Esmera locked her knees to keep her legs steady, but all it did was make her walk like a robot past the yaoguai flanking the doorway. Even so, she was still shaky as she entered the dining room on Ruagu's murderous arm, and the unexpected weight of the beautiful outfit on her frame didn't help.

Even so, she noticed the curtains framing the windows like clouds with silver linings and the benches forming a rectangle around the table, topped by silver and bronze seat pads like the coat of the snow leopard figurine at the centre of the table. Like Zaha, its eyes were completely white. Esmera fancied that the goddess was watching over her even as she felt dreadfully and undeniably alone.

Fortunately, the tyrant beside Esmera didn't notice her discomfort. He was too occupied with smirking at Tauram, who stood by the window with his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes on the floor while two yaoguai stood on either side of him, their gazes trained on him.

Why had Ruagu even brought Tauram here? To make him a servant? To mock him with the power he had stolen from him? It was a bold and possibly stupid move to invite the man whose throne he had stolen and whose family he had destroyed, but it spoke of the faith Ruagu had in his terrible power. A faith that Esmera might be able to use against him. She just didn't know how yet.

Ruagu led her to the table, his viper brushing against her as it slithered alongside them with a hiss. He stood by the head of the table, claiming the seat there as Esmera had expected he would. What she didn't expect was that he would hold out a cold, gnarled hand to help her step over the bench and sit down. Then again, maybe she should've expected it, that Ruagu would feign a gentleness he didn't naturally possess just to lure her in.

Esmera took her place with a hasty, murmured thanks while the king took his. Between them, his viper rested in a coil, eyeing Esmera with slitted, distrusting eyes. She wondered what his power was, if he could know what she was planning.

That was unlikely. At least, Esmera tried to convince herself of that as she looked away from his unsettling eyes.

The viper flicked his black tongue in Esmera's direction before turning to Ruagu, hissing. The usurper merely waved his hand, making no reply that gave Esmera an idea of what his familiar was saying about her. Tauram drifted nearer at Ruagu's beckoning, still avoiding eye contact with everyone seated at the table.

"Some jiaozi, please." Ruagu gave Tauram a mere glance before turning back to Esmera.

With hands as beautiful and mesmerising and graceful as always, Tauram lifted a steaming dish from the centre of the table. He uncovered it and, sliding the chopsticks out from their holder on the side of the dish, he held a dumpling over Esmera's plate.

It looked a bit different from momos, narrow as if they had been squeezed into their shape by a closed hand rather than the round dumplings she was so familiar with. Hopefully they tasted as good despite how different they looked.

Ruagu tutted. "Surely the rightful king should be familiar enough with the rules of etiquette to know that the monarch is served before any of his guests."

Tauram's jaw tensed at the condescension in Ruagu's words, but he said nothing, merely turned to the king with the jiaozi held out. After he had set four dumplings onto Ruagu's plate, the king held up a hand for him to stop.

Tauram turned to Esmera. Once two dumplings sat on her plate, she held up her hand. She had been hungry when the servants had been bringing in the food and tempted by their delicious aromas, but her appetite had since shrunken. Even two dumplings felt like too much to fit inside her when she sat before the man who had murdered her family.

Tauram frowned at her but made the wise move and turned away without a word. He set a golden tray of little golden bowls of sauces that Esmera. She waited for the king to help himself first, her lips clamped together even though there was so much she wanted to tell him about how much she hated him, hated being here with him.

Once Ruagu had raised his chopsticks and red-stained jiaozi to his mouth, Esmera helped herself. The dumpling tasted like cardboard on the outside and boiled cabbage on the inside, nothing like Belaren's flavourful creations. It was certainly not fit for a king, but Ruagu was already popping his second one into his mouth. Perhaps he and Esmera just had different tastes.

"So, where are you from?" Ruagu picked up another jiaozi with agile, ancient fingers.

Esmera swallowed her dumpling and stifled a groan. This was a first date like any other, except she hadn't consented to it, and the penalty for not wanting a second one was death.

"Arkōsāra, but you knew that." She met Ruagu's eyes and hoped her gaze wasn't as withering as she wanted it to be, or he'd see right through her facade before she got close enough to end his.

"Indeed." Ruagu inclined his head, still watching her, the dumpling hovering in front of his mouth. "But where exactly did you live? I'm curious to know where the portal your crafty mother snuck you to led."

Esmera opened her mouth to reply then shut it again. It felt like a betrayal of her dead mother, the only reason she had survived the massacre, to give Ruagu the answer he asked for, but surely there was no harm in it this many years after the time. She was already in Ruagu's clutches. Only by appearing cooperative would she get out of it.

Esmera took a breath. "The USA."

"Ah." Ruagu helped himself to his fourth dumpling. "And what was it like there? Growing up alone?"

