The Journey Home #2
He smiles and his hands find my waist. Hesitant at first, then steadier when I lean into him. I pull my own shirt over my head—simple, practical, nothing like the silks I wore at the festival—and watch his face change.
“Lián.” My name in his mouth like a prayer. Like a discovery.
“I know.” I bend to kiss him. “I know.”
We learn each other slowly.
His hands mapping my ribs, my spine, the curve of my hip. My mouth on his throat, his collarbone, the soft skin below his ear that makes his breath catch. Every touch a question. Every answer yes.
He’s careful with me. So careful it almost breaks my heart—this man who commands armies, who has held the weight of an empire, touching me like I’m something precious. Something that might shatter.
“I won’t break,” I whisper against his skin.
“I know.” His hands tighten on my hips. “I am not being careful because I think you will break. I am being careful because I want to remember everything.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Then pay attention,” I say, and show him what I like.
He learns fast. Of course he does—he learns everything fast, that’s the problem with him, the way he focuses. And right now all of that focus is on me. On the way I move. The sounds I make. The places that make me gasp and the places that make me laugh.
“There,” I breathe, and he remembers. “Like that,” and he adjusts. “Yes,” and he smiles against my throat, quietly triumphant, and I think: this is what it should have been. All those years. All those lives. It should have been this.
When I finally guide him inside me, he goes still.
Completely, absolutely still—the way he goes still when something matters too much for words. His eyes find mine in the darkness, and I see it all: the want he’s buried for twenty-two years, the fear that this will somehow be taken from him, the wonder that it’s happening at all.
“Okay?” I ask.
“I—” He swallows. “I do not have words for this.”
“Then don’t use words.”
I move. Slowly at first. Teaching him the rhythm, letting him find it. His hands grip my thighs, not guiding, just holding on—like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s tilting sideways.
And then he moves, and—
Oh. Fast learner doesn’t begin to cover it.
“How—” I gasp.
“I am paying attention.” There’s something almost smug in his voice, buried under the breathlessness, and I want to laugh and I want to cry and I want to stay in this moment forever, where the Emperor of the Jade Throne is undone beneath me and I’m the one who did it.
We find each other in the dark. Give and take. Push and pull. It builds slowly. A tide rather than a wave. His breathing ragged, my thighs trembling, both of us climbing toward something that feels too big to survive.
“Lián—” A warning. A question.
“I know. I’m—” I can’t finish. I’m past words. Past thought. There’s only this: his hands on my skin, his eyes on my face, the impossible fact of us.
When it breaks, it breaks us both.
I bury my face in his neck. He holds me like he’s afraid I’ll disappear. We shake apart together, and it’s not graceful, it’s not the stuff of epic poems, it’s just two people who found each other against all odds and refused to let go.
After, I collapse against his chest, boneless, breathing hard. His heart pounds beneath my ear. His hand traces idle patterns on my back—shoulder blade, spine, the dip at the base of my ribs, back up again.
Learning me. Still learning me. Like he’ll never stop.
“You’re a fast learner,” I manage.
His laugh is a rumble beneath my cheek. “I had incentive.”
“Flatterer.”
“Truth-teller.” His arm tightens. A pause. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For letting me be new at something.” His voice is quiet now.
Serious. “I am never permitted to be new at things. I must always know. Always be certain. Always have considered every possibility.” His hand stills on my back.
“You let me not know. You let me learn. That is a gift I do not have words for.”
My throat tightens. This man. This impossible, infuriating, wonderful man.
“Stay,” I say. It comes out rougher than I intend. “That’s how you repay it. Just stay.”
“Always,” he says.
And the terrifying thing is: I believe him.
Dawn comes.
The sky turns gray, then pink, then gold. The fire is ash. The river keeps moving, because rivers don’t care about the small dramas of immortals and emperors and whatever we’ve become.
I wake up tangled in him. His arm heavy across my waist, his breath warm against my shoulder, his heartbeat slow and steady against my back.
For a moment I just lie there, memorizing the weight of him.
The smell of woodsmoke and something that’s just him.
The way his hand curls around my hip like it belongs there.
It does belong there. That’s the terrifying part.
“You’re awake,” he murmurs against my hair. Not a question.
“You’re observant.” I don’t move. Neither does he. “How long have you been watching me sleep?”
“I do not watch you sleep. I simply happen to be awake while you are sleeping. There is a difference.”
“That’s creepy. That’s a creepy distinction.”
“Noted.” His arm tightens. Just for a moment. “We should move.”
“I know.”
Neither of us moves.
Dumpling breaks the spell by yowling directly into Tianlong’s pot, because he has no respect for emotional moments or personal boundaries. Tianlong’s response is unprintable. I take this as our cue to start the day.
Ren is efficient when he packs. Military training, probably—or maybe just twenty-two years of never being allowed to be slow at anything.
I watch him move around the camp, rolling bedrolls and checking saddlebags, and I think about his hands on my skin last night.
The way he touched me like I was something worth being careful with.
I think about the fact that I let him.
“You’re staring,” he says without turning around.
“I’m admiring the view. There’s a difference.”
He glances over his shoulder. The almost-smile. The dangerous one. “Noted.”
The gates rise in the distance when we crest the last hill. Gold and red against the morning sky, catching the light like a promise or a threat. The same gates I climbed over eight weeks ago with poison in my pocket and nothing to lose.
I have something to lose now.
He rides beside me. Close enough that our knees almost brush. He hasn’t spoken since we mounted, but his hand found mine for a moment before we started—a reminder, a promise, a mine that didn’t need words.
I didn’t pull away.
The palace is waiting. The court is waiting. The conspiracy we uncovered, the traitors we’ll name, the monster in the shadows who’s been hunting my bloodline for seven hundred years. All of it, waiting behind those gates.
I could run. I’ve done it before. Eight hundred years of practice makes perfect.
I don’t run.
I ride toward the gates beside a man who chose me—who chose me, in the dark, with his hands and his mouth and his “always”—and I choose him back, and I don’t look behind me.
Not once.
Chapter 644: In which our heroine discovers that the hardest part of staying isn’t the staying. It’s believing you’re allowed to.