Their foreheads parted.
But their eyes did not.
Time seemed to hesitate.
Suspended between two breaths, between two heartbeats that no longer knew who they belonged to.
There was no sound left in the room, nothing but that strange, dense silence that had settled without warning, like a presence of its own.
Tianyin’s tears were still falling.
Silent.
Stubborn.
As though they refused to obey her, as though they had decided, on their own, not to lie.
Her lashes were heavy with moisture, her irises still drowned in the pain she had not had time to conceal, that pain she had carried for so long that she no longer quite knew where it ended and where it began.
And Yanlong was looking at her.
Not the way one looks at someone they believe they know.
Not with the cold, calculated gaze with which he usually looked at the world around him, that prince’s gaze that judged, evaluated, passed over people the way one passed over pieces on a board.
No.
He was looking at her as one looks at something being discovered for the first time.
As though, in those corridors, in those rooms, in that palace where they had crossed paths without truly seeing each other, he had looked without ever seeing.
Those wild strands of hair falling across her face.
The way she held her breath whenever something troubled her, as though she could contain her emotions simply by holding the air in her lungs.
The curve of her shoulders, slightly hunched, that unconscious reflex of making herself smaller than she really was.
And those eyes, those eyes that sought his without even realizing it, with a disarming honesty, a vulnerability she did not even try to hide because she did not yet know that she should.
His lips trembled.
A sentence formed somewhere in his chest, vague, incomplete, made of something he would not have known how to name.
It rose slowly, climbed toward his throat, searching for words to take shape…
and died there, soundlessly, for lack of language.
He who always knew what to say.
He who never hesitated.
He whose words were always sharp, precise, perfectly placed like blades, there, facing her, he had nothing left.
Just that useless tremor on his lips, and that emptiness in his mind where an answer should have been.
Tianyin was the first to move.
She rose abruptly, as though staying one second longer would have burned her.
As though the proximity of that gaze was a flame, and she had only just realized she was getting too close to it.
Something in Yanlong’s eyes was doing something to her that she did not understand, something invisible and insistent that crawled up the back of her neck, raised goosebumps along her arms, tightened her throat for no valid reason.
She did not want to understand.
She refused to understand.
She wiped away her tears with a sharp gesture.
Almost violent.
The gesture of someone erasing evidence.
She gathered her clothes without a word, without a glance, and disappeared behind the partition.
Reality had caught up with them.
Yanlong did not move immediately.
He remained where he was, in the silence she had left behind, and lowered his eyes to his hand.
The one that had held hers.
His palm was open, turned upward.
Empty now.
And yet, he could still feel her.
The warmth of her fingers against his.
That light, almost timid pressure, and yet so real, so present, like an imprint the skin categorically refused to forget even after the hand had disappeared.
He slowly closed his fingers around nothing.
Opened his palm again.
The ghost of her warmth was still there.
What is happening to me?
The question cracked through his mind like a slap, sharp, unexpected, almost humiliating.
He who never asked himself such questions.
He who had always known exactly what he felt, exactly what he wanted, exactly where he was going.
Why am I thinking about her like this?
This isn’t me.
This isn’t me at all.
He stood abruptly, his jaw clenched.
The floor creaked slightly beneath his weight.
He took a few steps toward the door, stopped, his fists slightly clenched at his sides.
The idea was absurd.
He knew it.
Ridiculous, even.
He was the Crown Prince, he did not believe in spells, he did not believe in weaknesses, and he certainly did not believe in the sort of things people told children to explain what they did not understand.
And yet it was the only hypothesis that stood against this strange, invasive thing that had settled in his chest without being invited.
This connection, intense, irrational, almost violent in its suddenness, that he had never felt with anyone.
Not once.
In his entire life.
He left the room, confused.
And confusion, for him, was perhaps the most destabilizing thing of all.
On the other side of the partition, Tianyin was dressing as quickly as she could.
Her hands were trembling slightly.
Just enough for her to notice, just enough that she could not pretend she had not noticed.
She clenched her fingers for a moment, hard, forcing them to steady themselves, and continued.
Her cheeks were burning.
She realized it when she leaned over the basin, that obvious red, almost indecent, coloring her cheekbones as though they had been rubbed raw.
She splashed water onto her face.
Once.
The cold water stung her skin.
Twice.
The heat held on.
Three times, with a kind of methodical desperation, as though water could truly chase away what was burning inside her, that dull and incomprehensible ember that had absolutely nothing to do with fever and that she refused to identify any other way.
She looked at herself in the trembling reflection of the water.
Her red cheeks.
Her still-bright eyes.
