Come back. I don’t answer. I won’t. I can’t. And yet the burn remains, a brand on the soul I pretend I don’t have, proof that the bond doesn’t care what I believe about worth, or history, or the cruel arithmetic of what I’ve done.
It just is. It just burns.
Her Reflection, His Undoing
Yuna
Moonlight pools across the vanity—thin, white, and cold, like watered milk left out too long. I sit perfectly still and watch the girl in the glass refuse to breathe.
Not a girl. A haunting.
She wears my face, but she’s lighter at the edges now, as if any sudden wind could blow her to dust. Since he left, I have been learning how to be an absence that can walk.
My fingers drift to the mark at my collarbone. It should be quiet. It should behave. Instead it smolders like a coal cupped under skin—pulse against pulse, a phantom heartbeat that is notentirely mine. I press my thumb into it until the skin blanches. The ache brightens. Pain blooms clean and useless.
It’s worse tonight. The glow threads into my veins with a stubborn warmth that feels like hope. I know better. Hope is a door with no hinges. Yet the bond hums high and bright, as if it knows something I don’t.
And underneath that hum is the shape of him.
Hunger. Braced restraint. A devastation he’s wrapped in denial so tight the edges cut him. I feel the way he stands too still beside an open window, the way winter gnaws at his throat because he lets it. I feel water run over his hands until they go numb. He used to find my name between his teeth like a laugh. Now he locks his jaw, swallows it like a sin.
The sound that leaves me is small and terrible. I tuck my knees to my chest and fold myself around the mark the way you curl around a wound. My nightgown is too thin for the season, thin enough that the cold can climb in. I don’t change. Let it bite. If my skin goes numb, maybe the love will follow.
It doesn’t. The bond will not let forgetting happen in this lifetime.
Close your eyes, and he’s there: towering and trembling, voice gravel and regret, hands steadying my waist as if steadiness was something he only remembered while touching me. The heat of his breath against my throat. The way he says my name like he doesn’t deserve it and wants it anyway.
“Yuna.”
I swallow around the ghost of it and fail. Once, he said my name like a string he was willing to follow into the dark. Now I carry the silence he left in its place.
Why did you run from this? From me?
We both know the answer. We both pretend we don’t.
I slide off the stool and cross to the window. Beyond the garden, the woods begin—black bark, white frost, the occasional flare of fox eyes in the undergrowth. Pine and ash thread the air, and memory overlays itself on the night so neatly it almost looks like truth: his coat rough against my cheekbone, his scent clinging to my hair because he held me close enough for my heart to call it home.
My palm meets the glass. The pane is colder than skin, warmer than the space he left.
“Do you miss me?” I whisper, because I am cruel to myself in small ways now.
The mark flares. I laugh, soft and mean.
“Then why aren’t you here?”
Tears find the corners of my eyes, undramatic, unannounced. They go down without sound. I don’t throw anything. I don’t scream. I was raised on courts and corridors and the discipline of pretty, quiet knives. My grief wears silk and stands straight-backed.
I go back to the vanity and the girl in the mirror. Her eyes are ringed in the kind of tired that no sleep can solve. Her mouth has forgotten how to curve in the middle. She looks like a princess carved from salt: made to endure, made to sting, made to vanish in rain.
I reach for the little lacquer box that holds useless cures. Fae salves meant to dull, oils to trick the skin into believing it is safe. A sprig of night-bloom pressed flat as paper. A rune drawn in gold ink—the old kind, the kind that stainswith vows. I unstopper a vial, dab the balm over the glowing mark, and murmur the spell my mother taught me for quieting troublesome magic.
“Be still,” I tell it, voice even.
The light beneath my skin obeys for a breath, then surges up, brighter—like a stubborn child lifting its chin. The glamour slides off my collarbone as if it never belonged to me in the first place. Of course it doesn’t. The bond is not mine alone to command.
I should hate it for that. I don’t. That is my undoing.
On the vanity rests a folded page with a crease down the center I’ve smoothed so many times the paper is soft as cloth. I’ve started a dozen letters; this one is the least terrible. I unfold it and read the words again, even though they are burned into me.
