Yanlong entered the kitchen without warning.
The door opened with quiet authority, and his silhouette filled the doorway for a fraction of a second before anyone had time to react.
He didn’t need to raise his voice.
There was something about his mere presence that came before words, a silent weight, a density that made people fall silent before they even understood why.
“Leave.”
One word.
Just one.
The maids froze, held their breath, and within a few seconds the kitchen emptied like a cup being overturned, silently, completely, without him needing to repeat himself.
The door closed with a dull thud.
Only the two of them remained.
Yanlong set Tianyin down.
She was still complaining.
Of course.
She was always complaining.
It was her way of existing, of resisting, of refusing to let herself be carried along by events as though she had no say in them.
He had only known her for a few days.
But that voice…
He had understood it immediately.
“What are you doing?!”
She looked at him, hands on her hips, eyes shining with indignation.
Behind her, the stoves were still warm, dried herbs hung from the beams, and flour was spread across the large wooden table.
An ordinary, domestic world that contrasted terribly with the way she carried herself, like a goddess forced into exile, even in a kitchen.
Even here, she had that way of occupying space that belonged only to her.
Yanlong didn’t answer.
He stepped forward.
One step.
And already he was standing before her.
Tianyin instinctively stepped backward.
A reflex.
Not fear, she would have wanted to clarify, but he was already too close.
Her back struck the edge of the table before she had time to think.
Her hands searched for support behind her and landed flat in the flour, leaving two clear imprints in the white powder.
She looked up.
Mistake.
He leaned over her.
Dangerously.
The morning rays passed through the wooden-slatted windows and fell directly upon the two of them, golden and slanted, as though deliberately drawn there, as though that particular light had existed only for this scene, only for this precise moment when two people who should never have found themselves like this had somehow found themselves together anyway.
As though the entire world were holding its breath.
As though this scene existed only now, outside of time, outside of everything.
Their eyes met.
Tianyin felt something freeze inside her chest.
He was only a few centimeters from her face.
Close enough for her to see every detail with a precision she had never wanted: the perfect line of his slightly furrowed brows, his tense jaw, his smooth skin, the strands of black hair falling around the contour of his face with a careless elegance that made him terribly handsome.
Terribly present. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
What is he doing…?
Yanlong’s gaze was deep.
Burning.
The kind of gaze one should never have for someone one couldn’t stand, someone one hadn’t chosen, someone one barely knew.
He placed his hands on the table.
On either side of hers.
His broad palms sank into the flour, their fingers almost intertwined in the white powder, an involuntary, absurd proximity that was impossible to ignore.
Tianyin felt something rise in her throat that she couldn’t name.
Something that, for once, had nothing to do with anger.
“What are you doing…?”
She said it very quietly this time.
It was no longer indignation.
It was something else.
Something that resembled a question she didn’t want to ask, a truth she didn’t want to face.
Her voice had lost its edge.
She realized it too late.
Yanlong’s gaze unsettled her.
Deeply.
More than it should have.
More than she had ever admitted to herself.
She felt an impulse deep inside her, biting her lower lip as though trying to hold herself back, as though trying not to succumb to this burning approach that destabilized her far more than she wanted to admit.
That strange and uncomfortable sensation that something was drawing them together even though they were opposites in everything.
Like magnets turned against each other.
Naturally repelled.
And yet incapable of truly moving apart.
“Have you bewitched me?”
Tianyin blinked.
He had said it so close to her that she felt every breath of those words brush against her skin, warm, direct, unsettling in a way she categorically refused to analyze.
At that precise moment, the sunlight brought out the hazel color of his eyes, that golden-brown shade that shifted from green to amber depending on the light, as though the color itself couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.
Yanlong had a brief, fleeting thought, which he immediately erased from his mind with iron discipline.
I had never noticed the color of those eyes…
He tightened his hands in the flour.
“I’ve never bewitched you!”
Tianyin’s voice cracked through the silence of the kitchen.
She pushed him away with both hands against his chest, a sudden, determined gesture, the only way she had to reclaim some ground, and moved away from him to put distance between them, to find a space where she could breathe without his presence filling all the air in the room.
This was becoming too heated.
This attraction they both refused to admit, this nameless thing growing despite them, despite their arguments, despite their completely opposite personalities, despite everything separating them—
She, born among the clouds and stars, daughter of the Celestial Emperor, accustomed to jade palaces and heavenly winds.
He, anchored in the earth and the politics of men, prince of a mortal kingdom that understood nothing of beings from above.
Two worlds.
Two natures.
And these few days of forced marriage had not brought them any closer.
At least, that was what she repeated to herself every morning.
Yanlong stepped closer again as he brushed the flour from his chest.
Standing now, facing her, he advanced with that deliberate slowness he possessed, the calm of a man who knew he had all the time in the world, that the room was closed, that nowhere she could go would ever truly be far from him.
“You celestial beings know spells to trap mortals,” he said.
His voice was calm, almost reasonable, as though he were presenting a perfectly logical argument.
“You must have done something to me.”
“I don’t know any spell for anything.”
She stared at him incredulously.
“You’re simply crazy!”
He didn’t answer.
Nor did he step back.
She decided to leave.
Dignified.
Without running.
As though nothing had happened.
Yanlong’s hand closed around her arm.
Firmly.
Without brutality, but without allowing any refusal either.
He pulled her back toward him.
They found themselves face-to-face.
So close that Tianyin had to lift her head to meet his gaze.
Yanlong’s eyes had darkened.
His brows were slightly furrowed.
He leaned toward her, strands of black hair falling around the contours of his face, dark and disordered, giving him an incredibly dark, incredibly…
Wow.
The thought crossed her mind before she could stop it.
He’s so handsome.
Within seconds, she felt her cheeks flush, a sudden, betraying warmth rising beneath her skin with humiliating speed.
She hoped the golden light of the kitchen would be enough to hide what she absolutely did not want him to see.
Yanlong’s eyes had become dangerous.
That was the word she would have chosen above all others.
Dangerous.
Because he was looking at her as though he could see everything, as though he could read through the distance she was desperately trying to maintain, as though he knew exactly what she was hiding and was simply waiting for her to stop pretending.
He leaned closer.
Until his breath brushed her cheek.
Until there was nothing between them but a few centimeters of warm air and that golden light that refused to leave them, a silent witness to this suspended moment between two beings too opposite to love each other and too attracted to ignore one another.
“Remove this spell from me,” he said.
His voice was low.
Reduced to something that sounded less like a threat than a disguised plea, something a proud man says when he has no other way to express what he feels without losing face.
Something vulnerable…
Behind the command.
“Right now.”
“Or…”