13. Till Death Do Us Part #3
The general who commands armies, who lost his own son to violence, who has every reason to distrust an assassin who was hired to kill his emperor. Bleeding for me anyway.
Something shifts in my chest. Something I’ll have to examine later, when there’s time, when there aren’t fifteen people trying to kill us.
“Your Highness—” He blocks a strike meant for my throat. “Move.”
“I’m moving.”
I’m not moving fast enough. The silk is wrong. The bump is wrong. My centre of gravity has shifted, and movements that should be instinct are suddenly unfamiliar, a body I’ve known for eight centuries suddenly foreign territory.
I go for a spinning kick I’ve executed ten thousand times.
The baby chooses this moment to shift directly onto my bladder.
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
I land the kick—barely—and spend the rest of the fight needing to pee with a desperation that has nothing to do with fear. Every impact. Every pivot. Every lunge. My body, staging a mutiny at the worst possible moment.
Eight hundred years of violence. Countless deaths. And THIS is what defeats me. A weak bladder.
Mei appears from an exit I didn’t know existed. Because of course she did.
“Twelve contingency plans,” she says, dispatching someone with an economy of motion I can’t help but admire. “And they chose the fourth most predictable option.”
“What was the first?”
“Poison in the ceremonial wine. I’ve been tasting everything for a week.” She breaks someone’s neck without breaking stride. “Amateurs.”
Her paranoia is how she loves. Her contingencies are her care.
I laugh. It’s not a good laugh. It’s the laugh of someone fighting in silk worth more than villages while her body commits treason.
Blood splatters across my sleeve. My sleeve. The phoenix embroidery that took someone months to complete, now ruined by arterial spray. Someone’s going to have to pay for this, and I’m going to make sure it’s the people who ordered this attack, and I’m going to bill them posthumously.
Do you know how EXPENSIVE this silk is?
Kill. Turn. Kill.
Through the chaos, I feel it—Tianlong’s restraint humming through the space. He wants to burn them all. I can sense it in the way the air tastes of ozone, the way heat flickers at the edges of my awareness, barely contained fury pressed into the smallest form he can manage.
Let me END this. I can almost hear him through Ren’s bond, seething.
Ren won’t let him.
There are civilians. Dignitaries. Fire damage to consider. Politics even in violence, calculation even in chaos.
The dragon seethes. The emperor rules.
I fight my way toward Ren.
Back to back.
The motion happens without words. Eight hundred years alone, and somehow I’ve found someone who moves with me like we’ve been partners for centuries. His blade covers my blind spots. My body covers his. We breathe together, fight together, become a single instrument of violence.
“Are you hurt?” His voice, steady despite the chaos.
“I’m FINE.” I break someone’s arm. Feel the bone give under my grip. “You?”
“Angry.”
“Same.”
We move. We kill. We protect each other.
I’ve never had a partner who could keep up. Never had someone at my back who I trusted completely. I’ve fought alongside mercenaries and soldiers and assassins and kings, and none of them—none of them ever—
Dumpling appears from nowhere.
He’s supposed to be locked in my chambers. He’s supposed to be nowhere near a combat zone. Someone is getting fired, assuming anyone survives to be fired. And yet here he is, winding between an attacker’s legs mid-lunge, seventeen pounds of orange chaos doing what he does best.
The man goes down hard. His head hits marble with a crack.
Dumpling sits on his chest and begins grooming himself with the serene indifference of a creature who has no concept of danger.
“Did the cat just—” someone starts.
“Don’t ask,” I say. “He’s going to be insufferable about this.”
He’s already insufferable. He’s always been insufferable. But he’s also the only creature in this room who’s completely unbothered by violence, and right now, that’s almost comforting.
The fighting ends the way violence always ends—suddenly, messily, with bodies on the marble and blood cooling on silk.
I stand in the centre of the carnage and realise I don’t know what to do now. I know how to fight. I know how to run. I’ve never learned how to stand still in the aftermath and just… be.
The silence is louder than the screaming was.
Incense still drifts from the braziers—sweet osmanthus through air that smells of copper and death.
Ren is across the room.
Our eyes meet.
He’s bloodied. Not his blood, mostly. His robes are ruined—gold and crimson turned brown and rust—and his hair has come loose and he’s never looked more like an emperor than he does right now, standing in the wreckage of our wedding day.
I cross to him. Or he crosses to me. Neither of us remembers who moved first.
His hand finds mine.
The binding cord is still on my wrist—cut loose from the altar during the fighting, but never removed. Frayed now. Stained darker with something that isn’t dye. When I look down, I see the matching loop on his.
We’re standing in carnage, surrounded by bodies, wearing what’s left of silk worth fortunes.
And somehow, impossibly, we’re still married.
“We should probably take these off,” I say.
“Probably.”
Neither of us moves to.
It’s just thread. Just a symbol.
Except it’s not. Except I said forever and meant it and someone tried to kill us and we’re still here.
Tianlong shifts on Ren’s collar. His voice is dry, but there’s something underneath it—something ancient and satisfied.
“That was the most eventful imperial wedding in three hundred years.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It is an observation. I found it entertaining.”
Ren exhales. “People died.”
“Not the people I care about.” The dragon’s eyes sweep the room—bodies, blood, broken furniture, a cat grooming himself on an unconscious assassin. “The rest is acceptable losses.”
I should argue. I should feel something other than the hollow relief of survival.
He’s not wrong. I hate that he’s not wrong.
Jing appears at the edge of the carnage.
She’s shaking. Her ceremonial robes are torn at the sleeve, and there’s a splatter of blood across the silk that I’m fairly certain isn’t hers. She must have hidden when the fighting started—smart girl.
But she’s clutching a scroll to her chest. White-knuckled.
“I found something.” Her voice trembles. “In the chaos—one of the attackers dropped this. I saw it fall and I just—” She swallows hard, looking at the bodies. Her face has gone pale. “It matters. I think it matters. But not now.”
“Later,” I say.
She nods. Doesn’t leave. Just stands there, guarding her scroll like it’s a weapon.
She fights with books. Right now, that might matter more than swords.
I look at the temple. At the altar where we stood. At the bodies, the blood, the ruined silk.
Wei is being tended by physicians, his arm bleeding through bandages, his face set in the grim satisfaction of a man who did his duty. Mei is already issuing orders, already containing the aftermath, already three steps ahead.
And Ren is here. Hand in mine. Cord on his wrist that matches the cord on mine.
I reach up and touch the comb. Warm from my skin. His mother’s comb, given to me hours ago in a moment of impossible tenderness. Mine now, through violence and blood and silk that will never be the same.
The attack doesn’t take this away.
Nothing takes this away.
Ren’s hand tightens on mine. I lean into him—just slightly, just enough—and feel his breath release against my hair.
“Wife,” he says.
The word sounds different when he says it. Like it means something. Like it’s been waiting eight centuries to find me.
“Husband,” I say back.
The cord is on our wrists. The comb is in my hair. The incense is still burning.
And somehow—impossibly, ridiculously, against every odd I’ve ever calculated—we’re still standing. Together.
That’s enough. For now. For always.