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Rei slowly walked to the table, trying not to twist his fingers together. “But you don’t think it’s too much? I might have gone overboard. We wouldn’t need to scrap everything here.”
“Oh, no! This is a much better idea. This renovation is perfect for the summer and fall season. Something to keep us busy…”
While we wait to figure out how to handle the fae problem.
Xiao Dan didn’t actually say the words, but Rei could feel them hanging heavy in the air between them.
He sipped his tea and stared out at the courtyard, the light bouncing off the white stones as a heavy silence settled between them. Xiao Dan wanted to say something. Lines of concentration cut between his brows and his lips were pressed thin. The vampire kept his eyes locked on his teacup. Rei could hear the wheels turning in his head as he searched for a good way to say what was bothering him.
“Yiyi told me that one of his first memories of your clan is of you,” Rei ventured.
Xiao Dan’s head snapped up, and the lines that had marred his handsome face disappeared in an instant. “He did?”
Rei nodded. With the tips of his fingers, he turned his empty cup while pulling up the memory of Yichen’s stories. “He said he arrived that first day in a carriage accompanied by more than two dozen soldiers. His father had told him that the people he would live with would hate him. That he was their enemy, and he’d always be alone, but he could not break because he was the prince of the Wu Kingdom.”
“I…I didn’t know his father had said that to him.”
After taking a sip of his tea, Rei continued, “But as he stepped down from the carriage, he saw you standing in the open doorway with a cat under one arm and one of the younger disciples slung over your shoulder, their feet kicking in the air while they giggled. You smiled at him like you were genuinely happy to see him. You handed Yiyi the cat and tickled the disciple before sending him off to pick plums. Yiyi said his first thought was begging his ancestors, ‘Please let this be real.’ And it was.”
Xiao Dan stared out at the rock garden and swallowed hard once. A light breeze cut through the courtyard and moved some hair across his forehead. “Shifu didn’t hide that the emperor ordered wu-di to us. However, he was adamant that Yichen be treated no differently than any other disciple. He wasn’t shown any favoritism because he was a prince, nor was he under any kind of suspicion because of questions about his father’s loyalty. It wasn’t difficult to see that he regarded himself as an outsider. I think that is why Chen took him under his wing. Chen also struggled under the weight of a distant father’s expectations.”
“Yiyi told me many stories of his long life, but he spoke very little of what it was like to be a prince. Nearly all of his stories were of the Zhang clan, his family.”
“Is that how he sees us still?” The words were a whisper, but they still hit Rei in the center of his chest as if someone had punched him.
He leaned forward, the cup still in his hand scraping across the smooth wood surface. “Is that what you think? What’s been troubling you?”
Worried eyes lifted and caught his. The fragile smile on Xiao Dan’s lips fell away at last. “I wanted to speak with you privately because I know Yichen shares his innermost thoughts with you. Does he still view himself as part of this family? We failed to rescue him from the fae realm. Failed to…protect him. Do we continue to fail him?”
Rei released his cup, only to slap his palm on the table. “You have never failed him. It was impossible to rescue him from the fae realm once the door closed. And it’s even harder to protect someone from something you don’t know exists. As difficult as it is to accept, you logically know that sometimes bad things happen. There is nothing you can do about that. I will say it again: you are not, nor have you ever, failed Wu Yichen.”
The shadows haunting Xiao Dan’s dark eyes and the lines stretching out from the corners didn’t disappear with Rei’s vehement reassurances. The vampire shook his head. “He feels…distant. A kind of distant I haven’t felt from him since those first days when he arrived with the clan. It’s as if he’s withdrawn from us, and I don’t know how to pull him back in. He doesn’t speak of his experiences. There’s this wall he keeps up, like he’s expecting us to toss him out.”
A soft sigh slipped from Rei’s lips. He knew what Xiao Dan was talking about. Picking up the teapot, he refilled Xiao Dan’s nearly untouched cup before filling his own.
“When we reached the human realm, the reason Yichen didn’t return with Chen was because of his fear and shame over our blood bond. Logically, he knew you wouldn’t think less of him, but something inside of him worried you would see him as tainted. That he wasn’t worthy of you any longer. It wasn’t until we learned that a blood witch might help him that he was willing to return to the clan.”
“Because he had a way of wiping away that thing that made him unworthy,” Xiao Dan finished.
“Mn. But that was nonsense, right?”
“Complete and utter nonsense,” Xiao Dan snapped. It was one of the first times Rei had heard the vampire sound angry, and it might have left him smiling. Those chestnut-brown eyes jumped to his face and narrowed. “Nothing would have kept us from welcoming him home. We would have protected you both.”
“I know. I see it in your every action toward each other.” Rei paused and frowned at his cooling tea. “I don’t want to talk about Yichen’s experiences in my realm. Those are secrets for him alone to share. But I will say that the torture they subjected him to wasn’t just physical. He suffered psychologically as well. They wanted us to feel alone. Isolated. A hundred years of that…”
He couldn’t finish the thought.
But he didn’t need to. Xiao Dan proved he was ever the insightful older brother.
“Or in your case, many centuries of that. It’s a hard lesson to unlearn.”
“Very much,” Rei choked out. “Yiyi was the only one I could ever depend on. And I was the only one for him, even though they tried to turn him against me so many times.” Rei cleared his throat of the sudden clog there. “Remember that we’ve been free for less than two months. He needs more time to feel safe and to let down the walls he’s held up for so long. Don’t doubt that Yiyi is happy to be home. This is the one place in all the world he wants to be.”
The tension rolled off Xiao Dan as his shoulders slumped and he huffed out an embarrassed chuckle. “Forgive me for prying.”
Rei shrugged. “There’s nothing to forgive.” He tossed back the last of his tea and smirked at his companion. “You love Yichen and want his happiness. You and the rest of the clan mean everything to him. How could I not do everything within my power to put your mind at ease?”
“Do you think the Zhang clan is a place that you can one day view as a home?”
