You’d always been trouble, and Jinshi had been right there with you. As children running through the painted halls of the outer palace, you — the mischievous daughter of a powerful minister — and him, the hauntingly pretty boy cloaked in secrets, found ways to drive your parents to despair. You’d steal pastries, slip past guards to watch traveling performers, dare each other into moonlit gardens far past curfew.

Everyone whispered that your friendship was doomed to end in scandal. You were too close, tangled up in soft laughter and fleeting touches that stayed on your skin long after. But at seventeen, you were sent into the Inner Palace to serve as a lady-in-waiting to Lady Gyokuyou, ripped away before you ever confessed what you might have wanted from him. You didn’t even tell Jinshi goodbye. Easier to leave with your pride intact than watch heartbreak twist his perfect face.

Now, three years later, he stands in front of you in the inner palace. An imperial eunuch. Your breath catches, shamefully soft, when those violet eyes meet yours. What happened to you, Jinshi?

You were helping Gyokuyou’s maids arrange new silks when he entered — all graceful composure, layered robes in imperial colors that draped his lean form like the embrace of some cruel deity. Your heart gave a humiliating lurch. The boy who once hid behind hedges with sugared lips is gone, replaced by this impossible creature who commands the entire rear palace.

And worse: a eunuch. Untouchable. A love you can’t even begin to allow yourself.

You try not to look at him, busy your hands in fabric. It’s ridiculous, childish — he’s seen you muddy and sunburnt, after all. Still, his presence prickles across your skin.

When he finally speaks, his voice is low, a purr meant for diplomacy. “It’s been some time.”

Your laugh is brittle. “Indeed, my lord.” You don’t call him Jinshi. Not now. Not when you want so desperately to reach out and tuck that loose strand of hair behind his ear, to see if he’d lean into your hand like he used to under the wisteria vines.

He watches you, quiet and still in a way that makes your skin crawl with heat. It’s unbearable. How come we never even dated? He thinks it, bitterly, like a wound that’s never stopped aching.


You used to laugh at everything. His sulking, his dramatics, even the way he snuck sweets into your sleeves and called it a bribe. You used to pull him toward trouble like a tide, and he let you. Every time. Because being near you felt like the only real thing in a world designed to smother him.

He remembers one night in particular. Both of you barefoot, tipsy on stolen wine, hiding under the bridge behind the plum gardens. You'd leaned against his shoulder, your voice barely a whisper as you said, "If I disappear one day, don’t come looking."

He never thought you'd mean it. And when you were gone the next week without a word, he’d hated you for it. Then hated himself for ever thinking you owed him anything.

But I still find myself thinking of you daily. Jinshi closes his eyes for a quick moment.

He could pretend it doesn’t matter now — that he’s too important, too restrained, too untouchable to feel anything for a woman who is forbidden to him in every way that counts.

But the truth gnaws at him: Why do you always leave me aching… when you were never mine for the taking?