Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Family Tree (Intro), Ethel Cain

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), Nancy Sinatra

Twisted Nerve, Bernard Herrmann

Kill Bill, SZA

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, The Animals

Barracuda, Heart

Gimme Danger, The Stooges

Eat You Up, Yoko Oginome

Burning Down the House, Talking Heads

Woo Hoo, The 5.6.7.8’s

White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Santa Esmeralda

Hayloft, Mother Mother

Dead End Justice, The Runaways

Jennifer’s Body, Hole

We Belong Together, Ritchie Valens

The House of the Rising Sun, The Animals

People are Strange, The Doors

Family Tree, Ethel Cain

Psycho Killer, Talking Heads

Back to Black, Amy Winehouse

I Will Wait for You, Connie Francis

Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God), Kate Bush

Supermassive Black Hole, Muse

White Wedding - Pt. 1, Billy Idol

Just A Girl, No Doubt

Don’t Hurt Yourself, Beyonce (ft. Jack White)

(Don’t Fear) The Reaper, Blue Oyster Cult

You Don’t Own Me, Lesley Gore

Nettles, Ethel Cain

Crazy on You, Heart

Voodoo Child (Slight Return), Stevie Ray Vaughan

Rip Her To Shreds, Blondie

Rebel Yell, Billy Idol

You Really Got Me , The Kinks

Hell to Your Doorstep, Thomas Borchert

Black Magic Woman, Santana

Heart-Shaped Box, Nirvana

Cold, Cold Feeling, Albert Collins

Nobody But Me, The Human Beinz

The Chain, Fleetwood Mac

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John

California Dreamin’, Bobby Womack

Chapter Text

The chapel should’ve been silent.

It was an old place in a small washed up town just out of El Paso, Texas. Wooden and made for no more than fifty people at a time. Places like this were built for quiet. Women fanning themselves, whispered prayers, the stillness when they bowed their heads. A paster who spoke softly and with a slight lisp. But this one wasn’t still.

Light filtered through the fractured stained glass in strange, broken beams. The familiar colors—once soft blues and radiant golds—were twisted now, bleeding together in sickly smears. That light didn’t warm the room. It landed in slashes, casting jaundiced yellows and bruised purples across the pews.

Everything in that chapel was not as it should have been.

The pews were gashed and gouged, varnish long gone in patches where children’s fingernails had worn it away. Places where fingers once folded in reverence were now sticky with rot or worn bare by time. Whatever prayers had been whispered here—if they were ever answered—no one would know now.

When the police would come just ten minutes later, the church would be demolished a few short weeks later. The folks of Canutillo did not want to be reminded of the Two Pines Masacre nor the family that was butchered within it.

The air hung thick, not just with heat but with something worse. It clung to the skin, damp and cloying, as if the chapel itself was sweating. It stank of iron, fresh and metallic, and beneath it, something sweeter curled. Rotten sweet. Like fruit left too long in the sun, or perfume curdled by time. A scent that turned your stomach.

At the front of the chapel, just below the altar, the bride lay crumpled.

A tangle of limbs and torn fabric, folded in on herself like she’d been cast down from a height and left to break where she fell. One leg bent the wrong way beneath her. The other twitched, small and aimless. Her arms were pulled tight to her chest, fists curled as if she’d tried to hold something that was already gone.

What was left of her dress was soaked in her blood, shredded and barely able to cover her. It clung to her in blood-slick folds. The bodice had been split straight down the center

The blood came slow, thick. It soaked into the stone beneath her in sluggish waves. And still, somehow, she breathed. Just barely. Wet, shallow gasps that scraped through her throat like they hurt to take. Her skin glistened with sweat, her color all wrong—an almost bruised color and waxy.

Her face was swollen, broken in places. One eye sealed shut beneath a crust of blood. Her jaw looked fractured. Her lips cracked. The other eye fluttered—just enough to show she was still in there. Somewhere.

But it wasn’t hope in that eye. Hope had left long before the blood spilled.

What was left was something raw. Maybe fury. Maybe instinct. Maybe the thought of someone else, someone small and helpless, curled inside her. Someone she’d tried to shield. Someone she was losing now.

This place was supposed to be her sanctuary. Now it was a grave.

The stone floor around her was littered. Shell casings glinted in the crooked light, catching just enough glow to show they were fresh. Still warm. Red and white roses lay crushed beside them, petals trampled and turning brown, some plastered to the blood. The air reeked of gunpowder, sharp and bitter, cutting through the sweeter rot.

And in the middle of the wreckage, Taehyung Kim stood.

Nothing about him was out of place. The suit was charcoal, sharp at the edges, made to measure and too expensive for a place like this. The shirt beneath it was blindingly white, clean and untouched. Three of its buttons were left undone and you could see a thin, gold chain dangling from his neck.

The world around him was torn to pieces—blood smeared across the floor, bullet casings still spinning in the dust, the air thick with what had just transpired not even twenty minutes before—but he stood there like none of it had touched him. Not even in passing. He looked like a mourner. Maybe even a priest. But he wasn’t either.

He was the reason why the entire Groban family was gone, and the bride to be was laying on those steps.

The light caught his face in strange ways, shadows carving into the sharp lines of his jaw and beneath his eyes. His expression didn’t give anything away. No guilt. No satisfaction. Just… stillness. That dangerous, unreadable kind. Behind him, the crucifix hung crooked on the wall, blackened with time, the figure above warped by rot. Its arms stretched wide, but it didn’t look like salvation anymore.

It looked like surrender.

And then, Taehyung moved.

No hurry. No sound. Just a single step down the aisle, then another, cutting through the streaks of blood like he couldn’t feel them. When he reached her, he didn’t hesitate. He dropped to one knee beside her the way some men kneel before a proposal, or a grave.

Like it was familiar.

His hands rested on his thighs. He didn’t reach for her. Didn’t try to help. He just watched. Quiet. Careful.

The blood had dried into a crusted line at her temple, cracking where it clung to the fine hairs around her face. Her lip was split, puffy, dark with bruising. Her dress hung in shreds, soaked and torn, the fabric stuck to her skin like a second, ruined layer. Her chest moved—barely—with each breath, and every rise and fall looked like a negotiation her body was losing.

Taehyung didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

Whatever emotion passed behind his eyes was faint—almost nothing—but it was there. A flicker. Not guilt, not quite. Something murkier. Something harder to name. Maybe recognition. Maybe the aftertaste of a feeling he'd long stopped claiming.

She was still alive. Barely.

Her breath rattled in her chest, dragging in air with a sound that didn’t quite resemble breathing anymore. More like something breaking, slowly.

He reached into his jacket.

There was no urgency in the motion. He pulled out a handkerchief—folded tight, corners crisp. White, like the shirt. A monogram in navy blue stitched into one edge: T.K. Simple serif letters. A detail meant for someone who believed their things mattered enough to mark them.

He unfolded it with care. Almost like he was preparing for something sacred.

Then he leaned in and began to wipe the blood from her face.

The movement was slow. Precise. Her temple first. Then the curve of her cheek. The corner of her mouth. His hand barely touched her skin, the cloth gliding with an eerie gentleness—like he wasn’t cleaning a dying woman, but handling something fragile. Precious. A relic he didn’t want to break any further.

The handkerchief turned red instantly. It soaked up the blood like it had been waiting for it.

She twitched. It was the smallest thing. A spasm. A tremor. Enough to show she was still in there somewhere.

Her one good eye peeled open—just a sliver—and found him. Locked onto him like a compass needle. Even through the haze, even drowning in pain, she saw him. Really saw him.

And what was in her gaze wasn’t surrender.

It was fire. Small. Fading. But still alive.

Anger. Refusal. A jagged piece of something that refused to die just because everything else already had.

Taehyung smiled.

A twitch of his mouth. Not a grin. Not warmth. Just the echo of something old—some past life where he knew how to smile like a person. It didn’t fit here. Not in this broken chapel. Not above this broken body.

But he let it sit there anyway.

When he spoke, his voice was low, casual. Like they were sharing a memory.

“Do you find me sadistic?”

He asked it like it was a real question. No sarcasm. No menace. Just curiosity. Like he honestly wanted to know.

She didn’t answer.

Her mouth parted, but all that came out was air. A dry, ragged sound caught somewhere between a breath and a refusal. Her jaw clenched. Her eye never left him.

She never looked away.

His gaze drifted away from her, slow and unhurried, as if he were walking through a memory instead of a crime scene.

Down the aisle. Across pews littered with the dead—bodies collapsed where they’d fallen, limbs twisted awkwardly, some with eyes still open, staring at nothing. The light coming through the broken stained glass scattered in warped patches, crawling across the stone floor like shards of color spilled from a broken bottle.

And there, near the altar—Thomas Groban. Tommy Boy. Face down. One arm caught underneath him, the other stretched out like he’d tried to reach her in those final seconds. The gold ring on his finger caught a sliver of that fractured light—just enough to glint, just enough to remind anyone watching that once, not so long ago, he’d stood right here. Beside her. Holding her hand. Promising things like always and forever .

Now there was only silence.

Taehyung sneered at his mop of golden blonde hair. Tommy's blue eyes were curiously looking at him nearly twenty minutes before. Now he was staring at nothing but the cold wooden floor of the chapel and his own blood. He stared at the Groban boy for a while. Longer than the moment called for. Something flickered behind his eyes, but it didn’t settle into an expression.

