“What are you doing?” she asked, a flush spreading over her face.
He scoffed as a response, and it told her enough—she was being stupid. Of course he was going to tend to his wounds.
“I-I’m right here.” Biyu could make out the outline of his back in the reflection of the glass and she squeezed her eyes shut to keep from watching him. Her face burned. “Stripping in front of me i-is improper! And—And it’s not right for you?—”
“You’re my wife, aren’t you? This is what you wanted, anyway.” There was a mocking tilt to his words, and they stung even though she shouldn’t have cared.
“I never meant to …” Biyu stared down at her quivering hands. She still couldn’t stop from trembling around him like she was a helpless fawn. Droplets of his blood had dried on her fingers, likely from when he had grabbed Vita’s blade at her throat. She traced the red dots, scraping it off with her fingernail distractedly. “I never meant to bind us together like this and I n-never meant to … to hurt you. I’m sorry.”
Why was she even apologizing to him? She shouldn’t have. Not after everything he had done to her, everything he had done to her family, and most certainly not after he had helped ruin her life.Hehad never apologized for everything he had done, so why did she feel the need to do the same? Especially when she hadn’t even done something as terrible as he had done to her.
But she couldn’t swallow those words again. It only seemed appropriate to apologize. Maybe she was just a pushover, she thought bitterly. Maybe she was used to apologizing all the time because she was always making mistakes. She could hear Liqin’s scornful voice in her mind.
You’re worthless, she seemed to say.You can’t do a single thing right. All you had to do was assist Yat-sen with finding a spell, and you still managed to mess that up? And now you’re apologizing to a man who killed your family members? You’re pathetic, Biyu. Absolutely pathetic.
The voice warped and shifted, becoming her father’s. She had only spoken to him a handful of times, and yet it was his piercing, cruel voice that had shattered her confidence since she was a girl. She was once again that little Biyu, making mistakes, being a burden.
Biyu scratched the dried blood harder than she intended, and she was snapped back into place, away from her foggy, horrible, deprecating thoughts. Away from Liqin’s and Father’s voices.
She tentatively glanced over her shoulder to find Nikator seated on one of the couches, a hooked needle in one hand as he stitched a particularly nasty gash on his forearm. Her eyes wandered to the muscular planes of his chest, his sculpted abdomen, and the giant burn scar covering his shoulder in patches of red, angry, twisted skin. It stretched from his left shoulder down toward his chest, where it tapered off into smaller, thinner threads over his heart. She inhaled sharply.
It looked painful, even though it had healed a long time ago, judging by its appearance. But that wasn’t the only scar he had; he had a plethora of others, too. Healed, pale, silvery slashes peppered over his body, some more visible than others. It shouldn’t have been too surprising, since he was a warrior, a trained, lethal soldier for His Majesty, and yet her chest squeezed at the thought of a knife jabbing into him, slicing through his abdomen, his arm …
She didn’t care, she told herself. Shereallydidn’t care.
Why did it matter that he had injured himself several times before?
“Did you hurt yourself?” Nikator wasn’t looking at her as he spoke, his attention rapt on stitching the wound on his forearm. When she didn’t answer, he raised his head, his sapphire eyes zeroing in on her. Whatever emotion he was feeling was completely shuttered from her.
“U-um.” Biyu ripped her attention away. She could feel the blush creeping up her neck. She shouldn’t have been staring at his body for that long, regardless of whether the scars were a surprise or not. And she most certainly shouldn’t have admired his bulging biceps, the tight muscles on his abdomen, thefirmness of his chest. She hoped he hadn’t noticed. “No, not … not really?”
“Are you asking me a question?”
“What? No …”
“Then why do you sound like you don’t know?” He went back to pulling the hooked needle out of his skin, slipping it back against his flesh, and sewing the wound. He worked surprisingly fast, his nimble fingers moving on their own accord as he glanced at the vials on the table, and then back at his work. “If you’re hurt, then sit here and apply some medicine. If you’re not, then sit here and wait for me.”
Biyu gingerly stepped toward him, a frown tugging on her lips. “Why are you ordering me around so easily? I’m still—” The words died off on her lips. She was still a princess, but why did it matter to hold onto that useless title here? He could order her around if he wanted to. He could kill her, too, if he wanted to. He could do whatever he wanted to, because she didn’t have any real power. So what if her father had been the emperor? That didn’t matter anymore. She was still useless Biyu making stupid mistakes. Like this whole marriage—cursed bond. She couldn’t do a single thing right.
Her shoulders dropped as she sat across from him on the couch. She folded her hands atop each other on her lap and stared at the bloodstain on her dress. She was sure this dress would need to be tossed; there was no way that stain was going to come off, and the maidservants didn’t like working that hard on a princess who didn’t matter anymore.
“What’s wrong?” Nikator stared at her, hard.
“W-what?” Biyu bit down on her tongue. Why couldn’t she stop stuttering?
He watched her for a minute, his expression hard to read, before he turned back to his wound. “Never mind.”
She sat like that while he stitched a few more of his cuts. Most of them weren’t deep enough to warrant stitches, but there were three that were especially nasty. He lathered medicinal-smelling salves onto the smaller cuts and bandaged them up slowly, precisely, like he had done this a hundred times before.
The entire time, Biyu’s attention waned, her eyelids growing heavy. It had been a long day full of confusion, horror, and deep-seated fear. Now that everything had somehow calmed to a lull, her exhausted body wilted against the couch and she closed her eyes. Just a few minutes, she told herself. A few minutes to just forget everything.
The words of the spell repeated in her mind in a loop, particularly the last half of it.
A thread that ties two flames as one
Bound in blood, in death, we burn
She definitely didn’t want to be stuck with Nikator in death, in life—forever.
