I have wished to be powerful my entire life, yet in the end, in the face of the most important moments, I am still powerless to change anything.
Yù’chén turns to me. He looks healthy again, his skin smooth and free of scales and dark veins. Beneath his cloak, he wears a fresh set of black robes.
He walks toward me and lifts the gauze curtain with one hand. The way he looks at me fills me with emotions I’m not meant to feel.
“Tell me this is real,” he says.
There are no words I can offer to make up for the wrongs I have done him. I have despised him on the basis of his birth, suspected him and doubted him time after time even when his every action was to help me, to protect me. I have accepted his help without consideration of the consequences for him as a half-mó—and I have sentenced him to death.
My vision blurs, and because my chest aches with all the empty apologies I can’t offer him, I speak his name: “Yù’chén.”
He crosses over to me in several brisk strides and reaches for me—then hesitates. We stand there for several heartbeats, his fingers lingering by my cheeks, and I realize I’m waiting for him to touch me.
Yù’chén swallows and slowly, very slowly, retracts his hand. He draws a deep breath and shifts his gaze to a spot behind me. “You shouldn’t be here.” His voice is hard.
“It’s my fault,” I choke out. “I asked you to help my sister—then the mó—and Yán’lù—”
“It’s all right,” he says. “I’ll be all right.”
“It’s not. You won’t. They’re not going to give you a fair trial, Yù’chén.”
Something settles on his expression: a resignation I have seen before. The same expression he wore when I confronted him about being a half-mó. When he asked me to see him as anything but. Finally, he looks at me again, his eyes as dark and as deep as the night.
“Àn’ying,” he says, and his voice is steady. “When we are born, we are set on a path to walk. One drawn by our birthright, our status, our blood. Some are born with golden crowns on their heads, beloved and made for a life of glory and dreams; others are less fortunate. That is fate, drawn and allotted by the Heavenly Order. I have known since the start what mine was meant to be. And if it should end here, I have no regrets.”
I clench my teeth, and this time, I cannot stop the tear that carves its way down my cheek. “I don’t know why you don’t hate me,” I whisper.
His expression softens. “You,” he says slowly, “are the first person who has treated me as if I’m…human. As if I am deserving of anything other than revulsion and disgust.”
I flinch.Youdisgustme,I once told him.
I steel the storm in my heart and meet his gaze. “Yù’chén, do you remember what you asked of me before we left to see my sister?”
He stills. “Yes.”
I reach out and press my palm to his chest, where his heart beats. “I see you.”
It is too little too late after all that he has done for me,where he is now, and what will happen to him tomorrow. But it is all that I can give him.
Yù’chén closes his eyes; a shiver passes through him, nearly imperceptible. When he opens them again, they are raw. They catch mine and theyburn,and it’s as though they ignite something in my heart and in my very soul: a fire that has been there all along and that roars to life at his gaze.
“Àn’ying.” He says my name as if it is the most important thing in this world. His expression is careful as he beholds me. Slowly, ever so slowly, he lifts his hand from where it rests on the bottom-left corner of his cloak. Lifts it toward my cheek. He pauses. A question.
I don’t look away from him. An answer.
His eyes heat, and his fingers finally fall, coming to rest on my cheeks. His touch sends shivers of pleasure through my body. Yù’chén doesn’t move, just holds me, barely, his palm cupping the edge of my jaw. His gaze, though, roams my face, as if he is studying the map of my features, committing every line and shadow to memory.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I reach up to touch his jaw. My breaths quicken as I trace the sharp lines of him, all made for devastating beauty and destruction. There is something different to the way we interact with each other tonight. It is nothing like the clumsy, passion-fueled embraces of the hot spring or the hazy stupor of the flowers’ poison back in his passage. This time, we are both awake, our breaths taut, so carefully and painfully aware of what we are doing, of this new level of intimacy between us as we explore each other beneath the fragile light of the moon.
And perhaps it is the awareness of our time running outthat makes me bolder, or perhaps it is the certainty of the feeling that has possessed me all along finally coming to light.
“Yù’chén,” I whisper. I ask the question that has been haunting me for weeks since that night at the hot spring. “What did you see in the forest?”
He hesitates, but he does not close off. No, there is only a weary grief to the way he pauses. His fingers are on the edges of my jaw now, sweeping over the sensitive crook to the back of my neck.
“I saw you,” he replies, and I shiver at his voice, at his touch, at the meaning in his words. “I saw you, dying, a demon drinking your soul.”
The Forest of Nightmares. I remember now, the way he froze at the sight of that blurred figure between the trees, the body lying within its clutches. The painted skins had manifested our worst fears. To Yù’chén, it had manifested my death.
