The silence that settled over the ruined ironwood desk was no longer heavy with state secrecy; it was thick, warm, and electric.
State documents from the southern provinces remained scattered across the floor like dead autumn leaves, but neither of them looked at the mess.
Katya leaned against the edge of the desk, her chest heaving, her lips swollen and flushed from the violent, magnificent collision of their mouths.
She looked at Wenzong, her blue eyes wide, raw, and completely unarmored.
The illusion was permanently dead.
She would never look at him as a captor, a tyrant, or an “old monster” again.
He was her fortress.
He was the man who had frozen fifty thousand soldiers on a snowy riverbank just to keep her village from burning.
He had claimed her with a desperate, wild passion that made her entire soul vibrate.
Wenzong stood inches from her, his breathing ragged, his large hands still resting heavily on her waist.
The clinical, terrifying mask of Bixia was entirely gone, and as he looked into her face, he realized with a jolt of panic that he could never hide behind it again where she was concerned.
She had seen the raw, hot blood beneath his ice.
She had pulled his humanity out into the daylight, and for the first time in his sixty years of life, he felt entirely, fiercely alive.
He didn’t want to rule the world; he just wanted to breathe her in.
The bubble of their sanctuary was shattered the very next evening by the absolute weight of imperial duty.
Consort Shu was not a scheming viper like Consort Xian.
She was younger, quiet, demure, and had spent her years in the palace fading into the background, never demanding a single favor from the sovereign.
But she was a daughter of the Jing Dynasty, and to her, filial piety was the absolute law of existence.
When her father, Minister Lin, ordered her to secure her family’s future by pleading for a son, she had no choice but to obey.She did not launch a provocative, seductive assault.
She used the only weapon she had: her flawless, heartbreaking submissiveness.
Wenzong was intercepted on his way back from the Grand Council.
Consort Shu knelt in the freezing courtyard outside his private quarters, her head pressed flat against the stone, her quiet weeping cutting through the evening air.
When Wenzong commanded her to rise, she stayed on her knees, her hands trembling as she clutched his robes, and cried out, “Bixia…
this servant begs your mercy.
I have given ten years of my family’s loyalty to the crown.
I have spent my youth in the quiet corners of your palace, never asking for favor, never disrupting the harmony.
But I am empty.
I have no child.
I have no son to carry my family’s name or pray for my soul when I pass into the earth.
If Bixia has found his blood run hot again…
I beg you, do not leave this servant to die in the dark.
Grant me a son.”
The plea struck Wenzong with a sickening wave of old, familiar guilt.
Because he had spent his life treating the harem like a cold administrative chore, it had never once occurred to him that this quiet, gentle woman was deeply grieved by her emptiness.
She had done nothing wrong.
She had played by the rules, respected his distance, and remained perfectly loyal.
Wenzong’s clinical intellect couldn’t save him here.
He felt a crushing, agonizing obligation to imperial duty.
In the Jing Dynasty, an Emperor belonged to the state, and producing heirs to secure the boundaries of the noble houses was his primary function.
He could not simply ignore a loyal consort’s tearful plea without looking like a cruel, irresponsible tyrant to the Grand Council.
For the first time since crossing the river, his heart and his duty were pulled in two opposite, violent directions.
He agreed to grant her an audience in her quarters that evening—not out of desire, but out of a heavy, suffocating sense of debt.
However, when Katya found out through the palace gossip network, the Siberian whirlwind erupted—but it wasn’t the fiery, hairpin-throwing rage of her first days.
This was a deep, poisonous, and entirely human ache.
When Wenzong entered the Palace of Solitary Radiance for her language lesson before his scheduled visit to Consort Shu, the tension in the room was suffocating.
Katya stood by the window, her back turned to him, her linen-bandaged fingers gripping her own arms so tightly the fabric strained.
Katya understood the intellectual reality of an imperial household.
She knew emperors had many women; she had known it before she ever arrived.
When she hated him, she didn’t care who he slept with.
But now?
Now that her heart had completely softened toward him, now that she had felt his lips and his tenderness, the reality of sharing him made her blood run cold with jealousy.
She didn’t want to be like the monstrous, murderous Consort Xian.
She hated the thought of becoming a bitter, desperate palace snake.
But she was a wild northern woman—she loved fiercely, openly, and exclusively.
The thought of the man who had just wrecked his desk kissing her, walking into another woman’s bedchamber to father a child, felt like a literal knife twisting in her gut.
She spun around, her blue eyes flashing with a dangerous, tear-bright fire as she looked at his exhausted face.
She spoke in her native Russian, her voice carrying a sharp, breathless edge of pure betrayal, “So…
the Tsar is returning to his collection tonight?
The man who held me against his chest and swore I was the only thing that belonged to him is going to go hold another woman?
To give her a child?”
Emperor Wenzong’s voice was flat with internal agony, “Katya…
you do not understand the laws of this state.
Consort Shu has no lineage.
She has been loyal for a decade.
It is a debt of the crown.
It is my duty.”
Katya stepped closer, into his personal space, as her voice cracked, “Do not speak to me of your debts and your duties!
In my village, a man gives his word and his body to one woman, or he walks alone in the snow.
I know your laws allow you a hundred wives, Zhao Siyan.
I know I have no right to be angry.
But I am angry!
It makes me sick to my stomach, and I will not pretend to smile and bow while you walk into her room!”
Wenzong stood frozen, his heart hammering in his chest.
He wanted to reach out, to pull her back into his arms, but his hands were tied by the heavy iron chains of his own empire.
The first true rift had opened between them, proving that the snakes in his court didn’t need poison or arrows to tear them apart—they just needed the unyielding structure of the throne itself.