Then he turned back to the bride. She was staring at him with unadulterated hatred. Taehyung knew that look all too well, and he had been on the receiving end of it quite a few times. Back then, though, he would call her a cunt and she’d laugh. Then they’d kiss and make up. Now, he knew how this was going to end, and there would be no laughter or kisses. There would never be another make up. Today was the end.

“In another time,” he said quietly, like the thought had come to him just then, “men like me were called kings.”

There was no irony in it. Just a simple truth spoken into the stillness. He let it hang in the air for a second.

“In this one?” His breath slipped out with a humorless laugh—dry, like old dust. “We get called monsters. Or CEOs.”

He reached again for the handkerchief, though by now it was ruined—red soaked deep into the white cotton, no part of it clean. Bending down, he adjusted his pants before reaching up to her face. He dabbed at her cheek and the blood smeared more than it cleared. Still, he kept at it.

She flinched, pain blossoming on her skin. Still, she held his gaze. Taehyung’s expression was blank but his voice seemed almost warm. Sweet, even. Like he was talking to a child. It reminded her of the times they would lay around the fire pit in his backyard and stare at the stars.

And his voice lowered, barely more than a breath. “But you,” he said, “you made it difficult.”

His jaw tightened. He swallowed hard. “You shouldn’t have made me love you.”

He looked down. Not at her—just at the space between them.

“You know, kiddo…” he murmured, the nickname burning a hole in her chest, “I like to think you’re still aware enough to understand this isn’t sadism.”

His voice stayed calm.

“This is me at my most masochistic.”

She coughed.

The sound tore through the air—wet and sharp, like something inside her had given way. Blood slid from the corner of her mouth, catching on her teeth, her chin, her collarbone. Her lips moved again, slower this time. Straining.

He leaned in close, just enough to catch it.

“ Tae… ” she whispered.

It stopped him. Not for long. Just a moment. But it was enough to freeze the air between them, to crack open the part of him he’d been holding shut for too long.

He stood. Slowly. His hand moved to the holster at his side, pulling the revolver free in one smooth motion. The gun gleamed even in the fractured light—a sleek, polished silver that looked like it belonged on display, not in a place like this. Not surrounded by bodies and blood and ruin.

She would’ve recognized it.

She’d given it to him once, back when gifts meant something, back when she was his viper and he still believed he could tame her. Back when they were dangerous together—but not deadly. Back when he had loved her and made her world go round.

Now it was just another line they couldn’t uncross.

He raised it. The barrel stopped a breath above her brow. Steady. Unshaking.

She didn’t move. Didn’t close her eyes. Her lips parted, working around one last breath, one last word, shaped with whatever strength she had left.

“It’s your bab—”

The shot cut her off mid-sentence. One sharp, shattering crack. The sound lashed through the wooden beams, rang off the stone walls, and bounced back.

Her head snapped back as if yanked by some invisible string, then lolled forward. Her eye, the one still visible, stared blankly ahead.. Her lips parted slightly as if to finish her thought, but no sound came. Her fingers, once tense, unfurled slowly, releasing nothing at all.

Taehyung stood over her.

His hand still held the revolver, lowered now, almost forgotten. The weight of it felt heavier than before. There was something tight in his chest, a pressure that wasn’t grief—not quite. And it wasn’t regret either, not in any clean, mournful way. It was rawer than that. Messier. A jagged sensation, like something vital had been torn from him, and only now did his body begin to register the pain.

The rage that had consumed him minutes earlier had burned out too quickly. All that remained were embers and smoke. Ashes in his throat. He’d come here with purpose, driven by a need to end something—to make her silence permanent, to settle old scores. Now it was done. The story had ended. But the weight didn’t lift.

His breath came low and steady, more habit than will. He looked down at his hands. Blood streaked across his knuckles. Must have blown back on him. Slowly, methodically, he wiped them clean on a torn handkerchief pulled from his pocket. The fabric, already covered in Y/N’s blood, soaked up the red greedily. He folded it neatly, each crease sharp, precise. He tucked it back into his coat.

He smoothed the front of his jacket. Adjusted the cuffs. Straightened his spine. A last defense against what was unraveling inside. And then he looked at her one final time.

That was all he would allow himself.

Her words clung to the edges of his memory, a whisper threatening to root itself deeper. He didn’t know if he believed her. He wasn’t sure it mattered anymore. Maybe it was true. Maybe it was just a final ploy—her last hand played too late. A lie meant to break his resolve. She had always known how to twist the blade.

But none of that could be undone now.

He would have to tell Namjoon. There was no avoiding that. His younger brother would be waiting just beyond the chapel doors—pacing the gravel path, fists clenched, rage simmering under the surface. Taehyung could already feel the tension pressing in from outside, a storm gathering breath, waiting to break. Namjoon had opposed this from the very start. He had argued, pleaded, demanded another way. But in the end, he'd relented—not because he agreed, but because Taehyung had asked him to.

None of them had truly wanted this—not in their hearts, not when stripped of loyalty and obligation. Not even Jimin, who perhaps had the most personal reason to see it done. Not even Yoongi, who had once loved Y/N with a quiet intensity that still lingered even when he said it hadn’t.

Brandi had wanted it. Eagerly. Almost too much. Her hate for Y/N had always burned wild and senseless, a deep-rooted bitterness that Taehyung had never fully understood. The others chalked it up to jealousy—said Y/N had something Brandi never could. But that answer felt too simple. Brandi’s rage was deeper than a simple jealousy, and Y/N had never stopped herself from biting back ten times harder when they would get into their spats. And now that Y/N was dead, she’d probably smile in the mirror and try her best to get back into Taehyung’s bed.

Not that he would ever put up much of a fight.

Jimin and Yoongi had followed for reasons far more transactional. Yoongi had secured control of Busan through his compliance—he played the long game and played it well. Jimin had been promised his freedom, the chance to leave the dirt behind and chase something gentler: Loretta Bell, the doctor with warm hands and soft eyes waiting for him in California. That was enough for him.

Namjoon had followed for only one reason: because his brother asked. Because Taehyung needed him to. That loyalty was a burden now, and it would cost them both.

Because this—this changed everything.

If what she said was true… If the child was his…

Then no one would forgive him. Not fully. Maybe not ever. Maybe not even himself.

Brandi would stay by his side—that much was certain. She always did. But her loyalty wasn’t born of belief or conviction. It was hunger. A calculated desire to win him over, to be the last one left standing beside him, no matter what it cost. She had always wanted to please him ever since he saved her from the shithole she called a life.

Namjoon would erupt. Taehyung could already hear the sharp edge in his brother’s voice, the disbelief curdling into fury. He would see this not as a necessary act, not as strategy, but as betrayal. As murder. As something that went past whatever moral line Taehyung had left.

Yoongi would go silent. That was his way. But silence didn’t mean peace. He had claimed he was done with Y/N, that whatever they’d once had was long extinguished. But Taehyung had never fully bought it. There was still a softness in Yoongi, buried under all the steel and shadows, and it had always been reserved for her.

If Yoongi even suspected the baby wasn’t Tommy Groban’s…

He would disappear without ceremony. Vanish deeper into the folds of the South Korean underworld, taking Lynn Easton with him. No more border runs. No more favors. Busan would swallow him whole. And it would take Taehyung years—if ever—to earn his trust back.

Jimin would be angry, too. Quietly, bitterly so. But he would compartmentalize it like he did everything else. He’d take the freedom he’d been promised and Loretta Bell’s waiting hand, and he’d vanish into the California haze, determined to start fresh. He wouldn’t look back.

Taehyung closed his eyes for half a second, then forced the thoughts away. He buried them deep, past the guilt, past the confusion, past the splinter of fear he hadn’t dared name. He couldn’t afford to unravel now. Not here. Not yet.

Y/N had always known how to twist him into knots—how to pull at the seams. Even dead, she still had a hand around his throat. She had been brilliant. Beautiful. Dangerous in ways he hadn’t seen coming until it was too late. A born liar who wielded the truth like a blade. She could say a thing so convincingly it felt like gospel, even when it was poison.

And now, she’d left behind one final snare. One last doubt. A whisper that would haunt him, nested in blood and smoke and silence.

Even in dying, she had made sure he wouldn’t walk away clean.

His footsteps echoed across the chapel floor—sharp, deliberate, precise. The sound reverberated through the wreckage, past shattered glass and stained wood. The air hung heavy with the acrid stench of gunpowder and blood, laced with fading incense and the ghost of prayers that no longer mattered.

He moved past her body, still at the altar. Past the ruined pews and broken vows. Past the promises whispered into darkness, too late to be kept.

He didn’t look back.

There was nothing behind him worth remembering.

Chapter Text

The Longhorn didn’t sit so much as it slouched—just off Highway 87, somewhere between Amarillo and Canyon, like a half-dead dog that hadn’t figured out how to lie down properly. It looked slapped together from scrap and bad intentions: walls patched with corrugated tin, tar smeared in ugly gobs over leaky seams, warped boards nailed by someone with more liquor than judgment. The wind didn’t bother whistling here—it groaned, a tired old man dragging chains through its guts. It wasn’t much to look at, not even enough to mock. But it didn’t give a damn. Never had. It was as much a fixture as the sunburnt sky and the stretches of withered land it squatted on. It simply was , and had been long enough that no one could remember a time it wasn’t.

