13. Till Death Do Us Part
Till Death Do Us Part
The door slams open at an hour that shouldn’t exist.
I have approximately two hours of sleep in my body and an emperor’s arm across my waist, and neither of these things prepared me for Jing’s face appearing in the gap like a harbinger of bureaucratic doom.
“You brOKE TRADITION.”
Ren’s arm tightens. I feel him surface from sleep the way soldiers do—instantly alert, already calculating threats. Then he registers the voice and subsides.
“Jing,” he says, without opening his eyes. “It’s not yet dawn.”
“It’s your WEDDING DAY and you spent the night TOGETHER and the servants have SEEN and the court historians will WRITE THINGS and—”
“Let them.” His voice is rough with sleep and something warmer. Something that makes my chest do an inconvenient thing. “Let them write that the emperor couldn’t bear to spend his last night as an unmarried man away from his future wife. I fail to see the tragedy.”
Jing makes a sound like a teakettle achieving sentience and regretting it.
I should help. I should say something diplomatic. Instead, I’m feeling the warmth along my spine where his body presses against mine, the way his breath stirs my hair, the particular disaster of realising I don’t want to move.
Eight hundred years of waking up alone. And now this.
Wonderful. Chapter 645 and I still haven’t learned to manage my expectations.
Mei appears behind Jing like a shadow that learned to wear silk. Her gaze sweeps the room—rumpled sheets, tangled limbs, Ren’s hand splayed possessive across my stomach where the bump has become undeniable—and her expression doesn’t shift.
“Your Majesty,” she says. “You’re needed.”
Ren sighs. The sound moves through both of us. “And if I refuse?”
“Then I drag you out myself, and the court historians will have significantly more interesting things to write about.”
She’s not bluffing. She’s never bluffed in her life. Her version of a bluff is a detailed threat followed by meticulous execution.
Ren presses his lips to the curve of my shoulder—brief, warm, a promise—and then he’s moving, untangling himself from me with obvious reluctance. His hand finds mine in the sheets and squeezes once before Wei appears at the door, flanked by servants who very carefully don’t look at anything.
“Husband,” I say, testing the word. It’s not true yet. It will be, in hours. “You smell like smoke.”
His mouth quirks. “And you look like you haven’t slept.”
“I wonder whose fault that is.”
His eyes darken. Just for a moment. Just enough.
Then Wei is hauling him toward the door with the determined efficiency of a man who has watched too many men make poor decisions in the name of romance, and Ren is gone, leaving behind the indent of his body in the sheets and the fading warmth of his presence.
I breathe.
“You,” Jing says, pointing at me with a finger that trembles with righteousness, “are going to be late for your own wedding.”
“Probably.”
“This is NOT ACCEPTABLE.”
“And yet.”
Dumpling appears from somewhere in the centre of the bed.
I have no memory of him arriving. He stretches—an elaborate affair involving all four legs and a spine that shouldn’t bend that way—and regards Jing with the supreme indifference of a creature who has never once cared about human social conventions.
“The CAT was HERE,” Jing says, scandalised to new heights. “The cat WITNESSED—”
“The cat will not testify before the court historians,” Mei says.
Dumpling slow-blinks at me. His expression is unbearably smug.
“He absolutely would if he could,” I say. “He’d demand compensation. Probably fish.”
Dumpling chirps. Agreement.
Jing looks like she might expire on the spot. Mei looks like she might help her.
I sit up. The silk sheets pool around my waist, and I press a hand to my stomach where the occupant has started her morning routine of attempting to kick her way to freedom.
“Stop that,” I mutter. “We have a schedule.”
She kicks harder. Apparently, she also doesn’t care about human social conventions. We’re going to get along terribly.
Two hours of controlled chaos later, and I’m starting to think death might be preferable.
I’ve been poisoned forty-two times. Stabbed through organs I’d genuinely forgotten I had. Once, memorably, I was trampled by ceremonial elephants during a diplomatic incident I still maintain wasn’t my fault.
None of that prepared me for bridal preparation.
“Your SLEEVE,” Jing says, near tears, adjusting something for the seventeenth time. “Why is your SLEEVE at that ANGLE?”
“Because I have arms, Jing. Arms do things.”
“Arms should do APPROPRIATE things on WEDDING DAYS.”
Mei is somewhere behind me, directing servants with the terrifying efficiency of a general commanding troops.
Silk moves. Hair pins appear and disappear.
Someone is burning incense that smells like every temple I’ve ever robbed, and another servant is doing something incomprehensible to my eyebrows.
I catch my reflection in the bronze mirror and go still.
