The mark throbs hard enough to steal a breath. The stone under my spine might as well be an altar. The ceiling blurs, then doubles. A tear breaks loose because there is nothing left in me that can hold. I catch it with the heel of my hand like it’s a secret I can keep from the dark.
“What have I done?” It comes out hoarse, a question meant for anyone but me. No one answers. The silence is too busy being all the things I didn’t say when I had a mouth full of chances.
If I go to her now, I go as a beggar and a blaze. I go with empty hands and a history that stains. I go knowing apology is a rope: it can pull someone close; it can also burn their palms.
But not going is worse. Not going is the slow cruelty. Not going is asking her to learn how to live next to a door I keep locking from the other side.
The bond flares again, and in it I feel her try to be brave.I won’t call again,she thinks, liar-soft. She closes her window. The latch clicks through me like a bone set back into place with no promise it will heal straight.
“I will come back to you,” I say, and that’s not a vow yet; vows are sacred and I am not. It’s a promise spoken low to the mark and the beast and the boy who never learned how to stay. “I will crawl through hell if I have to. I have crawled through worse.”
The mark warms under my palm like it believes me more than I do. I want to give it steadiness through the thread the way she used to smuggle me calm on nights when wrath clawed up my throat. My hands don’t know how to send gentleness withoutshaking. I try anyway. It feels like learning to write with the wrong hand—ugly, clumsy, honest.
If she turns away when I arrive, I will guard her from a distance until distance kills me. If she tells me to go, I will go and never let harm find her without finding me first. If she forgives me—
The thought is cruel. Mercy is a blade, too.
The doorframe across the corridor throws a shadow shaped almost like a person. For a strangled breath, I imagine it is her—bare feet, hair haloed in city light made patient by glass. The ache is so immediate I have to look away before I reach for something that isn’t there.
Another tear falls, then a third. I don’t stop counting; there’s a limit to how many lies you can tell yourself while you watch your own hands fail.
“Yuna,” I whisper, because names are bridges. “I’m sorry.” The words scrape like they came up along brick. “I was a weapon long before you touched me, and I mistook that for all I could be.”
The mark answers after a breath, a small, stubborn heat that feels like a hand pressed to a door from the other side. The thread hums with something likeI know.Or maybe that’s just the mercy I’m starving for inventing a kinder echo.
Outside, a wind change carries pine and far smoke. The outpost creaks. A kettle somewhere finally sings. The ordinary goes on with or without the extraordinary. It should be humiliating; it is a relief. The world can keep turning while I relearn how to stand.
I press my forehead to my forearm and breathe like a man punished by prayer until my ribs ache less from fighting thetruth. I will go to her before the night forgets our names. I will knock. I will kneel if I have to. I will not ask her to be the brave one alone again.
If she asks me why it took burning to make me move, I will tell her the truth:
Because I am not worthy, and sometimes that is what it takes to change a man—understanding that worth is earned by the work of staying, not the fear of leaving.
I push myself upright, slower than I’d like. The room lists, then steadies. My shirt hangs open; the mark throws low light against the stone—demon fire kissing fae script, a miracle I did not deserve and still have. I lace the edges with clumsy fingers, let the glow burn through the weave, and don’t hide it.
“I’m coming back,” I say again, not to convince the night but to bind myself to the sound. “Even if I have to crawl.”
The bond quiets to a warm ache, like a hearth someone remembered to bank for dawn. For a long moment, I stand in the half-dark and listen for her breathing through a city that does not care. I don’t hear it. I feel it—a steadier rhythm than mine, and as long as it goes on, so will I.
I step toward the door.
Behind my ribs, the mark glows once—bright enough to paint my knuckles gold—then settles, as if it, too, has decided.
As if it, too, knows the only way out of the silence I made is the sound of her name spoken at her threshold, with nothing left in me but the truth and whatever she chooses to do with it.
Secrets in the Bloom
Yuna
The gardens are blooming again.
Violet lilies lift their painted throats. Ghost-pale moon roses unfurl like confessions no one is brave enough to speak in daylight. Fire blossoms—those stubborn, scar-rimmed things—push up through soil that once stank of iron and smoke. The silver morning light washes everything clean and still, as if beauty could be a kind of amnesty.
I crouch anyway, fingers in the earth, pretending I’m here for a reason that isn’t running from the storm beneath my ribs. Minji asked me to help replant after the last ambush. She said the beds needed hands that know how to be gentle. I said yesbecause I am better at tending broken things than admitting I am one.
The dirt is damp and cool. It should steady me. It doesn’t. My palms tremble around the tender stem of a fire blossom as I tuck it into its new home. It isn’t the cold.
It’s him.
