My Useless Tamer Skill Tamed the Emperor novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: The Wall

The change came, and the man who came out of it was alive.

Hinata had braced for the worst for an hour.

She'd been sitting on the tower floor with the panther's head in her lap, counting his breaths.

When the last red light slid away she had shut her eyes.

Fur ran to skin under her hands.

Valdemar lay on the boards on his side, grey-faced and dripping with sweat, and breathed in great shuddering drags.

"Hinata," he said.

She opened her eyes.

Then she burst into tears.

She had not cried since she was summoned.

She had not cried at the portrait, or the pen, or the rice ball, or the Regent's ring.

She cried now, with both hands over her face, and he dragged himself upright and pulled her into his lap and held her.

"I am here," he said into her hair. "I am here. It is only a stomach ache. I have had worse from the palace cook."

"It wasn't a stomach ache!" She hit his chest with a fist. "You were dying! I made you throw up for an hour, you idiot, you ate the thing when I said no!"

"I do not remember it."

"I know you don't remember it, that's the whole problem!"

He was quiet for a moment.

His fingers combed through her hair, steady now.

"Tell me," he said.

She told him.

He went rigid under her hands at the word venison, and he did not breathe again until she finished.

She told him the cat had not run.

His arms tightened until it hurt.

"He tried to kill me," Valdemar said very quietly. "In a cage. Like a dog."

"I know."

"He had my face painted above a throne, and he tried to kill me in a cage."

"I know." She pulled back to look at him. His gold eyes had gone flat and terrible. "I'm so angry, Valdemar. I've never been this angry. I want to go up to that gallery and take those rings off his fingers one at a time."

He looked at her.

And then, unexpectedly, he laughed, a rough cracked sound with no humor in it.

"Do you know," he said, "I think I am afraid for the first time since the Hunt."

"Of what?"

"That I will die before I have had a hundred nights of this."

She kissed him.

It was not gentle.

Her hands fisted in his hair, and his arms locked around her back, and she poured all the fear of the afternoon into his mouth.

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