I couldn’t answer.
Yuna arrived seconds later.
“Are you hurt?”
“No,” I whispered. “Just… shaken.”
“Youfroze,” Minji hissed. “Youneverfreeze.”
I swallowed the knot in my throat. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You don’t get to ‘mean to’ in the field.”
Yuna’s touch was gentler. She grabbed my arm, eyes wide.
“This is about him, isn’t it?”
I flinched. Didn’t answer.
“Seori…” Her voice was a whisper. “This isn’t just a mark anymore, is it?”
“No,” I admitted.
Silence fell. A truth too loud to ignore.
Minji’s shoulders dropped. She looked scared.
“Then figure it out. Before it kills you. Or one of us.”
I nodded, throat burning. But inside… I was already unraveling.
Rheon wasn’t just a mission anymore.
He was a warning. And a tether I didn’t know how to sever.
Minji
Blood in the rain
She was slipping.
Not just in battle — though tonight proved that too — but deeper than that. In her eyes. In the way her hand hovered just a beat too long before drawing her blade. Seori had never hesitated. Never missed a kill.
Until now.
And I didn’t know what scared me more — that she was distracted, or that I already knewwhy.
The bond mark.
That cursed thing that burned into her shoulder the night she faced him — Rheon. Demon prince. Enemy. Andsomething else I couldn’t quite name but saw plain as day in her face.
We pressed deeper into the ruins after the first ambush. Yuna scouted ahead, quiet as moonlight. I took Seori’s flank, keeping my steps just behind hers, eyes scanning every shadow.
But I wasn’t watching the shadows anymore.
I was watching her.
The stiffness in her shoulders. The way her breaths trembled like they didn’t belong to her. Her fingers clenched the hilt of her blade like it was the only thing tethering her to reality. I had seen her wounded before. Bleeding. Exhausted. But I had never seen herhaunted.
