Chapter 29: Round Four

I should have closed the door.

I know that. Any sane person would have closed the door. This woman was the reason I lost my clan, my name, my allowance, my bed, and one shoe. Her husband was First-rate. Her husband had paid a gang to break my legs. Her husband had sent her away to the countryside specifically so this could never, ever happen again.

I should have closed the door.

Instead I just stood there with my mouth open while Madam Seol Hwa-ryeon walked past me into my room like she owned it.

She looked around. The cracked jar. The broken stool. The bed that groaned if you breathed on it.

"This is where you live now?"

"Since you got me thrown out of my house? Yeah."

She turned around and laughed. That laugh. Low and wicked and a little bit wild. The same laugh she used to throw over the Baek Clan wall at me when I was pretending to do sword drills in the courtyard and actually just watching her hang laundry.

"I got YOU thrown out?" She tugged off her riding gloves, one finger at a time. "Mu-jin. Sweetheart. Who climbed over whose wall?"

"...You invited me."

"I waved."

"You waved with your whole robe open."

"It was a hot day."

God. I’d forgotten how she was. How fast. How she talked like a knife fight.

She dropped her gloves on my stool. Then her hands went to the clasp of her black riding cloak.

"Wait," I said. "Wait, wait. Seol. Your husband—"

"Is asleep. In his own wing. With his guards. Who think I’m asleep in mine, three hours away, with the door locked from the outside." The clasp came open. "He’s been locking it every night since I got there. Did you know that? Like a prisoner. Like livestock."

The cloak slid off her shoulders and hit my floor.

Under it she wasn’t wearing a pretty silk robe. She was wearing a man’s riding clothes. Tight black trousers. Boots to her knees. A dark jacket buttoned to the collar, dusty from the road.

She’d climbed out a window to get here. I could see the scrape on her palm.

"He found out," she said quietly, "that I wasn’t the first. That there were others. Before you. Two of his own guards. A silk merchant from the capital." She smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. "I’m thirty-eight years old, Mu-jin. I married that man when I was seventeen. Twenty-one years of watching him play go and count his tea leaves. You think you were my first mistake?"

I didn’t say anything.

"You were just the first one he caught." She stepped closer. "And the first one who looked at me like I was alive."

[Target: Seol Hwa-ryeon.]

[Desire +20.]

There it was. That was her spark. Not my body. Not the system.

Twenty-one years of being furniture.

She unbuttoned the jacket slowly. Watching me the whole time. Daring me to stop her.

I didn’t stop her.

Under the jacket was a thin linen binding wrapped around her chest, soaked with sweat from three hours of hard riding. She peeled it off. Didn’t hurry. Didn’t hide. That body I’d only seen in a rush, three months ago, in the middle of the afternoon with guards walking past the window — I saw it now in lamplight. Slowly.

She was harder than I remembered. Leaner. Like the country estate had burned something off her. Her ribs showed a little. There were marks on her wrists where she must have tried a locked window more than once.

And her eyes were the same. Exactly the same. Wild. Hungry. Bored for twenty-one years and finally, finally awake.

"Last time," she said, "we didn’t get to finish."

"We got to round three."

"I said finish." She hooked one finger in the front of my robe and pulled. "I’ve been thinking about round four for three months. Locked in a room. Every night."

She kissed me.

And it wasn’t like anyone else.

Not shy like Yeon-hee. Not a duel like Ayla. Not careful like Seo-ah or desperate like Ji-yeon or cold-then-burning like Seo-rin. Seol kissed me like she was escaping something. Like my mouth was the open window and she was climbing out of it.

She pushed me back against the wall. My cracked rib screamed. I didn’t care.

"You’re hurt," she said against my lips.

"Long story."

"Tell me later." Her hands were already on my belt. "I don’t care about later."

The system pinged.

[Desire +25.]

[Target: Seol Hwa-ryeon.]

[Desire — MAXIMUM.]

The coal in my belly flared. Reached for her. Tried to—

[Harmony formation: locked.]

