She looks up. Smiles like the moon bleeding red.
“You are more than you think, she made us promise to protect you.”
The dream shifts. I’m kneeling in a ring of fire. The same fire from the raid — the one Rheon carried the child through. Only this time, I’m not afraid.
The flames don’t burn me. They curl around my fingers like threads. And in the center of the circle stands a man cloaked in shadow — tall, impossibly still, with wings of smoke and eyes like void.
He reaches out, palm marked with a spiral — thesameone that glows on Rheon’s chest.
“You are ours,” he says, voice echoing like wind in tombs. “Sealed in fire. Claimed in blood. Bound by fate.”
“You carry his spark.”
--------???--------
I jolt awake, gasping, drenched in sweat. The room is dark. The mark under my collarbone is searing — not from the outside… but theinside.
Burning.Remembering.I don’t know what that was.
A vision? A memory? A curse?
But something inside me whispers the truth.
The Guild didn’t raise me. Theyhidme.
And now that the bond is waking…
so am I.
Rheon
What Bleeds, Binds
The shrine burned behind us. The child still cried in my arms. And Jisoo — fucking Jisoo — had the audacity to smirk as we vanished into the shadows.
I paced the floor of our underground safe house — a forgotten subway tunnel we’d carved into a sanctuary. The walls pulsed with faint glyphs, warding us from detection. The girl had been left with a safe family — a half-demon healer who owed me blood for sparing his son.
But the weight hadn’t left me. Neither had her eyes.
Seori’seyes.
The way she looked at me. Not with hatred. With… doubt.
I hated that I liked it.
“Where the hell were you before the raid?” I snapped.
Jisoo, lounging in a cracked leather chair with one leg over the armrest, gave me a lazy grin.
“Getting the fire starters. What, you didn’t like our grand entrance?”
“You could’ve gotten her killed.”
“She’s a hunter,” he shrugged. “Comes with the job.”
“She’s more than that,” I growled.
He tilted his head, and behind him, Taeyang stirred. The berserker leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching me like I was the unstable one. He didn’t speak much, but when he did, it always cut deep.
