7. Please
Please
Ren is being weird again.
Not the normal weird—the quiet intensity, the way he watches everything like he’s calculating twenty different outcomes.
That’s just him. That’s the man who’s been running an empire since he was barely old enough to shave, and I’ve made my peace with dating someone whose brain never stops strategizing.
I’ve been watching him for seven days now—not the professional watching, not the tactical vigilance.
The other kind. The kind where I notice that his hands keep drifting to his pocket.
That he starts sentences and doesn’t finish them.
That he looks at me sometimes like he’s rehearsing something in his head.
He never fidgets. A lifetime under watch has taught him a stillness that borders on unnatural. I’ve seen him stand before councils with less tension in his shoulders than he carries now.
“You’re doing it again,” I say.
He goes very still. “Doing what?”
“The thing. With your hands.”
His hands, which had been moving toward his pocket, freeze mid-air. He looks at them like they’ve betrayed him. Tucks them behind his back with as much dignity as a man can muster when he’s been caught fidgeting by a woman who kills people for a living.
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Mmhm.”
We’re in his study. Evening light slants through the paper screens, turning everything amber and gold, painting shadows across the stacks of correspondence he’s been ignoring all day.
Dumpling is sprawled across the desk, one paw dangling over the edge, orange fur gilded by the dying sun.
He’s claimed the stack of diplomatic messages from the Xiang delegation as his personal bed, and no one has had the courage to move him.
Somewhere deeper in the palace, I can feel Tianlong’s presence—warm and smug and watching. The dragon bond isn’t mine, but I’ve lived in these walls long enough to sense the edges of it. The heat at the base of Ren’s skull. The weight of ancient attention.
He’s always watching lately. Tianlong. Like he knows something is about to happen and wants a front-row seat.
“You’ve been acting strange all week,” I say, because apparently I’ve decided to push this. “Stranger than usual. And your usual is already—”
“I am not strange.”
“You tried to have a conversation with me three days ago and then suddenly remembered you had urgent business with the fish ponds.”
“The koi are a matter of—”
“The koi, Ren.”
His jaw tightens. That muscle jumps, the one that means he’s either about to say something important or swallow it entirely. I’ve learned to read that muscle. It’s become unreasonably significant to me.
“There have been… considerations,” he says carefully. “Matters I have been attempting to address in the appropriate manner.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is an answer. It is simply not the answer you want.”
I narrow my eyes. He meets my gaze with the serene expression of a man who has negotiated trade agreements with hostile nations and survived three assassination attempts before breakfast and is pretty sure he can handle one pregnant assassin asking inconvenient questions.
He’s wrong, obviously, but I appreciate the optimism.
Something shifts. His hand moves again—pocket, then away—and this time I catch the edge of paper. Crumpled. Like it’s been folded and unfolded a hundred times.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
“Ren.”
“It is nothing.”
I move before he can react. Old instincts—or maybe just the fact that he lets me, because Ren doesn’t let anyone take anything from him unless he wants them to.
Years of surviving court politics, of reading threats in the angle of a salut or poison in the pause before a smile, and he lets me pluck the paper from his sleeve like I’m not dangerous at all.
Like I’m something else entirely.
My fingers close around the paper as it slips free, and I’m already unfolding it before he can object, smoothing out the creases against my palm.
His handwriting. Formal. Careful. The kind of careful that means he wrote this slowly, deliberately, probably at three in the morning when he should have been sleeping.
The ink is slightly smudged in places—he’s been carrying this against his body, folding and refolding, the paper soft at the creases.
Liàn—
These past weeks have shown me—
The text stops. Starts again. Stops. There are crossings-out. Revisions in the margins. At least three different attempts at the same sentence, each one abandoned.
—that what we share is something I—
—that you have become—
—that I find myself wanting—
The last attempt just trails off. No ending. Like he couldn’t figure out how to finish the thought.
My chest does something complicated. My throat tightens.
I’ve seen Ren’s handwriting on imperial decrees. On death warrants. On trade agreements that shifted the balance of power across three kingdoms. Always precise. Always certain.
This is none of those things. This is a man who doesn’t know how to say what he means.
“Is this a speech?”
“No.”
“Ren.”
“…It is a revised speech.”
“For a proposal.”
