Chapter 6: The Sect's Own Chain

The chain was lying on the black silk when Chenjue set him down.

Not the ankle chain.

This one was twice as long, a coil of pale green jade-iron with a cuff at each end.

Wuhen knew it the way he knew his own hands.

It was the chain from the lake.

"You kept it," he said.

"I took it off you before we left the ice."

Chenjue sat on the edge of the bed and let the cold links run through his fingers.

"It's Azure Peak work, isn't it? Your elders made it with such care."

"It was made for me," Wuhen said.

"Yes."

"So use it," Wuhen replied.

Chenjue's eyes lifted.

Wuhen pulled himself back against the headboard, pale, tired, and unashamed, and held out both wrists.

"Go on. It's yours now. I'm told you like to keep things."

For a long moment the demon lord only looked at him.

Then he closed the first cuff around Wuhen's right wrist, and it clicked, and the second around the left.

He threaded the chain through the carved bars of the headboard, pulled it taut, and locked it.

Wuhen's arms stretched over his head.

The cold of the jade-iron went through him, and with it something that was not cold at all.

"Too tight?"

"Obviously not."

Chenjue's mouth twitched.

He took his time.

He pulled the black robe off Wuhen's shoulders, and then the rest, and laid him bare on the silk with his wrists fixed above him.

Then he sat back on his heels and simply looked.

"Stop that," Wuhen said.

"I've been looking at you for a hundred years, through the ice."

"You were asleep," Wuhen answered.

"I dreamed."

Chenjue's hand trailed down the center of his chest, over the scar.

"I dreamed you were standing over me with a sword. And a dry face."

Wuhen went still.

"What?"

"You said Sleep. That was all you said."

The hand pressed, light and exact, on the old scar.

"You looked down at me bleeding, and your eyes were dry. You didn't even have the decency to cry."

Something stopped in Wuhen's chest.

He had many answers, and every one of them was true, and none of them would come out of his mouth.

"What did you want?" he said. "A funeral?"

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Sealed the Demon Lord for a Hundred Years, Now He Wants His Jailer from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.