"Yes, Father," Yuwen Lin's voice answered, obedient as always.
The door opened, then closed, leaving silence in its wake.
Lian lay in the darkness, barely feeling the healer's hands as they worked over his wound with mechanical efficiency, applying salves and bandages.
A tool.
A slave.
Expendable.
The bond between them pulsed faintly in his chest, a thin, fragile thread. He had thought it meant something, that he meant something to her, but perhaps he had been a fool all along.
The poison in his veins felt almost irrelevant now, for what did it matter if his body failed when his heart had already been gutted? He drifted deeper into the fog, away from the pain and the voices and the crushing weight of the truth.
She called me a tool.
And in the suffocating darkness of his unconscious mind, Lian let himself believe it.
The Healer's Perspective
The junior healer, a young woman named Mei, watched the unconscious gentleman with a furrowed brow.