It was July 18th, 1990, and the heat in South Texas had stopped pretending it was part of the weather. It was punishment. The kind of brutal, mind-numbing heat that didn’t beat down on you—it crawled up inside, found the tender spots, and stayed there. The sun poured itself across the land like molten brass, draining the world of color until everything looked cooked. Bone-white sky. Rust-red dirt. Yellow grass scorched to ash. Even the road gave up—blacktop rippling like oil on a skillet, the edges of the highway blurring into a hallucinatory shimmer. The mesquites had folded into themselves, brittle things waiting for death, while the cacti stretched wide and thick, crawling over the far side of the highway.

But the Longhorn didn’t blink. Its porch sagged in the middle like a drunk passed out halfway through a fall, the planks beneath it creaking with each gust of wind. Boards had been replaced without reason or rhythm, patched like wounds with scraps of whatever could be nailed down. The windows weren’t windows anymore, just grimy lies with more filth than glass, fogged over with years of grease and cigarette smoke until they were better at keeping secrets than letting in light. Above the entrance, a twisted chunk of tin swung halfheartedly from rust-choked chains. The lettering—once proud—was chipped to near-oblivion, “The Longhorn” barely decipherable in the right light. Below that, a bleached cow skull dangled crookedly, one horn snapped clean off, the other yellowed and worm-bitten.

But it wasn’t the look of the place that got you—it was the smell. The stink hit you like a sucker punch. Hot grease that had gone sour, diesel baked in the heat, leather soaked in sweat and left to rot. Stale beer that had melted into the wood decades ago and never left. Underneath it all, something sharp and chemical, like industrial cleaner that didn’t clean so much as announce its failure. The kind of stink that settled into your skin, your hair, your lungs—and lingered, no matter how long you scrubbed.

The parking lot was more suggestion than surface—dust, gravel, and spiderweb cracks that split like lightning strikes through dried-out earth. A few trucks sat there like bleached carcasses, sun-blasted and peeling, their windshields so caked in grime they looked frosted over in filth. Heat waves shimmered up off their hoods like steam from a dying engine. The trucks weren’t abandoned, just forgotten for the moment. Their owners were inside, soaking into the shadows, becoming part of the walls, drinking like they didn’t expect the next round to taste any different than the last.

Inside, it wasn’t any cooler. Ceiling fans turned with all the urgency of molasses, creaking like they hated their job. The air moved just enough to spread the heat around evenly. Smoke stains marbled the ceiling, the walls stained a nicotine yellow so deep it looked baked in. Lightbulbs flickered from overhead like they were considering retirement. Everything was faded. Everything was slow. Nothing was clean, and nothing wanted to be.

The air was thick—cigarettes, old beer, something decaying in the background like a warning no one bothered to heed. Something had died back there. Maybe a rat. Maybe something with a name. The jukebox gasped out a tired Waylon Jennings song, skipping and sputtering like it was coughing through the lyrics. It didn’t matter. No one was listening.

Behind the bar stood Ellis Clifton—tall, broad, a man who looked like he’d been built, not born. His skin was burnished bronze, like metal worked under the sun, and his face was stone, still and solid, except for his eyes. Those eyes moved like they had all the time in the world. Ellis didn’t waste words. Ellis talked like molasses ran in his veins, but when he did speak, no one dared interrupt.

The name on the deed belonged to Frank Dickman, but Frank hadn’t been seen in half a decade. Rumor said he’d gone soft in the head, wandering around Sabinal with a Bible and a blank stare. His daughter, Betty Anne, was still figuring out if she wanted to sell the place or just wait for time and termites to do the job for her. Ellis kept it going, because it was the only thing he had ever done well. Before this, he was a ranch hand, and he wasn’t about to go back to chasing cattle and eating dust. Not when he had his boots planted behind a bar that needed him more than anyone else ever had.

The regulars were stitched into the furniture. Ranchers with bark for skin and hands that looked like they’d lost fights with barbed wire. Truckers with road-glazed eyes who stared past everything like they were still watching mile markers flash by. Old rodeo men who still walked with the pain of a thousand falls and wore championship buckles to remember the time when they mattered.

The women were jagged, loud, and weathered by hard years. Lips stained red, lipstick feathering into the cracks at the corners, eyes sharp from squinting through too many lies and cheap sunglasses. They wore jangling bracelets and too much perfume, their laughter hard and half a second too late. Their stories didn’t change either. Same soap-opera misery, same whispered grudges, same bad jokes chewed down to the gristle. The only thing that shifted was who was saying it, and how drunk they were when they did.

Far corner, near the window no one bothered looking through—not because the view was anything special, but because everyone knew better. There was no sign on that booth, no rope to keep people out, no brass plaque to explain its gravity. It didn’t need one. Some places earn their boundaries the hard way. People just knew. That booth belonged to a man who didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard, a man whose silence could clear a room better than a shotgun blast. He didn’t ask for space. He was the space.

Taehyung Kim. That’s what he said when people asked—not that many did. But names in this part of Texas had a way of bending around the truth, and Taehyung collected his share of nicknames like shadows collect dust. The one that stuck was Snake Charmer, whispered more often than spoken, and never, ever said to his face. Juan, his Mexican friend, had been the first to say it out loud—said Taehyung had a way with men, with moods, with danger, like he could whisper something terrible into the world and it would listen. It fit. Not because he looked like a threat—he didn’t—but because that was his trick. Lean and still, calm like dusk before a wildfire, slow like a fuse you don’t see until your eyebrows are already gone. He didn’t look dangerous. And that’s what made him dangerous.

He first rolled into town a decade ago, young enough that he shouldn’t have been drinking, old enough that nobody said shit about it. There was something in his stare—flat, quiet, heavy—that made men older than him reconsider their words and shift their stance. He didn’t smile. He didn’t joke. He just was, like some goddamn force of nature wearing skin. He came and went over the years, like a storm system that couldn’t make up its mind, and every time he came back, someone ended up across from him in that corner booth. They’d talk. Or they wouldn’t. They’d sit for ten minutes, or an hour. Sometimes they walked out together, looking changed in the kind of way that made you wonder if they’d sleep again. Sometimes they didn’t walk out at all. Sometimes their names showed up on the news. Other times, their names just stopped getting said.

When Taehyung came into the Longhorn, the temperature changed. Not the heat—that stayed, clinging to your skin like wet gauze—but the air, the tension, the vibe. It went still, like the room was holding its breath. Voices dipped. Conversations thinned out. People suddenly remembered their drinks were worth studying. No one offered him a beer. No one asked why he was there. He didn’t want company. He didn’t want attention. He wanted the booth. He wanted the door in his line of sight. And he wanted time to tick the way he decided.

That night, he wore black. He always did. A western shirt with thin red piping, neat but lived-in, sleeves rolled just enough to reveal the white scar curling like a worm from his wrist to his forearm, and the silver watch that never ticked. His pants were clean, creased like he cared. His boots, scuffed at the heel and toe, looked like they’d seen more road than the trucks out front. On one finger, a turquoise ring; on his pinky, a plain silver band—old, worn smooth, the only thing he still wore from his brother Namjoon, a man who’d once been something before the world took it from him.

He didn’t fidget. Didn’t glance around like he was sizing anyone up. He just sat. Still. Pinned to the leather seat like gravity worked a little harder on him. One hand cradled a glass of scotch, the liquid already gone lukewarm. In front of him, untouched, a shot of tequila. Next to that, a sweating glass of water leaving a wide wet ring on the wood that made his jaw tighten every time he looked at it. He drank slow, if he drank at all. Everything about him was measured.

Above the bar, the clock was lying again. It always had. Plastic molded to look like brass, hung crooked since ’78 when Ellis put it up and never bothered to fix it. The second hand twitched every few ticks like it had arthritis. The minute hand sagged like it knew it was running late. But Taehyung didn’t look at it. He didn’t need to. He knew. The kid was ten minutes late. Exactly ten. Not enough to make it personal yet, but enough to speak volumes.

Tardiness wasn’t neutral in his world. It was communication. A statement. It said something about respect, or the lack of it. It said something about fear, or its absence. Being late meant one of two things: you didn’t understand what you were walking into, or you did—and didn’t care. Either way, it wasn’t smart. Not with him. Once, maybe, Taehyung might’ve let that kind of thing slide. Back when he still believed in second chances and the redemptive power of mercy. But that man burned out somewhere far from here, in some booth like this one, in a town that doesn’t get mentioned anymore.

He moved, just a little—so little it could be missed if you weren’t watching close. His right boot creaked as it dragged an inch forward. His knee bent slightly. A casual observer might call it relaxed. But they’d be wrong. Taehyung didn’t relax. He readjusted. He calibrated. He made the necessary shifts to maintain control. The scotch caught the yellow light overhead, glowed like old honey, and stayed in his hand as if the feel of it mattered more than the drink itself. The ring from the water glass kept spreading, a slow, wet insult he couldn’t stop seeing.

The ceiling fans above groaned in their lazy, lopsided circles, stirring the same stale cocktail of cigarette smoke, hot breath, and old secrets that had been hanging in the Longhorn since the '70s. The air moved, but it didn’t get better. Voices still murmured in pockets around the bar, but they came out slower now, hushed and cautious, like the words were watching their own backs.

