Yun Yun closed her eyes, and tears slid down in silence. They ran along her cheeks and gathered into a single drop at her chin, trembling before falling onto her dust-stained instep, warm yet icy cold.
Clenching her teeth, she slowly took two steps back and half leaned against the table again. Its edge pressed into the small of her back, bracing her body in a defiant curve.
"Leave me one last shred of dignity... please... don't..."
Her voice was low, so low she might have been speaking to herself. It was the last plea a woman could squeeze out at her most wretched. She knew it might be useless, but she said it anyway. Because she had nothing left to lose.
Fan Tian looked at her-the woman bracing herself against the table, teetering on the brink yet refusing to fall.
Her breathing was ragged, her chest rising and falling unevenly. Blood from where she had bitten her own lips still stained them. Her chin was slightly raised, like a prisoner who refused to concede defeat, yet there was a shattered beauty to her.
She was clearly begging him, but nothing about her bearing looked like a plea. Her back remained straight. Even with her clothes disheveled and her feet bare, she was still a sword that had been bent but not broken.
"Are you afraid?" Fan Tian asked.
"Yes," Yun Yun said. "You're a demon."
Her voice was soft but extraordinarily clear, like a pebble dropped into a deep pool, sending out ring after ring of silent ripples.
She was not lying. Death was simple. She had walked the edge between life and death countless times and had long since learned to face it calmly.
But these things before her-the shame forcibly laid bare, the will drowned beneath drugs