The moment Gong Pingru crossed the three-month mark, the pregnancy was announced. The inner court exploded into a frenzy of congratulations sharp enough to draw blood.
I had never been this paranoid. I practically took over her palace. Every bowl of soup, every bolt of silk, every potted plant had to pass Auntie Jin Se's hands first. I bypassed the Imperial Hospital and had Mother smuggle in a retired military physician who could spot ground abortifacients even when they were folded into tonics.
Wei Zhang stopped playing the game. After months of enforced distance, he simply stopped avoiding me.
He explained it one night, tracing the line of my jaw in the dark. He had believed that ignoring me was the only way to keep me off Empress Dowager Li and Princess Shengyang's radar. To keep me alive.
"I could stomach the distance when you were far away," he murmured against my hair, his voice rough. "But once you were inside the walls—once I saw you kneeling there with the rest of them... I couldn't do it anymore. I want them to know you're mine."
He didn't sound like a sovereign. He sounded like a man who had spent his life swallowing blood. Candlelight caught in his eyes, and his lashes trembled like a bowstring held too long at full draw.
He has been caged for so long it's a miracle he hasn't gone mad.
I felt that familiar, helpless pull in my chest—the instinct that had nothing to do with palace survival and everything to do with the boy who used to stare at me at banquets. I slipped my fingers into his hair, kneading the rigid tension out of his scalp. "It's all right. Bao Niang isn't afraid of what you have to become."
I meant it. My grandfather was the former Grand Tutor. My father and brother held half the empire's cavalry in their fists. If Wei Zhang needed to breathe, I would gladly use my family's weight to smash a hole through the Dowager and the Princess's iron ceiling.
* * *
Gong Pingru's belly slowly began to show. A "misplaced" brazier of musk-infused charcoal turned up in her antechamber. A week later, a courtyard step was polished smooth with unseen oil. We caught both before she took a step. We tore the servant quarters apart looking for the source, but the trail had been professionally severed. I doubled the guard around her pavilion and squeezed the Internal Affairs Bureau for every safety precaution left in the book.
Gong Pingru, despite her elegant composure, was catastrophically bad with a needle. So I took over the sewing. Small, impossibly soft padded robes. Little shoes with glaring tiger faces embroidered on the toes to scare off evil spirits.
One afternoon, I was fighting a stubborn seam on a tiger shoe when two arms slid around me from behind, locking me securely against a broad chest. The heavy, dark scent of dragon-incense washed over me.
"What is Bao Niang making?" Wei Zhang pressed his chin hard into my shoulder, rocking me slightly.
I bit off the thread and held up the tiny, aggressive-looking tiger shoe. He stared at it for exactly half a second, tossed it onto the table with complete disinterest, and buried his face in my neck.
"Do you like children?" he asked, his breath hot against my collarbone.
I was seventeen. I leaned back against him, the needle still hovering in my hand. "I haven't really thought about it."
"I hate them," he said. The sudden, flat cruelty of his tone made me jump.
Before I could turn around, his grip tightened, almost painfully. "The birthing room eats women alive. Women die in there. If you want a child so badly, I'll go take one from someone else and give it to you."
The sheer, tyrannical madness of the statement hung in the air. I twisted in his arms, staring at his profile, catching the sudden, frantic shift in his eyes.
He saw my shock. The ruthless Emperor vanished instantly, leaving behind a desperately backpedaling young man. "I—I didn't mean that. If you want them, we'll have them. I'll give you as many as you want."
He stayed in Ganquan Palace that night. He spent hours, breathless and entirely focused, undoing me under the silk quilts as if he could grind the conversation into dust and leave nothing behind.
* * *
The New Year approached, bringing the one privilege I desperately wanted: as a titled court lady, Mother was permitted to enter the inner palace.
After five months apart, Mother didn't cry when she saw me in the reception hall. She sat down, her back ramrod straight, and delivered the news like a war report: Father and Brother were trapped at the Northwest garrison. They weren't coming home for the New Year.
Then she reached out, caught my face in her cold hands, and said my cheeks had hollowed out.
I swallowed hard. She was the one who was fading. The Zhen estate was massive, and without the men, it was a cavern of silence. How was she surviving the winter alone?
Before I could ask, she waved it away, saying Grandfather had summoned her to Huizhou for the holiday. The tension in my chest loosened.
She interrogated me with the ruthless efficiency of a general inspecting newly forged iron. Was I eating? Were the eunuchs obedient? Was that Wei family boy making me suffer? The way her eyes narrowed when she asked the last question made it clear that if I said yes, she was prepared to march into Yangxin Hall and physically assault the Son of Heaven.
Finally, she leaned in, dropping her voice below a whisper. "Have you thought about a child? I heard one of the new intake is already carrying."