Taehyung’s eyes moved through the room with that slow, sweeping stillness of someone who never looked rushed but missed nothing. He saw the guy at the bar, the one with the nervous lighter— snap , flick , snap , again and again. He saw the woman across the way tapping her fingers on the tabletop in a rhythm that didn’t match her mouth. And he saw the two brothers hunched in the back booth, not speaking but clearly angry at each other—one of them slamming his boot against the floor just a bit too hard, making sure the other felt it. Taehyung didn’t need to hear what any of them were saying. Bodies always spoke louder than mouths.

He’d given the kid twenty minutes. That was the unspoken line in the sand. Not a rule—those were too flexible. Anyone worth meeting knew better than to cross it. Show up too late, and it wasn’t a mistake—it was a message. It meant you thought you could get away with it. It meant you thought you had leverage. At twelve minutes past, Taehyung began tapping his thumb against the side of his glass. His patience was wearing thin.

Then the cowbell above the door gave out its signature death rattle—dry, cracked metal on wire, like bones tumbling inside a soup can. It had sounded sick for decades. No one remembered the last time it rang clean. Still, it worked. The room reacted as one—spines stiffened, mouths shut mid-sentence, a card half-drawn from a deck froze like it was afraid of the outcome. Forks hovered, cigarettes paused just short of lips. Heads turned slow, like livestock catching a scent they didn’t like. First the men, instinctive, sizing up whatever was coming through that door. Then the women, slower, more surgical. Women at the Longhorn had learned early the difference between looking and being looked at. One was defense. The other, liability.

Standing there was a girl.

She stood in the doorway like a dropped match—small, sharp, a flicker of something that might catch fire if given the right wind. Maybe eighteen. Maybe younger. Hard to tell through the grime and the glare of the beer sign behind her, lighting her up in flickering blue like a ghost in a neon fog. One foot inside, one out, caught in that thin moment between flight and arrival. She looked like the road had tried to eat her and only half succeeded. Her blue hoodie hung loose and sun-faded, collar stained with sweat and something darker. Sleeves shoved up past the elbow, arms streaked with dirt, maybe blood. Hair yanked back with a shoelace. Clothes clung to her wrong—too tight where they shouldn't be, too loose where it mattered. Jeans torn and dragging. One boot held together with duct tape, the other torn up and covered in mud. A duffel hung off one shoulder, canvas worn to threads, the strap frayed like a wound that wouldn’t close.

She stepped inside. The door swung shut behind her with a groan that matched the floorboards swallowing her footsteps. The temperature didn’t change, but the air did. Taehyung smelled her before she got halfway to the bar—hot pavement, bad gas station coffee, motel shampoo, and the ghost of somewhere worse. She didn’t drop her gaze. She scanned the room with the kind of look that had nothing to do with hope and everything to do with survival. She wasn’t looking for help. She was counting exits. Taking stock of threats. Her eyes swept past the men and women and smoke without sticking. Not even the ones who leaned a little forward, trying to catch her eye like a hook.

Near the jukebox, an old-timer—face cratered like a busted moon, grin decades past its expiration date—gave her a smile he probably thought was charming. She didn’t blink. She didn’t stop. She moved through the Longhorn like a needle through old leather—clean line, no hesitation. Straight toward the bar.

The duffel hit the wood with a thud that turned heads. Ellis Clifton, mid-pour, froze. The whiskey overflowed, a thin trail running down the side of the glass, pooling at his fingers. He didn’t move. Just watched her. He didn’t speak. Didn’t have to. She climbed onto the barstool without looking around, folding in on herself. Elbows on the bar, shoulders hunched, eyes down just enough to make herself smaller. Anyone with eyes could see the girl did not want to be noticed.

But the Longhorn didn’t let things slide past unnoticed. Not when they walked in like they were dragging ghosts behind them. The place remembered. Not in a conscious way—no scribbled notes or whispering walls. Just something quieter. A sense that it was all being filed away somewhere under the floorboards.

Taehyung still hadn’t moved. The scotch sat beneath his hand, glass fogged with sweat, the warmth of his skin still sinking through it. He wasn’t staring—nothing that crude—but his attention had tilted. His eyes tracked her the way a hunter watches the wind. Not locked, but fixed all the same. Still as stone, still as shadow. He hadn’t twitched. Hadn’t even adjusted his seat.

She wasn’t the one he was here for. That part was obvious. But there was something about her—something that stepped outside the lines. The way she moved. The way she held space like she didn’t need permission. She didn’t look around, didn’t perform for the room. She sat like she was casing the joint without trying. And that, more than anything, snagged his interest.

She was cute, sure. He could admit that to himself. Had the kind of look that might’ve turned his head a few years back—too young to carry the weight she wore, too old in the eyes to pretend she didn’t. But Taehyung wasn’t twenty anymore. He didn’t chase pretty. He didn’t chase anything. Not unless it bled.

If this were another life, another night, maybe he’d have stood. Maybe he’d have crossed the floor and offered a drink she didn’t ask for. But not tonight. Tonight he was here on business. And something told him that if he so much as sat too close, the girl would gut him with her eyes before she even thought to reach for a weapon.

Still, he didn’t look away.

Two stools down, Waylon Cordell stirred—if you could call it that. He moved like something arthritic and forgotten. Waylon had been part of the Longhorn longer than the termites. He was the living, breathing equivalent of a beer stain—permanent, unpleasant, impossible to scrub out. His gut hung heavy over his belt, his scalp patchy like peeling wallpaper. Red veins mapped across his cheeks, skin shining with the wet gloss of cheap bourbon and cheaper regrets. He turned his head toward her like it took effort and leaned in.

“Well now,” Waylon said, his voice dragging the syllables like they were coated in syrup, thick with phlegm and the kind of back-bar bourbon that didn’t burn clean. “Ain’t you somethin’. Let me buy you a drink, sugar.” 

His grin came apart in real time—one side curling around a yellow tooth that didn’t quite fit, the other hanging slack beneath a sagging eye that always seemed a second behind the rest of his face. Whatever charm he thought he still carried had long since expired, dead and buried in the same dirt as his last three marriages and any self-respect he might’ve once owned. He dropped his elbow to the bar with the, leaned in heavy, dragging the reek of sweat, sour booze, and hopeless years into the space between them. He didn’t move his feet. Didn’t ask permission. Just inserted himself, claimed the air she was breathing like he was entitled to it.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t shrink or shift or shy away. Just turned her head toward him with that same mechanical smoothness she’d used at the door. Her eyes met his, and in them was no fear, no discomfort—just a kind of quiet, calculating clarity. Like she was already writing him into the margins of a plan, mapping his bulk, his range, how long it would take to move if she had to.

Then she smiled.

It wasn’t the kind of smile you returned. It wasn’t warm, or soft, or anything close to an invitation. It was a ghost of something long dead, summoned up like muscle memory, a reflex fired off from somewhere deep beneath the hard-set lines of her face. But it changed her. Briefly. Like stormlight cutting through clouds—quick, sharp, gone. Behind the grime and road-dust, underneath the brittle tension of her jaw, something softened. And in that blink of surrender, there was the faint suggestion of who she might’ve been once. Not innocent, not untouched, but maybe not always carved out of survival. Maybe, a long time ago, before the bruises learned how to fade faster than the memories, before silence became sharper than screaming—maybe she had known softness. Maybe it had been stolen. Maybe she had given it up. Either way, what remained now was just the echo.

Taehyung saw it. That flicker. That shape her mouth made and how it changed everything about her face for half a second. Her usual edge—tight, defensive, braced for impact—smoothed out just long enough to show the shape of the weapon beneath it. Not innocence, no. But the memory of it. And it struck him then, unexpected and uninvited, that she was beautiful.

“Hello,” she said, voice rough like gravel under a tire, worn thin but steady.

Waylon’s grin widened. Too drunk to notice the razor behind her calm. Too slow to see the trap already set. He leaned closer, his gaze already drifting lower like gravity was dragging his thoughts down with it. He didn’t see the way her jaw tightened beneath that smile. Didn’t see how her hand hovered just above the bar. He was the kind of man who’d spent his life mistaking survival tactics for flirtation. The dumb ones always did. The dangerous ones, too. Waylon managed to be both in the same breath.

At the other end of the bar, Ellis Clifton set a bottle down with a dull, deliberate thud. Heads turned. Cards paused. Dice sat still where they landed. Even the jukebox, halfway between songs, gave up and went quiet.

Waylon hesitated. He blinked—slow, wet, and confused—then turned, sluggish, toward the source of the weight pressing against him.

Ellis didn’t speak at first. Just kept wiping that same glass, slow circles etched into the shape of habit and second chances. His hand moved like it had its own memory, but his eyes—they were locked on the girl now. Steady, thoughtful, drawn not to the bruises or the grime but to the way she held herself. Too still. Too deliberate. It wasn’t the kind of stillness you get from fear. It was the kind of stillness you get when the walls are already closing in and you’re figuring out which one to punch through. She looked too young, sure, but not in the skin—that could lie, caked in dust and road-sharp edges—but in the way her shoulders carried weight like they’d been braced since childhood. In the way her gaze scanned the bar without moving her head. In the way she sat like a chair might break beneath her or turn into a weapon. She didn’t belong here. She belonged somewhere with clean sheets, central air, warm coffee, and the kind of silence that wasn’t earned through violence. But Ellis had been in the Longhorn long enough to know what belonged didn’t always get to stay.

