Strumming a guzheng bare-handed at high speed hurt.
After a few minutes of throwing her “Siberian whirlwind” into the strings, her bare fingertips bled slightly, leaving a few crimson spots on the white silk wraps of the instrument’s bridges.
When Emperor Wenzong slid open the doors to the Palace of Solitary Radiance(Guhui Gong) that evening, he didn’t find the chaotic, feather-strewn disarray of the previous night.
The pavilion was dead silent.On the table sat the massive guzheng.
Two of its thickest silk strings hung loose and snapped, curled like dead vines over the wood.
Near the bridges, faint, crimson spots of fresh blood stained the white silk wraps.
Katya was sitting by the dark window, her back turned to him.
Her shoulders were tense.
She expected him to be furious; Tutor Lin had fled the compound screaming about barbarian war drums, and she knew her “punishment” would be severe.
She braced herself, ready to snap at him in Russian the moment he approached.
Wenzong didn’t speak.
He set his lacquered box down, his eyes instantly tracking from the bloody strings to her hands, which she was trying to hide beneath her long silk sleeves.
He didn’t pull out a paper.
He didn’t write Patience.
Instead, he raised his voice, calling out to the corridor with a sharp, ringing imperial command that made the paper screens vibrate, “Pang!
Bring the white jade ointment from the Royal Apothecary.
Instantly.
If you tarry, your legs will be broken.”
Katya flinched at the sudden, booming authority in his voice.
She spun around, her blue eyes flashing with alarm as Eunuch Pang practically threw himself into the room, sobbing with terror, scrambling to deliver a small ceramic jar before fleeing the pavilion as if the devil himself were chasing him.
Wenzong walked over to her.
He didn’t sit across the table as her tutor; he sank onto the floor cushions directly beside her, invading her personal space with an intense, unhurried focus.
“Show me.” He commanded her, but there was a note of gentleness in his words.
Katya frowned, stubbornly keeping her arms crossed.
“Leave me alone,” she muttered in Russian.
“It’s just skin.”
Without a word, Wenzong reached out.
His large, warm hand clamped firmly but gently around her wrist, lifting her arm.
He carefully uncurled her fingers.Katya’s breath caught in her throat.
The skin on her fingertips was raw, split open from the brutal friction of the thick zither strings.
Small beads of blood were still rising.
She expected him to squeeze, to punish her, to show her the cold malice of a captor.
Instead, Wenzong opened the ceramic jar.
He dipped his long, elegant fingers into the cool, herbal white ointment.
With an agonizing, meticulous gentleness, he began smoothing the salve over her raw cuts.
His touch was so light it felt like the brush of a moth’s wing.Katya froze, her entire body locking up in sheer disbelief.
She looked from his hands up to his face.
Wenzong’s jaw was tight, but his eyes—usually cold, analytical obsidian—were wide, soft, and filled with a profound, quiet intensity.
He wasn’t looking at a slave.
He was looking at something fragile and precious that he desperately wanted to protect.
He pulled a strip of clean white linen from his robes and began wrapping her fingers, his movements slow and predictable to keep her from startling.
As his warm hands cradled hers, the terrifying myth of the “old monster” completely collapsed in Katya’s mind.
A captor does not bind a slave’s wounds with his own hands.
A tyrant does not look at a barbarian with a face mirrored in pure, aching compassion.
For the first time since her village was raided, the icy wall of her defiance fractured.
A sudden, overwhelming wave of warmth flooded her chest, and her blue eyes filled with hot, unshed tears.
She realized this man possessed a capacity for profound tenderness—and the realization terrified her because she was starting to care for him.
For Wenzong, the moment was an existential earthquake.
His whole life had been governed by the state, by bloodlines, by laws, and by cold, clinical numbers.
He had never loved his mother, he’d never known her; he had never felt a spark of affection for Consort Xian or the mothers of his children.
He had genuinely believed he was born without the capacity for human warmth—a machine designed solely to hold a crown.
Yet, as he tucked the edge of the linen bandage securely around her thumb, his hands were trembling.
He felt a deep, fierce ache in his chest at the sight of her blood.
The thrill he felt wasn’t the cold triumph of a strategist; it was the raw, terrifyingly beautiful instinct of a man wanting to comfort a woman.
He had just discovered his own humanity in the middle of a ruined room, guided by the wild blonde woman who had upended his entire world.
He let her hands rest in his for a lingering, breathless beat.
He looked up, meeting her tear-bright blue eyes, and spoke the word he had taught her two nights before, his voice a low, raspy whisper, “An.”
Katya swallowed hard, a single tear slipping down her cheek as she looked at her bandaged hands, then back to his face.
“An.” She whispered.
Wenzong’s soft hand gently brushed away her tear.
She found herself leaning her face into his hand, as though seeking comfort.
She covered his hand against her face with her own hand and whispered, “An,” again.
Did he know that she felt peaceful in his presence?
The next morning, the report reached the Palace of Virtuous Grace through Consort Xian’s shadow network.
Xian was standing by her window, her fingers stained with the black ink of her forced scripture copies.
Eunuch Qin knelt behind her, his voice a trembling whisper as he delivered the news: The Emperor ordered royal ointment.
He dismissed the maids.
He bandaged the foreign woman’s bleeding fingers with his own imperial hands.
Xian didn’t speak.
She didn’t sigh.She gripped the edge of the wooden lattice window so hard that her long, decorative silver fingernail guards bent and snapped against the frame, digging deep into her own flesh.
The image of her hyper-efficient, cold husband dropping to his knees to tend to a bleeding barbarian woman shattered her mind.
For forty years, she had given him perfect obedience, perfect children, and a perfect court, and he had never once touched her with anything resembling gentleness.
Her jealousy transformed into something absolute and deadly.
The baseline rules of the court were officially dead.
She looked toward her steward, her face a mask of pure, frozen, murderous steel.
“She is a disease in his mind.
Prepare the arsenic.
If the Emperor will not clear his path, the inner court will do it for him.”