“I feel—” Her voice breaks around the truth. She drags her nails down the back of my neck, and night tilts. “I feel everything. Even when you’re not here.”
My control frays. Heat climbs my spine and sets my teeth aching. I kiss her like a dying man trying to memorize air. The taste of her is summer stolen from winter, a sweetness that shouldn’t survive cold. My hands bracket her hips, then her ribs, then rise to her throat where I can feel the wild, relentless tempo I’ve been pretending I don’t hear in my own chest. Her lips part; a soft sound slips free and undoes me.
Not real, I tell myself. This is not real.
But the bond doesn’t care. It drags me under. Light bleeds under her skin, star-silver, fae-bright, and I hate how much I want to bathe in it, how much I want to press my mouth to that glow and call it holy. I lower my forehead to hers. The woods hold their breath. Even my wrath goes quiet, startled by the gentleness in me.
“Please,” she whispers, and the word is not a demand but a surrender. “Don’t stop.”
For one heartbeat, I mean to obey. For one heartbeat, I am only man and not monster, only hunger and not history. But then the other truth lodges like a shard under the nail:
She is fae. I am wrath.
I have bled men dry with these hands. There is a ledger carved into my bones, and love is not a currency it accepts. Not from me. Not for her. Not when every story I know ends with a fae court smiling while they nail a demon heart to a door.
I pull back a breath, then another, each one burning like the first inhale after drowning. I press my mouth to her hairline, a penance and a promise I can’t keep.
“Because it’s not real,” I say, but that’s only half of it. The other half claws its way out of me anyway. “And because I am not worthy of it. Of you.”
Her eyes search mine, wide and wet and furious. The bond thrums hard enough to hurt. I can feel her argument bloom—a thousand reasons, a thousand risks she’d take without blinking. I see how she would hold my rage like a hot coal and refuse to let go. I see the future laid out like a road and all the wreckage it requires.
“I can’t love you,” I say, and something inside me howls at the lie that is also a truth. “Not like this. Not when you’re fae.”
There. I say it ugly. I spit it out before it poisons us both. The wordfaehangs between us like an accusation, like a prayer broken in the middle. Her face shatters, not pretty, not noble—just human enough to make me hate myself. She breathes in to speak, but the dream begins to peel back at the edges, color leaching from the trees, frost melting into fog.
“Taeyang—”
I could stay. I could press my mouth to hers and let the lie be tomorrow’s problem. I could let the bond close around us like the easiest trap we’ll ever want. But mercy isn’t always soft. Sometimes it’s walking away before the cut goes deep.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, and it’s the sharpest blade I have.
Darkness folds. Her fingers slip from my jaw like rain leaving stone. The last thing I hear is her voice, a soft break that hits like a hammer: “Come back.”
I wake with my fists clenched and my sheets twisted like restraints. Cold air knifes the room; sweat chills on my spine. For a few blind seconds I don’t know which world is the dream—until the bond reminds me.
It sparks in my chest—small, insistent, a thread tugged from far across the city. I go still. There: a flicker of annoyance that isn’t mine, the ghost of laughter bitten back, the sensation of something warm between palms. She’s awake. She’s drinking tea, and it’s too hot; she muffles a curse and smiles anyway. The tiniest scrape of a chair leg against wood. A window sliding open. The night on her skin.
All of it fades, wisps of sensation bleeding into the dull throb of absence. I brace my hands on the mattress and bow my head until my horns would scrape the floor if I let them show. I breathe through the ache like I’ve learned to breathe through pain in a fight—steady, ruthless, unkind.
I told her I can’t love her because she’s fae. That’s the simple version, the clean cut. The whole of it is worse.
I can’t love her because the rage in me is not a thing I master; it’s a tide I ride until it throws me. Because my first language is violence, and the fae court measures affection in oaths I won’t survive giving. Because I wasn’t made for softness. Because mercy doesn’t stick to my hands. Because I was born to be a weapon and weapons don’t get to want.
I drag myself upright, cross to the window, and crack it open. Winter breathes in. Seoul’s lights smear in the distance, halos in the fog. I stare at the city like it might tell me who to be. It doesn’t. It only hums, indifferent. My reflection stares back from the glass—eyes still rimmed in gold, pupils thinned to a demon’s edge, a mouth that tastes like goodbye.
The bond stirs again, faint as a moth’s wing. I could answer. I could let her feel steadiness from me, an apology without words. I stand there and don’t. I force the thread to slacken. It hurts like pulling a hook from meat.
A laugh barks out of me, ugly. “Not worthy,” I mutter to the dark, to the beast under my skin, to the boy I buried and the king who made me dig the hole. The words fog on the glass and vanish. “Not able.”
I go to the bathroom, twist the faucet, let water run until it shocks my wrists and burns my throat when I drink. The mirror is cruel. It shows me a hunter’s body and a sinner’s mouth. It shows me hands that can’t forget what they’ve done. I stare until the gold recedes from my irises and leaves them human-brown again. The pretense of ordinary is a poor disguise, but I put it on anyway.
“Stay away from her,” I tell the man in the mirror. I make it an order, not a plea. Orders I know how to keep.
The bond pulses once—like a heart deciding to beat after a pause. In the far distance of my chest, I think I feel her tilt her face to the sky. I think I feel her whisper something that might be my name. I close my eyes and lock every door inside me.
When I stretch out on the cold bed, I leave the window open and let the night bite. It keeps me honest. It keeps me awake.
Still, as the hours drain, her voice threads the dark—soft, relentless, the only lullaby I’ve ever hated and wanted.
