Chapter 14

Bo Li wasn’t worried that without the business card she’d never find Tricky Terry again.
This wasn’t the modern world. People weren’t indifferent in the way they were now; they were *nosy*. If Tricky Terry really meant to host a banquet, all she had to do was go into town and ask around. Someone eager for gossip would spill everything.
Breakfast was rabbit—what Eric had hunted.
In front of her, he skinned it: he drew a line with his dagger along the rabbit’s belly, hooked both hands into the cut, and tore outward in one brutal pull, ripping the pelt off in a single sheet.
Bo Li was so shocked she almost wanted to beg him to catch another rabbit so she could try tearing the skin off too.
Unfortunately, she didn’t dare.
After breakfast, Eric poured water over the fire to drown it, kicked dirt over the embers, and finally tamped the loose soil down with his boot.
When he finished, there was almost no sign a fire had ever been there.
She had to admit: winning Eric over had been the smartest thing she’d done since crossing over.
He seemed to have extensive wilderness experience. Calm and fast, he folded the tent together with the wool blanket, lashed them to the back of the saddle, then laid the hiking backpack crosswise behind it and strapped it down with thick leather.
In the modern world, horses were luxury on top of luxury.
Even people who’d “ridden” usually did so with a trainer right beside them.
Ordinary people didn’t know how to approach a horse safely, or how to adjust a saddle without spooking it.
Living with Eric was dangerous, but she had to admit—without him, she would have died under the manager’s gun. Or under Caesar’s hooves.
Bo Li hadn’t forgotten: when Caesar went mad, it once bit off a stablehand’s ear.
Eric had helped her a lot.
She couldn’t help saying, “…Thank you.”
When you’re out in the world, extra thank‑yous never hurt.
Eric acted as if he hadn’t heard. He swung onto the horse and took the reins.
Bo Li was about to say, *I can get up myself*, when he bent down as before, clamped her at the ribs, and lifted her into place.
She swallowed the words.
She remembered what was on the card: Tricky Terry lived at a hotel in New Orleans. She just didn’t know how far they were from the city.
They traveled in silence.
Bo Li stared at the passing landscape, her head louder than it had ever been.
Truthfully, at first she’d never planned to build a circus. She’d only said it to win Eric over.
And everything after that—tailoring scripts for “freak” performers, making the audience see them as living people—had also been to win him over.
He never spoke. His thoughts were unreadable, his actions unpredictable.
All she could do was use people with experiences similar to his to crack his defenses.
Only then did her odds of surviving him increase.
She hadn’t expected Tricky Terry to come to her.
Now resources and money for a circus were suddenly on the table.
If she didn’t follow through on what she’d said, it might trigger Eric’s suspicion. So she’d have to grit her teeth and live up to her own words.
There wasn’t much to see in the swamp—only tall, sinister bald cypresses, their branches thick with moss, dark green lichen hanging in curtains and swaying in the wind.
Bo Li watched until she accidentally fell asleep. When she woke again, the sky had already darkened.
They were no longer in a cypress swamp. A few crude farmhouses had appeared, along with fenced pens for pigs, cows, and sheep.
The road was wet mud, and every few steps there was a pile of horse droppings.
As they neared the city, the fog grew thicker and dirtier, turning a grimy brown‑yellow.
Gas streetlamps lined the road, but the fog was so dense the light seemed to be swallowed whole, barely escaping at all.
Bo Li frowned, covering her nose with her sleeve. The air here was even more acrid than a modern highway.
Eric seemed to have been to New Orleans before. Even with the fog so heavy, he found the hotel without hesitation.
He leaned forward as if to toss the reins onto a hitching post.
Bo Li hurriedly stopped him—afraid he wouldn’t see her gesture, she practically hugged his waist. “Wait. Do you know where there’s a clothing shop?”
Eric paused, then took the reins again and flicked them lightly from the saddle, guiding the horse in another direction.
Bo Li let out a breath.
After a night of fermentation, his smell had become…complicated—sweat, blood, and the swamp’s rot‑leaf stink all mixed together. If they walked into a hotel like this, they’d draw every eye in the place.
The thought made her scalp prickle.
Eric didn’t like being in public. He liked being watched even less.
If that happened, he might start killing.
The clothing shop was about to close. Bo Li had to plead before the owner finally let them in.
For some reason, the owner didn’t seem surprised by Eric’s mask at all. He took a soft measuring tape from around his neck and began taking their measurements.
“Six feet two…” he muttered at Eric’s height. “You’re lucky. We don’t usually carry sizes this large. A customer named Terry ordered a lot of clothes for his ‘freaks,’ and some were this big. We always make a few extra pieces as backup. We just happened to have some left—so you can have them.”