The silence that follows is deafening. Dumpling yawns. Somewhere in the distance, a bird calls. The universe continues on, completely indifferent to the fact that my brain has stopped working.
“…Perhaps,” he says.
“You’ve been trying to… propose.”
“The circumstances have not been ideal.”
“For a week.”
“I had… plans.”
The word comes out strangled. Plans. He had plans. And I—
And I threw up on one of them. Got another one raided by Mei’s security detail. Spent the third interrogating him about koi.
Every single time he started a sentence and then stopped. Every time his hands moved to his pocket. He was trying to propose.
Oh.
Oh.
“You absolute idiot.”
He blinks. “I—”
“A week. You’ve been trying to propose for a WEEK, and I—” I’m laughing now. I might also be crying. The hormones have been relentless lately and I can’t tell the difference anymore. “I threw up in your vase. I questioned the pond situation.”
“To be fair, the koi situation was quite—”
“REN.”
He closes his mouth.
I stare at him. He stares back. The paper is crumpled in my fist—twelve different attempts at saying something that should be simple, twelve failed versions of words that apparently required historical precedents and jasmine metaphors—and he’s standing there like a man facing execution.
Like he genuinely doesn’t know what I’m going to say.
Like he thinks I might say no.
The Emperor of the Jade Throne, who commands armies and moves nations like pieces on a board, is standing in front of me looking terrified.
“You could have just told me.”
“I wanted it to be—”
“Romantic?”
“…Yes.”
The laugh that escapes me is half-sob, half-hysteria. I press my palm against my sternum like I can hold myself together through sheer pressure. “You’ve been trying to make it special. Like I’m going to say no if the candles aren’t right. Like any of that matters.”
“It matters to me.” Quiet. Certain. The kind of certain that stops me cold. “You deserve something that is not… utilitarian. Not another arrangement. Not a negotiation.” His voice drops. “You deserve to be wanted. Properly. With intention.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
“What I deserve,” I manage, “is a partner who talks to me instead of practicing speeches at three in the morning.”
He flinches. Just barely—if I didn’t know his tells so well, I’d miss it. “You knew about that?”
“I can hear you pacing. I’ve always been able to hear you.” I step closer. “Every night this week. Wearing tracks in the floor. Muttering to yourself.” Another step. “I thought you were stressed about Lord Shen’s faction. Or the Xiang situation. I didn’t think—”
I didn’t think he was losing sleep over me.
Something shifts in his expression. That careful control cracking at the edges, and underneath—
Underneath, he looks terrified.
I know that look. I’ve worn it myself, in darker moments, when wanting something felt like the most dangerous thing I could do. When caring about an outcome meant giving the universe ammunition.
“Are you going to say no?” he asks.
“OF COURSE I’M NOT GOING TO SAY NO, YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT.”
The words come out louder than I intended. Possibly the entire east wing heard them. Possibly the guards stationed in the corridor are right now composing mental letters to their families about the dramatic developments in the imperial quarters.
I don’t care.
“…That’s not technically a yes.”
“YES.” I throw my hands up. One of them still has his crumpled speech clutched in it, twelve failed attempts at romance waving through the air like a flag of surrender. “Fine. Yes. I’ll marry you.”
“That’s still not—”
“I LOVE YOU.” My voice cracks on it. Stupid.
Embarrassing. My eyes are burning and my throat is tight and I keep going anyway because what’s the point of armor when he’s already seen everything underneath it.
“I’m having your baby. I live in your chambers.
I fell asleep on your shoulder last night and you stayed there for three hours even though your arm went numb.
I know because I woke up and you were trying to flex feeling back into your fingers and you still didn’t move. What more do you want?”
The silence stretches.
When he speaks, his voice is very quiet.
“I want you to want this. Not the alliance. Not the child.” He swallows. “Me.”
Oh.
The word lands like a blade between my ribs. Clean. Precise. Opening something I’d almost managed to keep closed.
He’s not just asking me to marry him. He’s asking if I want him—the man underneath the emperor, the one who reads philosophy at midnight and forgets to eat when he’s working and can’t sleep without pacing grooves into his floor.
The one who brought me tea at wrong temperatures for weeks until he figured out exactly how hot I like it.
The one who listened to me talk about nothing for hours and never once looked bored.
The one who’s spent his whole adult life being a symbol instead of a person, and wants to know if I see the difference.
He’s asking if I see him.