Page 47 of The Nightblood Prince

My breath caught in my throat. Siwang was a man who cared for his duties above all else.

Never in my life would I expect him to say something like this.

A warm silence fell between us, and I desperately wanted to reach across the table and hold his hands, pull his body against mine and hold him.

I wanted to tell him that everything was going to be okay, though I didn’t believe it. “Can we still turn this war around?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you know?”

“This.” With that, Siwang leaned forward and kissed me.

Really kissed me. It wasn’t the gentle touch of lips that it had been before. This time, there was hunger, and neither of us was afraid to pull the other in. His arm wrapped around my waist, our bodies so close I could feel the heat of him through our clothes, and his hard muscles underneath.

One violent swipe of his hand, and the porcelain tea set shattered on the floor.

He pressed me down onto the table, and I pulled him in closer.

His hand slipped through the folds of my robe and I pushed my body against him, desperate to feel more of him.

I burned hotter with each heart-pounding inch left between his hands and my flesh, already going soft for him, craving the roughness of his fingers, craving him.

Siwang pulled himself back. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I lost control of myself. I—”

“I want you,” I whispered against his ear, slowly crawling into his lap and guiding his hands toward my thighs. If this was the touch that the concubines went feral for, then I understood now. “If not now, we might never get this chance again.”

“Fei, you shouldn’t. You don’t have to, I mean.” Even as he said this, his fingers were sliding up my legs, his lips kissing me with more fever than before.

My body was as hungry as his, and I was sick of suppressing this want. No matter what happened tomorrow, and tomorrow’s tomorrow, I didn’t want to regret a thing. For it suddenly occurred to me: after tonight, I might never see him again.

“Fei, we can’t…I want to do this right.” Though he said this, he did not push me away. He only held me tighter, his lips claiming mine between breaths.

“As long as it is with you, it is right.” I pulled myself away so I could look at him, so he could see that I meant these words. “I want it to be with you.”

I moaned and my whole body quivered when his fingers finally touched me where I wanted him to. My breath hitched as I felt his fingers enter me, so much bigger than mine, so much stronger. He moved slowly at first, then quicker.

Harder, I wanted to beg him. My hand wandered lower like the concubines said to do when pleasing a husband. When my fingertips reached between his thighs and brushed him, the mighty Siwang mewed like a kitten, the softest sound I had ever heard him make.

“Fei,” he whimpered, pulling me closer, lips trailing my jaw, neck. Kissing, biting, sucking. “I love you.”

There it was.

The unspoken confession from earlier. The words I’d almost heard him utter before self-control got the better of him. Always controlled. Always composed. So much had changed between us, yet so much was the same.

I kissed him harder. With every aching want inside me, I kissed him. He was the temptation I had resisted for too long. But just because Lifeng Fei and Crown Prince Rong Siwang could never be happy together, it didn’t mean we couldn’t have this moment.

“I love you,” he whispered again.

I love you, too, I wanted to say. Especially now, as I invited him closer, guiding him toward all of me.

“I love you, Fei!” he cried as he entered me, and I flinched. It hurt, but I wanted him so much I didn’t care. I needed him more than I had ever needed anything. I was desperate for more.

Siwang moved slowly, cautiously, as if I were a delicate vase he didn’t want to break. I smiled at the thought of me, breakable.

I grabbed his waist and pulled him in, until I felt like my world was consumed by him.

I wanted him to remember me.

If anything happened, I wanted him to die not with the echoes of me leaving him under snowfall, but with this memory of our embrace.

Siwang’s touch was soft, his lips sweet and heady like the plum wines we used to steal from his father’s feasts, two giggling kids running through the gilded halls. His eyes were always on me, even back then, and he did whatever I told him to.

My prince.

My Siwang.

His teeth brushed my neck as we moved, our raspy breaths the most beautiful symphony I had ever heard. Back arched, my hand tangled in his silky hair to keep him close, I felt myself growing hotter, lighter, higher.

The warm candlelight in Siwang’s tent flickered as the world turned darker, darker, darker, until I was standing in the middle of a bloodied battlefield, stained crimson. Half-dead men and severed limbs were scattered at my feet. Swords and axes and arrows flew from alldirections.

And at the center of the chaos was Siwang, on his knees, a bloodied gash in his torso and another one in his leg.

“Siwang!” I tried to run, pumping my legs furiously to close the distance between us. But no matter how hard I forced myself to move, he was always beyond reach. Blood pooled around him, crimson as winter roses.

Before him stood a young man swathed in silvery white, too pristine to belong on the battlefield. He raised his sword, and—

“No!” I gasped awake to the interior of Siwang’s tent, a white tiger’s pelt draped over my body.

It was a vision. Magic lingered like a hum on my skin, Fate’s touch ringing in my ears.

“You can’t go to Changchun,” I said as I reached across the bed for Siwang.

Only to find it empty, except for a piece of paper.

Stay safe. Wait for me, the note read. I love you.

He was gone.

I leaped to my feet and quickly gathered my robes. By the time I ran outside, half the camp was either gone or in the process of packing.

“What’s happening?” I asked the man guarding the tent.

He bowed as soon as he saw me, as if I were someone important.

I guessed that to him, I was, considering I had climbed into bed with the crown prince last night.

I blushed. “The prince and the commanders got word that the situation at the front is becoming dire. They had to leave overnight with the First Battalion. The Second and Third will follow in the coming days.” He spoke with the rigid fluidity of a well-practiced speech, which meant there was more that he wasn’t telling me.

Siwang wouldn’t leave in the middle of the night without a good reason.

“What kind of emergency?”

The man opened his mouth, then closed it. He had not rehearsed this part half as well. I pulled out my dagger and slammed him against the pole of the tent. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know! I’m just a guard!”

“What do you know, then?”

“The…the prince told me to tell you to wait for him if you asked anything.”

Wait for him? Who was I? A docile wife, expected to sew and embroider while she waited for her beloved to come back from the war?

I let him go. “Very well.”

I could send a messenger to warn Siwang, but what if the message couldn’t reach him in time? In the dream, I had no idea where they were. I didn’t see Changchun in the background. They could have been ambushed for all I knew.

They’d left last night. If I left within the hour, I’d still have a chance of catching them before they reached Changchun.

“Can I borrow a horse from the stables?” I asked the guard, not knowing if he had the power to grant my request. Horses were valuable in the army, and we didn’t have many to spare.

“The prince left his steed, Beifeng, for you.”

I paused. Beifeng was the fastest horse in the land; this boded well for me. “Did he tell you anything else?”

“No.”

I had never been to Changchun; I knew only that it was south of here. “Get me a map, fast. Prince Siwang’s life depends on it.”

I slipped back into the tent and picked up the silver-tipped bow Siwang had also left behind.