“You don’t get to ask that.” No heat. Just truth. “If you want me,chooseme. Out loud. In daylight. And stay.”
There it was—the key I’d pretended I couldn’t find. It rattled everything bolted down inside me. I leaned in until I could count the gold flecks in her eyes.
“I choose you,” I said, shame and want and terror braided into one rope. “And I will stay. I will learn how to hold without hurting. I will be the man who stands next to you, not the shadow you learn to step around.”
Silence laddered between us. She searched my face like a map and found the places still uncharted. Her throat worked; her lashes trembled. The bond beat, hopeful and afraid.
Then she stepped back.
“Learn first,” she said, not unkind. “Then come find me.”
She turned and walked away—again, always—and I stood where she’d left me, hands useless, chest full of thorns I put there myself. The fae lights in her hair went with her, a moving constellation I had to earn the right to follow.
I hated Kaelen.
Not because he wanted her. Because hecould—stand in her light without flinching, ask without taking, listen without leaving. Because for one vicious, honest second I envied a man who’dnever have to scrub blood out from under his nails before touching her face.
The bond throbbed once, hard enough to bow my head. In the pulse I felt her—steadying herself on a railing I couldn’t see, breathing through the ache I gave us both, refusing to look back.
Cowardice tastes like copper. Resolve like ash. I let them both sit on my tongue until I could tell the difference.
“I’m coming back different,” I told the night, the archway, the jealousy snarling under my ribs. “Or I’m not coming back.”
Far below, somewhere I couldn’t reach from here, laughter lifted—bright, unbroken. It wasn’t hers.
Not yet.
A Kingdom Calls Her Home
Yuna
The petal in my palm gave up gently golden, soft, surrendering to the smallest breeze. It clung to my fingertip for a heartbeat, then fell. I watched it spin to the cracked flagstones where wildflowers had learned to grow in the seams of ruin. Something in me recognized the choreography: beauty, bravery, then letting go.
The air tasted like a word no one wanted to speak. It stretched between Kaelen and me as we walked the far edge of the Guild’s courtyard, where the wards don’t sing as loudly and the world feels honest enough to hurt. He kept glancing over, mouth pressed thin, like he’d practiced a hundred openings and every one of them betrayed something.
“Kaelen,” I said at last, voice careful. “You didn’t cross demon-marked land to… chaperone me.”
His steps slowed.
“No.” The single syllable landed heavy.
Wind ran curious fingers through my hair. Under my ribs, the bond tightened, that now-familiar cinch that made breath a verb I had to remember how to do. The mark warmed against my collarbone, low and insistent. It was always worse after I had seen him.
Taeyang.
Even his name gathered the weather.
Kaelen slipped a scroll from inside his cloak. The wax seal flashed green-gold in the waning light—the Summer Court’s crest stamped deep, my mother’s sigil pressed beside it, immaculate and final.
He didn’t offer it to me.
He held it to his chest—as if it could burn there, as if it already had—and said softly,
“Your parents are calling you home.”
The world pinched at the edges.
“Why?”
