Footsteps scrape stone somewhere beyond the hedges—Minji’s cadence, quick and purposeful. The spell of the garden doesn’t break so much as fold itself around the reality that always returns. We don’t move. Not yet.
“Taeyang,” she says. “If he tries to make you kneel…”
“I already chose who I kneel to,” I answer, and the truth of it steadies my hands. “He can’t take what I gave to you.”
She looks at me like she believes me more than she believes the sky is above us. It guts me and builds me in the same breath. A shadow appears between the cypress columns. Minji, eyes bright with bad news.
“It’s time,” she says. “We found the first uncle’s nest. The King wants a public start.”
Of course he does. He wants a spectacle. He wants to turn me into his leash and call it governance.
I nod without looking away from Yuna.
“One breath away,” I say again, because I need her to have the rhythm of it in her bones.
She squeezes my hand.
“Come back.”
“I will,” I say, and hate the piece of me that knows promises like this are invitations for the world to test its aim.
I take two steps away and stop. The garden makes a liar out of pride. I go back, press a kiss to her brow—light, reverent, a vow without throat—and leave before I teach myself how to stay when I’m supposed to move.
At the path’s edge, I look over my shoulder. She’s still there, a small brightness inside a place that wants to own every kind of light. She lifts our ribboned wrist and mouths something I can’t hear but feel anyway.
Survive.
“I will,” I whisper to the garden that forgives nothing. “Even if it kills me.”
Don’t Leave Me Again
Yuna
The attendants lace me into a dress meant for diplomacy and a corset meant for war. Silk over leather. Petals over steel. The breastplate is etched with flowering thorns—pretty enough for a balcony, strong enough to stop a knife if anyone decides the Princess should be a lesson before the morning ends. They pin moonstone at my throat; they buckle armguards that look like bracelets. The ward-chain at my wrist hums like a caged wasp.
“Highness,” one whispers, eyes down. “The balcony has been prepared. The warding focus is set.”
A cage with a view.
“Leave us,” I say, and they go as if the room itself told them to.
I sit on the edge of the dressing couch and try to breathe around the ache in my ribs. From here I can hear the palace changing shape—portcullis groaning, banners unfurling, the low thunder of boots on stone as the court pretends it isn’t terrified. Somewhere, Minji is folding a map into a pocket only she will remember. Somewhere, Jisoo is counting exits and lies. Somewhere, Seori and Rheon are murmuring each other into steel.
I press my thumb to the ribbon Taeyang tied around my wrist, violet stubbornness against the silver chain. A knock, soft and wrong for a morning like this.
“Come in,” I say, even though I already know.
Taeyang fills the doorway like the shadow of a storm that has learned how to be gentle. No armor, just a dark coat and a leather harness for blades he pretends he won’t need. He looks like he didn’t sleep—which is unfair, because my heart is the thing pacing in his chest.
“You look like a promise,” he says, and the rawness in his voice makes my throat sting.
“You look like a threat,” I answer, and try to smile. It breaks halfway through.
He crosses the room in three long strides and stops a breath away, hands hovering like he’s afraid of touching a bruise he made once and swore never to make again.
“The King wants you on the eastern balcony,” he says, careful. “You’ll anchor the ward. If the lines fail, you reinforce them. You’re the last defense if the gates fall.”
“Not a princess,” I whisper. “A fuse.”
