Her legs slowly unhooked from his waist.
They didn't fall away — they 'unfolded', dropping open to either side with heavy, exhausted grace, her thick thighs spreading wide across the wet grass, her belly settling forward as he eased her out of the fold.
Her chest rose and fell in slow, deep swells.
Milk still seeped from both nipples — unhurried now, lazy — tracking down the curve of each swollen breast and pooling in the hollow of her collarbone, dripping sideways when she shifted.
She was looking at him.
Not the ceiling. 'Him.' Her eyes unfocused and half-lidded, the ahegao slowly melting into something quieter — something rawer, a look that had no name in the vocabulary of queens but that every ruined woman knew intimately.
Cang held himself above her for a moment.
Still inside her, softening slowly, his release still warm between them.
He looked at her face — read every broken, glowing, devastated thing written across it — and then he said it.
Conversationally.
