The Villainess Wants To Retire

Chapter 574: The emperor’s fear

"Move!" Soren’s voice cracked like a whip through the courtyard, sharp and lethal. He wasn’t the returning hero in that moment; he was the Emperor, and he was terrified.He barked orders at the gathered staff, his eyes scanning for the physician, his trajectory already locked onto the imperial wing.

Aldric opened his mouth to say something, perhaps a greeting, perhaps questions about his disappearance, but Soren was already moving, a blur of blood-stained armor and white silk.

Aldric closed his mouth understanding the desperation that bled from him.

Ryse stepped back. He had seen the Emperor in many configurations, in the heat of battle, in the cold of the council room, but he recognized this particular look.

This was a man who would cut down anyone who stood between him and the door. The crowd parted like water before a prow. The corridors opened, staff scattering to clear the path as the Emperor carried his wife toward their private sanctuary.

Eris didn’t protest. She couldn’t have if she tried. Being carried through the palace, she became aware of the sensory reality of him.

He smelled of sweat, old iron, and the metallic tang of dried blood. But underneath the grit of travel, there was him, the specific, underlying cold that was his signature. She had missed that scent without knowing how precisely she had catalogued it in her mind.

Her hands gripped the edges of his clohtes, her knuckles white. She didn’t let go. She couldn’t.

You’re real, she thought, the words a rhythmic chant against the back of her teeth. You’re here. You’re real. You aren’t a ghost.

She felt his heartbeat through the fabric, a frantic, thumping rhythm that matched her own. The corridors blurred past, tapestries, torches, stunned faces, until the heavy, familiar doors of the imperial wing arrived.

Soren kicked the door shut behind them. The sound was a finality, a wall built between them and the rest of the crumbling world.

The room was theirs. His absence was still there in the arrangement of his books and the lingering scent of his tobacco, but that absence was ending now. He set her down on the bed, his movements careful despite the desperate urgency vibrating through his muscles.

But what followed was not careful.

He kissed her the way a man kisses a woman when he has been to the edge of existence and back.

He needed to confirm her through every sense available, the taste of her, the feel of her skin, the sound of her breath catching in her throat.

His mouth found the hollow of her neck, his face burying itself in her hair as he inhaled. It was the inhale of someone breathing air for the first time after nearly drowning.

"For a second, I thought I wouldn’t see you again" he muffled against her skin, his voice thick and broken. "Every mile... every province... I was just measuring the distance back to you. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t let the dark take me because I knew you were waiting."

Eris wasn’t built for this kind of fluency. She had spent two lives learning how to hide her feelings, how to sharpen them into weapons. She didn’t have the words to match his.

Instead, she reached up, her hands cupping his face, her thumbs tracing the new lines of exhaustion around his eyes. She pulled him back so she could look at him, her gaze searing.

"I missed you," she said. It was simple. It was the only thing she had. But the way she said it, the raw, unshielded honesty of it, meant more than any poem.

Soren’s expression fractured. He looked like a man who had just been handed the only thing he actually wanted after a lifetime of being told he didn’t deserve it.

He returned to her then, his kisses continuing over her forehead, her collarbone, her wrists. He was taking an inventory, memorizing the map of her as if he feared she might vanish if he stopped touching her.

But then, his hands found the thin fabric of her nightgown, and he stilled.

The urgency slowed just enough for the soldier and the mage to re-emerge. In the flickering lamplight of the bedroom, he actually looked at her. Really looked at her.

He saw her face. He saw the tiredness that went deeper than normal fatigue, deeper than the stress of a missing husband.

It was a different kind of exhaustion, the kind that comes when the body’s reserves are being siphoned off by something internal that isn’t replenishing.

He noticed the thinness. She looked more fragile than when he had left. Her collarbones were too sharp; her wrists felt like glass in his hands.

Soren’s hands paused. His magic, always a part of him, reached out automatically toward the seal. He didn’t even think about it; it was a reflex, a check on the barrier that kept the Great Fire from consuming her.

He found the crack.

It was wider than before. Much wider. The seal wasn’t just strained; it was beginning to buckle under the internal pressure of the war between her fire and the something else that was there. The barrier he hoped to save her life was now the only thing keeping her from exploding, and it was failing.

Anxiety arrived, instant and cold.

Soren pulled back just enough to see her eyes, his hands remaining on her shoulders. "How have you been feeling?"

It was the specific evenness of a man asking a question while he was already calculating the probability of a catastrophe. He was a commander assessing a breach in the wall.

Eris read him instantly. She saw the fear behind the question, saw the way his eyes darted to the space where the seal sat in her core. She saw him doing the math, realizing that while he was gone, she had been dying.

She met his eyes, her expression settling into a mask of stubborn defiance.

"I’m fine," she said.

It was the biggest lie she had ever told him, and they both knew it.