Chapter Thirty-Three Worse than Any Nightmare

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

WORSE THAN ANY NIGHTMARE

I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. I just hoped the signs were all in my head, that I was reading too much into the gradual change in the way he looked at me. The way those looks lingered. I mean, he told me he didn’t find me attractive in very explicit terms!

I should not have licked so many things in front of him.

Despite the panic racing through me, his kiss is gentler than expected, his mouth moving languidly against mine. It helps me suppress the urge to lurch away from certain danger. As things stand, I have more to gain from doing this with him than resisting it. What I wouldn’t give to unravel him, riffle through his mind the way he does with mine…

I think of the things I grudgingly admire about him. His unparalleled abilities. His striking intellect. His utter audacity. The fire in his eyes when he rallies the people to rise up.

Before I know it, I’ve looped my arms over his shoulders. He makes a low noise and clutches me closer by my hips, as if even my chest against his isn’t close enough. Desire curls inside me—

No, not me . This can’t be my own longing. It’s his , rolling off him like the ocean waves, as overwhelming as his spirit pressure. His hand slides over my rear, then he tips me backward. I brace for a plunge into seawater. Instead, I hit a soft mattress with him on top of me, his arms supporting himself on either side of my chest. My armor gives way to a thin robe. As warmth pools into me from our mingling mouths like melting honey, I recognize the dim new setting as his quarantine chamber. My own bed lies empty across the glass divider that’s meant to keep us apart.

“Have you fantasized about this?” I break from his lips to ask.

He tries to kiss me again without answering, but I press two fingers against his mouth and fix a demanding look up at him.

After a brief stare-down, he sighs, sounding almost as weary as when he was reminiscing earlier.

“Perhaps.” He picks up my robe sash, playing with it before slowly pulling it looser. “It’s indeed a tad maddening, lying beside you every night but being unable to pull you through that glass and touch you like this.”

His eyes lock onto mine. My sash comes undone with one decisive tug of his long fingers. My robe falls open, exposing me. I shiver, struggling to keep my head clear. It is very, very hard to think through the ravenous craving taking over me. I don’t know what to feel, knowing a need this potent was thrumming under his skin every time he looked at me. If I should welcome it or fear it.

It occurs to me that he didn’t need to manifest me with a piece of clothing still on. Maybe that’s part of the fantasy. To have me in his bed and undress me.

He grazes his lips from my breasts to my neck. His fingers brush past my stomach and slip between my legs.

“ Ah —” A startling jolt of pleasure arcs through me.

His mouth curves into a smile against my pulse. I bite my lip. It shouldn’t feel this good with so little effort. I think he’s making me feel it, the way he induces other sensations in me during training. I imagine him caressing a sprawling network of my raw, unprotected nerves, stroking them like the strings of an instrument.

“Not even the gods can hear us in here, empress,” he croons near my ear. “Moan for me.”

“Fuck off!” I snap instinctively before biting down harder on my lip.

“Hmm?” He withdraws his hand. The pleasure recedes like a tide. “Did you mean that?”

“…No,” I admit, so dismayed by the loss that I arch against him before I can help it.

He laughs and resumes what he was doing.

I make a small whine of frustration at how much I don’t want him to stop. He’s the last person I should be doing this with. I’ve had actual nightmares about it. I try to imagine him beheading someone to remind myself of how terrible he is, yet, disturbingly, for a reason I’m not willing to unpack, it makes me move more aggressively with him.

It reminds me of the painkillers the army doctors injected into me that time I got shot, how they made pure unnatural bliss course like sunlight through my veins. As with those painkillers, if I’m not careful, this will lead me to ruin.

“Whatever happened to finding me ‘mentally childish and physically repulsive’?” My words come out frail and slurred, as if I’m drunk on the overflowing heat between us.

“Perhaps you have grown on me. Besides…”—his lips hover above mine—“I never believed you innocent in these matters.”

He kisses me with renewed yearning.

I stop berating myself for going through with this. If he senses any resistance, I might not catch him so vulnerable again. I remind myself of the words that keep me sane: If Qin Zheng can touch me, it’s not real. This is not real. It doesn’t count. This is a game, one I won’t lose as long as I remember who and what he is.

My thighs tighten on either side of his hips. He pins my wrists to the bed. The golden thread linking us glows softly in the darkness, illuminating the way his fingers slide up to lace with mine. Giving up on maintaining any semblance of pride, I let gasps and moans escape me to the rhythm of sensation rolling through me. I let myself sound airy and helpless. I bet he likes that.

“ Shīfu …” I make myself whimper.

It riles him up as much as I suspected it would, driving him to kiss me again and again with a mad intensity.

Somewhere deeper in my consciousness comes a spill of memories I’ve never experienced. Scenes from two centuries past, rifles and flames and bombs and qì blasts, cries from advancing armies, humans against humans, Chrysalises against Chrysalises. War plans and speeches turning into demolished streets. Workers mobilizing in dingy factories. Finely dressed people getting strung from lampposts. Interpersonal drama with a lot of yelling and betrayal.

The unwinding of his mind into mine delights me more than anything he’s doing to me. The more I learn about him, the more I can use against him. I kiss him back harder, hungrier.

“ …Go work in the factory down the street, boy. We can’t keep feeding you for free… ”

“ …You were never supposed to crown yourself emperor! You are twisting our every ideal for your personal glory!… ”

“ …I didn’t raise you to butcher thousands!… ”

“ …If they cannot understand you, eliminate them. They will only hinder the revolution… ”

“ …Get some rest, Zheng’er. I will come back to you… ”

“ …Her Highness will never agree to this if we tell her… ”

I do a mental double take at that latest voice.

Yizhi’s.

I reel back the stream of Qin Zheng’s memories. I see Yizhi and Sima Yi in their purple robes, bowing before Qin Zheng’s quarantine chamber.

“Will you be the one to tell the empress she now has no choice but to be inseminated, Secretary Zhang?” Qin Zheng says, his voice mocking but sharp with simmering anger. “I believe she would take it best coming from you .”

“Actually, Your Majesty,” Yizhi says, “there’s a procedure that can produce a child between Your Majesty and Her Highness without her having to be the one to carry it.”

“Is that so?” Qin Zheng’s tone turns more normal. “How would it work?”

“We extract her eggs and fertilize them with Your Majesty’s necessary material in a lab,” Yizhi explains with clinical detachment. “Then we implant the embryos into a surrogate mother.”

“Yet that child would still belong to me and her? With no deficiencies?”

It’s Sima Yi who assures him, “They’ll be no different than if she birthed them herself. A brother of mine did the same procedure with his wife when they struggled to get pregnant. They’ve got a beautiful pair of twins now, his and hers by blood even though they came out of another woman. Honestly, when it comes to the pregnancy itself, it hardly matters which woman does it.”

Yizhi makes a hum of disapproval. “It does make a difference when it comes to maternal age. As I’ve said, Her Highness is way too young for it. A woman five to ten years older would have a smoother pregnancy. But Her Highness will never agree to this if we tell her, so it’s best if we extract what we need without her knowledge. It’ll involve giving her shots of hormones for about ten days and then an egg retrieval that can be done under anesthesia while she’s asleep. We can build the necessary equipment into her component of Your Majesty’s quarantine chamber. I believe this will both appease the gods and spare Her Highness from agony.”

I startle awake through several layers of consciousness until I draw in a frantic breath of real air. I lurch up in my bed on my proper side of the glass. On the other side, Qin Zheng rouses as well, blinking blearily at me.

Medical equipment looms in the shadows beside my bed, worse than any nightmare.