Yanlong let her go.
Slowly.
His fingers opening one after another, without haste, without abruptness.
Just the gradual release of a grip he had held for too long and knew he had held for too long.
The silence between them was still there, dense, burning, suspended in the air of the room like smoke after a fire.
Their gazes had not yet broken apart.
Not quite.
There was still something resisting, something that refused to let go even after their hands had.
Then Yanlong took a step back.
He straightened his tunic.
A slow, precise, mechanical gesture, his hands adjusting the fabric, smoothing a crease, returning to their usual position.
He fixed his hair.
Within a few seconds, he became once again the impenetrable Crown Prince whom nothing ever seemed to reach.
Or at least, someone who looked like him from a distance.
He walked toward the door.
Opened it.
And found himself facing an entire corridor of maids who burst into laughter all at once.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Yanlong looked at them for one second.
Just long enough for each of them to individually and simultaneously decide to study the floor with an attention they had never before given to the stone tiles in their lives.
The laughter was strangled inside sleeves, shoulders hunched, gazes lowered.
He closed the door behind him and walked away down the corridor with that calm stride that was never hurried.
Inside, Tianyin had heard all of it.
She waited three seconds.
Then she walked toward the door, placed her palm flat against the wood, closed her eyes for a second.
And traced the spell with her fingertips, the glowing characters appearing on the panel like ink drying backward, from the inside out, every stroke shining with a cold, firm light.
Sealed.
She took a step back.
Looked at her work.
There.
Let him try.
She sat down with her back against the door, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs.
On the other side of the paper, the candles cast her shadow across the panel, a clear, recognizable silhouette, her back to the world, knees drawn up.
The flames flickered in the still air, leaning gently as though they too were searching for something to hold onto.
She didn’t want to sleep.
She didn’t want to dream.
She especially didn’t want to think about that space between them that had been far too small, that silence that had said everything without saying anything, that look she didn’t know how to put away in her mind.
She didn’t want to.
She fell asleep.
The morning light was golden and clear when she slowly opened her eyes.
She blinked.
The floor beneath her was hard.
Cold.
She was still sitting against the door, her legs numb, her neck stiff from an angle that promised to be painful.
Outside, through the paper panel, the sun drew sharp rectangles across the floor of the room.
The weather was beautiful.
She stretched, still half-asleep.
Her arms rose above her head, her shoulders cracked, her eyes closed in that hazy moment of waking when the brain has not yet decided to become useful.
She startled.
Yanlong was sitting at her desk.
He was reading documents.
He had changed.
His hair was neatly arranged, his tunic fresh, his brush moving across the paper with the quiet regularity of someone who had been working for a while.
He looked like a man who had been there from the beginning.
Tianyin did not move.
Since when…
how…
I had sealed the door.
I had sealed it.
I sealed it myself, I saw the characters appear, I checked, I…
She abruptly stood and turned toward the door.
The spell was broken.
Clean.
Neat.
Not forced, dissolved, as though someone had known exactly where to press to undo it.
The glowing characters had disappeared.
Nothing remained except an irregular edge on the paper panel, where someone had detached a piece.
A hand appeared over her shoulder.
A hand appeared over her shoulder, a piece of paper bearing the last characters of the spell between its fingers, still faintly glowing, held out to her with the casualness of a man returning something he had never considered his own.
Yanlong.
He slipped the piece into her hand, tucked his documents beneath his arm, and left the room without looking back.
Tianyin stared at the paper in her palm.
Then she followed him.
“How did you do that?” Her voice echoed through the corridor, louder than she had intended.
“And why did you come in in the first place?
I had sealed that door.
On purpose.
So you couldn’t come in.
That was precisely the point.”
Yanlong walked.
“Are you listening?”
He kept walking.
“Yanlong.”
Still nothing.
Then he stopped abruptly.
Tianyin didn’t have time to slow down.
Her nose struck his back with a dull and decidedly undignified sound, and she stepped back, instinctively bringing a hand to her face.
He turned around.
Slowly.
And walked toward her.
One step.
Then another.
His eyes in hers, dark, direct, without hesitation, the gaze of a man who did not often look at people but who, when he did, looked at them completely.
Tianyin stepped back.
One step.
Then another.
Her heel found the edge of the lotus pond behind her, and there was nowhere else to go.
She slipped.
Her leg fell into empty space, her balance gave way, the sky and water merging in her field of vision…
Yanlong’s hand closed around her arm.
One single movement.
And she found herself pulled against his chest, her feet back on solid ground, her heart in her throat.
Their gazes met.
Intense for him.
Avoiding his for her.
She gently pulled her arm away.
Straightened.
Looked away.
And saw the pond.
Dark water.
Lotus flowers opening in the morning light, their petals an almost unreal white.
The reflection of the sky within it, calm, indifferent.
Something rose.
Suddenly.
Her beneath the water, the cold, arms around her in the darkness, and then at the edge of the pond, her lips that had…
Her hands rose toward her mouth on their own.
Was it real?
Was it a dream?
Did we…
She turned toward Yanlong.
He was looking at her.
And on that face that never revealed anything, there was something.
A shadow.
Fleeting.
Almost nothing.
But she had seen it.
He took a step back.
Smoothed his tunic.
The same gesture as the night before, mechanical, automatic, that of a man putting his clothes back in order because he could not put something else back in order.
And walked away.
“Wait!”
Her hand closed around his wrist before she had decided to do it.
He stopped.
“Yanlong,” a voice said.
Soft.
Melodious.
Perfectly placed.
Pei Ruxue was approaching along the lotus pond, a servant holding a peach-silk parasol above her, her immaculate dress barely brushing the stone tiles.
She smiled, that precise, calibrated smile that gave the impression of warmth without ever truly possessing it.
Her eyes went straight to Yanlong.
And Yanlong looked at her.
Tianyin did not know what to read in that gaze.
She did not know either whether she wanted to read it.
Behind Pei Ruxue, a man approached.
Tall.
Lean.
Features of an almost unsettling symmetry, as though someone had taken the time to draw each one individually.
He held a closed fan in his hand, covered in dense calligraphy written in characters Tianyin did not recognize, perhaps from another world.
He advanced with the quiet lightness of someone who knew that every room he entered belonged to him a little, simply because he had entered it.
He was everything Yanlong was not.
Radiant.
Open.
With something in his smile that warmed without effort, without calculation.
Mo Yin.
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