sickly pale. His skin was almost translucent; Rin could see blue veins under his jaw, crisscrossing with his scars.
“My siblings and I spent our childhood playing by the river,” he said. “There’s a grotto about a mile out from the entrance to this channel, this underwater crystal cave that the servants liked telling stories about, but Father had forbidden us to enter it. So of course all we ever wanted to do was explore it.
“My mother took sick one night when Mingzha was six. During that time my father had been called to Sinegard on the Empress’s orders, so the servants weren’t as concerned with watching us as they might have been. Jinzha was at the Academy. Muzha was abroad. So the responsibility for watching Mingzha fell to me.”
Nezha’s voice cracked. His eyes looked hollow, tortured. Rin didn’t want to hear any more. She had a sickening suspicion of where this story was headed, and she didn’t want it spoken out loud, because that would make it true.
She wanted to tell him it was all right, he didn’t have to tell her, they never had to speak about this again, but Nezha was talking faster and faster, like he was afraid the words would be buried inside him if he didn’t spit them out now.
“Mingzha wanted to—no, I wanted to explore that grotto. It was my idea to begin with. I put it in Mingzha’s head. It was my fault. He didn’t know any better.”
Rin reached for his arm. “Nezha, you don’t have to—”
He shoved her away. “Can you please shut up and just listen for once?”
She fell silent.
“He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” he whispered. “That’s what scares me. They say the House of Yin is beautiful. But that’s because dragons like beautiful things, because dragons are beautiful and they create beauty. When he emerged from the cave, all I could think about was how bright his scales were, how lovely his form, how magnificent.”
But they’re not real, Rin thought desperately. Dragons are just stories.
Weren’t they?
Even if she didn’t believe in Nezha’s story, she believed in his pain. It was written all over his face.
Something had happened all those years ago. She just didn’t know what.
“So beautiful,” Nezha murmured, even as his knuckles whitened. “I couldn’t stop staring.
“Then he ate my brother. Devoured him in seconds. Have you watched a wild animal eat before? It’s not clean. It’s brutal. Mingzha didn’t even have time to scream. One moment he was there, clutching at my leg, and the next moment he was a mess of blood and gore and shining bones, and then there was nothing.
“But the dragon spared me. He said he had something better for me.” Nezha swallowed. “He said he was going to give me a gift. And then he claimed me for his own.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rin said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
Nezha didn’t seem to have even heard. “My mother wishes I’d died that day. I wish I’d died. I wish it had been me. But it’s selfish even to wish I were dead—because if I had died, then Mingzha would have lived, and the Dragon Lord would have cursed him like he cursed me, he would have touched him like he touched me.”
She didn’t dare ask what that meant.
“I’m going to show you something,” he said.
She was too stunned to say anything. She could only watch, aghast, as he undid the clasps of his tunic with trembling fingers.
He yanked it down and turned around. “Do you see this?”
It was his tattoo—an image of a dragon in blue and silver. She’d seen it before, but he wouldn’t remember.
She touched her index finger to the dragon’s head, wondering. Was this tattoo the reason Nezha had always healed so quickly? He seemed able to survive anything—blunt trauma, poisonous gas, drowning.
But at what price?
“You said he claimed you for his own,” she said softly. “What does that mean?”
“It means it hurts,” he said. “Every moment that I’m not with him. It feels like anchors digging into my body; hooks trying to drag me back into the water.”
The mark didn’t look like a scar that was almost ten years old. It looked freshly inflicted; his skin shone an angry crimson. The glint of sunlight made the dragon seem as if it was writhing over Nezha’s muscles, pressing itself deeper and deeper into his raw skin.
“And if you went back to him?” she asked. “What would happen to you?”