Soft, careful, wearing composure too heavy for the first hour and too necessary for the second. Pain flickered behind the calm. She knew. She knew this would split me open. She hadn’t told me.
Pieces clicked into a pattern I hated: the way she holds a cup—elbow fixed by court training; the way silence fits her when duty needs a mask; how flowers turn toward her like supplicants in a chapel. The bond flared beneath my skin—white-hot, bright enough to hurt.
Kaelen’s fingers hovered near her arm again. My vision went pricked and mean. Possessiveness snarled; rage bared its teeth; confusion slid through the middle, colder and more dangerous than either.
The herald droned the terms we inked in obsidian: peace-bonded blades, two escorts, no glamour, no compulsion, no memory work. Paper burned clean as Seori sealed them; spell-smoke lifted and vanished. None of it changed the geometry of the moment: I stood a breath away from the man I vowed to kill—and the woman I loved was his daughter.
Yuna bowed—Summer-perfect, palms open, spine a line any court would envy—and rose with those ember eyes still on me. No apology. No plea. Justthis is meoffered like a blade and a mercy.
I felt betrayed.
Not by what she is—by when she let me know. By the way the truth arrived with an audience. By the fact that even crowned, evenhis, she still stole my breath from lungs built for smoke.
Kaelen murmured; she answered with a sound that used to belong to nights and gardens and my hands in her hair. Themark burned until I had to turn my face to the sun just to find something honest left in me.
I did not draw a blade. I did not move.
The bond ached. Trust hairline-cracked. Want refused to dim.
And for the first time, I couldn’t tell what I hated more—that she kept a crown-shaped truth in her mouth until today…
…or that even now—evenhis, even royal—I wanted her anyway, ember eyes and midnight hair and all the ways she makes a weapon forget it was forged for anything but her.
The Truth Beneath the Crown
Taeyang
The sun had slipped behind the summit’s high towers hours ago, leaving the courtyard in a cold that got its teeth into bone. Wardlights guttered along the colonnade, their glow catching on frost-etched ivy, the air still heavy with incense that didn’t belong to mountains. I hadn’t moved.
The stone under my boots held the day’s heat like a memory too faint to matter. I wanted the bite of the wind; I needed something sharp enough to argue with the fire chewing under my ribs. Every time I blinked, I saw her crown. Every time I breathed, I heard her voice. The world had the nerve to keep turning.
Fae princess.
Not just grace. Not just teeth and moonfire and the girl who laughs in gardens. Royalty. Hidden. And in hiding, a kind of lie.
I’ve torn down walls for less than the names the Fae King keeps. I have rehearsed killing him the way other men practice prayers. And still, when she stepped into that hall, the first thing my body did was choose her.
Beautiful. Radiant. Heart-shattering.
I hated her for that. I hated myself more.
Footsteps found the stone behind me, careful enough that they could have been anyone else’s. They weren’t. The bond was already tugging, rude and sure, like a thread being pulled through cloth that thought it was done being sewn.
“You followed me,” I said, not turning.
“I always do,” she answered. Softer than this night ever gets.
Yuna.
Her scent reached first—honeysuckle and dusk, the faint smoke that clings to silk after torches are put out. My fists were clenched. She came to stand beside me, close enough that heat found its way through my coat, close enough that the bond eased and sharpened in the same breath.
“You should’ve told me,” I said at last, voice low and honed. “Before I learned it with a crown on your head and your father breathing the same air as me.”
“I was going to,” she said. It wasn’t a lie; that made it worse. “You weren’t ready to hear it.”
“And you were ready to keep it?” I turned. I shouldn’t have. Those ember eyes lifted to mine and the argument I’d built in my chest went to ash.
Pain had set up house in her gaze, a bruise you can’t glamor out. Moonstones threaded her dark braid, midnight woven with light; a single strand had come loose, curling against her cheek like it had decided to stay. The circlet was gone—left with the hall, with witnesses—but it clung to the set of her shoulders, to the way stillness chose her and made her look older than she is.
