The secret passages behind the archive walls were narrow, damp, and smelled of ancient earth. Zhenkai pulled me through the dark, his hand locked around mine so tightly I could feel the frantic rhythm of his pulse through his palm.
The stabilizer was wearing off. My legs turned to water, and I stumbled, my shoulder hitting the cold stone.
"Meilin!"
He caught me before I hit the ground, swinging me into a small alcove hidden behind a statue of a weeping crane. He pressed his back against the stone door, listening for the heavy boots of Fang's guards echoing in the main hall.
Silence fell, thick and heavy with the scent of dust and the metallic tang of our shared blood.
"I can't... my heart," I whispered, clutching his tunic. The poison was tightening its grip again, making my chest feel like it was being crushed by iron bands.
"Look at me." Zhenkai's voice was a ragged command. He dropped his sword and cupped my face with both hands. His skin was hot against my icy cheeks. "Focus, Meilin. I am right here. You are not in the river. You are in my arms."
I leaned my forehead against his collarbone, gasping for air. The intimacy was a different kind of pain—a beautiful, terrifying ache. For five years, I had been touched only by blades and cold wind. Now, the heat of him was shattering the ice I had built around my heart.
He tilted my chin up. In the dim sliver of moonlight filtering through a high vent, his eyes weren't those of an Emperor. They were the eyes of the boy who had watched me jump—full of five years of unsaid apologies and desperate longing.
"I thought I had killed you," he breathed, his thumb tracing the curve of my lower lip. The gesture was so tender, so ruinously intimate, that it hurt more than the poison. "Every night for two thousand nights, I woke up reaching for a ghost."
"I hated you," I whispered, my voice breaking. "I survived only to see you bleed."
"Then see me," he countered, stepping closer until there was no air left between us. He took my hand—the one still clutching a dagger—and pressed it directly over his heart. "Feel it. It's yours. It has always been yours. If you want me to bleed, do it. But don't you dare leave me again."
His gaze dropped to my lips. The tension pulled tight, a wire about to snap. He leaned in, his breath ghosting over my mouth, hesitating as if asking for permission from the girl he had once lost.
I didn't push him away. I reached up, my fingers tangling in the dark silk of his hair, pulling him down.
The kiss was desperate—a collision of salt, copper, and five years of buried grief. It wasn't soft; it was a battle. It was the taste of survival. He groaned low in his throat, his arms wrapping around my waist, lifting me until my toes barely touched the floor. In that dark, narrow tunnel, the Emperor and the Shadow vanished. There was only us.
He pulled back just an inch, his forehead resting against mine, both of us heaving for air.
"The antidote is in the High Alchemist's lab," he rasped, his eyes dark with a new kind of fire. "I will get it for you. Even if I have to tear this palace down stone by stone."
I reached for the mask hanging from my belt, but he caught my wrist.
"No," he said, his voice dropping to a protective growl. "No more masks between us. If we die tonight, I want to die looking at Meilin, not Forty-Seven."
He reached into his inner robe and pulled out a small silk pouch. He opened it to reveal a single, crushed petal of a Red Lotus—the flower of my house. He had carried it for five years.
"I found this in the river the morning after you jumped," he said softly. "I told myself that if I ever found you, I would give it back."
He tucked the petal into the folds of my tunic, right over my heart. Then, he picked up his sword, his face hardening back into the mask of the Emperor.
"Stay behind me. We're going to the West Tower."