I huff a breath that isn’t a laugh.
“So—bad feeling?”
He nods once.
“A seam somewhere I can’t stitch yet.”
We sway, and the light from the garden spills in—vine-shadow and moon-silver, the city beyond strung like a constellation that fell and decided to stay. I rest my cheek against Rheon’s shoulder for a measure, let the world narrow to velvet and bone and the sound of his breathing evening mine.
“Every time I think I know the shape of danger,” I say, “this place invents a prettier version.”
He hums.
“Then we make our promises ugly enough to survive it.”
I pull back to look at him.
“Promise me.”
Rheon’s eyes darken, not with hunger—though that’s there, always—but with the thing that makes hunger gentle.
“I will keep Taeyang alive if the sky has to learn my name in order to fall,” he says, each word ironed flat and hot. “I will keep Yuna unbroken even if the throne learns it can bleed. And if the King tries to make an altar out of you, I will set his chapel on fire with the candles he lit.”
“You’ll have help,” I tell him. “From the girl who went to shrines for absolution and found a monster instead.”
He smiles like it hurts and cups my jaw.
“You stopped being a supplicant the moment you buried your first mercy.”
“Minji says mercy is a blade with a prettier name,” I say. “Jisoo says the same, but with better metaphors.”
“Taeyang says he will come back,” Rheon murmurs. “Yuna says she will make that true.”
We turn again, and the rhythm slows until it’s only the count of our own heartbeats. Up close, I see the thing I didn’t want to say out loud in case it felt too much like tempting the world to test it—fatigue at the corners of his mouth, the kind that looks like a man’s body remembering every time it had to hold the door against a storm alone. I tip onto my toes and kiss that tired place as if the kiss were a balm I know how to make.
“Bad feeling, noted,” I whisper against his skin. “Now leave it with me.”
“Seori,” he warns. It isn’t a word so much as a hand on my shoulder, warm and anchoring.
I slip my fingers into the inside pocket of his coat and pull out the red thread I’ve been keeping since a different night in a different city, when we decided wanting could be another word for living.
“Crimson oath,” I say, looping it twice around his wrist. “To remember who we are when the room tries to rename us.”
He watches me tie the knot.
“You kept it.”
“I keep what matters,” I say. “Even when I have to hide it.”
He binds a matching loop around my wrist with a strip he conjures from shadow and heat—the same color, the same knot. When he finishes, he turns my palm and presses a kiss to the center like he’s signing a treaty with our bodies that our enemies don’t have language for.
“Hunter,” he says, softer, “if the line breaks—”
“I make a new one,” I cut in. “If the gate falls, I become the door. If the King points at Yuna, I stand in the way and make him learn a different shape of regret.”
“And if something comes for you while I’m not looking?”
“Then it will learn I have two best friends who don’t miss, a fallen angel who does not forgive himself and therefore can’t forgive anyone else either, and a demon prince who sets palaces on fire when people speak to me like I’m a problem to solve.”