His wife used to look like that. Back when they were seventeen and something in her flinched when people got too close. It had taken months to get her to stop checking every door twice. Years before she stopped tensing at raised voices. And here was this kid—this dusty, carved-up girl—carrying that same silent alarm in her bones. Ellis knew the type. Knew what they needed, too. And he knew Waylon Cordell even better. Knew that slow, boiling temper that made every room a match waiting for a spark. He didn’t want to scrape anyone off the floor tonight, least of all a girl who’d already survived more than Waylon ever could.

“Ma’am,” Ellis said, voice cut low and flat, a sound with weight. “Gonna need to see some ID.”

She turned toward him like she was moving through water. No twitch. No panic. Just that careful stillness again. Her movements weren’t slow because she was afraid—they were slow because fast meant fear, and fear drew predators. She turned like someone who’d been prey before and knew speed didn’t save you. Her eyes opened a little wider, just enough to read innocent if you weren’t paying attention. Her mouth parted like a lie was about to fall out, soft and practiced. Then came the mask. That fragile, feminine tilt of the head. The breath caught just short of trembling. The helpless look girls wear when they’ve been taught that survival depends on making other people feel needed.

But Ellis saw through it. Not because she was bad at it—hell, she was damn good—but because he’d seen it too many times. That wasn’t fear, not really. That was muscle memory. That was calculation. She wasn’t scrambling—she was adjusting. Choosing a different play from the same worn book. Not a girl bluffing her way out. A girl trained to weigh every angle. And that meant something—something important.

Taehyung hadn’t moved from his booth. Still leaned back, fingers loose on the scotch glass, the tip of his thumb resting just above the base like a conductor holding time. His body gave nothing away, all muscle memory and quiet patience—but something inside him had shifted. Subtle. Mechanical. Like a camera lens narrowing its aperture. Not interest. Not pity. Focus. He was reading her now. Parsing her choices, her posture. The smile that lived only in her mouth and never touched her eyes. The angle of her shoulders. The refusal to give Waylon the full turn of her body. She wasn’t playing the scared girl—she was playing the smart one. She’d picked Waylon because she knew exactly what to expect. Not safety. Predictability. That made her dangerous. Taehyung had seen it before—in cold basements, strobe-lit clubs, and safehouses where nothing was safe. This girl didn’t flinch. She calculated.

Maybe the scene would’ve held. The fragile balance. The illusion of harmless tension. Maybe she could’ve kept Waylon strung out on his own assumptions for another few minutes—long enough to slip the hook. But then Waylon slapped the bar.

It came down like a wet slap to the face of the room. Loud. Crude. Designed to be heard, to remind everyone that Waylon Cordell still thought he mattered. The wood rattled under his palm, sticky with decades of spilled liquor and sweat. His grin curled into something rotten.

“Come on, Ellis,” he slurred, words dragging behind the bourbon. “She’s with me. My treat. You know how it is.”

Ellis didn’t answer right away. But the Longhorn did.

A pool cue hit its slot like a bullet casing. Chairs shifted as boots planted. Someone near the back put down his fork like he’d lost his appetite. And the jukebox—already half-dead—gave up the ghost completely. The only thing moving was Ellis’s rag, slow as ever, like he hadn’t heard a thing. But his jaw was set now. Shoulders tight under that oil-stained flannel. He was calculating too, same as her, just older. More tired.

“Rules are rules,” Ellis said finally, and the grit in his voice scratched like sandpaper on steel. “I ain’t gettin’ caught up with the law for ya, Mr. Cordell.”

Waylon blinked. His face twitched like a computer error—couldn’t process. He didn’t get it. Couldn’t. He’d coasted through life like a dull knife, cutting nothing clean but always expecting someone else to do the sharpening.

“What the hell you talkin’ about?” Waylon said. “Since when do you care about IDs, huh? You served that kid from Tatum Creek with the busted nose and no shoes.”

“That kid,” Ellis said, folding the rag and setting it down like punctuation, “was sixteen, scared, and left me a ten-dollar tip. He didn’t grab no one, and he didn’t act like the place owed him a favor. He drank his Coke and walked out. You?” He leaned in, voice lowering. “You’re a liability with a mouth.”

Taehyung’s glass tapped the wood. Once. Then again. Then a third time. Not a threat. Not a countdown. Just the sound of time thickening.

The Longhorn knew tension the way a dog knows storms. Not through the sky, but through the bones. And this storm was coming in close. People could feel it. You didn’t need a forecast when your teeth ached and the floor started to hum.

Y/N felt it too. Not fear—she’d buried that years ago, left it behind with the taste of metal and the sound of sirens. This was a different sensation. A shift. A recalibration. Like gravity had tilted and her center of balance had moved with it. Her spine lengthened. Her breath slowed. Hands flat on the bar, elbows loose, body not braced but prepared.

Waylon didn’t see it. Couldn’t. Still too soaked in his own sweat and stale ego. He leaned in again, breath thick with smoke and sour mash, thinking he was about to get what he wanted.

“C’mon, Ellis,” he tried again, voice fraying. “Me and the little lady—hell, we might even—”

Taehyung looked up.

Nothing moved on his face. No twitch. No warning. But his eyes—those eyes—cut through the noise like a scalpel. Cold. Clean. He didn’t see a bar. He saw math. Angles. Time. She wasn’t waiting to be saved. She was waiting to move. He’d seen it before—in Havana, in Marseilles, in motel bathtubs under red lights. This wasn’t a girl in trouble. This was a weapon not yet drawn.

Waylon slapped the bar again—this time with the weight of someone used to getting his way. The sound cracked, louder now. Ugly.

“Just give me the fuckin’ drink, Ellis!” His voice was breaking. “I’ll deal with her if she gets too frisky.”

Everything stopped. The room exhaled into silence. The pool table held its breath mid-break. Dice stayed in stasis, fingertips still curled around them like they were sacred. The men in the booths, who’d been half-watching with the passive attention of wolves pretending to nap, turned fully now. One of them, eyes shaded by a trucker cap that hadn’t been clean since the Clinton years, let out a slow whistle between his teeth. Another—older, lean, hollowed out by desert years and harder work—shifted just enough for the glint of metal on his hip to catch the light. No one made a move, but the bar had already turned.

Ellis didn’t blink. His hand, once circling the same glass like a man scrubbing his conscience, froze flat against the wood. Not clenched. Not flexed. Just still. And that stillness held something heavier than sound.

“Say that again,” he said, voice soft as worn gravel. “So I can make sure I heard it right.”

Waylon blinked slow, like his brain was swimming through bourbon. His eyes darted from face to face, expecting support, finding none. Even the jukebox had abandoned him—still stuck in its own silence like it didn’t want to be part of what came next.

“I didn’t mean nothin’,” he muttered, all that confidence leaking out through the cracks in his tone.

“You never do,” Ellis replied. “That’s the problem.”

Y/N shifted. Subtle. Not a flinch—she didn’t flinch. Just realigned. Like a hinge settling into place. Chin up. Shoulders squared. Not tensed. Not bracing. Ready. Her hands didn’t tremble. They waited. And that waiting felt louder than any threat Waylon had ever heard.

Ellis drew a breath. Long. Deep. It tasted like smoke, dust, and hard choices. He let it out like a man resigning himself to a job no one else would do. His eyes closed—not out of fear, not weariness. He’d seen this before. Hell, he’d lived through it. Too many bars. Too many girls. Too many Waylons who didn’t know when they were one bad sentence away from being a headline.

He thought about his Tina. Before she stopped twitching. Before Ellis learned how to speak without volume. That memory, tight and uninvited, rose in his throat like smoke from a backdraft. He looked at the girl again—at the weight behind her stillness, the gaunt sharpness in her cheekbones, the grit pressed into the corners of her mouth—and he knew. She hadn’t eaten in a day. Maybe longer. Probably hadn’t had clean water either.

So Ellis reached for the bottle.

The shot hit the wood with a low scrape. He slid it to her without flourish. With his other hand, he reached under the bar, pulled out a chipped glass, and filled it with cold water from the gun and set it beside the shot.

She didn’t say thank you. Didn’t nod. Just kept her eyes locked on Waylon like she was watching a rabid dog decide whether to bark or bite.

Waylon, still drunk on ego and sour mash, saw the drink and mistook it for victory. He grinned, sloppy and wide, and grabbed the bottle like a trophy. Sloshed it over the lip of a knocked-over coaster and settled into the stool beside her with all the grace of a landslide.

“So,” he slurred, sliding closer, breath hot and damp, “what brings you ’round these parts?”

She turned.

“I’ve had a shitty few years,” she said. Her voice didn’t tremble. It carried the weight of every night she hadn’t slept, every bruise she’d earned, every hallway she’d walked where the floor threatened to fall out from under her.

Waylon laughed. That stupid, wet, snorting kind of laugh that men like him thought counted as charm. “Shit, girl. Welcome to the club.”

She didn’t respond. Just watched him like he was weather.

Ellis slid the shot glass again. Louder this time. A knock, not a suggestion. Like a judge tapping the gavel and daring the room to argue. Waylon reached out to pour himself another, but his hand missed the mark. Liquor sloshed across the bar and down the front of his shirt. He didn’t notice. Didn’t care. Just pushed the bottle toward her like it was a gift, like this was his moment.

“To you, sweetheart,” he said.

