Come back to me, Taeyang.
I’ve tried to add reasons, bargains, threats. I have crossed them out until the page looks like a map of ravines. The truth stands in the white space between the lines: I would have chosen you a thousand times. The bond was not a cage. It was a door. I was ready to walk through.
He was the one who couldn’t bear the threshold.
He looked at me and saw fae. He looked at himself and saw wrath. He took the pieces of us that could have been and sorted them into sins and saints until love was the only thing left without a category. Then he set it down like a weapon he was done with, as if not wielding it could save me from the edges of him.
As if I have ever been afraid of bleeding for what I want.
The bond stings at that thought and shows me a flash that isn’t mine: gold irises dimming to human brown in a mirror; fingers braced on porcelain; a mouth that has tasted goodbye and hates it. He says something to his reflection in a low voice I can’t catch. The window beside him is still open. The night walks in uninvited.
I close my eyes against the sight of him, and the ache grinds like stone on stone. I am fae, yes, but not untouched by human truths. I learned to braid hair and carry knives and read a room the way other children learned hymns. I know what it is to be left. It doesn’t matter what crown sits waiting on your head when the person you chose says you were a mistake he refuses to make twice.
I fold the letter again. My hands shake. I slide it back into the box and shut the lid. Sending it would be begging, and I have begged enough in private to know it is not sacred work—it is simply another way to bleed.
The candles have dripped themselves into little wax lakes. I snuff them out with a steady hand and let darkness take the corners of the room. Without the light, the mark at my collarbone becomes the brightest thing here. My own small star where faith should be.
“Even if it hurts,” I whisper, because I am not done being cruel to myself. “Even if we shatter.”
A tremor answers—barely there, like a moth wing against glass. He hears me. He always does. He is very good at pretending hearing is not the same as listening.
I stand and unfasten the tiara I wore earlier—a courtesy for a dinner where everyone watched my mouth and no one heard my voice. Emeralds wink before they go dark in my palm. I set the crown beside the box. The weight leaves my headand, briefly, I sway with the relief of it. I pull a sweater over the nightgown and climb onto the window seat. Outside, frost feathers the railing pale. I unlatch the window and let the night inside, the way he did. Cold air pours in and buries itself in my lungs. I cough, then laugh at myself. The mark warms against the chill, a contradiction I have learned to live with.
Across the garden, something moves—a deer nosing through dead leaves, a life that wants what it wants without apology. I envy it. I pity it. Either way, it keeps moving.
In the bond, the faintest pressure: the shape of his hand closing, then opening. The animal part of me—the one that lives under court manners and remembers the forest—answers with a reach of its own. For a heartbeat, we are a bridge spanning two quiet rooms in a loud city.
I break first. I always will if breaking is what keeps my spine straight.
“I won’t call again,” I tell the cold, the trees, the bit of him I can feel if I look without blinking. “Not tonight.”
The mark flickers, then steadies. It doesn’t punish me for the lie I might make of that promise tomorrow.
I press my forehead to the window frame until it hurts just enough to anchor me. Somewhere in the palace, a clock dismembers the hour. Somewhere else, Seori’s laughter streaks the corridors like a small comet; somewhere else, Minji falls asleep over a book and will wake with a paper crease on her cheek. Life insists on happening.
I tuck my feet under me and let my eyes sting without wiping them dry. I have been unraveling in quiet ever since he left. I will keep unraveling until I learn how to knit myself back together with the thread he refused.
“Come back,” I say at last, so softly the frost might have imagined it. “Or don’t. I’ll find a way to be whole either way.”
It is the bravest lie I have told.
I close the window. The latch clicks like a final period at the end of a letter I’ll never send. In the sudden hush, the bond continues its steady, traitorous glow. I press my palm to it one more time, not to smother, not to punish—just to acknowledge what is true:
I loved a demon, and he taught me what it costs to keep loving in the space he left.
I go to bed without extinguishing the moon. Let it watch. Let it witness the way I do not shatter, even as lines appear like cracks in fired porcelain. I turn my face to the empty side of the mattress and breathe until the ache is a rhythm I can survive.
The mark warms, then cools, then warms again, like a tide that can’t decide if it’s leaving or returning.
He already knows.
And still—he is gone.
The Mark Glows
Taeyang
I don’t sleep anymore. Not the kind that heals. I close my eyes and the dark just lists everything I’ve broken, then asks me to sign my name at the bottom.