[Meridian recovery: 28 days remaining.]

Of course.

The first woman the system ever pinged for, three months ago, and now it wouldn’t even let me—

Wait.

Three months ago. Madam Seol was the first. The system was brand new. I didn’t know about maximum. I didn’t know about Harmony. I didn’t even know there WAS more.

Her number was already climbing back then. That afternoon, her husband slid the door open, and I ran, and—

We never finished.

She never maxed.

Until right now.

And the system was locked.

I almost laughed. The timing on this thing. Honestly.

Then her hand found what it was looking for, and I stopped thinking about the system at all.

Through the wall, very faintly, something tapped.

Tap. Tap.

Ayla’s code. Two taps. I hear you.

I didn’t notice.

Seol had me on my back on my groaning bed. Her riding trousers were somewhere on the floor. Her hair was all over both of us. My hands were on her hips and her hands were braced on my chest, right over my bandages, and she was looking down at me like she’d ridden three hours in the dark just to see my face from exactly this angle.

"Round four," she breathed.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Three taps now. Harder. Faster.

I still didn’t notice.

Down in the courtyard, somewhere far away, a horse whinnied. Then another. Then a lot of them.

Seol leaned down and kissed me again, slower now, and lowered herself—

TAP TAP TAP TAP.

And from the walkway outside my door, not a tap — a whisper. Sharp. Urgent. Seo-rin’s voice, no clack, no calm, nothing I’d ever heard from her before:

"Mu-jin. Torches at the gate. Gu crest. Twenty men. He’s here."

I froze.

Seol froze.

We stared at each other.

"He followed me," she whispered. Her face had gone white. "He must have checked the lock. He must have—"

Footsteps on the stairs.

Not the clumsy footsteps of a drunk dock thug. Not the shuffling of a porter. Heavy. Even. Measured. Every step landing exactly the same. The footsteps of a man who’d been doing sword forms every morning for forty years.

And then I felt it.

I’d felt Cha’s qi. Sharp. Cold. A needle. I’d felt Hwang’s. Deep and controlled.

This was different.

This was a mountain.

It rolled up the stairs ahead of him like a wave. Pressed down on the whole east wing. My chest locked. My lungs stopped. The lamp on my stool flickered and went flat, like even the flame was scared. Through the wall, I heard Ayla’s husband snort awake and say, "What in the—"

First-rate.

Real First-rate. Not someone teaching it. Not someone holding back in a training hall. A First-rate martial artist, furious, walking up the stairs toward the room where his wife was naked on top of the boy who ruined his name.

Seol grabbed my face.

"Mu-jin. The window—"

The footsteps stopped.

Right outside my door.

Nobody breathed. Not me. Not Seol. Not Seo-rin on the walkway. Not Ayla through the wall.

In my last life, I died alone at a desk.

In this one, I was naked on a broken bed with a married woman, and a First-rate swordsman was standing on the other side of a paper door.

And I thought — weirdly, stupidly, right then — at least I’m not alone.

The door didn’t open.

It exploded.

Paper and splinters and Seo-rin’s red patch with her little stamped seal blew across the room in a storm. The doorframe cracked in half. Cold night air came rushing in.

And standing in the wreckage, in the lantern light from the walkway, was a tall, thin, gray-bearded man with a face I’d last seen going purple in my father’s main hall.

Elder Gu.

He wasn’t purple now.

He was white. Perfectly calm. Perfectly still. A long straight sword in his hand, drawn, the blade humming with so much qi it made the air around it shimmer like heat over a summer road.

He looked at his wife.

He looked at me.

"Baek Mu-jin," said Elder Gu quietly.

Three months ago, I ran.

Over the wall. One shoe. Pants down.

I looked past him. The walkway. The railing. A three-story drop to the courtyard full of torches and twenty Gu Clan swords.

Behind me, my one window. Barred from outside by the inn after the tusk. Seo-rin’s idea. For my safety.

Elder Gu lifted his sword.

"This time," he said, "there is no wall."