His heartbeat is a steady drum under my palm—my drum now, stitched to mine by Seori’s starlight and stubbornness. When I lift my hand, the crescent beneath my bandage warms; when I replace it over Taeyang’s matching mark, both of us exhale like the world has been put back on its hinge.
He’s already awake. He always is. Warriors learn to sleep with one foot in the fire.
“Does it hurt?” he murmurs, voice rough as if he’s been sanded down to truth.
“Only when you’re not touching me,” I say, and it makes him smile the way light breaks on water.
We don’t move for a long while. There’s nothing ceremonious about it—just his thumb tracing the inside of my wrist where the ribbon lies violet and stubborn, my breath counting the little shivers in his chest every time a bad memory tries to lift its head. The bond hums low and sure, that intimate hush I never knew I wanted:here, here, here.
When I finally sit, the room tilts—not from blood loss, but from the sudden weight of everything I chose last night. Banishing a father. Wearing a crown that feels less like gold and more like an oath. Living in a body that belongs to the person I love and also to a people who will need me to be steel when I want to be a girl in a garden.
Taeyang’s hand finds my knee.
“Don’t climb the mountain before breakfast,” he says softly.
“I climbed you,” I say, deadpan.
He chokes on a laugh.
“Your Majesty.”
I turn to face him, both knees on the mattress, the slip falling off one shoulder in a way that would have made the old court clear its throat. His eyes darken; the bond brightens; for a heartbeat the morning is a promise of how easily we could forget the world again.
“Temptress,” he says, wrecked and fond.
“Later,” I whisper, and tip my forehead to his. “First—listen.”
He straightens, all that beautiful attention trained on me like I’m a lesson he wants to ace.
“I love you,” I say, not because last night didn’t say it loudly enough, but because there are days when you need words to be a house you can go back to. “I love you, and I’m still yours. Not because the bond tells me to, not because a mark glows, not because the realm is watching. Because when you were wrath, I heard your name under the noise. Because when the world tried to make you a weapon, you learned how to be a hand.”
His throat works.
“Say it again.”
“I’m still yours,” I repeat, cupping his jaw. “And you’re mine. But I won’t be your leash, Taeyang. I’ll be your door. If the brand whispers, you come through me or you don’t go at all.”
A slow breath leaves him, like pain being convinced it can be quiet.
“Yes,” he says simply. “Teach me how to be aimed.”
“First,” I say, and push him gently back against the pillows, “we eat. Then we break a cup. Then we make the palace learn new manners.”
He huffs.
“In that order?”
“Unless you want Seori to see me faint in the Archive,” I say. “She’d never let me forget it.”
The knock is soft—two beats, pause, one: Minji. She slips in with a tray loaded with fruit, broth, and something that smells like hope disguised as porridge. Jisoo is a shadow at her shoulder, wing newly bandaged, eyes gentled by the kind of relief that turns into vigilance if you look away.
“How’s the royal plumbing?” Minji asks, a little too loudly. “Not leaking anymore?”
“I hate you,” I say, reaching for her hand anyway. We squeeze—hard, quick, the way we’ve always promised each other without saying it. Jisoo’s thumb presses a brief blessing into my shoulder; the crescent thrums back. For a second I see it—the future where I stand on a balcony that doesn’t hurt, and below me are my people and my impossible family, and none of us are small.
Seori and Rheon arrive as we finish eating. The Under still clings to them like a scent—iron and midnight and a door you only see when you’ve already passed through. Seori’s gaze flicks to my bandage, to Taeyang’s cut, back to my eyes. She nods once.Still holding.Rheon’s shadow curls at the threshold like a dog deciding which strangers get to keep their ankles.
“We found the counter-sigil,” Seori says, sliding a thin, rune-torn page out of a sealed case. “It won’t erase the brand tonight—that’s work for the Veil and time—but it will break the cup’s inclination. Your bones will stop wanting to kneel when old magic whistles.”
