The Goddess Who Sealed Him Is His Maid Now novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Night Tea
The maids refused to carry the tea to the Demon Sovereign's burning room, so pulseless Luan went in alone, caught the gold seal thread that hurt everyone else, and remembered who had tied it.
The Hai bell rang over the Palace of Nine Chains, and every maid in the courtyard put down her work.
It was the hour when the Demon Sovereign's tea went up to the Hall of Chains.
Nobody wanted to carry it.
Ning Luan stood at the kitchen door with her sleeves tied back, watching four girls find reasons to be somewhere else.
"My hands are wet," said one.
"I have to fold the sheets," said another.
The youngest, who was sixteen, simply started to cry.
Housekeeper Mei came in with her ring of keys and looked at the tray.
It held a black pot, one cup, and a plate of plain rice cakes the Sovereign never touched.
"Last night he burned the hand off the maid who went up," Mei said. "It grew back. Her nerve didn't."
She didn't order anyone.
She never did.
"Any girl who doesn't want to go can stay in the kitchen," she said. "No wage is docked. No one is asked why."
The girls stayed where they were.
Luan picked up the tray.
"Little ghost," said Mei, and her gold tooth caught the lamp. "You don't have to."
"I know," said Luan.
It was true that she had never been afraid of anything.
It was also true that she had no pulse.
When she was eight, the palace physician had pressed two fingers to her wrist for a long time and then gone to find another physician.
Neither of them had found a heartbeat in her, and she had gone on running, eating and growing like every other girl in the courtyard.
The maids called her the ghost maid, and she had stopped minding years ago.
She climbed the hundred and four steps to the Hall of Chains with the tray steady in her hands.
The guards at the door looked at her as if she were walking into a fire.
"The tea," she said.
One of them opened the door.
The room beyond was black stone, with nine iron chains hanging from the ceiling and a bed as wide as a boat.
The Demon Sovereign was on his knees in the middle of the floor.
Yan Cangjue was a huge man, six feet four, with black hair loose to his waist.
His eyes were the color of fresh blood.
His robe was open, and in the center of his bare chest a gold thread came out of his skin.
It rose over his left shoulder and down his back.
The loose end thrashed on the stone.
The thread had gone white.
Where it struck, the floor cracked.
Blood ran from the corner of his mouth, and he wiped it with the back of a scarred hand.
"Put it down and go," he said.
His voice was low and rough.
"The tea is for your throat," said Luan. "Mei says it helps."
"Mei is wrong."
"Then I'll put it down and go."
She walked across the room.
The thread lashed at her.
It cut the air an inch from her ear, and it sliced the lamp beside her in half.
She did not flinch.
She set the tray on the floor in front of him, and the pot rattled as the whole room shook.
The cup tipped.
Hot tea ran across the stone toward his knee, and the thread went for it, and for her.
She didn't think.
She reached out and caught the white thread in her bare fist.
Every maid in the palace had heard what happened to the people who touched that thread.
It was said to take the skin off their palms.
Luan felt a warmth go through her hand.
The white faded.
It went gold and soft, and it stopped thrashing, and then it curled around her wrist twice and lay still.
Cangjue had stopped breathing.
"Take your hand off," he said.
"It isn't hurting me."
"That isn't what I said."
His hand shot out and closed around her wrist.
His palm was huge, scarred and burning hot, and he held her with the thread between his fingers and her skin.
He stared at the place where they touched.
"Nobody has touched that in nine hundred years," he said. "It cuts everyone who comes near me."
"It's warm," said Luan.
"It was never warm."
She looked down at the thread wound around her wrist, and then at his face.
Up close he did not look like the monster the kitchen girls whispered about.
He looked like a man who hadn't slept in centuries.
"What's your name?" he said.
"Luan. Ning Luan. I do the laundry and the night tea."
"Luan." He said it as if he were tasting it. "Why are you not afraid of me?"
"I don't know how."
His grip tightened.
She felt the pulse in his fingers thumping against her skin, strong and fast, and her own wrist beneath it as silent as stone.
"You have no heartbeat," he said slowly.
"I've never had one."
"That is not possible."
"It's what the physician said."
He didn't let go.
The thread around her wrist glowed warmer, and something shifted behind her eyes.
It was like a door opening in a house she had lived in all her life without ever finding the room.
She saw snow.
She saw a white sleeve, and a man on his knees in the snow with his chest bare.
Her own two hands were pulling a gold thread tight through his heart.
She heard her own voice, from a great way off, saying, "Hold still. This will hurt me more than you."
Luan stared at the man in front of her.
She had tied that knot herself.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend