As if on cue, the air around them began to shift. It grew heavier, colder, and denser as the electrifying, horrible sensation of Muyang’s magic filled the room. They both flinched and turned to the doorway. Waiting, with bated breath.
Muyang entered, slamming the door shut behind him. He was dressed in black silks, gold dazzling from his hair crown, asword with a dragon hilt gleamed with lethal intent at his hip. He peered down at them with his midnight eyes; the same as theirs. And yet his were filled with a wickedness Biyu could only hope to mimic.
His gaze flicked over them clinically, narrowing slightly at Biyu’s appearance.
“You both seem well,” he began.
“You!” Biyu lurched off the bed. The instant her feet touched the floor, her knees buckled and she collapsed. Yat-sen quickly grabbed her by the arm to help her up, and she kept one hand steady on the bed frame to hoist herself up. Nausea rolled over her, but she bit it down as she glared at him. Through the haze of pain and grief, her rage intensified at the sight of him. “You killed him!”
Muyang lifted a dark eyebrow as she tried to lunge at him again. Yat-sen held her back, bracing an arm over her stomach and lifting her off her feet as she struggled forward. He was surprisingly strong, despite his lanky frame.
“Let me go, Yat-sen! Let me fight him!” Her screams turned to half-sobs as she pinned Muyang with a loathing stare. “You killed him! How dare you stand there in this room and tell me I’m fine? You’re a horrible monster! You raised him, didn’t you? He trusted you! He was loyal to you! And what did you do? You killed him! All for what? To get back at me? Or was it because he fell in love and you didn’t like that my wellbeing had more control over him than his loyalty to you?”
His expression of indifference didn’t change and that fueled her anger further.
She thrashed harder, managing to kick Yat-sen on the shin hard enough for him to loosen his grip. She elbowed his chest and he released her with a sharp inhale. She dove forward and grabbed the front of Muyang’s robes. Her hands trembled as she stared up at him.
“You monster! Give him back to me!” She pounded her fists on his chest, but he made no move to stop her. “Give him back! He’s all I have— He’s all?—”
Yat-sen yanked her off Muyang, but she didn’t resist this time. Her body went limp, more sobs wracking through her.
“How could you do that to him? To me?” she wept. “How can I move on from this?”
An expression she had never seen on Muyang’s face almost gave her pause; it was so foreign, so strange, that it was hard to look away: discomfort. He seemed thoroughly uncomfortable standing there, watching as she wept and screamed. Almost like he didn’t want to be there, but had no choice.
“Biyu.” His voice cracked like a whip in the room and he grimaced, as if not realizing his default tone was commanding and harsh. Then he said more quietly, “Please cease your crying. Nikator is not dead.”
The world came to a standstill.
Her heart skipped a beat.
The words echoed in her mind:Nikator is not dead.
It didn’t make sense, but the hopeless part of her clung to it, grasping onto the threads of hope that had long been incinerated. She rose up to her feet, shivering all the while.
“W-What did you just say?”
Muyang stared at her pointedly. “You must feel him through the bond, correct? I never broke the bond you both share. Just as how he must be feeling your pain. I can imagine he’s panicking right now, trying to rush here as soon as he can. I sent him away this morning, since he wouldn’t leave your bedside these past three days. I thought the outside air might be good for him. It wasn’t easy ripping him away, but he needed to eat, to breathe, to do anything but worry over your unconscious body. I told him it’s normal to fall into a comatose state if you drain your magicentirely, but he had never seen it first-hand from someone who isn’t used to magic?—”
The rest of his words drowned away; she could scarcely pay attention to anything other than Nikator beingalive. She grasped onto the bond, filtering through her own heavy emotions of pain and grief, and tried to feel his. He wasn’t hiding his, but she had been so consumed by grief that she hadn’t felt the tendril of panic, the relief, the confusion that he felt.
She swayed, her limbs suddenly feeling light. “He’s alive?”
“And well.” Muyang nodded stiffly. “I could never kill one of my own.”
“Then why?” Her eyebrows pulled together. Nothing was making sense.
“I had to test you both—well, you, mostly.” He crossed his arms over his chest, peering down at her with black eyes that seemed to swallow all the shadows in the room. “You betrayed me, and I had to see if you were serious about loving Nikator. I needed to see how far you would go for him. I needed to see if you were simply using him to try to kill me and my people, or if there was more to it. I also needed to see how serious Nik was about you.”
“It was all a test?” She felt sick to her stomach.
Muyang didn’t appear too happy about it, either. “Trust me when I say I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy hurting you and Nikator. I wish for the best for you both, but I needed to see if you were loyal—to him, at least. I needed to see that you weren’t a threat to my reign, to myfamily.”
He could have killed her if he had wanted to, but he hadn’t. He had tested her to see if she still posed a risk. She could understand his reasoning, even if bitterness coated her mouth at the idea of it all being a farce.
But Nikator was alive. That was all that mattered.
“You both tried to murder me.” Muyang’s voice came out flat. He leveled them with a sharp stare. “If I were anyone else, you would both be dead. And if you were anyone else, I would have killed you on the day of the coup.”
