"Shuang'er… what do I do?" His voice was hoarse, almost breaking. "Every time I see you, my heart aches. I can't breathe knowing you'd give yourself away just to save me. I can't stay still knowing you will belong to another man..."
The air around them felt alive, her pulse answering his, their bond thrumming like a secret heartbeat. His forehead rested against hers, breath shallow, filled with a longing that burned but never crossed the line.
"Why must our fate be written in pain? Why must we be this cursed?" he murmured with sadness oozing out of his aura.
Yueshuang's fingers trembled as she pushed weakly at his chest, but her voice became soft, trembling, "Lian… please…"
Neither of them moved for a long time, two souls trapped between duty and desire, bound by a curse that neither chose, and a love that could only destroy them both and couldn't be publicly acknowledged
The air suddenly shifted.
A tremor ran through Lian, a shudder that started deep in his bones.
The scent of her, crisp winter frost, and the delicate, fleeting sweetness of a flower that blooms only at night, flooded his senses. It was her pheromones, rising in an involuntary, desperate answer to the raw agony between them.
His head, buried in the curve of her neck, lifted slowly. His eyes, dark pools of torment, were now lit with a new, primal fire.
"Shuang'er…" Her name was no longer a plea, but a claim —the only thing that brought him sanity.
He didn't guide her this time. He captured her.
One hand slid from her shoulder to cup the back of her neck, his fingers tangling in her hair. The other arm locked around her waist, pulling her flush against him, erasing the last sliver of fragile space. The gasp that left her lips was swallowed whole.
His mouth found hers in a collision of pent-up longing and desperate fear.
This was not a gentle kiss. It was a confession written in the language of crashing waves and wildfires. It was hunger and anger at a fate that sought to tear them apart. He kissed her like a man starved, drinking her in as if she were the only source of air in a drowning world.
For a frozen moment, Yueshuang remained rigid, the shock of it locking her joints. But then, a dam broke within her. The push against his chest faltered, her trembling fingers curling instead into the fabric of his robe, clinging to him. A broken sob escaped her, lost in the searing heat of his mouth. She kissed him back, her own passion rising to meet his, a silent, furious rebellion.
It was a kiss that tasted of salt tears and a future they could never have. It was a kiss that spoke louder than all their whispered pains: I am yours. I have always been yours.
It was bittersweet with burning forbidden feelings.
When they finally broke apart, breathless and ravaged, their foreheads rested together once more. The air was no longer just charged; it was scorched.
"Let the world burn," he breathed against her lips, his voice raw with a newfound, reckless resolve. "I don't care about the consequences anymore. I only care about you."
When his lips left hers, silence swallowed the room. Their breaths mingled, uneven, and unsteady between them. The world beyond those walls no longer existed.
Lian's hands lingered against her face, trembling as if afraid she might fade away like a dream, "Every time I touch you," he whispered, voice rough with emotion, "it feels like I'm breaking a law written by the gods themselves."
Yueyao's throat tightened. His scent, the warmth of his presence, the fire that pulsed through the mark on her neck, all of it screamed of belonging. Yet inside her, everything screamed back no.
Because she was not Yuwen Yueshuang.
And the girl he loved, the one who had made that promise, who had borne this bond, was long gone but the bond still remained.
She was still mated to him, and this couldn't change.
"Lian…" she began, forcing the word out through the rush of her heartbeat, "you shouldn't...."
He cut her off softly, pressing his forehead to hers. "Don't say it. Don't push me away again. Whatever curse binds us, I'll bear it all alone. You're mine, Shuang'er. You always have been."
Yueyao's eyes burned. She wanted to tell him the truth, that the soul standing before him was a stranger wearing her face, that the heartbeat echoing his was not the one he had marked.
But the mark pulsed again, a cruel reminder that fate didn't care for truth. The bond recognized the body, not the soul within it. And his touch, his voice, pulled at her as if her new life itself was tied to him.