Her eyes shine.
“You don’t have to kneel.”
“I want to,” I answer, and it isn’t about apology. It’s about choosing who I am a weapon for. “Not to beg. To serve. To love. To lace your boots before battles and unlace your armor after. To keep the fire outside the door and carry it only when you ask me to burn.”
Tears tip over her lashes. I touch them with my mouth like they are holy water and I will be struck clean if I get this wrong.
Outside, the palace turns in its sleep. Inside, Minji snores once—sharp, indignant—and Jisoo’s wing rustles; Seori laughs under her breath like relief learned how to make a sound that won’t spook.
Yuna draws me closer by the ribbon.
“Say it again,” she murmurs. “Something I can carry when the court tries to make me a cage.”
I lower my forehead to hers—my favorite altar, my only throne.
“Let every command the world ever wrote into me be overwritten by your breathing,” I tell her. “Let every curse find your name and get lost. If the bond is a chain, let it be the kind that keeps me by your side when I would have run. If there is a price left, I pay it. If there is a door left, I hold it. If there is a night left, I light it.”
She exhales like a woman laying down a sword.
“And if there is a day left?”
“I’ll call it ours,” I say.
The brand stirs—petty, persistent. The sigil warms and hushes it. The new half-heart thrums like a drum teaching an army how to march.
“Rest,” Seori says from the foot of the bed, voice gentled by the privilege of having watched us almost lose what we were not ready to name. “Both of you. We break cups at dawn.”
Rheon’s shadow nods like a man agreeing to a murder. Minji rolls over and mutters,
“I’m bringing a bigger bag.” Jisoo doesn’t look at me, but I feel the shape of his forgiveness hovering in the quiet between his breaths.
I lay down beside my queen on the narrow cot, careful of bandages and crowns, and let our joined pulse pull me under. The whisper in my chest tries once more—heel—testing the frame of the life I am building. It hits the ribbon on my wrist, the ink over my heart, the girl with moonlight in her lungs who saidI love youwhile dying and then decided not to, and the bond hums back a word that isn’tnoand isn’tyes.
Mine,it says, and the curse has no language for that.
I close my eyes.
Her crown rests on a table like a weapon we will decide how to wield. My curse lies down beside it like a dog that finally learned whose hand it’s allowed to lick.
Between them, her breathing. Between them, my vow. I sleep, and for the first time in a long time, I don’t dream of fire.
I dream of a door that opens when she says my name.
The Bond Takes Over
Taeyang
Three nights after the Vale, the palace finally remembers how to be quiet.
The healers have left candles the color of warm honey on the sill. The vines sleep. The air tastes like moonmint and clean linen instead of smoke. Yuna stands at the balcony doors in a soft slip the shade of first light, hair falling down her back like something I should kneel to on instinct alone. The bandage beneath her collar is smaller now, the half-moon Seori wrote over her heart a faint glow under skin.
Our marks answer each other across the room—my crescent, her crescent—two coals deciding to be fire again.
“Are you sure?” I ask, because want is loud but love is careful.
She turns, and the look she gives me is a vow.
“I’m sure,” she says, and then, wicked-soft: “Unless you plan to keep staring from over there.”