I patted her arm. I told her the pregnant woman was Gong Pingru, my closest ally. I also told her I was seventeen, currently swallowing brutal bowls of contraceptive herbal brew every morning, and in no rush whatsoever.
Mother exhaled sharply, the relief evident on her face. "Good," she murmured, her grip on my hand tightening violently. "The court is a powder keg right now. The Dowager and the Princess are waiting for an excuse. Do not put a target on your own stomach until the Emperor has secured an heir elsewhere. You stay out of the crossfire. You stay alive."
I nodded.
I thought of Wei Zhang's frantic, aggressive terror at the thought of me in a birthing room. I decided it was best not to share that specific detail with Mother.
* * *
My first New Year in the palace was a marathon of ritual and gold-threaded silk. Once the final round of formal greetings ended, I shed the heavy head ornaments and took a back path through the snow to Jinghe Palace to check on Consort Ji.
She wasn't surprised to see me. She unlatched the heavy wooden doors, pulled me inside out of the biting wind, and pressed me onto the warm heated brick bed.
"Technically, you're younger, so I should be handing you New Year's silver," she said, her smile wry as she poured the hot wine. "But you're a Senior Consort now. By palace rules, the silver flows the other way."
We traded a few sharp, easy jokes. For half an hour, it felt like the old days—before the promotions, before the terrifying weight of the Emperor's attention had shattered our peaceful obscurity.
But Consort Ji drank too fast. This was her fourth year inside the red walls. The Emperor hadn't stepped foot in Jinghe Palace in years. She poured another cup, movements a little clumsy, and admitted what I already knew: she and the women from her intake had been forgotten. The only one still visible was Imperial Concubine Cao, who had survived by attaching herself to Noble Consort Qi and producing a daughter.
Then Consort Ji set her cup down too hard. The wine sloshed over the rim.
"You don't need to drive yourself mad protecting Gong Pingru's stomach," she said, her voice dropping to a sudden, dead serious rasp. "As long as she doesn't slip on ice or eat actual poison, nobody in the upper ranks is going to touch that child."
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I asked her why.
"Because her family is a tiger painted on paper," Consort Ji said bluntly. "Because she has no backing. If she births a princess, they might throw her an Imperial Concubine title. If it's a prince—the Emperor's firstborn son—do you honestly think they'll let her keep him? A mother with no power? That child will be pulled from her arms and handed straight to Empress Wang to raise. The Dowager will have her heir."
"But why would Princess Shengyang allow that?" I pressed. "If the Empress gets the first prince, the Dowager's faction wins."
"Because Princess Shengyang isn't stupid," Consort Ji slurred slightly, gripping my wrist. "If the Empress takes the first... then Noble Consort Qi gets the second. Balance of power. Everyone gets a piece of the Emperor's bloodline. Except the wombs that actually bled for it."
I stared at the flickering brazier. The math was sickeningly clean. "But what if the two factions break their truce? What if they don't want the other side to have a prince at all?"
Consort Ji froze. Her fingers tightened on my wrist like a vice.
Then her face broke. The careful, sensible Consort Ji vanished. In her place sat a woman weeping with the choking grief of someone who had been screaming in silence for years.
"Think about it, Bao Niang," she choked out, her voice ragged. "The Emperor is twenty-three. He's been on the throne for four years. Do you honestly believe that out of three dozen young, healthy women in the inner court, only two have managed to conceive in four years?"
The air in the room turned to ice in my lungs.
It wasn't that the women were barren. They had been pregnant. And those pregnancies had been taken—used as bargaining chips in the invisible war between Empress Dowager Li and Princess Shengyang. Weeks of flesh, then blood on silk, then nothing in the records, as if it had never existed.
The pieces snapped together. It explained how Consort Ji had recognized Gong Pingru's symptoms so quickly. It explained how her hands had known what to do when she corrected my stitches on the tiny tiger-head shoes.
No one had told me. Consort Ji had been one of them.
She scrubbed her face viciously with her sleeve, forcing her voice to stabilize. "Don't look like that. You're trembling. The slaughter is over—for now. The Dowager and the Princess have reached a stalemate. They need heirs now to secure their own power blocks. They're actually encouraging us to breed."
I couldn't speak. I finally understood the brutal reality of Mother's warning. And I finally understood Wei Zhang's frantic, sickened terror when I mentioned having a child.
If I got pregnant, my child could not be handed off to another consort. My father's military backing made that impossible. Which meant my child would instantly become the ultimate threat to both factions at once. They would use everything in their arsenal to kill it in my womb.
When I stumbled out of Jinghe Palace into the freezing wind, I vomited bile into the snow. I thought of Gong Pingru, sewing tiger-headed shoes for a baby she believed she would get to keep.
Who could survive having their flesh torn from their arms like that? Who could survive it and not go completely insane?
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