. That he wasn’t more than merely a patient, a body to treat.
No matter what came next, she needed to know he was whole.
His jaw ticked, but the corner of his mouth pulled into a soft surrender. “Fine.”
He limped into the room and eased himself onto the edge of her bed, moving slowly, as though the air between them was made of glass. He didn’t stir as she sat down next to him.
“Lift your shirt,” she said softly.
He obeyed without protest. The hem dragged upward. She smelled the healing salve the palace healer had applied and saw the loosely wrapped herb-soaked bindings around his torso. A peek beneath the cloth strips revealed the mottled bruising across his lower back and along his vertebrae.
She inspected his spine, confirmed the stitches on his thigh held and the surrounding flesh showed no infection.
Only then was she satisfied. His shirt was still on her bed, and he was still sitting there, staring at her.
Her hand lingered just above his knee, the other braced behind him where she’d steadied herself on the mattress.
He hadn’t moved, just watched her. Their faces were so close that their noses would’ve touched if she but leaned down a little.
His eyes roamed her face, brow furrowed as he traced the brutal geography of her bruises, a map of suffering he hadn’t been able to prevent.
The heartbreak she saw in those blue depths flayed her open.
A sudden, sharp pang seized her. A lump rose in her throat, thick with the premonition that something irreversible was unfolding in this moment.
“JingYi.”
Her name was a raw scrape of sound in the room.
She didn’t look away, and he held her there, in the stillness, his expression a landscape of devastation.
His hand lifted, achingly slow, until his palm cradled her cheek—her purple, blue, blemished cheek.
The touch was unbearably gentle against the evidence of violence.