“Do it,” I tell her.
She studies me for a heartbeat, making sure I didn’t meanhurt me to pay for it.She nods only when she decides I didn’t.
“Sit.”
I peel open the torn shirt. The air bites the half-moon. She cleans the blade, pricks her thumb, and draws a small sigil over the cut—three strokes, a curve, a star. Not deep.True.Her blood beads and binds to mine with a heat that isn’t heat. My brand hisses like a snake denied.
Rheon’s shadow settles over my shoulders like a cloak that remembers being a hand.
“There’s a counter-sigil for guest-right,” he says. “Minji thinks the Archive has it. We’ll break the cup at the Veil and unteach your bones the angle.”
“And if I slip before then?” I ask, staring at the door of the room where Yuna lies because I cannot stop imagining it opening on the worst thing a man can be to the woman he loves.
“Then you fall into her,” Seori says. “The bond outranks the king.”
I swallow, and the wordkingcurdles in my mouth.
“I don’t want to make her carry what is mine.”
Seori’s expression softens, tired and bright.
“That’s not how carrying works.”
The whisper in my chest tries again—heel—and finds the fresh ink of the sigil and skids. It doesn’t vanish. It sulks. I can live with sulking.
I return to Yuna. The infirmary is thinner without Rheon’s shadow filling the doorway, but the room has learned her name now. It likes the sound.
I sit. I take her hand. Our pulse argues and then agrees.
She wakes like a door opening on light.
“Hey,” she whispers, rough-edged and stubbornly alive. “You look like you haven’t blinked since the dawn of time.”
“I blinked,” I say. “Once. I didn’t like it.”
Her mouth tugs.
“Dramatic.”
“Yours,” I say, and the word tastes better than any title I’ve ever been given.
She touches the ribbon at my wrist, a thumb stroking violet that refuses to fade.
“Did it hurt?” she asks, eyes flicking to the new ink over my heart.
“Which part,” I ask, “the spell or the truth?”
“Both.”
“Yes,” I say, and then—because she deserves ugly answers with the pretty ones—“The brand still wants to be a mouth. Seori taught it a new word. Rheon will teach it a new silence. I’ll teach it that I am not the boy who learned wrath before he learned water.”
Yuna’s fingers curl into my palm.
“And if it forgets?”
“Then it can watch me kneel to you and learn what obedience is for,” I say, the vow stripping itself down until there is nothing left to misinterpret.
“If the world insists I kneel, I kneel to the woman who used a crown to make room for mercy.”
