Chapter 28: The Wardrobe

The handle turned.

I stopped breathing. I stopped thinking. I pressed myself so far back into Ayla’s silk dresses that a hairpin stabbed me in the ass, and I didn’t even flinch.

The door opened one finger’s width. Gray dawn light cut across the dresses. I could see a sliver of him — a big shoulder, a dusty travel coat, a thick beard with crumbs in it.

Then Ayla’s voice, low and lazy, from the bed:

"Husband."

The door stopped moving.

"You ride all night," she said. "For me. With dates."

"Of course, flower! I—"

"Then why are you looking for a robe?"

Silence.

Through the crack, I watched the sliver of his shoulder turn away from me. Toward the bed. Toward whatever he was seeing there.

I heard a soft rustle. Silk sliding off skin. Hitting the floor.

Oh, God.

"...Flower," said the merchant, in a completely different voice.

"You stink like horse," said Ayla. "Come. The bathhouse is empty this early. I wash you myself."

"The BATHHOUSE? Downstairs? Now?"

"Now."

The wardrobe door swung shut with a soft click.

Heavy footsteps crossing the room. The rustle of a robe. Ayla laughing — that low chest laugh, the one I thought was only for me. The door sliding open. Their voices going down the walkway, his loud and happy and stupid, hers low and teasing.

Then nothing.

I stood in the dark between her dresses for a long, long time.

My heart was still going like crazy. But it wasn’t just fear anymore.

That laugh.

She was going to wash him. With her own hands. In the bathhouse where she sometimes dragged me at midnight.

I’d never felt this before. In either life. This hot, sour, stupid feeling in my stomach, worse than the yin overflow.

She’s not mine, I told myself. She’s his wife. He’s her husband. I’m the one hiding in his wardrobe with my dick out. I don’t get to feel like this.

I felt like this anyway.

Great. Jealousy. Another thing I never got to experience in my last life. Love that for me.

I got out of the wardrobe. Got into my own room. Got my own clothes on. Sat on my own bed with my cracked jar and my three-legged stool.

Ten minutes later, someone knocked. Two quick taps.

Yeon-hee.

Medicine bag over her shoulder. Fresh bandages in her hand. She took one look at my face and stopped in the doorway.

"What happened?"

"Ayla’s husband is back."

"Oh." She came in. Closed the door. "Oh, Mu-jin."

"I was in the wardrobe."

"Oh, MU-JIN."

"Naked."

She covered her mouth. I could see her shoulders shaking.

"It’s not funny."

"It’s a little funny." She sat beside me on the bed and started unwrapping my old bandages with quick, careful fingers. "And you’re jealous."

"I’m not jealous."

"Your pulse says you’re jealous." She pressed two fingers to my wrist without even looking. "It’s doing the same thing it did when I said my husband was coming home in three days. Remember? In the hot spring?"

I didn’t say anything.

She finished unwrapping. Looked at my ribs. Bruised. Ugly. Healing slow because all five Harmonies were asleep. She ran her fingertips over them, very lightly.

"Welcome to being the other one," she said softly. "It’s terrible. I’ve been doing it for weeks."

I looked at her.

She smiled. A little sad. A little teasing.

"When Dong-min comes home," she said, "I sleep next to him. And I think about you. And it’s terrible, and I feel guilty, and then I think about you some more." She dipped a cloth in her herbal tincture. "That’s what you signed up for, falling for married women. You don’t get to own them. You just get the parts they give you."

The tincture stung like fire. I hissed.

"Baby," she said.

"Mean."

"Physician." She leaned over and kissed the bruise, right on the worst part. Then a little higher. Then on my chest, over my heart.

Then she climbed into my lap. Very carefully. Knees on either side of my hips. Avoiding the ribs.

"Your Harmonies are asleep," she said quietly.

I blinked. "How do you—"

"I’m a physician. I can feel it. Your qi’s been flat as a pancake since the overflow. You won’t get anything out of this." She put her hands on my face. "I don’t care. Do you?"

