Chương 149: 10. Day of Distress 1

We held each other's gaze for two heartbeats. The morning light was still thin, casting the ruined hut in half-shadows, but her golden eyes were already completely awake. The weakness from last night's fever and hypothermia lingered, yet there wasn't a trace of sleep's dullness in those depths. Instead, they held a stillness that was almost unsettling—like someone had carefully rearranged every coal in a dying fire back into perfect, deliberate order. I opened my mouth and managed to squeeze out exactly one word.

"Morning..." The instant it left my lips, I wanted to take it back. It didn't sound like a greeting. It sounded like a man who'd done something questionable trying to casually flip past the most incriminating page of his life story. Ignicia looked at me, her expression unchanged.

"Cedric," she said evenly.

"I'm currently wearing nothing at all. And I'm a little cold." My spine went rigid, and I immediately fired back a response.

"Your clothes were completely soaked through. Keeping them on would have made things worse last night, so I hung them up to dry." She didn't even blink.

"You also took them off me." Her tone wasn't loud or harsh, but it carried the precise, methodical weight of charges being read in a courtroom. I had the uncomfortable certainty that if this were a royal tribunal instead of a broken shack on a deserted island, two more sentences from her would have me measuring rope lengths at the gallows.

"I swear," I said immediately, "I absolutely didn't do anything inappropriate." She studied me for a moment. The corner of her mouth moved—barely.

"Why are you in such a hurry to say that?" I choked on my next words. She had a point. The speed of that disclaimer was probably the single most guilty-looking thing I could have done. An innocent man would have sighed and explained calmly. What I'd done was essentially sprint to the witness stand before anyone called my name. I was just about to add something like "I simply wanted to clarify the facts"—which would have made it infinitely worse—when she moved. Her hand came up and pressed down on my shoulder.

Not hard, but fast and precise. I'd barely pushed myself halfway upright before she pressed me back down onto that excuse for a bed. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Right. Last night I'd been thinking: she's this weakened, surely she'll be manageable now. I would like to formally retract that thought.

Even running at half capacity, the Dragon Princess's instinct to seize control was operating at levels most healthy people couldn't match on their best day. I found myself looking up into her eyes. They were close now—close enough that I could see the narrow, almost cruel vertical slits of her pupils. Compared to the overwhelming pressure of her dragon form in the darkness, this face was more like a blade returned to its sheath: surface calm, edge very much intact.

"I am an adult," she said slowly. Her voice stayed low, but every syllable felt like she was drawing a boundary line.

"I won't cry and wail, and I won't demand you restore some notion of my honor." I let out a dry laugh.

"Should I be relieved?"

"Don't be." Her gaze didn't waver.

"I only said I wouldn't handle this in an unsightly manner." The breath I'd started to take wisely retreated back down my throat. She was clearly reading my expression with surgical accuracy, because something faint moved through those golden eyes—not quite a smile, more like a spark of genuine interest. She could see that I was beginning to realize this wouldn't blow over quietly, and she seemed, if anything, to find that mildly entertaining. This was not a good feeling.

What made it worse was that I understood her perfectly. Ignicia didn't rush to judgment. Instead, like someone granting a condemned man time to dig his own grave, she began laying out the facts piece by piece.

"You touched my reverse scale." A pause.

"You shared a bed with me through the night." Another pause.

"And when I was at my weakest and most exposed, you watched over me, held me, and carried me through the darkness until dawn." With every sentence, I felt an invisible noose tighten around my neck. I'd had a defense ready—that was emergency first aid—but somewhere between her second and third point, I quietly abandoned it. Because she wasn't wrong about a single fact. The question had never been whether these things happened. The question was what they meant according to dragon customs.

And she was clearly about to enlighten me on that point. Ignicia held my gaze, still maintaining that unnerving calm. If anything, too calm.

"In the Dragon Lands," she said lightly, "the reverse scale is not something outsiders are permitted to touch. Let alone share warmth through the night. Let alone be the one who holds someone together until dawn." As she spoke, a faint flush finally appeared beneath her ears—so light it looked like it might vanish if the morning light shifted, yet undeniably there. And somehow, that made her more dangerous, not less.

Not because of embarrassment, but because she knew exactly how far over the line this had gone, and she was still holding herself together with iron will, delivering every word without flinching. I suddenly understood. This wasn't just collecting a debt. This was collecting a debt while simultaneously testing whether I was worth the trouble of collecting from. And she was enjoying the process. At least a little. I drew a breath and tried to make my voice sound less hollow than my chest felt.

"So Your Highness intends to pass judgment here and now, according to Dragon Lands law?"

"That depends on what you say next." The reply came instantly, like she'd been waiting for exactly that question. Of course. She wasn't trying to corner me from the start. She was laying out the dragon customs like a map and watching to see whether I'd play dumb, try to run, or face it directly. The elegant cruelty was that she knew exactly how uncomfortable I was, yet deliberately closed the distance anyway.

She leaned in toward my ear, her breath barely there—a whisper of warmth—and when she spoke, each word landed like a knuckle tapping against bone.

"So then," she murmured, "how do you intend to handle this... Ambassador Cedric?" Every trace of humor drained from my face in one clean sweep. Because I knew she wasn't joking. Or at least, not entirely.