Bo Li thanked him at once.
The owner seemed to take her for Eric’s manager and started making conversation. “You here for that oddities exhibition? The city’s been packed lately—people coming in for that show…”
“No, no,” Bo Li said. “We’re brothers. He’s my younger brother—just got back from hunting in the swamp.”
As she spoke, she handed the shirt and trousers to Eric and sent him to the changing room.
The owner measured Bo Li’s height and looked baffled. “You two brothers—one of you’s freakishly tall, the other’s short as anything… What, did he steal your milk in the womb?”
Bo Li nearly choked on her own saliva.
Thank goodness Eric was in the changing room and hadn’t heard that.
Mother. Woman. Intimacy.
All forbidden words to him.
He wouldn’t allow anyone to joke about those things.
A thought suddenly occurred to Bo Li: if she took care of him the way a mother would…would she be able to live longer under his hand?
She had to flip the dynamic.
Predator and prey—she couldn’t keep letting it stay that way.
Maybe this was a way in.
With that in mind, she turned and asked the owner, “Do you have dresses? In my size…dresses.”
In the end, Bo Li bought several printed dresses, a few shirts and trousers, a wide‑brimmed hat, a coarse felt ladies’ hat, and a black cloak.
Eric had no opinion on what she chose. The only thing he bought for himself, at the register, was a pair of gloves.
Black leather gloves.
As he slowly pulled them on, using those long fingers to tug the leather tight until it stretched taut over every knuckle—
The movie scene replayed in Bo Li’s head without warning, and she felt that same cold, cruel aura of a hunter.
Maybe it was fear. Her legs went a little weak.
Bo Li made him put on the black cloak and the black wide‑brim hat, and then they returned to the hotel.
At the entrance, a few gentlemen were smoking. They glanced at them lazily as they dismounted, then went right back to their loud, careless banter.
—Buying clothes had been the right decision.
Bo Li didn’t dare imagine the contempt in those gentlemen’s eyes if they’d shown up unwashed and stinking of swamp and blood.
Exposed to looks like that, what kind of frightening thing would Eric do?
Another narrow escape.
If this were a game, she felt like an achievement should have popped by now.
Bo Li wiped cold sweat from her forehead, found a bellhop, and booked a room. She’d originally wanted two rooms, but thinking of how dangerous Eric was, she decided it was safer to stay together.
The hotel had a dedicated bathhouse. The previous guest had just finished bathing; the water was still hot. The bellhop said that if they didn’t mind using “used” water, the bathing fee could be cheaper.
Bo Li refused politely and asked them to heat two tubs of clean hot water.
Their room was on the third floor.
At the stairs, a child was handing out cards.
He looked only twelve or thirteen, dressed in a grown man’s suit with hair pomaded flat and shiny.
“Gentlemen! Next week, a spectacle unlike any other will be held here—this is the curator, Tricky Terry’s card!”
Bo Li took one. Compared to the card Tricky Terry had given them earlier, this one was cheaper—no address. The edges were printed with ornate patterns, and beneath his name was a line of elegant small script:
—“Curator of Oddities.”
Bo Li pocketed it, thanked the boy, and went upstairs.
After the bellhop led them to their room, he told them the bathhouse was next door. The water was still being heated; someone would come notify them when it was ready.
Bo Li thanked him again.
Once the door closed, she realized she still didn’t know whether Eric would even agree to bathe.
Wild animals didn’t like baths.
…He wouldn’t refuse, would he?
Bo Li turned toward him. Before she could say a word—
The world blurred. In the next second, she was slammed to the floor.
The carpet was thick wool, and even so, the impact hurt so badly she almost cried out.
“…You,” she sucked in a painful breath, “…what now?”
Eric loomed over her, silent. The gaze behind the mask was almost tangible as it rubbed slowly over her throat.
She looked pained. She looked terrified. Sweat beaded along her neck—slick and hot, like wet charcoal, making his palm sting.
And even when she was terrified to the limit, she still let him touch her.
He didn’t like that.
It made him feel…at a loss.
She seemed to love touching him, and making him touch her.
No one had ever treated him that way.
Not even his mother.
In the past, what he touched most were corpses.
In the Mazandaran palace, he had performed killing for the king—torturing prisoners in the chamber, or strangling men with rope in the arena.
He had touched all kinds of bodies.
Warm. Cold. Rigid. Bloody. Eyes still open.
Alive, they refused his touch. Dead, they became docile livestock, letting him lift them, drag them, haul them along.
He was calm and rational, never fantasizing that he might be allowed to touch the living.
But these days…he had been touching far too much.