The ward hum rises to a keen. The circle on the stones brightens, begins to spin faster. Through the narrowing line of sound, I think I hear a distant answer—the scrape of boot on tile, the sudden lurch in the bond, a flare trying to force itself through a wall.
Taeyang.
My chest cracks.
“I would have forgiven almost anything,” I tell Kaelen, because I need him to carry the truth of me into whatever comes next.
“Almost,” he echoes, shattered.
“Not this.”
I move. He does too. We meet, not with blades, but with hands, with all the years we built between us, and there is no clean way to write what happens next. I break his ward with blood and bone—my palm pressed to the spinning ring until skin gives and magic answers me instead of it. He catches me by the waist with an oath only childhood friends know, hauls me back before the circle can slice me to ribbons. The Sentinel lunges. The lake roars. The lanterns go out.
And then—
“YUNA!”
His voice. The bond shatters through the muffle like a star punching a hole in the night. The ribbon sears my skin. The ward staggers. Kaelen flinches at the name and looks up—past me, through me, over my shoulder—into the darkness where wrath is coming.
His face folds.
“Don’t run,” he whispers. “Don’t make me do this.”
It’s already too late. He knows it. I know it. The Sentinels know it. Kaelen steps through the ward instead of away from it—seal flaring in his palm, oath-light winding up his arms like chains he chose. He doesn’t face me when he speaks.
“I’m sorry,” he says, voice wrecked. “I’m sorry for being almost.”
The sanctum doors slaminward—glass shatters, moonlight fractures—and wrath explodes across the threshold.
“LET HER GO”
Taeyang’s roar tears the night in two. I reach for him; he reaches back—fingers, hope, the ribbon at my wrist— Kaelen’s arm snapsaround my waist. The ward whips tight, silver thread locking my limbs. A transport sigil ignites beneath our feet, cold as a grave.
“Don’t,” I breathe, but the floor is already falling.
Taeyang’s hand grazes mine—heat, promise—and then the circle yanks me away. The last thing I see is his face breaking open, a god of war begging the world to give me back. The sanctum seals. The spell takes. And I am gone.
My trust, soft and stubborn as lilies, rips at the root—blood on the petals, silence in my throat. I don’t know if anything will grow there again.
Unforgivable
Taeyang
The ribbon burns a line into my palm. It’s Yuna’s—violet, soft, a promise I tied myself—and now it’s the only thing that didn’t slip through my fingers. I’m still kneeling in the sanctum wreckage, glass crunching under my boots, the taste of lightning on my tongue. The circle that swallowed her leaves a scorched ring in the stone, humming like it might open again if I bled enough on it.
I press my hand to the mark on my chest until it hurts.
The bond is there, but far muffled, dragged behind walls I can’t see. Every time I reach for her, I hit something cold and ancient, and it throws me back like I’m a boy again, clawing at adoor that won’t open while everything I love burns on the other side.
Unforgivable.
The word finds a home and makes a nest out of all my old losses—parents, first love, the parts of me I buried to stop feeling—and now it addsherto the pile. Not gone. Not dead.Taken.
Bootsteps and wings. Rheon is first through the blown doors, shadows curling off his shoulders, Seori at his back with her blade bare and her eyes already reading me like a battlefield. Jisoo follows—quiet rage, careful hands—Minji sliding in at his side, her gaze raking the ruins for the seam a plan might fit through.
“Where?” Rheon asks.
I point to the burned circle. My voice is wreckage. “Sanctum sigil. Court-bound. He used a royal seal.”
