“They tried to make me confess the crime, but I didn’t, so they broke my right shin with an iron rod. And . . . I don’t know how much you saw on the night of my Heat . . . They branded me with the mark of a thief. On the sole of my right foot.”
JingYi squeezed the tile until its edges bit into her skin. She lowered her head. Her body remembered everything: the snap ofbone, the world going white with pain, the smell of her own flesh as they branded her like cattle.
Bile rose to her mouth, and she swallowed the bitterness. She wanted to drag the shame out by the throat. Hold this ugly thing and understand why she’d carried it so long.
“In the end, the joke was on them. The pain triggered my Awakening. I presented as an Omega the following night.”
The fever from her shattered bone and scorched flesh intensified into something primal. Her Awakening came raw, unmedicated, utterly alone. No one came until her scent shifted. Only then did they summon the physician and the Luneth priestess to assess her worth.
The physician declared her leg too damaged to set right. An Omega with only the birthmark might have been passable. But with a permanent limp?
When Alexander made a low, strangled sound—half-breath, half-curse—she finally dared to look up. He’d gone so pale the colour leached from his lips. The stillness in him was worse than any outburst. His hand gripped the edge of the board until his knuckles shone stark against the lantern light, the veins in his forearm drawn tight.
“Six years old,” he said hoarsely. “They broke your leg.Brandedyou.” His voice cracked over the last word, as though forcing it through his teeth.
The air turned to glass in her lungs. She didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.
He sat rigid, every line of him strung with fury. His chest rose once, sharply, as though he had to remind himself to breathe. His eyes were impossibly blue but clouded with something black and dangerous beneath—a kind of murderous promise.
“Give me their names,” he hissed.
Her fingers curled around the smooth tile in her palm. The heat of his rage radiated across the small table, and for a moment she wondered if she feared it—if sheshouldfear it.
But . . . no. His anger wasn’t turned on her. It was turned outward, at the faceless ghosts of her past. A strange, fragile feeling unfolded in her chest. No one had ever been angry for her before. Angryather, yes—for her face, her limp, her very existence. But this—this fury was a fortress built around a wound.
And she had no idea how to hold it.
Her lips parted. She meant to answer, but all that emerged was a small, uneven whisper, “What use are names when the deed is done?”
A muscle ticked in Alexander’s jaw. Deliberately, he placed his next tile—but didn’t flip hers.
The lantern creaked overhead, its glow rocking with the sea. Shadows dragged long across the table. Their silence wasn’t empty. It throbbed.
He released his breath. Then, quieter still: “Your turn.”
And so, the game went on.
CHAPTER 46
ALEXANDER
He’d suggested this game, knowing how little he knew of her life before Tremore—only fragments, glimpses, never the marrow of it. If he meant to keep her in Parandor, to keep her at all, he needed to understand the people who’d shaped her . . . and those who’d failed her.
But he’d never known the extent of horror she’d lived with. Now, he understood why she didn’t take his coins.
“What about your brother, ShunLi? Why didn’t he protect you?”
JingYi looked up, her face inscrutable in the shifting light. “He didn’t return to the Imperial Palace until I was twelve years old.”
She let the answer settle, but her voice turned even softer. “I Awakened when I was six, but Awakening isn’t the same as First Heat. That came later. ShunLi—” She paused, her gaze turning distant, as though a door had opened inside her and she had no choice now but to walk through it. “I was fourteen the first time I felt the pull of Heat. I didn’t understand it then, but the young Alphas in the palace did. They scented it on me, followed me into one of the secluded courtyards.”
Her eyes stayed fixed on the board. “There, they cornered me, laughing, telling me the things they intended to do, how they’d have to slam my face against the floor to avoid looking at me.”
Alexander’s grip on the table turned to iron again.
“When they reached for me, ShunLi appeared. He didn’t touch them, didn’t even say a word. He glared at them, and they scattered like frightened dogs.”
She rubbed her temple as though to ward off a headache. “To this day, I don’t know why he interfered, or why he negotiated this marriage.”
