“Then I’ll kill him.”
Truth, raw and ugly, split the night. The fae lights stuttered like even they remembered what my hands are for.
“You have no right, Taeyang.” Her voice didn’t rise; it cut. “None.”
“The bond says otherwise.”
“The bond you denied?” She took a step toward me. She only came to my collarbone; somehow I had never felt smaller.
“You pushed me away until silence learned my name.”
“I was protecting you.”
“From what? From me?” She didn’t blink. “Or from what you become when you love me?”
My jaw worked.
“From what I become when I lose.”
For a second, the set of her mouth broke. Then she rebuilt it, brick by brick.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t watch me anymore.”
“Too late for that.” I closed the distance in one breath I couldn’t afford, one heartbeat I couldn’t slow. My hand rose and stopped just shy of her cheek, trembling with everything I wanted and had no right to take. Heat rolled off her—fae magic and fury and the familiar wild that undoes me.
“I see the way he looks at you,” I said, voice roughened to truth. “Like you’re light. Like you’re whole.”
Her lashes lowered, lifted.
“And how do you see me?”
“Like you’re the end of me,” I said, and the words felt like stepping off a cliff on purpose.
The bond flared—one hard beat that hurt and healed in the same breath. The air pulled tight between us, the way it does just before a storm admits rain. My fingers hovered in the space where her skin warmed the night. One more inch and I’d be gone.
She didn’t move. Didn’t speak. The fae lights gilded the wet at the corner of her eye; she blinked and refused to let it fall for me.
“Kaelen calls me by my name,” she said finally, quiet as the truth that ruins you gently. “He doesn’t make me smaller so his fear can fit.”
My hand dropped like a sentence. Jealousy snarled up my throat—the old, easy animal. Lust clawed after, mean with hunger. Love—the difficult thing—held them both by the scruff and asked me who I was going to be.
“He touched your arm,” I said, hating the pettiness and unable to stop the bleed. “He wore your air like it belonged to him.”
“He asked,” she said, more tired than cruel. “You’ve done a lot of taking, Taeyang. Not much asking.”
That landed. I felt it. I let it.
“I am trying,” I managed, each word a scraped knuckle. “I’ve been a weapon so long I forgot how to reach without drawing blood. Seeing him beside you—” I broke off, swallowed heat. “It makes me want to set the Summer Court on fire and salt the ashes. It makes me want to earn you so cleanly I never have to look at a man like him and wonder if he deserves the place I left empty.”
Her lips parted around something that could have saved me. She closed them on it.
“You don’t get to be jealous of what you surrendered.”
“I know.” The admission stripped me. I didn’t try to hide. “But I am. And I am ashamed that it took jealousy to make me move.”
The night held us like a breath. The city below went on not caring. A wind lifted the hair at her temple; I wanted to tuck it back, to earn the right to be the hand that smoothed instead of the one that scorched.
“If he touches you like he means to keep you,” I said, and it wasn’t a threat so much as a prayer with teeth, “tell me you chose it. Don’t make me watch you use him to unlearn me.”