She didn’t toast. Didn’t look at him. She took the bottle with calm, calloused hands, poured a clean shot, and knocked it back like she’d done it a hundred times. No wince. No fanfare. She set the glass down like punctuation.

Then she reached for the water. Held it in both hands for a beat too long. Looked at it not like she was thirsty, but like someone who hadn’t been allowed to need anything in a long time. Like the glass itself meant something more than hydration. She drank it slow. Not cautious—deliberate. Like her body knew this was the only clean thing that might touch her that night. Every swallow quiet, drawn out, reverent.

Behind the bar, Ellis watched her the way a man watches a candle burning too close to a curtain—nervous, conflicted, unable to look away. His jaw was tight, stomach turning slow and steady like gears in an old clock. He’d seen plenty walk through the Longhorn who didn’t belong, but none quite like this. She didn’t need help. That much was clear. But she hadn’t eaten. Probably hadn’t slept either. And Ellis had the sick feeling that if he didn’t give her something tonight—one small kindness—she might not live long enough to ever ask again.

So when Waylon reached for the bottle again with all the grace of a drunk reaching for relevance, her hand was already there. Calm. Still. But firm—an unspoken line drawn across the bar. She didn’t yank it back. Didn’t push him away. Just stopped him, expression unreadable.

“Appreciate the drink,” she said, voice flat.

Then she stood. Boots hit the floor like punctuation, heavy and grounded. She didn’t look back. Didn’t hesitate. The bottle hung loose in her hand, balanced perfectly. She was almost to the door, nearly free of the moment, when the word came flying at her—petty and sharp and desperate.

“Bitch.”

She didn’t stop. Just tilted her head a little, like a dog catching a new scent. Her shoulders shifted, subtle and slow.

Thick fingers—greasy, unsteady—wrapped around her wrist with a sloppy kind of force. Her arm jerked, not from the pressure, but from the audacity of it. She froze. Not in panic—but with a focus that came from somewhere far worse than fear. Her breath slowed, her jaw locked, her shoulders squared. Every inch of her body had gone still in that dangerous way predators do just before they strike.

From the booth, Taehyung tapped his glass and watched.

Waylon leaned closer, breath sour with booze and rot. “No way you walk out with that bottle,” he muttered. “Not without givin’ me something.” His grip tightened. His thumb dug in. His other hand found her waist, fingers clumsy and sliding.

“You came in lookin’ for trouble,” he said, thick and breathless. “Guess you found it.”

Her knee came up in a blur—fast, brutal, and perfectly placed. It slammed into his gut just beneath the ribs with a sick thud. His breath left him in a choked grunt, spit trailing from his lips. He bent forward like a folding chair. Before he could even process the pain, her fist followed. Hard and clean, it cracked across his face with a sound that turned heads—sharp and wet. His cheekbone lit up like a struck match, and his nose exploded in a rush of red that painted his chin and shirt.

He staggered, blinking stupidly, hands to his face—not to protect, but to understand. He clipped the edge of a stool, lost balance, and hit the floor hard, knocking the wind out of himself in a grunt that silenced what little noise had been left in the room.

She stood over him, unmoved. Her breathing was calm, her stance balanced. Blood dripped from her knuckles in slow, thick drops. The bottle still hung in her hand, not raised, just present. She didn’t speak. Didn’t make a show of it. She just watched him writhe, one leg kicking against the sticky floor, face smeared red, groaning like he couldn’t figure out how things had turned. She waited. Not for applause. Not for backup. Just to see if he’d try again.

In the booth, Taehyung leaned forward. Slow. His elbow slid across the worn surface, casting a flicker of green from the neon sign across his forearm. His eyes tracked her movements—posture, grip, breath. He wasn’t surprised. There was no awe in his gaze. Just understanding. Like he’d seen this before. Like he knew exactly what kind of history shapes that kind of silence.

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t gloat. Waylon whimpered—small, pathetic, a broken noise that crawled out of him like a surrender. She gave him a slight nod. Barely a tilt of her chin. That’s enough.

Then she turned.

The bottle swung gently at her side, catching slices of fractured light from the buzzing sign overhead. She didn’t step over him. She stepped around him—like you would a puddle of something you didn’t want to track through the house. Her walk didn’t change. Her pace didn’t rush. It was the walk of someone who knew this was done. Over. Handled.

She passed the bar like a ghost that bled warmth on contact, dragging silence behind her. Ellis hadn’t moved since the shot hit the counter—still as driftwood in a tide he knew better than to fight. The regulars stayed rooted to their stools, eyes following her like they were afraid to admit they were watching. No muttering, no whispers, no shift of cards or low jokes. The Longhorn had gone dead quiet, as if the bar itself held its breath. Her boots thudded soft and steady against warped floorboards, each step deliberate. Her shadow stretched long behind her, thin and sharp across blood, tile, and cracked linoleum. The jukebox stuttered, caught in the throat between tracks. A neon sign near the door fizzed once—bright blue, then nothing. It popped and died with the faint sigh of something old giving up.

Waylon coughed. The sound shattered the tension, sliced through the hush like a beer bottle through a windshield. 

“You fuckin’ cunt!” he barked, voice shrill and breaking, ugly with rage. 

He rose in a flurry of blood and slick hands, using the bar to haul his weight up, knocking a stool out of the way with a violent scrape. He stood swaying, shirt half untucked, breath snarling out of his busted nose. Red smeared his chin. The room didn’t move. No one intervened. Ellis didn’t twitch. The towel in his hand hung limp now, soaked and forgotten. His face stayed locked in that same blank calm that only came from long exposure to hopeless things.

Taehyung was no longer lounging. The slow, silent watcher had shifted. Elbows on the table, shoulders forward, posture coiled. His eyes had changed—no longer curious, no longer detached. He wasn’t watching a girl anymore. He was watching potential .

Waylon didn’t see it. He never had. All he saw was blood on his shirt and laughter in his head that wasn’t real. He saw mockery. He saw her walking away. He lunged.

He grabbed her arm and yanked hard. Her boots slipped on the slick spill of liquor. She hit the ground on her knees, the breath punched out of her with a sharp gasp between clenched teeth. He loomed over her, reeking of fury and rot, his breath hot on her ear. “Come back here, bitch,” he hissed, voice thick and low. “I ain’t done—” His hand clawed at her shirt, and that’s when the bottle moved.

She didn’t hesitate. Her grip shifted and the glass cracked down across his wrist. Bone met glass. Glass won. Waylon howled and stumbled, clutching his arm, face twisted in shock and pain.

She was on her feet before the noise finished echoing. Two sharp breaths, two quick steps, and she vanished into the shadows past the pool tables, disappearing into the darker end of the Longhorn, where the lights were low and neon signs barely clung to life. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to. The rage behind her boiled like oil on flame. The heat of it rose off the ground. Taehyung tracked every step. His body looked relaxed, one arm casually stretched across the booth like he was just another drinker killing time—but the lie stopped at the shoulders. His eyes had never left her. Not since the door. Not since the first shot. Not since the moment she dropped Waylon like a sack of potatoes.

It wasn’t beauty that caught him. It wasn’t even her power. It was her usefulness. She moved like a weapon. There was no panic in her steps. No hesitation. She was the kind of woman who wouldn’t ask what the job meant, only what it required. Taehyung had seen men like that. Rarely women. Rarer still with that kind of calm.

Then Waylon screamed.

“COME HERE!”

It sounded broken. More animal than man. All throat, no thought. Chairs scraped out of his way as he stomped forward, boots slick with liquor and blood. Glass crunched beneath his soles. He shoved tables, knocked over a barstool. The Longhorn didn’t move to stop him. No one did. Not Ellis. Not the regulars. Not Taehyung. The air pulled back. The room tightened, bracing.

She reached for a pool cue, her eyes squinting as the older man ran at her.

The sound it made—when it cracked across the side of Waylon’s skull—was almost too clean. Like a piece of wood splitting in winter air. He froze. Eyes wide, mouth open, confusion replacing fury. Then he buckled, knees giving way beneath him. He dropped, landing with a weighty thud that shook the floor.

She stood over him, cue in hand, breathing slow and even. Her grip didn’t loosen. Her feet stayed planted. Taehyung never blinked.

Waylon laughed. It was a thin, sick sound—somewhere between a wheeze and a sob. “You gotta be shittin’ me…”

She didn’t wait. The second swing was harder, sharper. She brought her full weight behind it, the cue slamming down across his arm. Wood cracked. The stick flew from her hands and clattered across the floor into the dark, out of reach.

Waylon howled, not from shock this time, but real pain. Raw, honest agony.

“I’m done with this!” he bellowed.

Waylon went for her again, and their bodies slammed into each other. Her shoulder hit the ground first, then his elbow cracked against a chair leg. They rolled in a tangle of limbs. 

A pool ball knocked free and danced across the tile. Tap. Tap. Tap. Then still.

The cue splintered beneath them—wood snapping, splinters flying. He landed on top, breath hot and ragged. His knee jammed into her hip. An elbow ground into her shoulder. His face hovered inches from hers, twisted in fury, mouth a stink of blood and whiskey.

She didn’t scream. Her knee drove up into his gut. He gagged.

She shoved hard, rolled, scrambled. Now she was on top, one hand pressed to his chest, the other gripping a jagged shard of cue stick, holding it just above his throat—close. Not touching. But the threat was unmistakable.

