“I want you,” Yuna says. “Not your perfection. Not your penance. You.” Her thumb brushes the scar at my knuckle—the one that didn’t heal clean, the one I hide without thinking. “When you step back, it feels like I’m being punished for something I didn’t do.”
“I’m not punishing you.” Shame climbs my throat. “I’m… keeping the world intact.”
Her laugh is soft and broken.
“Since when has the world askedusfor permission to fall apart?”
I press my forehead to our joined hands. The words come out before pride can chew them: “I’m afraid.”
“I know,” she says again, and somehowthatis the thing that undoes me.
I sink to a knee without meaning to. Not fealty. Gravity. Her fingers slide into my hair, and I breathe like a man who’s been underwater too long.
“There’s a story about the first fae queen,” she murmurs. “She chose a river for a coronation throne and a forest for acrown, and the court laughed. They said she was unfit because she didn’t pick gold.” A smile ghosts across Yuna’s mouth.
“She told them anything that feeds you is fit to rule.”
“What feeds you?” I ask, a rasp.
She leans down until our foreheads touch. “The way you watch the doorandthe sky. The way you apologize with action. The way you say my name like it’s a decision.” Her voice thins, then holds. “Not the way you bleed when you think I won’t notice.”
I let my eyes close. Trust, then terror. Want, then shame. The old tide rolls in; I brace for the pull. It doesn’t take me. Not this time. Her hands keep me anchored where I am.
“You could do better,” I say, ugly, honest.
She hums. “I’m not shopping.”
I snort despite myself. It cracks something hard inside me, and the hurt sloshes out. “I dream of you,” I admit. “Of your hands in my hair. Of kneeling.” The confession is a bruise I turn toward her on purpose. “It doesn’t feel like losing when it’s you. It feels like—”
“Choosing,” she finishes.
I nod. “And I want to. Gods, I want to. But part of me still lives in that burning house. Part of me still hears your father’s men in the dark and believes if I love anything, it dies.”
Her mouth tightens—not at the mention of her father, but at the lie fear keeps telling. She lifts my hand and sets it over the mark at her collarbone. The heat of it finds my palm like a lighthouse. I swear the world tilts.
“I’m not a flame you found in a ruin,” she says. “I’m the one walking you out.”
The bond swells—bright, then bright enough to hurt. My breath frays. I keep my hand where she placed it. She covers it with both of hers and holds me there.
“Stay,” she says. One word. A soft order. A prayer I’ve been waiting to be given.
“I will.” I don’t recognize my voice.
“Even when it’s ugly?”
“Especially then.”
She studies me for a long heartbeat, and whatever she’s looking for, she must find it. Her shoulders ease. She lifts my other hand and guides it to her waist, then steps into me until there is no space left that my doubt can fill.
“Taeyang.”
“Yuna.”
“Your darkness is not a disqualification,” she whispers. “It’s a map. I’m not afraid of where it leads if it leads me to you.”
Something in me breaks. Not the bad kind. The kind that makes room.
I rise—slow, careful—and kiss her like a vow: not a taking, not a test, not a plea. A promise. She makes a sound into my mouth that I will carry across wars. When we part, her forehead stays against mine, and we breathe the same breath until the world steadies.
