“Because war is coming, Yuna.” His voice dropped into a register meant for truth. “Not raids. Not posturing. War.” A breath. “And your father… is afraid.”
The word sat wrong in my mouth. My father had not been afraid the day he banished four families for questioning a treaty; not afraid when he ordered the mosaics scrubbed whilethe marble still smelled like blood. If he feared now, it meant the ground under us had shifted in a way that would not shift back.
“Afraid of the demon realm,” I said, already knowing.
Kaelen nodded.
“Specifically—Taeyang’s bloodline. His uncles are stirring. His name sits on their tongues like steel.” His gaze flicked to my mark and away. “Yours sits beside it.”
I shook my head and stepped back because the ground wanted me to.
“They wouldn’t dare.”
“They would,” he said, and the pity in it made me want to break something delicate. “And they are. Your parents think the bond makes you vulnerable. They want you where they can control the story. Where they can protect you.” A pause, honest and unkind. “Or… hide you.”
The words struck bone.Control the narrative. Hide me.I could hear my mother say them without moving her lips, the way she said all the most dangerous things.
“I’m not a secret to be locked away,” I said, teeth tight around it.
“To them, you are.” Kaelen’s expression softened into something that belonged to our childhood: two children in a citrus grove learning which fruits are for eating and which are for throwing. “A fae princess bonded to a demon warrior? It’s scandal and leverage in one body. It’s a threat they can’t put on a leash without putting it in a cage.”
I turned toward the sky. Twilight held itself still—no stars yet, just blue deepening into something that wanted to be night. A blank page, waiting for a hand I didn’t trust.
I could still hear Taeyang from last night, soft and wrecked:You’re the end of me.How I hated that it sounded like a confession. How it made my chest ache like something had pushed up through the soil and bloomed only to be stepped on.
“I can’t go back,” I said, barely louder than the wind.
“You may not have a choice.” Kaelen set the scroll on the low stone bench between us, like an offering and a sentence. “It’s a summons, not a request. Defy it, and they brand you traitor.”
The word crawled under my skin and made a home. Trait—betrayal—who?
“And what about what I want?” I asked, turning. The question scraped its knees on the way out. I sounded younger than I like. I hated that.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. In court math, want is a luxury. Only need gets counted.
Footsteps found us. I didn’t have to look to knowthatgait—power contained because it knows what happens when it spills. The bond tugged and my mark flared, the ache sliding from general to specific. My lungs forgot, then remembered. Kaelen’s eyes cut over my shoulder, jaw tightening.
“He’s watching you,” he murmured. “Always is.”
I kept my gaze on the scroll. If I looked up now, I would come apart in a way that would be his to clean up or mine to regret. I wasn’t ready to choose which wound to wear.
So I did the thing that hurt cleanest.
I picked up the scroll. The wax was still warm from his body; the seal smelled faintly of orange blossom and old iron. Duty has a scent. It gets into your hair.
I walked.
Past Kaelen’s quiet, guilty exhale. Past the archway where the wards made their small, constant music. Past the shadow in the corridor whose outline I could recognize in sleep.
My mark burned like a brand. His scent rose to meet me anyway—smoke and steel and that impossible heat my cells had learned too well. We passed close enough that the silks at my wrist brushed his knuckles. I kept my eyes down.
“Yuna—” he began, voice rough.
I didn’t let myself hear it. If I heard it, I would stop. If I stopped, I would break. If I broke, I would hand the pieces to a man who was learning how to hold without cutting and still had too many sharp edges to trust with my shattering.
The corridor widened into a hall full of portraits that pretended they didn’t watch. I kept walking until the sound of his breath was something the stone swallowed, until my legs remembered whose body they belong to.
At the end of the hall, I leaned into a column and finally cracked the seal. The wax split with a quiet pop, as if it was relieved to be done pretending it could keep anything whole. The parchment unfurled like a wing. Script sloped across it in my mother’s thin, immaculate hand.
