Shadow unthreads from the colonnade. Rheon steps into the lantern-glow and becomes a man again. Seori follows—barefoot, blade sheathed, underlight quiet as a good secret. Farther back, Minji and Jisoo pause where the garden spills into pavement. No one speaks. No one corrects. They only stand the way people do when the holy thing istwo people deciding.
Seori comes to my side and hovers a steady palm just over my chest, not quite touching.
“I won’t take it from you,” she says, eyes on mine. “I’ll only unfasten what shouldn’t have been fastened there. You do the rest.”
Rheon tips his head; something in the air goes cool and wide—the Veil unspooling enough to make room for a different law.
I look at Yuna. She looks back like she’s already forgiven the boy who learned wrath before he learned water. I put my hand over hers where her crescent warms through linen. The bond swells, and for once I don’t brace against it.
“Now,” Seori murmurs.
I let go.
The brand under my sternum—old, ugly, a command with a thousand teeth—rises snarling. It’s ready to rip what it can’t rule. It hits Yuna’s palm, hits Seori’s waitingno, hits the world Rheon steadied, and finds nowhere to root.
Heat threads through my ribs—violet-gold, river-cold, star-hot. It hurts, but not like breaking. Like a bone finally set true. The old mark unthreads, one stitch at a time, and in its place the half-moon Seori wrote flares bright andwants.Not to own. Tobind.To become what it was always meant to be.
“Breathe,” Yuna whispers.
I do. The pain sharpens, crests—and then it isn’t pain anymore. It’s weight where there used to be a hole. It isher—the scent of moonmint, the sound of wisteria in wind, the taste of a stubborn laugh against my teeth—flooding the chamber where hunger kept all its weapons.
Something sears across my chest, bright and clean. She gasps, hand flying to her collar. Through the linen I see it: her crescent flares open, my half-moon lifts to meet it, and a thin, brilliant thread arcs between them—starlight braided with heat. It lays itself into us with a patience that feels like a future. It seals with a soft sound I feel in my spine.
Yuna’s eyes shine.
“Do you feel it?” she asks.
I drop to my knees because my body doesn’t know any other way to hold this much grace.
“I feelhome.”
She goes down with me, both of us in the wet grass, laughing once because tears make fools of kings and queens and demonsalike. She cups my face with both hands and presses her forehead to mine.
“Say it,” she breathes, and her breath is a vow I didn’t know I was starving for. “Say you’re done running.”
I swallow, throat burning with the heat of what just branded me true.
“I’m done running.”
“Say you’re mine.”
“I am yours,” I whisper, and the thread between our marks hums approval like a bell that belongs to us.
Seori steps back, eyes wet and victorious. Rheon’s shadow folds around us once, a benediction from the Under, then releases. Minji’s hand presses over her mouth; Jisoo’s head tilts like he hears choirs no one wrote.
Yuna smiles like dawn decided to be a person.
“Then take me,” she says, not as a command I can fail, but as a gift I can’t.
I gather her into my lap and the thread brightens, the marks flaring until the whole garden is full of it. We kiss like a man and a woman learning the wordoursin a language we built together—slow, reverent, hungry. When we break for air she tastes like storm and first light.
“Does it hurt?” she asks, thumb skimming the new seam over my heart.
“It hurts the way a missing thing hurts when you finally get it back,” I say. “Which is to say—I never want it to stop.”
A single petal lands in her hair. I tuck it behind her ear with hands that can be gentle because she taught them to be.
“Taeyang,” she whispers, like a prayer that forgot it was supposed to be quiet. “Look.”