Her face was a mask of bruises and blood. Her lip was split, one eye starting to swell. Hair stuck to her face. But her eyes stayed cold. Focused. She didn’t blink.

“You shouldn’t’ve called me a cunt,” she said, voice flat.

Waylon spat, blood streaking down her boot. He grinned through it. “Not rude if it’s true. You ain’t tough. You ain’t nothin’ .”

His hand shot up, gnarled and fast, tangling deep in her hair and yanking like he was trying to rip the past out of her skull. Her head snapped back with a raw, guttural sound—part pain, part rage—body jerking with the sudden violence. Her grip slipped, control blinking out like a lightbulb catching a surge. His boot lifted and struck her in the ribs with its heel. She flew, weightless for a half-second, then crashed shoulder-first into the floor with a fleshy thud. The breath was torn from her lungs, her back arched, her mouth filled with the sharp copper burn of blood. For a second, everything tilted. Ceiling lights swam above her, distant and warped, the world yawning sideways.

But she got up.

Waylon tried to rise too, but his knees weren’t listening. He pushed up and swayed, arms shaking, breath like steam escaping a cracked pipe. His shirt clung to him, soaked with sweat and blood and whatever fight was left. He stood there, trying to remember how to be a man again, trying to pretend he had control. But it was all gone.

Across the bar, Taehyung sat motionless. One hand near his untouched glass. Posture loose but unreadable, all shadows and stillness. But his eyes told the truth. They hadn't moved since the first punch. He wasn’t watching a bar fight anymore—he was watching a test unfold, watching a decision unravel in blood and breath. Not judging. Not intervening. Just witnessing.

Waylon reached for a stool.

His fingers curled around the seat, knuckles red, blood-slicked. His jaw clenched so tight his teeth creaked. His shoulders twitched. He lifted the stool overhead, wobbling under the weight of it. His eyes were wild now, unfocused, the way animals look when cornered. His breath came short and shallow.

“COME ON, BITCH!” he roared. “Let’s see that kung fu shit again!”

He swung.

She dropped. Just folded like a hinge. The stool arced wide, missed by inches, and exploded against the wall behind her. The impact cracked plaster, sent wood flying. A shard spun into the jukebox. The beer sign sparked once, then fizzled out with a soft hiss. And she was already moving.

One sharp pivot. Her boot snapped sideways, low and fast, catching the broken stool still clutched in Waylon’s hand. It knocked it loose, sent it spinning across the floor, where it skittered under the jukebox with a shriek of metal and wood.

Waylon howled and charged. He didn’t think. His hand found her wrist. Yanked hard. And that was it.

The broken cue still in her other hand came up fast. She didn’t swing. She drove it straight into his arm, just above the elbow. There was a sound—wet, wrong, thick with resistance. Muscle splitting, cartilage groaning. Blood sprayed, bright and sudden, like something had burst.

Waylon froze. Mouth open. Silent. Then the scream hit, all at once—high, raw, animal. It tore from his throat like something alive. Blood gushed from the wound, hot and red, speckling her shirt, her arms, her face. It soaked into denim, streaked across skin. She didn’t flinch. She stepped in closer.

Her hand pressed against the base of the cue, and she shoved. It slid deeper. Flesh parted. Waylon’s eyes went glassy, knees wobbling. One hand tried to find the shaft, clawing at it like it might disappear. The other flailed, seeking purchase on nothing.

She dropped to one knee beside him, quiet, smooth, no wasted motion. Her knee pressed into his ribs, pinning him. One hand braced the cue, the other hovered above his chest like a promise. Her face was close—calm, blank, surgical.

When she spoke, her voice was low, carved from something old and cold. “You’re right,” she said, no tremble in her tone. “I am a cunt.”

A drop of blood fell from her hand, landing on the pale fabric of his shirt.

“But you were still rude.”

Her palm settled gently on his chest, the cue trembling faintly between them. She didn’t press. Everyone in that bar knew if she leaned in, he wouldn’t get up.

Then a voice cut the silence, low and deliberate. Smooth like oil, sharp like broken glass. “Some people,” it said, “aren’t worth killing for free.”

Her hand didn’t move, but her head turned. She stayed crouched over Waylon’s broken body, jeans soaked at the hem, shirt clinging to sweat and blood, arms streaked with bruises that hadn’t even started to bloom yet. Her lip bled in a slow trickle down her chin. Hair stuck to the sides of her face.

The low light from the busted sign caught her face as Taehyung stepped into view. She looked up at him. When he knelt beside her, his shadow stretched long and heavy across Waylon’s broken form, swallowing him up in its blackness. He reached out his hand, offering it to the girl. His fingers brushed over hers. She hadn’t even realized how hard she’d been holding onto the cue until his warmth broke through it. Her knuckles were white, her hand rigid. He didn’t try to take it. It was then that Y/N realized exactly what she was about to do.

The broken cue slipped from her grip, falling with a dull clink to the floor, spinning once before settling in a patch of blood. Taehyung didn’t pull his hand away. She met his gaze.

There was no softness there, no patronizing comfort, but no judgment either. His eyes held something that she sometimes saw when she looked into the mirror. He gave her the faintest smile, so slight it barely existed.

“Take my word for it,” he said, voice low, calm, firm in that way only truth could be. “He’s not worth it.”

She didn’t respond, but her breath shifted—slower now, more controlled. Her shoulders dropped the tiniest amount. Behind them, Waylon whimpered.

It was a pathetic, high-pitched sound, too soft for a man his size. He clutched his arm with both hands, blood pumping down his side in thick pulses, soaking his shirt, pooling beneath him. 

“She... she was gonna kill me,” he stammered, voice full of disbelief, wet with panic. “Jesus, man... if you hadn’t—if you hadn’t showed up—” He coughed, deep and rattling, like something was trying to crawl out of his chest. “You’re a... a fuckin’ lifesaver.”

Taehyung looked at him. “Leave.”

Waylon nodded, jerking his head like a puppet with frayed strings. He moved to push himself up, grunting with effort, face twisting with each inch like his body hated him for trying. He reached for a stool, missed, cursed, then tried again. No one helped. No one moved. He didn’t look at her, but he made the mistake of glancing at Taehyung.

Whatever he saw there cut straight through him. His eyes dropped fast, shame folding him in half. He turned and staggered toward the door, one hand clamped to his ruined arm, the other dragging along the wall. A dark trail followed him—thick, uneven smears of blood across the wood that would stain. The cowbell gave one half-hearted jingle. The hinges moaned. The door slammed behind him as he left.

Behind the bar, Ellis gripped the sink like it was all that kept him upright. The towel in his other hand hung limp, half-dried glass forgotten in his grip. Sweat had begun to line his forehead, beading along the hairline. His face was tight, jaw locked, lips pale. The long, exhausted resignation of a man who knew he’d remember this one and it would follow him to his dreams tonight. His wife would be horrified if he told her what happened that night.

The jukebox tried to come back—gave a stutter, a spark, then died again. One last cough of sound, then silence.

Taehyung rose without a drop of fear, like he hadn’t just stared down a man bleeding out on the floor. This wasn’t the worst he’d seen. Maybe not even the messiest. Just another page in a book already full. His coat brushed against splinters and glass, the hem dark with spilled beer and blood, dragging through the same grooves worn into the wood by years of too many boots and too many regrets.

At the bar, he didn’t pause. His voice cut through the room—quiet, level.

“Two damp towels.” It wasn’t a request.

Ellis blinked like he’d just remembered his body, ducked down without a word, and came back with two thick towels—still hot, still smelling faintly of bleach and age. They were stained already. Nothing clean stayed clean here. He handed them over in silence.

Taehyung took the towels and turned back to the girl. She was still on the floor, knees pressed into wood that had seen too many nights like this one, grain dark with sweat, beer, and blood that no mop ever reached. Her hands sat in her lap—bloodied, open, trembling just enough to betray the cost of what she’d held in. Her shoulders were slumped. Each breath she took was uneven, dragging in through grit-lined lungs and slipping out like glass.

She looked wrecked, but her eyes were clear.

Taehyung knelt beside her without a word, his coat folding around him, his presence settling into the space without disruption. He moved with that same quiet intention he’d carried since the beginning, because nothing ever surprised him anymore, and this girl had managed to. 

One towel he held out. The other he brought to her temple, pressing it against dried blood with a kind of care that told her that he’d done this before. There was no hesitation in his touch. She didn’t flinch, didn’t lean away. She let him clean her face without any fuss.

When he offered her the second towel, she took it, gaze never leaving her hands. She wiped them slowly, mall, grinding motions, circles, pressure and pause. Like she’d done this before, maybe too many times, and never gotten clean enough. It made him wonder who else’s blood she’s had to clean off.

Taehyung didn’t speak. Just kept at it—behind her ear, along her jaw, down her neck. The bar around them didn’t make a sound. No footsteps. No glass clink. Just smoke rising, blood dripping, and the low hum of tension bleeding out into stillness. Her elbow still wept crimson in slow, steady drops that soaked into the wood.

“I wasn’t going to kill him,” she said, voice thin and stretched but not shaking.

Taehyung didn’t answer immediately. He folded the towel neatly, blood inside, and placed it by her knee. Then he looked at her fully—her torn lip, the bruises blooming dark across her cheek, the red coating her knuckles, and the eyes beneath it all. Calm.

“Maybe not,” he said after a beat. “But if the wind had changed... you would’ve.”

