Something softens in her eyes, and I feel it in my chest where our lives split and stitched.
“So what do you need?”
“A job,” I say, surprising both of us. “Something I can finish before night that looks like love when you read it back.”
She thinks. The queen in her stacks the tasks; the woman chooses which one will make a man breathe better.
“Speak to the battlements,” she says finally. “Make the soldiers listen to you because you remember their names and not because you terrify them. Teach the rookies the stance that keeps their shoulders tomorrow. Eat with them. And at noon, go with Seori to the Archive and let her finish unteaching your bones. Come home before dusk. Sit with me while I read bad petitions. When the brand whispers, touch the mark and say my name out loud. That’s enough.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s everything,” she says, and smiles like it hurts a little less now.
I look at our knees touching and then up at her mouth and decide I am allowed one selfish thing before I go be useful. I lean in and press a kiss to the pulse at her throat—brief, reverent, the kind of kiss a man gives when he’s decided to live.
“I’m going to fail at being perfect,” I tell her, standing. “But I will not fail at staying.”
She catches my hand and squeezes once, hard.
“Good,” she says. “Perfection bores me. Persistence doesn’t.”
I carry her bowl to the tray like a ceremony and pull on my coat. The brand tests the door of my ribs as I reach for the latch. The sigil warms. The bond hums. The whisper has nowhere to hook its teeth.
“Taeyang,” she says.
I turn.
“Let me say it so you stop making a religion out of regret.” She rises, steps into me, palm flat over my heart. The heat under her hand eases. “You hurt me. You also saved me. You are not a ledger I’m balancing. You’re the home I chose. Stop acting like I haven’t.”
My throat closes. I nod because the other option is falling apart and I have a battlement to teach how to stand.
At the door, I pause again—not because I am afraid, but because some promises deserve to be spoken twice.
“Yuna,” I say, and when she looks up I give her the sentence that will be tomorrow’s discipline and the day after’s too:
“I don’t know if I’m worthy. But I can bewilling. And if I am willing every day, let that be enough.”
Her smile reaches the new moon under her skin.
“It is,” she says. “Now go be useful.”
So I do.
I walk the halls and learn names and hands and the small superstitions soldiers tuck into their greaves. I correct stances without humiliation. I eat bread that tastes like dust and victory. I go to the Archive and stand while Seori reads under her breath and the old ink protests and a younger part of me finally unclenches. I say Yuna’s name out loud when the brand tests me, and the sound builds a spine in places I used to leave empty.
At dusk I come home with dirt on my boots and enough left over inside me to sit on the floor and read petitions that pretend our people are simple. She leans on my shoulder and laughs in the right places. When night turns its head to listen, I slide down and lay my ear over the crescent beneath her bandage.
Two beats. One life.
I sleep with my hand over her heart and my curse under hers, and somewhere between the first breath and the last thought, the old whisper tries to rise and finds no room.
It can sulk.
I am busy learning how to stay.
Fae Queen, Demon Mate
Yuna