The woman looking back at me is a stranger.
Silk the colour of phoenixes—red and gold, patterned with birds rising from flames.
Hair piled elaborately, pinned with jade and gold.
Face painted just enough to suggest I might be human and not the creature who’s spent eight centuries surviving things that should have killed her permanently.
The bump is visible under the sash. Eighteen weeks of something I never expected, growing into someone I haven’t met. The silk strains around it, and every few minutes, the occupant shifts, rearranging herself like she’s already rehearsing for future inconvenient moments.
Even the baby is restless. She gets that from me.
“You’re glowing,” someone says. A servant, arranging my train.
I am not glowing. This is the sheen of sweat and existential dread and the particular desperation of a woman who hasn’t used the privy in two hours because getting out of these robes requires a team of engineers and possibly divine intervention.
“Thank you,” I manage. “I feel radiant.”
The lie tastes like copper.
Dumpling has claimed the centre of the vanity table. Hairpins scatter around him like offerings to an orange god. He’s grooming himself with the focused intensity of someone who believes they’re the most important person in the room.
He’s not wrong.
“Move him,” Mei says.
“I’m not moving him,” Jing says. “YOU move him.”
“I don’t touch vermin.”
Dumpling yawns. His teeth are very small and very sharp and he’s looking at Mei like he knows exactly what she called him and has already begun planning his revenge.
“I respect his commitment,” I say. “Work around him.”
They work around him. What choice do they have? He’s seventeen pounds of orange spite, and he’s chosen his ground.
The minutes pass. Servants come and go. Someone paints my lips a colour that’s supposed to be auspicious and is actually the exact shade of blood I’ve seen too often. Jing fusses with my hair until I want to snap at her, adjusting the angle of phoenix pins until they pull at my scalp.
And then suddenly—
She stops.
Her hands go still on my shoulders. Her eyes meet mine in the mirror, and they’re wet.
“You look,” she says, and her voice cracks. Just slightly. Just enough. “You look like an Empress.”
Oh.
Something cracks behind my ribs. I don’t let it show. I’ve had eight hundred years of practice at not letting things show.
“Thank you,” I say. “Also, for the thirty-seven pregnancy books.”
Her laugh is wet. “I have twelve more. For after.”
“Of course you do.”
The door opens.
Ren shouldn’t be here. Tradition says he shouldn’t see me before the ceremony—another rule we’ve already broken, because we broke it last night, because we’ve been breaking rules since the night I tried to kill him and he asked me to stay.
He’s here anyway.
Wei is behind him, looking pained. “I tried to stop him, Your Highness.”
“You failed,” Ren says, and his eyes find mine, and everything else disappears.
He’s in ceremonial robes. Gold and crimson. The dragon motif coiling up his chest like Tianlong made manifest in thread. His hair is bound properly, his face composed, every inch the emperor the empire needs him to be.
But his eyes.
His eyes are looking at me like I’m the only thing in the room. Like I’m worth the wait. Like he already knows my answer and is still terrified I’ll run.
I don’t run.
He’s carrying something. I don’t see it at first—too distracted by his face, by the particular way he’s breathing, by the fact that he came here when he shouldn’t have because he couldn’t stay away.
Then he opens his hands.
The jade comb is pale green, worn smooth by centuries of touch. The carving is simple—a phoenix, rising. The kind of thing that could be any noblewoman’s treasure, except for the way his hands hold it. Reverent. Careful. Like it’s the most precious thing he owns.
“I’ve been carrying this since we met,” he says. His voice doesn’t waver. His hands do. “I kept waiting for the right moment.”
I can’t speak.
I’ve spent eight hundred years speaking. Running commentary. Deflection. Armor made of words.
I don’t have words for this.
“It was my mother’s.” He steps closer. Close enough that I can see the texture of his robes, the slight tremor in his fingers. “Now it’s yours.”
He places it in my hair himself. Jing makes a sound of protest about placement—something about angles and precedent and historical accuracy—and is silenced by Mei with a look that could curdle milk at a hundred paces.
The jade is cool against my scalp. Heavy in a way that has nothing to do with weight.
“I don’t—” My voice catches. I swallow. Try again. “I don’t know what to say.”
His mouth curves. Just slightly. Just enough. “That might be a first.”
A laugh escapes me. Wet and broken and nothing like the sound I meant to make.
He touches my jaw. Just his fingertips. Just enough to tilt my face toward his.
“You’re going to be late,” I say.
“I’m the Emperor.”
“And I’m going to be late.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
Something shifts behind my sternum.
I let him see my hands shake when he pulls away.