6. The Craftsmanship Is Exceptional #2
His mouth twitches. Almost. “I prefer balconies.”
“Of course you do.”
Mei clears her throat. We both look at her.
“I’ll have it analyzed,” she says. “Thoroughly. Contained and monitored.” A pause. “If you’re done…”
She means if you’re done making eyes at each other while a monster’s gift sits on the table. Mei doesn’t say things directly when she can imply them with devastating precision.
“We’re done,” I say.
We’re not done. We’re barely started. But Mei takes the rattle and the box and the note, and then it’s just me and Ren and the space where horror used to be.
“I don’t care about the political implications.”
He says it quietly. We’ve moved to the window—not touching, but close enough that I can feel the warmth of him through silk and whatever expensive fabric emperors wear when they’re not being imperial.
The garden stretches below us, all careful pathways and cultivated beauty, nothing wild, nothing uncontrolled.
Like him. Like the man he’s spent his whole life trying to be.
“You should care about the political implications. You’re the emperor.”
“I should.” He’s looking out at the garden, but I don’t think he’s seeing it.
I think he’s seeing everything he’s afraid of—the Hungering King at our gates, the baby in danger, the woman he’s somehow ended up loving standing next to a window that looks out on a world full of things that want to hurt her.
“I care that he can reach you. That he knows about her. That he could have—” He stops.
Starts again. “I care about the wrong things.”
“Caring about your pregnant… whatever I am… isn’t wrong.”
“It’s inconvenient.”
“Everything about me is inconvenient. You should be used to it by now.”
He turns. Looks at me. And there it is—the thing he doesn’t say, the thing neither of us says, the thing that’s been building since the first time I killed him and he refused to stay dead.
“I’m not used to any of it,” he says. “I don’t think I ever will be.”
My chest does something complicated. I ignore it. Ignoring complicated feelings is basically my primary skill set at this point.
“That’s unfortunate. I’m not going anywhere.”
“No.” Something shifts in his expression.
Softens, maybe, if Ren is capable of soft.
The late afternoon light catches his face, and for a moment he looks younger—less emperor, more man.
The man who brings me wrong-temperature tea because he wants to do it himself.
The man who definitely spent hours selecting incense before our dinner. “You’re not.”
I should say something. Deflect. Make a joke about his poor life choices or my extensive history of running away from things that matter.
I don’t.
I just stand there, in the golden light, and let him look at me like I’m something worth keeping.
Dumpling announces his presence by jumping onto the table where the gift used to be.
He sniffs the empty space. His orange fur bristles. He makes a sound I’ve never heard before—not quite a growl, not quite a yowl, something in between that conveys very clear opinions about ancient evil and its gift-giving choices.
“Even the cat knows something’s wrong,” I say.
“The cat knows many things.” Ren watches Dumpling with the expression of a man who’s been outmaneuvered by a small orange creature more times than he’d like to admit. “He chooses to share none of them.”
Dumpling finishes his investigation. Apparently dissatisfied with what he’s found—or hasn’t found—he jumps down, crosses the room with the deliberate pace of a creature who’s never had to hurry, and climbs into my lap.
Not my lap, exactly. My stomach.
He settles there, all warm weight and rumbling purr, positioned directly over the baby like a very small, very furry guard.
“You can’t protect her from ancient evil,” I tell him.
He blinks at me. Slow. Unimpressed.
“He seems to disagree,” Ren observes.
“He weighs seventeen pounds.”
“Seventeen pounds of pure conviction.”
Dumpling purrs louder. I scratch behind his ears, and he pushes into my hand with the shameless demand of a creature who knows exactly how much he’s loved.
From somewhere in the room—from the small form curled near the windowsill, reduced to the size of a large lizard because fitting a palace-sized dragon in living quarters presents logistical challenges—Tianlong’s voice drifts across. “The creature has opinions about your gifts.”
“The creature has opinions about everything.”
“He is not wrong about this one.”
I look at the dragon. Three thousand years old, golden-scaled even in miniature, eyes like furnaces. He looks ridiculous at this size—all that ancient dignity compressed into something that could fit in a basket—but the power is still there. The knowing.
“Did you feel it?” I ask. “When the gift arrived?”
A pause. Tianlong doesn’t pause often. Tianlong has had three millennia to perfect the art of having an answer for everything.
“I felt something,” he admits. “Old. Grieving.” Another pause, longer this time. “Familiar, in ways I do not wish to examine.”
“You knew him. Before.”
“I knew of him. The Hungering King’s story is… not unique, among immortals. The grief that consumes. The love that becomes hunger.” His eyes meet mine, and there’s something there—warning, maybe, or recognition. “It is a path many have walked. Few return from.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“I was not attempting comfort. I was attempting accuracy.” He stretches, a movement that shouldn’t look dignified but somehow does. “The gift is not a threat. Not in the traditional sense. It is something more complicated than that.”
“Complicated how?”
“If I knew, I would say. I am ancient, not omniscient.” A pause. “Though the distinction is sometimes difficult for mortals to grasp.”
“And there’s the Tianlong I know and tolerate.”
“Tolerate. I have witnessed the birth of stars. And you tolerate me.”
“Aggressively.”
Something that might be amusement crosses his ancient face. “The hatchling will be interesting, I think. With parents like you.”
Dumpling presses his head against my stomach, purring. As if he knows something I don’t. “She’s not even born yet and they’ve started scheming.”
“A preview of things to come,” Ren says. And there—finally—a ghost of something like a smile.
Tianlong settles into the windowsill, pretending to sleep but almost certainly still listening.
Ren doesn’t leave.
I should fill the silence. That’s what I do—noise, jokes, movement.
Filling every quiet space before it can fill me first. Silence is where the memories live.
Silence is where the grief waits, patient and hungry.
Silence is where I have to face the fact that I’m eight hundred years old and still don’t know how to be loved without waiting for it to be taken away.
But I don’t.
He sits across from me, and Dumpling purrs on my lap, and outside the window the sun is doing something golden with the garden, and I just… let it be quiet.
It takes me a moment to realize I’m not afraid.