The outpost is a box of stone and breathless air clinging to the mountain’s side. Far below, Seoul pulses—traffic like veins, windows like scattered coins. I lean into the balcony rail until the cold bites bone, until the night wind threads straight through my armor and ribs and whatever passes for a heart in monsters made of wrath.
Silence is loud when you’re the one who taught it how to be.
Stars glitter like the wet in her eyes the last time I looked at her and chose fear over fate. Gods, her laugh—bright, startled, rare. It used to catch on the edges of words and make them better. I haven’t heard it since I told her a lie dressed as mercy.
Since I left.
I was born of flame and ruin. She was born of moon and mercy. And yet when I touched her, we burned the same. That should have been a benediction. I made it a warning.
“Don’t think about her,” I tell the dark. “Don’t feel her.”
But the bond is older than my orders. It goes where it wants.
Heat flares under my sternum without warning, a spark that finds tinder and becomes a mouth. The mark ignites—first a sting, then a scald—like someone pressed a brand to the inside of my ribs. I claw at the laces of my shirt and drag fabric away, sucking air in like an animal dragged up from underwater.
No. Not now. Not—
It spreads. Gods, it spreads. Fire threads between bone and muscle, roots itself in the old hurt I pretend is healed. My knees give and I catch the stone with one palm. The world tilts. The rail leaves an imprint on my shoulder I’ll feel for hours.
And then—I feel her. Not a memory. Not the echo I feed on when I’m starving. Her.
Sorrow like a room with all the furniture taken out. Longing like a hand I can’t hold steady. Fingers pressed to a cold window, breath fogging glass. The bite of night air on bare ankles. The tiny tremor she tries to breathe past because fae princesses are not supposed to shake.
Yuna.
Her name is the only prayer my mouth still knows how to say.
My chest heaves. She is not thinking of me; she is aching for me. The difference is a blade. I press my palm to the mark and it answers like a second heart, relentless. Fae runes knit into demon fire, our two alphabets forced to agree. The skin there glows—gold braided with silver, my ruin spelling her name in a language I never earned.
The balcony isn’t the only thing lit.
Across the distance, through stone and city and whatever we pretend separates us, something soft rises in the dark—like a star deciding to be closer. I don’t see it with my eyes. The bond lifts my chin and turns my head north, toward the gardens that keep secrets and the window where she taught a grin to live on my mouth.
I know where she is. I know it the way you know the direction of heat with your eyes closed. And she knows. The knowing strikes sparks along the thread between us until the night smells like rain that will never fall.
Relief doesn’t come. Terror does.
Because there are words you can’t unsay, even if you were trying to save the person you love from the worst version of you. Because I told her the bond meant nothing when the truth is it meant everything and I was the one who didn’t. Because I taught her doubt, and it learned her name too fast.
I stagger inside. The corridor is colder than the balcony because the wind is honest and walls are not. I let my back find stone and slide down until the floor stops me. The outpost hums with the small sounds of other lives—footsteps above, a kettlesomewhere, laughter muffled by doors. None of it touches me. The mark keeps time, bright and stubborn.
In the pulse I feel her try to tame it. Glamour, balm, the old fae words meant to hush what has never listened. It obeys a breath, then lifts its chin like her. A small, fierce refusal to go quiet. I taste iron, and it takes me too long to realize I bit my own tongue.
I told her I couldn’t love her because she is fae. That’s the version that fits in one breath. The long version is ugly. My first language is violence. My second is leaving before I’m told to go. The fae king wears the memory of my family’s blood like expensive perfume. Every vow I have ever made has cost someone. I thought I was saving her from mathematics that always ends the same.
All I did was teach her what it feels like to be less than chosen.
The bond tightens, not to hurt but to hold. A shiver that isn’t mine runs the length of my spine. She whispers something into her empty room and the sound threads me. I don’t hear the word; I hear the break in the middle.
I rest my head against stone and let my eyes close because it’s worse to see my hands shake. Wrath is a tide; I’ve always ridden it forward. Tonight it turns and drags me under. Fury at myself is simpler than grief until it isn’t.
A memory surfaces uninvited: her laugh after the first time I failed to make tea without turning the kettle to slag. The way she pressed her mouth to the inside of my wrist, right over a vein, like she wanted to kiss something that proved I was alive.
“There,” she said, voice bright with triumph. “You do have a pulse.”
“Don’t count on it,” I told her. I meant don’t count on me.
She did anyway.
