NOVEL NEXT Chapter 314: An Intervention
Deming's answer came slow, scraped clean. "I want her to live long enough to die old, with calluses that came from something other than a sword."
Mingyu accepted it with a single nod. "Useful want."
He tipped his head toward Yizhen. "You."
Yizhen let the fan hang from two fingers, studying the painted crane as if it might rescue him. It didn't. "I want to be where she expects me when she turns her head in the dark," he offered, tone stripped of silk for once. "And I want to keep the boy breathing, even if it keeps me outside the room."
Truth sat bare in the half-light. It didn't embarrass him. He'd killed for less.
"Useful," Mingyu allowed, softer there.
"Captain," he prompted.
Longzi's jaw worked once, then steadied. "I want to stand where the next knife hits first," he ground out. "If she gives me a door, I will hold it until the hinges learn my name."
Mingyu almost smiled. Almost. "Good. Now we prevent you from turning those sentences into weapons against each other."
He stepped to the cabinet and drew out a small wooden board. Not Go; a simpler grid he'd used as a boy to teach strategy to younger brothers who preferred throwing stones to placing them. He set it between them and placed three counters—iron, jade, horn.
"Mine," he explained, touching the board's frame. "These are your lanes. Iron for Deming—discipline and weight. Jade for Yizhen—flex, misdirection, the beauty people underestimate. Horn for Longzi—hard edge, plain function."
Yizhen's brows lifted, amused despite himself. "You reduce us to materials."
"I reduce chaos to a thing that can be carried," Mingyu returned. "Now—lanes."
He traced them with a finger. "Deming intersects the inner court, drills, rest, the small domestic cruelties she forgets to forgive herself. Yizhen intersects the heir's routes, the market alleys, the places where shadow buying buys us a day we didn't know we needed. Longzi intersects the Emperor's circuit, the guard rotations, the east wall. Here—" he tapped the single square where all three lines met "—you consult, not collide."
Deming looked at the square the way a man looks at a distant hill he doesn't like but intends to climb. Longzi catalogued distances without touching the board. Yizhen—of course—stole the horn counter, twirled it once, and put it back exactly where it belonged.
"Last piece," Mingyu added. "Confession."
Yizhen's head tilted. "To whom."
"To her," Mingyu returned. "She will not go fishing for your hearts. If you want to be in a room she keeps, you will tell her what you just told me. Tonight or tomorrow. Not next winter. Not on your deathbeds. Cleanly. Spell it out for her, because she doesn't understand it otherwise."
Deming's shoulders went rigid. "You ask us to lay a burden at her feet at the end of a day already full of weights."
"I ask you to stop pretending she can't carry this particular one," Mingyu countered. "She carried a country."
Longzi's mouth thinned. "If she says no."
"Then you honor the no," Mingyu answered, tone turning glacial. "You do not poison the halls with 'almost.' You serve anyway. You stand the posts anyway. And you keep your mouths shut about what never happened."
Yizhen worked the fan open with a little sigh that was not surrender and not defiance. "And if she says yes."
Mingyu finally sat. Carefully. "Then you learn to share in ways that don't make my study smell like a stable."
That cracked something in Yizhen—actual laughter, brief and unguarded. Even Deming's posture loosened enough for breath. Longzi didn't smile, but the hard line of his shoulders eased a fraction.
"Questions," Mingyu invited.
Deming lifted a hand as if asking permission to intrude on his own life. Old habit. Old court. "What of the old Emperor."
Mingyu's eyes cooled. "Contained." A beat. "When it is time, I will end that ledger myself. Until then, he doesn't enter this room."
A curt nod. Deming accepted the boundary and its promise.
"Lady Huai?" Longzi pushed, duty refusing to ignore fallout.
"Her mother left without the cakes," Mingyu replied. "We stamped the line. Revenue will close the books. If any echo reaches your posts, swallow it and keep walking."
Yizhen flicked the fan once, sideways. "And Xiaoyun."
"Work has been found far from the inner corridors," Mingyu answered. "If she wanders back, she learns what 'no' means from a woman who enforces it. You don't look over your shoulder. You don't rescue her from choices she's old enough to make."
Silence—not the dangerous kind, the digesting kind—settled for three breaths.
"Good," Mingyu concluded. "We're finished here."
They didn't move. He could feel the next questions clustering like sparrows: How. When. What words. He spared them none.
"You're soldiers," he reminded them, tone turning brisk. "Treat this like any other order. You've scouted. You've mapped. Now you engage."
He rose. "We walk together."
Deming's head angled, wary. "Now."
"Now," Mingyu confirmed.
Yizhen pushed off the bookcase with a flourish too pretty for the room and then stripped it from his posture as if setting aside a robe. Longzi adjusted nothing; he had worn readiness when he walked in.
They moved toward the door like three different answers to the same question. Mingyu reached for the latch.
A knuckle touched the other side—twice, neat, impatient without apology.
Yaozu's voice came through the lattice. "She's looking for you."
Mingyu glanced once at the men behind him. "Perfect." He worked the latch. The screen slid. Lamplight from the corridor ran like water over the threshold.
Xinying stood there with a sheaf of slips in one hand and ink on the edge of her thumb, hair skewed by the kind of day that broke other people. She took in the room, the men, the board on the table, Mingyu's face.
"If this is a coup," she drawled, "schedule it for after breakfast."
"Not a coup," Mingyu returned, stepping aside to let her pass. "An intervention."
She lifted a brow. "Of what."
"Of hearts," he answered, and watched Deming fail to hide a wince, Yizhen's smile turn dangerous, Longzi's spine decide whether to break or bend.
He didn't bother to try and hide the smile on his face.