“I don’t kneel to kings,” I tell the floor, because if I look up and see her eyes I’ll fall apart. “I kneel to what saves me.”
Silence. Her hand trembles in mine. The chain at her wrist hums like a snake deciding whether to strike. I thread my fingers through hers until the tremble evens out.
“Is this what it feels like to need someone?” The thought in my head breaks loose into sound. I let it. “Hunger with a name. Thirst with a face. I was fifteen when I promised the world it could never make me need again. I was wrong. You undo every promise I made to survive. And I’m asking you to let me be undone.”
Her breath stutters.
“Taeyang…”
I finally look up. She’s looking at me like I’m the first honest thing she’s seen all day. Her eyes are wet, but it’s not weakness. It’s a flood she’s been holding with her teeth.
“You don’t deserve to kneel,” she says.
“I don’t deserve to stand if standing means towering over you.” I swallow. It scrapes. “I shouted. I grabbed. I was the room that hurt you, not the door that opened. I will not be that again.”
Her fingers tighten. The chain pulses, offended. The bond answers anyway thin, muffled, stubborn as a weed growing through stone.
“I can’t be your death,” she whispers. “I won’t be the thing that brings your ruin.”
“You were never the ruin,” I say, and the truth comes out like I’ve been chewing glass to get to it.
“You’re the reason I stopped swinging at shadows. If I must wear a leash to hunt my uncles under your father’s banner, I will. If I have to saylaterto my rage, I will. If I must bow to a throne so I can stand beside you, I will bow. But I will not say we’re finished while your voice shakes like that.”
Her chin trembles. She tries for steel, grief leaks through anyway.
“He said he’d kill you.”
“Then he’ll try,” I answer. “And he’ll learn I’m not the boy he murdered by proxy.”
A breath, ragged.
“If I reject you—”
“Don’t make me bless a lie to make you feel safer.” My hand tightens before I remember and force it gentle again. “Rejecting me won’t stop him. It’ll only make you bleed alone.”
She shuts her eyes. A tear slips free and lands on my knuckles. It feels like absolution. It feels like a sentence.
“Look at me,” I ask.
She does.
“Here is my vow,” I say, steady now. “I will never raise my voice to make you smaller. I will never use my hands to make you stay.If you send me away, I will go.But I will not leave because fear told me to. I will leave becauseyoudid.”
I press my mouth to her fingers—once, like a signature.
“And if you keep me,” I add, “I will learn whatever this is asking me to learn. Patience. Restraint. Diplomacy.” A dry, ruined laugh. “Humility.”
Her lips quirk despite the wreck of us.
“You?”
“Don’t tell anyone,” I whisper. “I have a reputation.”
The smallest breath of a smile. Then it fades, and I see the girl who jumped from the Star Bridge and laughed before she hit the water. I see the princess learning to breathe with chains on. I see the woman who chose herself in a room where choosing was treason.
“You can’t fix this by bleeding first,” she says.
“I’m not trying to fix it,” I say. “I’m trying tostay.”