Esmera clenched her jaw as she took hold of her second jiaozi with fingers less accustomed to using chopsticks.

Ruagu asked her that as if he cared. As if he had forgotten that he was the reason Esmera had grown up an orphan. She wanted to summon the army he had killed her family to protect himself from right in that moment, but she only relaxed her face and gave a soft smile, stifling her simmering fury.

"It was difficult." Esmera measured her words as she spoke. "Fighting for food. Fighting for survival. Never having enough of anything to go around, no matter where I was."

Ruagu gave her a sympathetic smile as genuine as crocodile tears as he helped himself to his final dumpling, but Esmera somehow managed to keep herself from snapping that out. The tyrant waved Tauram forward with the next course, some kind of rice dish interspersed with pale pieces of prawns and bright green peas.

Ruagu took four heaped spoons of the dish. It smelt sweet, almost cloying. Esmera only asked for one spoonful, not knowing if she could eat another and not wanting to overcommit. Tauram ignored her gesture for him to stop and gave her another spoon before she could stop him. She glared up at him. He met her eyes unflinchingly.

He looked away, but not before Esmera realised that she had never seen his eyes so empty. So hollow, looking into a brittle soul. She didn't know how much of that was Ruagu and how much was her.

I'm sorry, she thought, even though she knew it was in vain, that he couldn't hear her thoughts. I'm so, so sorry.

Ruagu cleared his throat, and Esmera looked back at him, plastering that smile that pained her cheeks with its insincerity. She hoped it was nice to look at, at least. She hoped it was convincing.

"You know..." Still with his chopsticks in one hand, Ruagu slid the other over Esmera's. His palm was as rough as tree bark. Any harder, and his touch would graze her skin. "You would never again have to endure any of that if you were married to me."

No? Esmera wanted to say. No, I wouldn't, but I would be humiliated by your affair and constantly terrified by your power.

Esmera knew that how he had treated Ghallia was no way to live, but she had to pretend she saw the appeal in a life with him more than the disadvantages, even if she had to lie about it through her teeth.

"It would be nice not to worry about all my bills even when working three jobs." The tears rising into Esmera's eyes were real. She may have left the worst of her life behind her, but her struggles would always haunt her.

A life free from the challenges Esmera had once known would be nice, but she had to make sure that Ruagu never distracted her from the fact that it was he who had done this to her.

"I can give you that freedom, peace, luxury and more if you pledge your allegiance to me." Ruagu cradled her cheek with his scratchy palm.

"I do pledge it," Esmera breathed, leaning towards him even though everything inside her withdrew from him.

His eyes were a solid black with no dimension to depth to them. Fine scars were etched into his skin, a mark of all the battles he had fought just to be in this seat today. But it was his pale pink lips that caught her eye as they curved.

"But, my dear Esmera, how can you pledge your allegiance to me when it doesn't even belong to you?" His eyes crinkled as he watched hers widen.

Esmera's stomach dropped. She narrowed her eyes at Ruagu's snake who still sat beside them, looking at her with what she could've sworn was a slithering, serpentine smile. She fought to keep her tone even l. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that my viper can smell Tauram all over you." He smiled, tracing his pointed fingernail over Esmera's lips. She flinched, expecting that he would draw blood but tasted none as she ran her tongue over her lip. "I mean that it only took him a single touch to know that my dearest friend and foe is your greatest weakness." He laughed softly, darkly. "This couldn't have worked out any better if I had planned it, me bringing him here to watch you betray him in the worst way." Ruagu looked between them, glee dancing in his wicked eyes.

Esmera shot a panicked look at Tauram. She hadn't meant for Ruagu to find out about them, but she should've known that he would. He was the type of person to know who or what to use against his enemies. Esmera was the fool for thinking that she would be the one to outsmart him after all the centuries he had lived.

Tauram's eyes flashed with the same fear. Then their expression vanished from them as though something had shut off inside him.

Esmera's heart clenched. She kept her eyes on Tauram, not knowing what to feel or think even as she was sure she was watching her plan spinning out of control.

"You must've told Tauram the same thing too, that you belong to him." Ruagu turned her face to him, and there was nowhere for her to look but those endless, malicious black eyes. "And it can't have been that long ago." He tsked. "Hong tells me the scent is quite fresh."

Esmera cast her eyes downwards, blinking to contain her tears before she hardened her eyes enough to look at him. She took a deep breath to control her panic, but her voice still quivered when she spoke, revealing her as both a coward and a liar. "It wasn't like that. It was just one night that we spent together when we were both lonely. That's it."

With trembling hands, Tauram filled Esmera's glass without her asking. It was the familiar, greyish, cloudy litchi juice, which he had also chosen for her without asking.

