The morning light cut through the thick wooden lattice of the Imperial Study, throwing long, bars of dusty gold across the dark ironwood floor.
The air was heavy, smelling of inkstones, cold tea, and the heavy residue of the shouting match that had just occurred between the Emperor and his heir.
The heavy lacquer doors slid open with a soft click.
Katya was escorted inside by an incredibly pale, sweating Eunuch Pang.
The moment she crossed the threshold, Pang bowed so low his nose scraped the carpet, practically scrambling backward out of the room to pull the doors shut behind her.
He didn’t want to be anywhere near this sacred, forbidden room.
Katya stood in the center of the vast library, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
Her hands were still wrapped in the white linen bandages Wenzong had applied the night before, their tips tingling slightly.
She hadn’t slept a wink.
Her mind had spent the entire night spinning in a frantic circle, trying to process the terrifying reality of poison soup, executed maids, and the heavy, protective weight of the Emperor’s arms holding her shivering body.
She looked across the massive room at the desk.
Emperor Wenzong was still sitting in his high-backed chair.
His heavy imperial robes looked stiff and suffocating in the morning light.
For the first time since she had been brought to this country, the cold mask of Bixia was visibly cracked.
There were deep, dark shadows beneath his dark eyes, and the sharp lines around his mouth were tight with a profound, bone-deep weariness.
He looked every bit of his sixty years, burdened by a crumbling family and an empire of snakes.
Her heart went out to him.
He slowly lifted his gaze to meet hers.
He didn’t speak.
He just sat there, waiting to see if she was going to scream, cry, or demand answers about the violence she had witnessed.
Katya looked at the vast shelves of scrolls, then looked back at the exhausted sovereign who had almost eaten arsenic at her dinner table.
The sheer, terrifying absurdity of the situation hit her.
He was the absolute master of millions, yet he looked like a tired village blacksmith who had just pulled a double shift in the dead of winter.
She walked forward, her bare feet silent on the thick carpet, stopping just a few feet from his massive desk.
She tilted her head, her long blonde braid sliding over her shoulder, and uncurled her bandaged hands.A wry, lighthearted smile tugged at the corner of her lips.
She spoke in her native Russian, her voice carrying a dry, self-aware humor that completely violated the somber gravity of the room, “Well…
at least your house arrest has great room service.
Though I think I’ll skip the soup from now on.”
Wenzong didn’t blink, his face remaining a stoic block of stone, though his eyes tracked her lips.
Katya caught the unyielding silence of the room.
She raised her eyebrows, holding up her stiff, wrapped fingers with a soft shrug, and muttered a colloquial phrase she knew he wouldn’t understand, dropping her voice to a playful whisper, “What?
Too soon?”
Across the desk, Wenzong’s brain violently short-circuited.He understood every single word.
His mind processed her dark humor in a fraction of a second.
Too soon?
His chief consort had just tried to commit regicide, his son had just threatened a coup, his court was on the verge of a bloody civil war—and this foreign woman was standing in his forbidden sanctuary making jokes about the poison menu.The absolute, clinical gravity of his sixty-year life collapsed under the sheer weight of her absurdity.
Wenzong clamped his jaw tight, his chest heaving as he fought a massive, unprecedented battle against his own face.
A sharp, breathless sound escaped his nose.
The lines around his eyes crinkled, and he had to look down at his inkstone to hide the fact that he was actively trying not to smile.She was completely ridiculous.
She was inappropriate.
She had absolutely no sense of imperial decorum.
And he wanted to lock the doors and keep her in this room for the rest of his life!
Without lifting his head, he reached into his drawer, pulled out a small, heavy brass key, and slid it across the ironwood desk toward her.
He spoke in his low, gravelly Chinese baritone, his voice thick with a strange, warm defeat, “You speak too much, Katya.
Go find a text in the back corner.
Do not disturb Zhen’s statecraft.”
Katya looked at the key, then up at his profile.
She didn’t understand the Chinese words, but she understood the gesture.
She snatched the key, a bright spark of curiosity returning to her blue eyes, and turned toward the massive, dusty shelves of the foreign archive—completely unaware that she was about to stumble onto the books written in her own language, and the ultimate proof of his secret obsession.
Katya took the heavy brass key and wandered into the deepest, darkest corridors of the massive imperial library.
She stopped in the Foreign Archives sector—a dusty, shadowed corner where the court stored records from distant trading partners and frontier principalities.
She trailed her bandaged fingers along the dark cedar shelves, her hand rested on a massive, leather-bound volume that looked completely different from the smooth, rolled silk scrolls of the Jing Dynasty.
She slid it off the shelf and opened the thick parchment cover.
Her breath hitched.
The text wasn’t written in the sweeping, brush-stroked characters of Chinese calligraphy.
It is written in dense, angular Cyrillic.
She pulled down another volume, and another.
Her heart does a violent hammer-dance against her ribs.
There were translated histories of the Slavic lands.
There were hand-drawn topographic maps of the Siberian river basins, complete with annotations about village populations, fur trade routes, and…
her own home province.
Katya stood in the dusty shadows, clutching a heavy leather book to her chest, her mind spinning backward at terminal velocity.
Her sharp intellect began aggressively cataloging every bizarre interaction she had shared with the sixty-year-old sovereign: The very first night in her quarters, she screamed about the hairpins being “needles trying to pierce my brain.” He didn’t order her execution; he walked over and touched her hair with a face full of unreadable intensity.
The next morning, she ranted to the empty room that she hated his laws and his pristine cage.
That exact evening, he locked the entire court out and appointed himself her private tutor.
Last night, she threw a starving tantrum, screaming in fluent Russian that she couldn’t use her bandaged fingers to eat.
He immediately roared a command to the kitchens to bring a hot feast for two.
He had spoken her name.
Katya.
The realization hit her with the force of a Siberian avalanche.
He didn’t learn her name from a diplomatic ledger.
He understood her.
He had understood every single solitary word she had uttered from the very second she arrived at his court.
A wild, dangerous flush of heat rushed up Katya’s neck.
She was mortified, she was furious, and she was…utterly spellbound.She dropped the heavy book onto the low table with a resounding thud that echoed through the quiet library.
She marched out of the shadows of the bookshelves, her bare feet slamming against the imperial carpet, and headed straight for the massive ironwood desk where Wenzong was pretending to read a state document.
Wenzong didn’t look up immediately, but maintained his flawless mask of regal indifference.
However, his hand froze over his inkstone.
He could hear the sheer, localized hurricane of her footsteps as they approached.
Katya slammed both of her bandaged hands flat onto his desk, and leaned directly into his personal space until her blue eyes were inches from his face.
She unloaded a volley of furious, highly accusatory Russian, but that time, her voice was laced with a sharp, breathless challenge, “You absolute, deceptive devil.
You understood me.
Every time I called you a cold tyrant, every time I complained about your ridiculous silk robes, and every time I called you a monster…
you knew exactly what I was saying, didn’t you?”