Seoul answers with a siren that recedes, with a bus that complains its way uphill, with someone laughing under an umbrella because their body remembered how. I press the handwarmer to my sternum until heat bleeds through skin and bone and into the place the bond likes to sit.
He told me once I was meant for no one. The words still catch in my teeth when I think them. Maybe he meantnot as property. Maybe he meantnot as penance. Maybe he meantI am a coward.I don’t have the translation yet.
I do have this: a chain that is mine and a bag on a shelf and a body that gets up when the sun tells it to, even when the heart is being dramatic. A laugh that will come back with practice. A future that will look like a rooftop again someday, dangerous and beautiful, even if the silhouette beside me isn’t the one I wanted.
I slide the window closed, tuck my feet under me, and let the rain teach the glass how to sing.
Tomorrow I will train. I will make Minji eat the last piece of bread just to see if she pouts. I will steal Seori’s terrible jokes and tell them to the rookies until they groan. I will move the bag farther back on the shelf and call it interior design.
Tonight, I wear the bead against my skin and breathe around a wound that refuses to be the only thing about me.
He didn’t keep the promise.
I am learning how to keep the parts of me he woke.
When Night Bites
Taeyang
I don’t sleep. Not really. I shut my eyes and pretend for a few hours, but the dark knows better. It curls around me, pries my jaw open, and pushes her name onto my tongue like a confession.
Yuna.
Every time I close my eyes, she’s there. Not soft. Not the tidy memory I tried to drown. She’s heat and hunger and the feeling of a blade held flat to the throat—danger, yes, but also a strange kind of mercy. Tonight the dream takes me like it always does: first the scent—wildflowers caught in cold air,starlight over wet stone. It coils around my senses like a noose and tightens until the trees appear.
The moon hangs brutal and high. I’m in the woods where the city lights can’t follow bark black as ink, frost on needles, wind threading through a thousand dead leaves. My claws are out. Control already slipping. Wrath skitters beneath my skin, impatient, a beast that recognizes its cage and rattles it anyway.
And she waits in the clearing like she owns the night.
Yuna. Damn her. Bless her. She wears moonlight and fury as if they’re a gown meant only for her. No jewelry except the faint glow along her collarbone—the bond mark. Mine, the monster in me says, like a prayer and a threat. It calls to the part of me I’ve kept muzzled for months, the part that wants, the part that takes.
“You’re not real,” I growl, voice torn raw. The words smoke in the cold. “Just a dream.”
Her head tilts, a slow, knowing angle, the way a hunter considers whether mercy is weakness.
“Then why,” she asks, lips curving, “do you look at me like you want to sin?”
Because I do. Because wanting is easy. Because deserving is impossible.
I step forward. The earth cracks under my heel; frost fractures like glass. She doesn’t flinch. She never does. She knows I won’t hurt her—the bond pulses between us, an old heartbeat, older than realms, older than the crowns men kill for. It threads heat through my chest, stitches my bones to hers, and for one reckless breath I let it.
“You left me,” she says when I reach her. The sound of it is small and enormous all at once, the way a single drop can wake an ocean. It’s the same tone she used the night I walked away—the night I convinced myself distance could starve destiny.
I take her waist in both hands, fingers splayed like I could anchor her to this unreal ground. The heat of her burns through moonlight.
“I had to.”
“No.” Her hands flatten against my chest, and through the dream, through muscle and scar, I feel the truth of her—a cool, steady thrum, the calm center I was never meant to touch. “You chose to.”
My throat tightens. Wrath snarls its disagreement. The fae in her flares like dawn. Two instincts collide and throw sparks under my ribs.
“Yuna—”
“Then stop pretending this doesn’t exist.”
She rises onto her toes and kisses me like the night has borders and we plan to cross each one. The world shrinks to the sound of her breath and the press of her mouth. I lift her without thinking—like gravity obeys her more than the moon—and slam her back to a tree because I need something stronger than my will to hold me up. Her fingers find my jaw, my nape, my hair, and the bond surges. For a moment I’m not only in my skin; I’m in hers—flashes that aren’t mine: a window fogged from tea, a cut on a knuckle she forgot to heal, a laugh she bit back at the wrong time. The echo of her heartbeat thunders through me and it is unbearable. It is everything.
“Say it,” I rasp against her mouth, against the mark that pulses beneath my lips. “Say you feel it.”