I thought about it.

No qi. No yin. No reward. No window popping up with a number.

Just Yeon-hee, in my lap, with her medicine bag on the floor and the morning sun coming through the paper window and her thumbs on my cheeks.

"No," I said. "I don’t care."

"Good," she said, and kissed me.

It was slow. Lazy. Nothing to prove. Nobody to drain. Nothing to win. She took her time with every single button of my robe, and I took my time with every single tie of hers, and when we finally lay back on my narrow bed it creaked and groaned and the cracked jar in the corner dripped like a little clock, and she laughed into my neck, and I laughed into her hair—

[Harmony: dormant.]

[No yin received.]

I waved the window away. Literally waved my hand at it, in the middle of everything.

Yeon-hee lifted her head. "What are you doing?"

"Swatting a fly."

"There’s no fly."

"There was a fly."

She gave me the math-problem face. Then decided she didn’t care, and kissed me again.

It was the best morning of my week. And I didn’t get a single drop of qi out of it.

In the afternoon, she took me to the herbalist’s street for more bandages and some foul black paste she swore would help my meridians.

I should’ve stayed in my room.

I know that now.

The herbalist’s street is in the middle of Hangju. Busy. Crowded. Full of servants running errands for rich families. Including, it turns out, rich families who live on the other side of my father’s wall.

I was standing at a stall, sniffing a jar of something that smelled like a dead fish’s armpit, when I felt it.

Someone staring.

I looked up.

Across the street, holding a basket of ginseng, was a skinny old servant in a gray coat with a crest stitched on his chest. I knew that crest. I’d climbed over a wall with that crest on the gate.

The Gu Clan.

The servant was staring at me with his mouth hanging open. Like he’d seen a ghost.

Which, as far as the Gu Clan knew, he had. The Baek boy took a barge south. Never coming back. The Boar told them so.

I stared at him.

He stared at me.

Then he dropped his basket of ginseng in the street and ran.

"...Who was that?" Yeon-hee asked.

I watched him disappear around a corner. Toward the clan district. Toward the Gu estate.

"Trouble," I said.

I didn’t sleep in Ayla’s room that night. Couldn’t. Her husband was in there. I heard them through the wall at sunset — laughing, talking, him snoring like a bear by the second bell.

I lay in my own bed and stared at the ceiling.

Her husband. Elder Gu’s servant. Seo-ah’s nine days. My five sleeping Harmonies. My forty percent of lost refinement.

I thought about my last life. When nothing ever happened. When the only thing that could go wrong was the internet cutting out.

I didn’t miss it. Not even a little.

But I wouldn’t have minded a quiet night.

The midnight bell rang across the river.

And someone knocked on my door.

Not two soft taps. Not three sharp knocks. Not a clack.

One knock. Slow. Heavy. Like the hand that made it had all the time in the world.

I sat up.

I walked to the door. Slid it open a crack.

The walkway was dark. One lantern swinging at the far end. And standing right in front of my door, wrapped in a long black traveling cloak with the hood pulled up, was a woman.

[Target Detected.]

She pushed the hood back.

Late thirties. Tight body. Wild eyes. Black hair loose and tangled from riding. A face I’d last seen flushed and gasping under me on round three, the afternoon her husband slid the door open and my whole life fell apart.

Madam Seol Hwa-ryeon.

She was supposed to be in the countryside. At her family’s estate. Indefinitely.

She smiled at me. Slow. Hungry. Exactly the way she used to smile at me over the Baek Clan wall.

"Hello, Mu-jin," she said softly.

[Desire +30.]

The number hit so fast the window flickered.

"A servant came running to the estate this afternoon," she said. "Out of breath. Telling everyone the Baek boy never left Hangju. He’s at some filthy inn by the docks." She stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell horse and road dust and that perfume I’d never forgotten. "I took the fastest horse in the stable and rode three hours in the dark."

Her hand came up and touched my chest. Right over my heart.

"Did you really think," said Madam Seol, "I’d stay away?"