Her mother’s voice rose unbidden from the deep, a cruel whisper half-lost to memory—curse you, curse you. If not for you?—
She tucked her chin to her chest, trying to swallow the small whimper pushing behind her teeth. She pressed her palm lightly to the arm across her waist, just to tether herself to the presence of another.
“JingYi?” His voice was low, tentative, a little rough.
Her throat hurt, but she pushed the words out. “I’m sorry I ruined the celebration.”
He didn’t speak at first. His arm didn’t move either, grounding her in place.
“It was beautiful,” he said, “and you didn’t ruin anything.”
She closed her eyes again. The silence between them was a living thing, and in its hold, the old, scarred truth within her twisted, restless. For years, she had carried it alone—a private, ugly stone in her gut. To speak it was to risk everything: his pity, his disgust, the shattering of this fragile, temporary sanctuary.
But the weight of his stillness, the absolute lack of demand, became a strange kind of permission. The words pressed against the back of her teeth. A cold, hard fact that needed release. If she was to be truly seen here, in this room where he’d brought all of her broken pieces, then let him see the first and deepest crack.
“I was six when my mother was executed,” she whispered.
The words came out too evenly, but it was the only way she knew how to speak of it—stripping it bare of feeling, laying it down like something already dissected a hundred times over the years.
“There was a stablemaster in the Peony Court with a mark like mine—same colour, same shape. Someone saw him pass my mother in a courtyard and decided there was an ugly, perverted reason why I was born this way. Rumours spread that he was my true father, and that I’d inherited his birthmark.”
He froze, but didn’t speak.
“The court believed it. His Majesty believed it. My mother lost her status overnight.” She paused, the memory a cold, familiar shape. “I was just a newborn. I have no memory of the palace we lost, or the privileges she wept for. But my mother . . . she mourned like a widow. She cried for the emperor every night. Begged to be seen. Begged, until the end, for her innocence.”
Her fingers curled into fists, her tone stripped bare.
“We were sent to an old, sealed mansion at the edge of the Peony Court. It was already falling apart when we arrived. I grew up in rooms that never saw the sun. The gates were always locked. No visitors. No company. Only Wu Ma, the caretaker, brought us food and news from the outside.”
The room felt too still. Too warm. A familiar tightness returned to her chest—the sensation of being so small and helpless, trapped inside a body that couldn’t stop what was coming.
“One day, some guards came. They dragged us out of the mansion. Not to free us, but to kill her . . .”
The story continued, each word laid down like a rock. Her heart thudded against her ribs, a frantic drum against the calm of her voice. At first, he didn’t move. Then, when she described the ropes being fastened to her mother’s ankles and the oxen, his hand flexed against her back—a single, sharp contraction, quickly suppressed.
“I thought . . . I thought she would look at me one last time and say goodbye. That maybe . . . she would say she loved me, just once.” Her voice faltered. “But she didn’t. She looked at me, and she said—” The words scraped out. “She saidIwas the reason. That if I hadn’t been born the way I was, His Majesty would have never cast her aside.”
The silence that followed rang louder than any scream.
She couldn’t cry—she didn’t want to cry—but the pressure behind her eyes built anyway. Her whole body ached with the strain of remembering. At six years old, she was not nothing—she wasworsethan nothing. She was a curse, bad luck, a harbinger of death to her own mother.
Alexander’s hand moved, slow and tentative, fingers gently raking through her hair.
“I thought I’d forgotten,” she said. “But then today . . . the game. The rope. The crowd shouting. The sack splitting. It wastoo much like that day. And I was back there again. Watching the oxen pull her apart.”
Her voice cracked, low and broken. “I can still hear her even now. Her voice cursing me, as if I’d asked to be born like this.”
She curled into a ball, her fists pressed hard enough to ache against her ears, but it was no use. The screaming lived inside her skull. Each breath hitched like a sob against him.
“I didn’t mean for any of it to happen. I didn’t?—”
His arms closed around her. A haven.
Her lashes, heavy with tears, fell shut. The rough warmth of his thumb brushed her jaw, his forefinger following, tilting her face up with a firm gentleness that brooked no hiding.
“Look at me,” he said.
Her gaze climbed to meet his, the world a watery blur. His eyes held hers, and in the low light, they were almost black, the pupils swallowing the ice blue colour until all she could see was a deep, unwavering focus.