“Then you make ‘enough’ a daily vow. Not a verdict.”
He leaves me to the wood and the air. Seori finds me next, because queens can smell when men are about to decide something poorly.
“I’m not running,” I say before she can accuse me of it.
“I know,” she says. “You’re rehearsing a speech you won’t give her—about how she would be safer without you.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. She isn’t wrong. Seori steps closer, the Under still clinging to her like iron and starlight.
“Don’t make Yuna carry your exit wounds,” she says, soft enough to sting. “Don’t make her keep convincing you to stay when you’ve already chosen it.”
“I stabbed her,” I say, the two words so ugly I want to punish my mouth for making them.
“And she brought you back,” Seori answers without blinking. “Now bring yourself back. Every day. Or the brand wins without having to whisper.”
She touches the mark over my heart once—light, precise, the way she touches a blade before a fight.
“Be the reason she breathes easier,” she says. “Not the reason she performs courage.”
After she goes, I sit on the cold stone and unwrap my hands. The skin over my knuckles is torn in clean little moons. I like the honesty of it. I don’t want to hide what it takes to be better. I find Minji on a bench near the colonnade, ankles crossed, scribbling sigils on the back of a ruined order of battle. Jisoo dozes beside her in that not-sleep angels do, wing half-spread to make a wind break she pretends not to notice.
“Say it,” Minji says without looking up. “Whatever heavy thing you hauled out here.”
“I want to be enough,” I tell the floor. “For her. For this. Without asking her to spend herself proving it.”
Minji caps her pen, looks at me the way surgeons look at stubbornness.
“Then stop setting the bar at ‘never slip.’ Set it at ‘never lie about it when you do.’ She can live with your truth. She can’t live with your vanishing.”
Jisoo’s eyes slit open.
“Also,” he murmurs, voice gravel-soft, “learn to forgive the boy you were taught to be, or he’ll keep driving while you’re asleep.”
I let the words land. I don’t argue with people who saved my life more than once.
By the time I climb back to our rooms, the light has made a decision and the palace is awake enough to pretend it was never anything else. I pause at the door because the part of me that only learned fire is always afraid of opening things.
Yuna is sitting on the floor in front of the balcony doors, back against the bed, knees up, a bowl of porridge balanced on them, hair in a loose knot that refuses obedience on principle. The bandage is smaller today. The crescent glows faint under her skin like a secret the morning agreed to keep.
She looks up. The bond tightens and eases like a hand finding a familiar grip.
“You ran,” she says evenly.
“I hit wood until my head shut up,” I correct, and then—because Minji is right about many irritating things—“I also practiced a speech about leaving. I threw it away.”
She pats the floor beside her.
“Then come sit and tell me the version where you stay.”
I do. Cross-legged, close enough that our knees touch and the ribbon on my wrist brushes her ankle.
“I can fight anything,” I say. “Except the part of me that thinks I’m worth less than your breath.”
She listens the way she rules: fully, without hurry.
“And today?”
“Today I want to learn worth the way I should have learned war,” I say. “Drill by drill. Breath by breath. Not as a feeling. As a discipline.”
