She blinked in confusion. ‘What?’

  He just gently grinned and turned away.

  Prince Qianzhong’s shadow pushed through the clouds, until he finally became solid and clear before their eyes. There was an indifferent benevolence in him; it was as though killing Bao Jinmeng and taken something from him too, and that loss was something small and little yet impossibly crucial. If his wife’s death had been a lethal stab to the heart, then killing his brother-in-w was the gentlest thought that gave him the tiniest step off the greatest cliff.

  But what y at the bottom of that cliff?

  In his eyes, Hu Yingliu saw, was a flickering light that was too familiar to her, too intimate to the girl she called Three.

  It was the look of someone who’d decided to abandon everything for a single belief.

  He whispered, ‘Chanzui, I will spare you, if you just take my deal. You don’t have to die a useless death here.’

  ‘I won’t wrong Mother again,’ the Sixth Prince hissed. ‘I’d rather —’

  ‘Is it such a terrible thing for me to be emperor?’ Then, as though looking down on a particurly ignorant and wilful child, he sighed and said, ‘I just wanted such a small thing…’

  And waves of qi poured out into the air.

  It was like a vat of boiling oil toppled into water; the stagnant qi in the air, the leftovers of her backfire, broiled with explosive desperation and craving. The impossible depth of it, the almost bitter-sweet taste of the emotions locked in it, told her:

  This man was a monster.

  ‘Your Highness,’ she roared, ‘protect Xi Yu! She can’t —’

  ‘Withstand it, I know,’ Xi Chanzui muttered, darting back out of her sight. ‘I’ll set up a barrier for her, but you’ll have to —’

  ‘Deal with him, I know.’ She swallowed back her fear; her meridians, dry of any usable lifeforce, tingled with pain from the sharp air. Like a giant web of steel, the ends all held in Prince Qianzhong’s grip, her every breath and movement cut lines thinner than silken threads in her skin.

  He could behead her at any moment.

  He was just pying with her.

  ‘Everything you’re doing is useless, Three,’ Prince Qianzhong said. His face twisted with cold anger, as though it was carved into the ice of his face. With each word, the emperor loomed closer; she forced herself to stand guard, desperately crushing her terror underfoot along with her heart as a gash was split open on her cheek. ‘By cutting away the shadow guard’s chains, the sins you have committed in this life now fall squarely on your head. You, who have syed hundreds, your own lover, and now your love’s own mother —’

  His head tilted as she twisted with fear.

  He whispered, ‘What makes you think you’re worthy of my daughter?’

  A poison of fury, terror, and an overwhelming denial coursed through her veins. It snapped her free — she lunged to the other man, her bdes swinging, but each blow was met with invisible steel cables, never touching and never coming close.

  ‘All of your efforts, no matter how righteous or heroic, are pointless in the face of death. Who have you the right to live after killing so many?!’ Prince Qianzhong’s words, each sharper than the deadliest knives cut deep into her, far deeper than her flesh wounds ran. The pain burned at her chest as though to rip her heart in two; the bloodied screech from her lungs brought boiling tears to her eyes.

  ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ She roared and her bdes swung, a madness drowning her as she screeched, ‘You don’t understand anything —’

  The prince ughed at the top of his lungs, an arm shing out.

  An invisible whip sshed into her — with a scream, a long red gash was slit across her stomach, sent flying as she stumbled to a stop at the foot of the cage.

  A pair of harsh breaths thudded behind her as she crawled back up, the air so thick with power it was like mud. Behind her, the qi slowly rippled — Xi Yu had begun to stir from her sleep. Her brother did not speak, with only his breathing growing evermore boured.

  She didn’t speak, instead pushing out again to stand before Prince Qianzhong. Invisible wires of pure lifeforce snapped past her skin — the gashes split across her nose, her shoulder, her legs, and for each one she would grip them with her scarred fingers and slowly climb across.

  But he did not kill her.

  Even as she was finally forced to her knees from blood loss at his feet.

  ‘You hate me,’ she whispered, looking up at those beautiful red eyes, ‘but you won’t kill me?’

  ‘You will die here today,’ he said. ‘But…’ His head tilted up to peer down at his children. ‘Three. If you just torture yourself to death, I’ll… I will save Qian’e and let Chanzui live. Just that, little guard.’ Then he cut himself off and said, ‘No, just kill yourself. Just do it yourself, and they will both live. Don’t you love her? It isn’t much to ask.’

  What was he even saying?

  Her eyes widened.

  What kind of bullshit was he even sprouting?

  She ughed as though mad, ‘How will dying even save them?!’ Her ughter grew louder, louder and louder until it boiled off the walls and shook her every bone. ‘You’re the one holding the strings. Whether I live or die, it is you who tried to kill your children, it’s you who attempted filicide!’

  Her hands reached up, seizing Prince Qianzhong’s pels. She pulled him down — down from that high pce on his feet to his knees, kneeling with her, kneeling to the cage and his children, and he didn’t stop her as her hands reached up to his colrbones and she gripped at his shoulders, his hair caught in her fists. ‘You give yourself all these fucking excuses! I tell you now, Xi Qianzhong, Devout and Loyal Prince, you are no different from me. The people you pn to kill, the people you have sin — your daughter, your wife, your brother, your sister —’

  Her eyes, her voice, swallowed his quaking will.

  She leaned forward to his ear and whispered, ‘All of their blood stains none but your hands.’

  Then her hand seized his head.

  Two fingers at the top of his head.

  One finger at the base of his skull.

  He froze.

  His breaths came out short. His qi rippled — it was as though the walls of a pond had all colpsed, the water spilling out to seep into the soil, vanishing without a trace like seafoam.

  ‘You have no more excess qi,’ he whispered. ‘You can’t kill me like this.’

  Then a woman’s voice said, ‘But we do.’

  Then four hands were pressed to her back — a billowing wave of qi flooded into her torn meridians, pain bursting across every bit of her body.

  The two siblings.

  They were helping her kill their father.

  ‘Wait,’ Xi Chanzui said. ‘I just want to know.’

  His qi — a thick mix of anger, disappointment, grief and shattered expectation — poured into Hu Yingliu’s veins faster than any drug or poison could. His sister’s had the taste of bitter relief, a sad mellow that no wine could bring and a worry that warmed her bones like roasted chestnuts.

  Xi Yu asked, ‘Did you ever truly love us?’

  Xi Chanzui asked, ‘Did you ever value our family?’

  The kneeling prince bowed his head. He no longer fought against the fingers that pressed on his skull. ‘I did,’ he said. ‘But not enough.’

  His children’s hands pressed into her back. She clenched around his head, the borrowed qi coursing through her body, until a white light shone from each of her fingertips. She pressed harder and harder, the father before her whimpering as his tears rolled down his face.

  Until finally.

  His whole body shattered into a bloody mist.