I close my eyes.
It’s too easy then. The memories find me the way smoke finds the seam under a door. Taeyang bleeding and snarling in rain, dragging me backward by the ribbon at my wrist and cursing me for being reckless in a voice that shook. Taeyang standing too close at the infirmary window, sunlight cutting his profile into something I couldn’t stop tracing with my eyes.Don’t die, Yuna,he breathed into my hair when he thought I was asleep.I’d destroy everything if you did.
Then the quiet after. The morning my mark warmed under his palm, and he looked at it like it was the edge of a cliff—and stepped back. The days he learned new corridors I wasn’t in. The way the training court emptied ten breaths before I arrived, his gauntlets still warm on the peg, as if avoidance could be polite. Petals left at my windowsill that smelled like moon mint and smoke; a ribbon tied around a practice blade I never admitted he’d touched. The small, stupid proofs that care can coexist with cowardice and hurt just as effectively.
He thinks not choosing is a kind of mercy. He thinks wrong.
“I’m tired,” I tell Seori, and the honesty comes out so fast it almost trips. “I’m tired of pretending I don’t check the balcony before I sleep. I’m tired of waking up with my hand on a ribbon that doesn’t belong to me anymore. I’m tired of being angry atwalls because I can’t be angry at him without wanting to kiss him or hit him or both.”
Seori’s mouth tilts—compassion, not pity.
“You’re allowed to be tired.”
“I don’t know which is worse,” I say. “Knowing we were fated. Or knowing he’d rather suffer than love me.”
A rooky would call it dramatic. A queen would call it strategy: say the hardest thing first so the rest has room to live. I curl forward, elbows on knees, knuckles against my lips until I taste ash.
“Demons don’t know how to love,” the old women at the guild used to whisper when I spilled honey on my books and asked why war was necessary.Not the way fae do.But I remember his hands, bloodied and shaking, holding mine at the vale when the world tried to end again. I remember the look he gave me when he thought no one else was watching. Not worship. Not hunger. Recognition. Like something finally fit.
“And then he left,” I whisper. “No goodbye. No explanation. Just… quiet.”
Seori doesn’t argue. She never does when the thing I need isn’t an answer but a witness. We sit like that until the wind changes, smelling of rain. Rheon drifts closer and pretends to study the sky. The ruin settles and for a second, I swear I hear wind chimes again, faint and stubborn.
“You don’t have to wait for him to choose,” Seori says, after the silence has softened instead of hardened. “You get to choose too.”
“And if what I choose hurts?” My voice thins. “If staying near him feels like picking at a scab that won’t heal, and leavingfeels like amputating the only limb that still remembers how to dance?”
“Then you say that out loud,” she says, thumb smoothing over the back of my fingers. “To him. Or to yourself first, if that’s all you can manage.”
I push a breath out that shakes and doesn’t apologize for it.
“I hate him,” I say, and the ash doesn’t flinch. “For making me wait in rooms he avoids. For touching my mark like it burned him and then pretending it didn’t. For making me doubt whether I imagined all of it.”
“And?” Seori asks, gentle, relentless.
“And I don’t,” I whisper, throat raw. “I don’t hate him. I hate what fear turns him into.”
I open my fist. The bead sits in my palm like an eye. Green, imperfect, stubborn. I slid it onto the frayed ribbon at my wrist and knot it twice. Mean-tight. Prayer-sure. A promise to myself, not to him.
Seori notices. She doesn’t comment. Instead, she nods toward the far wall where rosemary pushed up through a crack and somehow survived.
“Take a sprig,” she says.
“Call it theft. Or proof that some things decide to live anyway.”
I rise on stiff legs and do as I’m told. The plant smells like kitchens and spring, defiant against the ruin. I tuck the sprig behind my ear and the absurdity of it—prettiness in a place that burned—makes my eyes sting harder.
“Come back with me,” Seori says quietly. “Rheon will scowl at the sky for a while. We’ll pretend it listens. Minji madesoup so terrible you’ll laugh. Jisoo will pretend he didn’t help with the spices. It will be noisy enough to make you remember your body.”
I nod, because I am tired of being the only thing in a room that remembers how to breathe.
We turn toward the road. I look back once—at the melted chimes, at the painted door charred into a black mouth—and something in my chest pulls like a thread caught on a nail.
If he ever came back…
I don’t finish the thought because it finishes itself for me, as inevitable as tide: I don’t know whether I’d run into his arms or slap him. Maybe both. Maybe the slap first, then the arms. Maybe that’s the worst part of love, you can’t starve it just because you know better.
On the path, Rheon falls into step a respectable distance behind us. The wind shifts again, bringing the distant scent of leather and clove and the apology of incoming rain.
