6. The Craftsmanship Is Exceptional #3
Not completely, anyway. There’s still the low hum of it—the part of me that’s always watching for the next loss, the next leaving, the next in an endless parade of endings. But it’s quieter now. Softer. Like a sound you stop noticing after living with it long enough.
“I don’t know what any of this means,” I say. Finally.
“Neither do I.”
“That should terrify me.”
“Does it?”
I consider. The jade rattle is somewhere else now, being examined and contained and worried over. The Hungering King knows where I am, knows about the baby, could have hurt us and chose to send gifts instead.
I’ve fought villains, monsters and killers before.
This is the first one who’s made me feel…
mourned. Like he’s grieving something he hasn’t even taken yet.
Like he’s already lost us, in some future that hasn’t happened, and the gift is his way of saying goodbye to something that was never really his to begin with.
“Yes,” I admit. “But not as much as it should.”
Ren nods. He doesn’t try to fix it—doesn’t offer solutions or strategies or the things emperors are supposed to offer. He just nods, and sits, and stays.
I’m learning that about him. He stays. Even when staying is hard. Even when leaving would be easier. Even when the woman he’s somehow ended up loving is complicated and broken and comes with an ancient horror attached to her bloodline like the world’s worst family heirloom.
He stays anyway.
“I keep thinking about the note,” I say. “The way he wrote it. May she know peace I could not give.”
“You think he means it.”
“I think he means something.” I watch the sunlight move across the floor, slow and golden, the kind of light that makes everything look softer than it is.
“He’s been grieving for a long time. That kind of grief—it does things to you.
Twists things. Makes you into someone you wouldn’t recognize, if you could still remember who you used to be. ”
“You would know.”
“Yeah.” I touch my stomach. Dumpling chirps at the contact, offended that I’m interfering with his guard duties. “I would.”
Silence again. But not the bad kind. Not the kind with teeth.
Ren stands. I think he’s going to leave, but he stops at the door. Turns back. The light catches his face, and for a moment I can see the boy he must have been—before the throne, before the dragon, before the weight of an empire settled on his shoulders and never lifted.
“The gift,” he says. “I don’t understand it. But we’ll figure it out.”
“We?”
“We.”
Something in my chest does something uncomfortable. Warm uncomfortable. The kind of uncomfortable that means something is changing, has changed, will keep changing whether I want it to or not.
He leaves before I can respond.
Which is fine. I didn’t have a response anyway. Or maybe I had too many responses, and none of them were things I was ready to say out loud. Things like: I’m scared. Things like: I want this to work. Things like: Please don’t make me bury you too.
Dumpling mrps, judging.
“Don’t start,” I tell him.
He starts anyway. Cats are like that. They have no respect for emotional boundaries or dramatic timing. He just stares at me with those big orange eyes, purring like he knows exactly what I’m thinking and finds it hilarious.
“You’re a terrible therapist.”
More purring. More judging.
I sit there for a while, watching the light change, feeling the warmth of the cat and the movement of the baby and the strange, terrifying absence of fear.
Somewhere in the palace, Mei is analyzing an ancient gift from an ancient monster, probably making Jing write the reports in triplicate.
Somewhere else, Ren is being emperor, carrying the weight of decisions I don’t have to make.
And somewhere out there, beyond the palace walls, beyond the mountains and the rivers and the centuries between us—
The Hungering King is waiting.
He’s always waiting. That’s what he does. He waits, and he watches, and he loves so hard that his love became hunger, became obsession, became the thing that’s chased my family across eleven hundred years of running.
And now he’s sending baby gifts.
May she know peace I could not give.
I pick up the note. Read it again. The brushstrokes truly are beautiful, precise, the work of someone who’s had eternity to perfect their calligraphy. Someone who still cares about beauty, about doing things well, even after all this time.
That’s the part that gets me. Not the threat. Not the horror. The care. The gift wrapped in silk. The note written like it mattered.
Monsters aren’t supposed to care.
But then again, I’m not supposed to be pregnant with an emperor’s baby while a dragon naps on my windowsill and a cat guards my stomach from ancient evil. Life has a way of ignoring what’s supposed to happen.
I fold the note carefully. Set it aside. Look out the window at the garden where Ren and I spend our evenings. Looking for him.
For the man who doesn’t give up. The man who stays.
The man who says ‘we’ and means it.
And here, in the quiet, I’m doing something I haven’t done in centuries.
I’m letting myself be part of a we.
Probably a mistake.
Don’t care.