“I don’t—” The word snaps. My chest tightens around what’s left. It comes out smaller, truer, unadorned: “I do.”
The wind drops. The valley hears me and doesn’t die of it. I don’t either.
It doesn’t fix anything. Admission isn’t a bridge; it’s the blueprint. I’m still a man who left. She’s still a woman learninghow to live with the ache I put in her body. But the truth sits easier than the performance, and I find I can breathe around it.
I pick up my armor. The breastplate weighs what it always did; it feels different anyway. The sword slides into its sheath with a clean sound. I stand and look toward the mountains, then toward the lights of the Guild, then up at the blind, indifferent stars.
“If I come,” I tell the bond, the tree, the cold, myself, “I come with a spine. I come with a plan that isn’ttouch her and call it healing.I come when I can stand in front of her and not ask to be forgiven just because I’m sorry.”
The mark settles, still warm, less frantic. A dog who has finally believed you will throw the ball when you’re ready.
I take one step toward the Guild. My body surges, greedy. I stop, because greed is not a vow. I turn instead toward the north wall. I owe Rheon a watch. I owe Jisoo a morning where I don’t look like a man trying to outrun himself. I owe Yuna space that doesn’t make her wonder whether loving me means doing all the work.
I start walking.
Halfway down the valley, cloud scuds past the moon. For a blink the world is all shadow. In that dark, the bond flares—one low, steady thrum, not a command, a reminder.Here. Here. Here.
“I hear you,” I say, and the admission does not knock me to my knees.
Not tonight.
But when the wind shifts and carries rosemary and moon mint down from the walls—her scent, stubborn and clean—I have to brace a hand against the stone and shut my eyes becauseI can feel the exact shape her palm would make over my heart if I were brave enough to ask for it.
“Not yet,” I whisper, to the mark, to the roof where she watches the city wrestle with itself, to the boy I used to be who thought fury was the only way not to be devoured. “But soon.”
The bond warms like a promise I haven’t earned and still plan to keep. The dead gingko rattles its paper coins. Somewhere beyond the wall, a laugh carries on the night that is not hers and still makes me smile because the world forgot for a second that it was supposed to be hard.
I climb. I stand the watch I promised. I let the ache sit next to me without calling it my master. When the hour turns and frost whitens the stones, I lay my palm over the crescent and give the only truth I can afford:
“I will not touch you until I can stay.”
The bond doesn’t punish me for that line. It learns it. It hums it back, steady as a heartbeat.
I keep breathing. I keep choosing. I keep not running.
Denial isn’t victory. It’s delay.
And tonight, for the first time since I left, delay feels like discipline instead of fear.
A Promise Never Kept
Yuna
They say time dulls pain. Liars.
Weeks have folded into one another like badly made sheets, and every sunrise still splits the seam. Morning light finds me where it always does—on the windowsill of the quiet manor we’ve been stationed in, knees pulled to my chest, chin on the ribbon at my wrist. Seoul hums below, alive and impatient. I feel like a boarded-up shop on a street that refuses to close.
The mark beneath my collar still glows—faint, stubborn—the way embers pretend they’re finished when everyone’s turned their backs. A delicate crescent. A promise carved in fate.
A promise he didn’t keep.
I trail a fingertip over it and the air shifts. Heat where there should be only glass and winter. Sometimes it feels like he’s standing behind me, close enough to catch my breath and hand it back. I turn anyway, every time.
No one’s there.
I keep a bag by the door. I packed it the night he left, because I was raised on stories where love runs and someone runs after it. Extra shirt. Spare ribbon. A tin of salve Minji made that smells like lavender and stubbornness. I haven’t touched the bag since. I pretend it’s because I’m busy. The truth is uglier: letting go would feel like killing the part of me that still knows how to hope.
Minji says I’m pale. She keeps fruit in her pockets and smuggles slices into my hand like contraband sunlight. Seori watches without hovering; when I forget to eat, she moves my bowl into my line of sight and pretends it migrated on its own. Jisoo doesn’t meet my eyes—guilt sits badly on angels, even fallen ones. Rheon watches too closely, the way kings do when they’re measuring a threat and a wound and deciding which one needs a bandage first.