That expression she did not recognize on her own face.
What is happening to me?
Am I going crazy?
She searched for her own answer in her own eyes and found nothing reassuring.
I’m not myself anymore.
I don’t recognize myself.
Am I losing my mind, or…
simply…
The thought began to take shape.
A precise shape, with a name at the end, a word she knew, one she had heard from others without ever thinking it would concern her one day…
She lightly struck the side of her head.
Once.
Twice.
With an almost comical firmness, as though she could physically dislodge something dangerous, expel that unfinished thought before it finished forming, before it became real.
Because a thought one has not finished thinking does not exist yet.
Because a word one does not say cannot cause any damage.
She took a deep breath.
Straightened her shoulders.
Smoothed her clothes with a hand that had stopped trembling through sheer force of will, or perhaps pride.
And she stepped out.
He was there.
Arms crossed.
Leaning against the opposite wall with disconcerting tranquility, as though he had not moved for hours, as though waiting were the most natural thing in the world for a man like him.
He was waiting for her.
Tianyin paused imperceptibly, for barely a fraction of a second, then ignored him with deliberate determination and continued walking.
He followed her.
Step by step.
The sound of his soles against the stone slabs, steady, calm, perfectly synchronized with hers.
Without a word.
His arms still crossed behind his back, his face perfectly closed off, but his eyes fixed on her, constant, relentless, with a steadiness that was beginning to make the back of her neck burn.
She stopped.
He stopped.
He started walking again.
But what the…
She followed the main gallery, passed the dark-red lacquered columns, turned into the eastern apartments corridor, and still that step behind her, still that presence at her back that she could feel without needing to turn around.
She crossed the great inner courtyard, and the servants stepped aside as they passed, their eyes lingering just long enough to reveal poorly concealed surprise, their whispers muffled behind discreet hands.
The Crown Prince.
Following someone.
He, usually so cold in the way he occupied space, so sovereignly indifferent to everything around him, he who crossed corridors as though the rest of the world were nothing more than scenery installed for him, was now following this young woman throughout the entire palace like a silent and incomprehensibly stubborn shadow.
Tianyin felt the gazes.
Heat rose into her cheeks for an entirely different reason this time.
She stopped in the middle of the courtyard, crossed her arms, and turned.
“What do you want?” she asked, frowning, her voice sharper than she had intended.
Silence.
He looked at her.
That’s all.
He looked at her with the air of someone who had not yet found the honest answer to that question, or who refused to give it.
There was no irritation on his face.
No mockery.
Just that gaze, direct and a little too intense, that did not blink, did not turn away, did not leave her anywhere to go.
Tianyin clenched her teeth.
Then she ran.
Her legs decided before her head did.
She did not think, she did not choose a direction, she simply fled with the instinctive urgency of someone who did not know exactly what she was escaping from but knew with certainty that she needed to get away from it.
She disappeared into the side corridors, passed the storerooms, went along the kitchens whose warm, heavy scents brushed past her, turned twice to throw off her pursuer, followed the old stone garden with its moss-covered rocks and twisted trees, and slipped behind a thick section of wall, in the shade, hidden.
She pressed her back against the cold stone.
Waited.
Her heart pounding hard, far too hard, much harder than the run justified.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Nothing.
No footsteps.
No presence.
Her breathing steadied slightly.
An almost incredulous smile curved her lips.
I lost him.
She had actually lost him.
She waited a few more seconds just to be safe, her shoulders gradually relaxing, and then pushed herself away from the wall to leave…
A hand slammed against the stone, right beside her head.
The sound was sharp, brutal, immediate.
A cloud of dry dust crumbled from above them in the silence of the garden, falling slowly like pale golden snow between their two faces.
Her body froze.
Everything froze.
Tianyin opened her mouth…
What the…
But the words dissolved in her throat before they could even exist.
Because Yanlong had leaned toward her.
Down to her height.
His eyes locked with hers.
So close that the world around them disappeared in successive layers, first the garden, then the palace walls, then the sky above them, then everything else, until there was nothing left but that narrow, burning space between their two faces, and that gaze.
That gaze.
Intense like a question one has been afraid to ask for far too long.
Hesitant like someone who is not accustomed to not knowing.
Frustrated like a man who understands far too well what is happening to him and still refuses to accept it.
And burning, burning with something he had no word for, something new and unsettling and terribly, dangerously real.
The silence between them tightened.
Like a thread.
Like something on the verge of breaking.
And then, in a low voice, made hoarse by something he did not entirely control, the voice of a man who was not accustomed to asking questions to which he did not already know the answer:
“What did you do to me?”
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