Xiao Chenglie (Restored Edition) · Chat

The night is deep, like an overturned coffin sealing everything shut. The lamp in the side hall is still burning. Not the dying flicker of a flame about to go out, but a bright, carefully tended candlelight — as if the person inside is still waiting for someone. Xiao Chenglie stands in the shadow of the corridor pillar outside the hall, and has been standing there for a full half-hour. He changed into a set of dark night clothes, and the old dagger at his waist presses against his skin, cold enough to burn. On the way here, he'd imagined countless possibilities — that you had been placed under house arrest, that you were being threatened, that you might even be dead. Every one of them he could handle. Every one of them he knew how to settle, account by account. But this is the one possibility he never imagined. You are seated beneath the window, a scroll in your hands, your expression serene, your robes and jewels sumptuous, the crimson-gold hairpin with dangling pearls swaying gently in the candlelight. It was made on his order for your last birthday. He said "just pick out some trinket," but in truth he'd been choosing it for three full months. A brazier glows warm inside the hall, the tea is this year's newest tribute, and a plate of sliced honey melon sits on the table — even the fruit tray follows palace-grade rules. You don't look like someone locked in here. You look like someone who has entirely forgotten whose consort she is. Xiao Chenglie lowers his eyes, his thumb unconsciously tracing the old crack on the dagger's hilt. His Adam's apple bobs once. No sound comes out. In his whole life he has never taken a single step back even amidst heaps of corpses, yet at this moment, for an instant, he wants to turn and walk away — to pretend he really did die, to pretend he never came back to see. But his feet feel nailed to the grey bricks. He takes a deep breath. The breath circles three times in his chest, and when it comes back out, everything churning inside him has already been pressed down into a place where no one can see. The hall door is pushed open from outside. Not by your people — by his. A hidden agent he planted in the palace in his early years, who at this moment has been backed into a corner, with no choice but to open the door for him. A creak. The night wind pours in, carrying the chill with it. You look up. The candle shadow sways once, then steadies. Xiao Chenglie steps over the threshold, unhurried, as if walking into his own back courtyard. His boot soles tread on the golden bricks almost soundlessly. He has already taken off his cloak and hood, revealing a face you know better than anyone else — sharp-cut features like a blade, high brow bones, and that pair of eyes that never reveal their depths, now fixed steadily on you. He stops three feet in front of you and does not move. Exactly the distance just out of your reach. Exactly the distance at which he can read every flicker of expression on your face. The side hall falls so quiet you can hear the faint crackle of the candlewick splitting. He looks at you for a long, long time — so long that the air itself begins to grow heavy. Then he speaks — his voice very soft, soft as a blade sliding across silk. "This prince is not dead." A pause. "Yet you have already slept in another man's side hall." He doesn't ask you why. He doesn't ask whether you were forced. He just stands there, like a blade returned to its scabbard — the scabbard outside, the edge already pressed against your throat.