My voice cracked on the last word. The ward hum pressed at my ears. He stayed quiet, and the quiet wrapped around us like ice.
“I waited for you,” I said, tears burning cold at the corners of my eyes. “Through the nightmares. Through the bond-burns and the way my mark wouldn’t be still. I waited.”
He finally looked at me. The gold rim had crept back into his eyes—guilt and regret banked like coals, and behind them something worse: fear.
“You’re not the girl I met,” he said softly, as if softness could blunt what it was.
The words went in like a knife finding a gap in armor. I kept my spine straight and let them fit. “Maybe not,” I whispered. “Maybe I grew into the crown you hate so much.”
“I don’t hate—”
“But you don’t trust me.”
Truth hung between us like poison caught in glass—visible, undrinkable. I wiped at my cheeks with fingers that wouldn’t stop trembling. When I spoke again, the sound was a thread. “You looked at me like I was everything. Now all I see is someone trying not to fall.”
“Because if I fall,” he rasped, throat working, “I won’t survive it.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“I never said it was.”
“But I feel like it is,” I said, and the words broke me on the way out. “Every time you flinch. Every time you pull away. Every time you almost say what you want, and then you don’t.”
He took a step toward me. Instinct made me take one back. The bond pulsed—one beat begging, one beat bracing.
“I can’t keep chasing a ghost,” I said, the ember in my chest guttering in a draft I couldn’t find. “And I can’t keep being punished for blood I didn’t choose.”
His mouth opened. Closed. No apology. No plea. No fight. Only the old companion he carries like a weapon: silence.
Something final settled over the courtyard. Even the wardlights seemed to dim, as if the palace itself didn’t want to watch.
So I turned.
My skirt scraped frost. The moonstones in my hair chimed once—a tiny sound, a little star dying. I walked, and when the wind rose behind me, I let it pick up the brittle music of my heart breaking and carry it down the long colonnade where portraits pretend not to listen.
Maybe he would hear it. Maybe he wouldn’t.
Either way, I was done bleeding for a love still debating whether it wants to live.
A Fae’s Fury
Yuna
The air felt different tonight. Thicker. Wilder. Full of things unsaid and undone. And I couldn’t breathe through any of it. The garden was empty. Just me and the cold. Just me and the weight of everything I had tried to carry in silence.
Taeyang’s words—You’re not the girl I met—still clung to my ribs like vines, suffocating. But it wasn’t just what he said. It was what I’d been hiding.
What I’dlearned.What Ifeared.
· · - ·?· - · ·
One week earlier
I went to the archives alone.
The Summer seal on the door recognized me with a whisper of old magic and lemon oil. Dust motes turned in light like tiny planets with nowhere to go. I was looking for maps, treaties, anything to explain why the demon and fae realms were starting to breathe like enemies again.
I found ruin.
