I close my eyes, press my mouth to the charm hidden in my armor, and breathe the way he told me to.
“Don’t leave me again,” I say to the wind.
The wind answers with bells and banners and the first distant roar of a war that has always been coming.
“Come back,” I whisper.
Somewhere, across stone and steel and the space between a promise and its proof, I feel the bond kick, like a bird inside a cage daring the sky to be real.
He’s still there.
And I will be, too.
The Last dance before the war
Seori
The palace is too bright to be honest. Lanterns drip from the colonnades like pearls, music ghosts along the galleries, and every polished surface reflects a version of me that looks steadier than I feel—braided hair, leather laced under petal-etched armor, blade at my spine and another at my thigh. The warding sigils along the floors hum for the Crown; the oath in my bones hums for something older.
Rheon finds me where the moon cuts a clean square on the marble.
“Hunter,” he says softly, as if the word were a pet name we invented in the dark. Shadow gathers at his shoulders and then thinks better of it, curling away like a tide that refuses to touch what I am standing on. He’s dressed for war without looking like it—coat dark as a closed door, throat bare, hands empty in the way only very dangerous men allow.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“You’re late.”
He tilts his head, that near-smile I once mistook for arrogance and now recognize as restraint.
“I was deciding whether to steal you or ask nicely.”
“Ask,” I say. “Then steal me anyway.”
His mouth softens.
“Dance with me.”
There’s no music in this wing. The court abandoned it for the balcony and the spectacle. But Rheon lifts our joined hands and the shadows oblige: a low, slow rhythm stitched together from remembered heartbeats and the scrape of old violins in older halls. I step in. He steps back. We catch the measure like a secret.
If anyone sees us, they see a demon prince and his blade moving in time, her head tipped toward his, his palm settled at the small of her back as if it had learned its place by prayer.
If anyone asks me later what it felt like, I will say:like standing in the doorway of a house I never thought I’d get to go home to.
“You’re far away,” I murmur.
“Just ahead,” he admits. “Scouting the worst outcomes so you don’t have to.”
“Share,” I say.
He spins me once, fingers skimming my wrist where the old mark—the one that bound us when dying was closer—flares in greeting. When he draws me back in, his voice is low enough that even the walls can’t make sense of it.
“The King is moving pieces I can’t see. Jisoo says ‘incline’ as if erosion can’t carve ravines. Minji is braver than her sleep will allow her to admit. Taeyang…” His jaw works. “He’s carrying all the rage he’s ever been denied the right to feel, and he’s calling it strategy.”
“And Yuna?”
His gaze finds my mouth, then my eyes.
“Yuna is trying to be a bridge for men who only know how to be walls.”