Her tears returned with a vengeance, blurring her eyes until the world turned smudgy around her. The gesture seemed futile, just like defiance, just like hope.

Even so, there was some incessant, persistent part of Esmera that wasn't ready to give up, that wouldn't be until she had breathed her last breath.

That was why she lied again, grateful that Jammas wasn't there to expose her or be disappointed in her.

"I do swear my allegiance to you and only you."

Esmera's gaze wavered as Ruagu drew her face to his. She hoped that he didn't notice, that his serpentine familiar hadn't realised how her fear betrayed her dishonesty.

Ruagu leaned closer to Esmera, smiling. "Prove it."

Esmera took a shaky breath. She was losing the lead she had worked and planned for, all because of Ruagu's pesky snake's annoying ability. There was only one thing to do, one thing that might convince Ruagu that Tauram was as meaningless to Esmera as he wanted him to be.

Esmera pulled Ruagu to her and kissed him. He didn't pull back as she thought he would, sceptical, scornful. Instead, he leaned into her, into it. Like he believed it.

He grazed her lower lip with his teeth. She flinched and managed to turn her whimper into a moan that she hoped would convince him that she was enjoying this even as she tried not to expel the little she had eaten from her stomach. Even as she could barely breathe from fear and terror and heartbreak.

She was doing this to protect Tauram and his kingdom, but in that moment, when she heard him knock one of the plates off the table and curse under his breath, she hated that this was what she had to resort to.

But his accident reminded her of her purpose. She pressed herself closer to Ruagu and felt him smile against her. Her fingers stroked the back of his neck. Her heart sped up as she touched the knot tying the string holding the heartstone around Ruagu's neck. She was seconds away from ending this, and she couldn't afford to mess it up.

Once Ruagu was accustomed to Esmera's wandering fingers, she began to pick at the knot tying the heartstone around his neck, shielding her one hand from the yaoguai and the viper's sight with the other. It loosened and loosened until it came undone.

But Esmera was too slow to catch the heartstone as it fell, and it landed in Ruagu's lap between him and Esmera. He finally pulled away, blinking himself out of his haze and then smirked down at it.

"That was a noble attempt but unfortunately a tad too slow, Esmera Finnaaz." Ruagu smiled as he touched his hand to Esmera's chest, the same hand he had been running through her hair just a moment earlier.

It happened in slow motion. It started as a brownish discolouration, like a marshmallow toasted over a fire. Then it spread like wildfire through a forest across the surface of Esmera's skin and into her chest. She grasped the edge of the table in pain, her knuckles tight, pale.

Esmera had never realised how painful Ruagu's deadly touch was. It was some consolation that she knew she only had a few moments to live with it.

It smelled too, burning through her flesh like acid, crackling like cautery as a surgeon saved a dying man's life. Esmera had heard it on a TV show once. She imagined it had smelt and sounded the same way when the doctors fixed her up after Stephan stabbed her, only then, she hadn't been awake to be aware of it.

Then Esmera couldn't hold herself up anymore, and she was slumping sideways into the seat beside her. Her mind distorted with pain, but in the recesses of her memory, there was something she had to do.

Tauram. Milatanur. The Finnaaz Army.

"Avenge me," she gasped out. She flinched at the flash of pain that passed through her chest.

Ruagu hovered over her, smiling with sickening satisfaction as he prepared to rot away the rest of Esmera, but two pairs of terracotta hands pulled him off her with a yell.

It could only be the Finnaaz Army. Esmera couldn't see far enough to be certain of that, but surely this couldn't have been in vain.

The days of planning. The nights of searching and tracking. The kiss she had shared with a viper. The artist king's heart that she had broken.

Surely this couldn't all have been for nothing.

Then Tauram was leaning over Esmera. His eyes were wide, urgent. He shook her. His mouth was moving, but she couldn't hear what he was saying.

She couldn't hear anything except her decaying, traitorous heart as it slowed, turning more and more feeble in her ears.

Tauram shook her again. His lips moved quickly, frantically, but she still couldn't make out his words.

Esmera struggled to focus her eyes, but her vision cleared, and she could see him. She still couldn't hear them though, and maybe it was just wishful thinking that she read his lips to say, "I love you."

She tried to say his name, but she hated that she could only manage to mouth it. A trail of blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She couldn't even lift her hand to wipe it away even as she wanted to, even as she didn't want him to remember her like this.

Were those tears in his eyes? He touched her lips with his thumb, shaking his head. She wanted to tell him not to cry for her, but if she couldn't hear him, maybe he couldn't hear her either.

Tauram turned and scrambled away from her. She barely had time to process that before he returned, something green glowing in his hand. He shook Esmera again, but now she was sinking for good.

Everything faded to black, that green glow in Tauram's hand the last spot of brightness to burn out.