Tess

“At last, he lifted his face from his sleeves and wiped furiously at his eyes. His voice was still broken as he said, 'I should have you beheaded for seeing me like this.'
It was another flat attempt to get me afraid of him—or perhaps merely a force of habit. But I knew the threat did not have his heart behind it. 'Is that so?'
'Beheaded and worse.'
'Terren, it is not a weakness to be seen.'
There were no knives between us now, no fear, not even enough distance for a sparrow to spread its wings. I looked into his eyes, and though they were older and meaner, there was no question they were the same ones as on the boy I’d seen in the meadow. I looked into them and I saw him.
Maybe it was possible to love somebody that one hated.
Maybe, buried heart-deep, I really did love him. Not the kind of love a wife shared with her husband—that was not possible, after all he’d done to me; I might have borne no scars, but my body still remembered—but the kind of love one human could not help but feel for another when they had to pry away blades to find them.
I did not know what else to call it, if not love.”
― Shen Tao, The Poet Empress