Delicious Poison
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8
The Baofang, Beijing, Autumn, 1519
He came back the following night.
She had told herself he would not. She had spent the day constructing a reasonable architecture of expectation — a man of his appetites, his access, the sheer number of women in this house who had been here longer and knew him better. He would satisfy his curiosity and move on. That was what collectors did. They acquired, they examined, and they moved on to the next remarkable thing.
He came back the following night and sat on the edge of her bed and removed her shoes.
She looked at him doing this. He was not looking at her — he was looking at what he was doing, with the same focused attention he gave to his bow and his languages, as though her shoes were worth his full concentration. As though she was worth his full concentration. As though there was nowhere else he was supposed to be and nothing else he was supposed to want.
She had armor for conquest. For being taken like a trophy, rutted and set aside. She had built that armor over the journey east, had reinforced it through the duel and its aftermath and the first night, and it was solid and she trusted it.
She had not built armor for a man removing her shoes like they were precious.
He looked up at her when he was done and she looked back and the lamp was burning low and his face in that light was the working face, not the Emperor face, the one she had first seen on the training ground — the face of a man doing something that mattered to him.
She was what mattered to him. She could see it and could not decide what to do with it and so she did nothing, held very still, and let him begin.
He kissed her with the patience that was not technique but temperament, and she held herself separate from it, managed it, observed it from a careful interior distance. He moved to her throat and she breathed. His hands found her and he knew — he knew with the certainty of a man who had given this his genuine study — every place on her body that was not neutral, every place that registered, and he did not rush through them on his way to something else. He treated each one as the destination.
She managed this for a while.
She managed it until his mouth moved to her breast and his hands moved lower and she felt what his hands found and she was — she was completely undone by it, immediately, without the warning she would have needed to brace for it, and the sound she made was involuntary and she hated it with a ferocity that had nowhere to go because he continued as though he had heard nothing unusual, as though her response was simply information he was receiving and incorporating, and this was somehow more devastating than any reaction she could have anticipated.
He brought her over the edge with his hands before he came to her at all.
She lay in the aftermath of it breathing and staring at the ceiling and he was looking at her face with the wonder expression and she said, in Arabic, through her teeth, “Don’t look at me like that.”
He said, “Like what.”
“Like I am something you cannot believe is real.”
He said, quietly, “You are something I cannot believe is real.”
She had no answer for that. She looked at the ceiling and breathed and he kissed her jaw and her throat and her collarbone with the tenderness that was the thing she had no armor for — not the desire, the tenderness underneath it, the care of a man handling something he considered extraordinary and irreplaceable — and she felt it move through her like the wave she could not stop and did not stop, simply let it move.
When he came to her it was with the same patience and the same complete attention and she had nothing left to hold with, no distance remaining, and she was simply there in the room with him and it was nothing like anything she had experienced or imagined and she understood at some point in the middle of it that the sounds she was making were beyond her management and that she did not, at this precise moment, care.
He was thorough. He was patient. He was, she concluded somewhere in the long warm middle of the night, the most attentive man she had ever encountered in the specific way of someone who had given a thing his genuine focus until the thing yielded everything it had.
She lay afterward in the lamplight and breathed.
He lay beside her and was quiet. Not the quiet of a man who had finished and was elsewhere in his head. The quiet of a man who was completely present and had no need to fill the space with anything. She was aware of him beside her the way she was aware of the lamp, the warmth, the sound of the leopard somewhere in the dark outside — as a fact of the room, real and close.
She said, into the quiet, “That was not what I expected.”
He said, “What did you expect.”
She said, honestly, because she was a woman who said what she meant and had decided she was not going to stop being that woman inside these walls no matter what else changed, “Less. I expected considerably less.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I have been thinking about you since the first letter from Khotan.”
She turned her head and looked at him.
He said, “A woman who kills two guards in chains and then asks the next morning to learn Chinese. I had been thinking about you for two months before you arrived.”
She said, “And.”
He looked at her steadily. “The thinking was insufficient preparation.”
She looked at the ceiling of the Baofang and felt the night around her and thought: I am in serious trouble.
He came back the third night.
She had stopped constructing architectures of expectation by then. She simply waited, which was its own kind of surrender she did not examine, and heard his step in the corridor and felt her body recognize it before her mind formally registered it, and that too she did not examine.
He came in and looked at her and she looked back and there was the moment between them that had existed from the first night in the east reception room, the moment that had no clean name, and then he crossed the room and touched her face the way you touched something you were afraid of breaking and she held very still and breathed.
He worshipped her.
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