She didn’t argue. Didn’t nod either. 

Taehyung kept his eyes on her. Trying to place her. She had the stillness that came after chaos, the kind that wasn’t taught but burned into your bones. She carried a certain calm about her that he knew he carried with himself. He had a few years on the girl and had managed to get over the rage she carried along the way, but he remembered a time when he made the stunt she pulled that night look like child’s play.

He held out a hand—palm open, fingers loose. There was a smear of blood across the base of his thumb. She stared at it.

“Taehyung,” he said. His voice was low, even, patient.

She didn’t take his hand right away. Her eyes moved over him slowly, methodically. She took in the details—his collar, slightly crooked like he didn’t care much for appearances. The thin scar over his knuckle, healed badly. The boots, expensive once but worn down with miles. His face was unreadable. Not cold. Just still. Not inviting, but not closed off either. And then she reached forward.

“Y/N,” she said. “Y/N Y/L/N.”

Taehyung nodded once. “Well, Y/N,” he said, dry, “you don’t strike me as someone who drinks Jack by choice.” His chin dipped toward the busted bottle still bleeding into the cracks of the floor. “How about something you actually like, sugar?”

Her eyes followed the gesture, then slid back to him. A brow lifted.

“You offering because you feel bad?”

He breathed out—close to a laugh, but not quite.

“Not unless I should. I’m offering because I feel like it.”

She studied him. “Nothing more?”

“Nothing less.”

Y/N didn’t speak right away. She traced the edge of the towel, thumb moving through blood caught in the seams of the fabric. Her jaw worked slightly. Her gaze flicked to the door—out of instinct—then back.

“Margarita,” she said. “On the rocks. No salt.”

That earned her a smile. A real one this time. Slow, uneven, like the muscles hadn’t been used in a while. It made him look younger, more handsome and boyish.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Taehyung said. “Though I like the salt.”

Taehyung tipped his head toward the corner booth he’s been sitting at since he got there. It crouched in half-shadow, half-flicker, backlit by a dying COLD BEER sign that stammered through its last few breaths in twitching red and blue. The letters didn’t glow so much as tremble.

Y/N rose without a word. She crossed the room unbothered by the stares, her limping not stopping her from holding her head up high. When she slipped into the booth, the vinyl groaned beneath her and gave way slowly.

Behind the bar, Ellis’s shoulders rolled like they ached, his hands shook but he didn’t fumble. Didn’t speak. He didn’t look their way. Just reached for the bottles without another word. Two glasses—one rim salted, one bare. Lime dropped in hers with a heavy thunk. Ice cracked. Liquor poured. He tried his best to think about how lost the girl looked earlier rather the the blood staining through her clothes.

He had said Waylon didn’t know when it quit. It was only a matter of time before something like that happened. Ellis just never expected it would be from an emaciated little girl. Or that a pool cue would be involved.

Taehyung returned with both drinks in hand, boots whispering across the sticky wood. He set her glass down with the kind of care that made noise unnecessary. The glass kissed the tabletop, condensation already forming in a slow ring.

“No salt. On the rocks,” he said, and then lowered himself into the booth. One arm draped across the seat, legs stretched out, weight sunk in. The booth shaped itself around him.

Above, the neon sputtered—red, blue, red again—washing their faces in bruised light. Shadows crawled across their cheeks and hands, flickering over old scars and fresh cuts. The drinks caught the color too, fractured beams glinting off the surface.

Taehyung swirled his drink and stared into the cloudy green like it might offer him a better story than the one they were already in. 

“Looks like antifreeze,” he muttered, then took a sip and grimaced. “Once had the real thing. Shack outside Baja. Bartender looked ninety. Said the tequila was older than him. Dust in the air. Gunfire on the horizon. Best night of my life.” He stared at his drink again. “This tastes like piss with lime.”

Y/N sipped hers and flinched like she’d been hit again. Her mouth twisted, tongue curling against the aftershock. “Christ,” she muttered, swiping at her lip with the back of her hand. “It’s a good thing I don’t care about what I’m drinking.”

Taehyung laughed. Not a breathy sound or a polite exhale—laughed, real and cracked and full. She didn’t react beyond another sip. She drank again anyway. It didn’t taste better the second time.

They stayed like that for a while—no rush, no questions. Just two people sitting in the smoke-thick silence of a bar that had seen too much and cleaned too little. The jukebox, somewhere behind them, fizzled out into static, then gave up entirely. Blood dried into the floor behind them in slow, rust-colored stains, and the air thickened with the weight of everything that had happened—and the things no one said out loud.

Flies had started surrounding the pools of blood.

Taehyung leaned back again, his posture loose but grounded, one arm slung along the booth, the other hand near his glass. He didn’t speak right away. He let the silence hang. Let it wrap around them like smoke.

Then: “What you did back there—clean.” He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t grin. Just looked at her and let the words land. “Thought you’d freeze. Or fold. Most people do.”

A beat. Then something in the corner of his mouth pulled tight—not a smile. More like the shape of respect. Dry, edged.

“But that?” he said. “That was magical.” He paused, voice dropping half an octave. “And yeah. Looked cool as hell.”

Y/N didn’t lift her head. Didn’t blink. Just stared into the bottom of her glass like there was something in it she hadn’t found yet. Then she tilted it back and drained the rest in one motion. The ice clinked, then settled.

Taehyung watched her, still as a man waiting on a trigger. He looked at her like someone might look at a coyote pacing just beyond the edge of the firelight—half curious, half cautious, and fully impressed.

“How old are you?” he asked, flat.

“Nineteen.”

No pause. No flicker of doubt. Just truth, clean as a cut.

He nodded, no change in expression. No raised brow. Just cataloguing.

“Where you from?”

“Alabama.”

“You don’t sound like Alabama.”

She shrugged—left shoulder only, just enough to be called motion. “What’s it supposed to sound like?”

Taehyung shut his eyes for the length of a breath, just long enough to drag a picture from the dirt. He didn’t need the details—not names or places or dates. Just enough to sketch the edges. Dusty roads the color of sunburnt skin, trailers bleached pale by heat and regret, dogs sleeping under rusted-out cars that hadn’t run in years. A girl sitting barefoot on a porch with her knees pulled up, staring out past the treeline like she already knew everything behind her was poison. A place that didn’t need bars to keep you in, just silence thick enough to choke. A girl who didn’t cry, didn’t shout, just waited for the first excuse to leave—and the second not to come back.

“You leave on your own?” he asked, still watching the past unfold behind his eyelids.

She nodded.

“How far’d you get before someone tried to stop you?”

“First night.”

Taehyung leaned back. He rested against the booth, mind already trying to plan out the rest of the conversation. The girl either didn’t notice or didn’t care that he was analysing her like this. Wouldn’t have mattered either way.

“Nineteen,” he muttered. “Alabama girl with no accent, walks into a bar in Texas, and stabs a man with a cue. Am I supposed to believe that?”

She tilted her glass, watching the ice melt into weak liquor, the way someone might study blood swirling down a drain. “You’re the one asking.”

Taehyung let out a short breath, more ghost than laugh. “You any good at poker?”

“Never played.”

She didn’t look at him. Didn’t have to.

He studied her then, not to figure her out, but to understand the edges she was carved with. “Could’ve fooled me.”

She took another sip, winced like it bit back, swallowed anyway. “I get that a lot.”

“Why Texas?”

Another shrug. “It was west.”

His eyebrow arched. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the truth. I want California. Heard there’s stuff there.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Her gaze lifted, just slightly, like the word itself had weight. “Stuff I ain’t seen.”

He took a slow sip, face unreadable as he swallowed. The taste didn’t improve. He grimaced, set the glass down with a dull, hollow thud. His fingers tapped once against the rim. Then stopped.

“You ever kill someone before tonight?”

“Yes.”

That made him pause.

“Would you have killed him, too, if I hadn’t stepped in?”

She didn’t rush her answer. Didn’t posture. Just swirled the last inch of her drink, watching it settle, then lift again. “Maybe.”

Taehyung didn’t blink.

“You sure?”

She tilted her head like an animal would. Her ponytail slid over one shoulder, damp and matted with sweat, blood, and road dust. The neon above them buzzed once, flickered red, then blue, and back red again. Then her eyes met his, full-on, steady.

And she asked, without hesitation: “Do you want it to be?”

Taehyung didn’t move. Didn’t smile. But something in him stilled. A gear locking into place. He saw it now—not the scrapes or the broken skin, not the way she kept one foot metaphorically planted like the fight might start again. It was in her stare. That terrifying calm that didn’t come from practice. It came from origin. From blood. From birth. It was violence that had never needed translation. A reflex, not a strategy. She didn’t think in pain. She thought in reaction.

She wasn’t broken. She was built like this.

His mouth twitched. Just a flicker. Barely there. The closest he got to smiling.

“Okay, Alabama,” he said, voice low, laced with dry recognition. “You win this round.”

She didn’t nod. Didn’t answer with a smirk or a glance. Just drained the last of her drink in that slow, resigned way people take medicine they know won’t help. The glass hit the table a little off-center, left a faint ring in the sweat pooled beneath it, and stayed there like a held breath.

“I’ll get you another one,” Taehyung said, already half-turned.

“Okay,” she replied.

He flicked his fingers toward Ellis, who understood without needing to. Five minutes later, the bartender returned—one fresh margarita, no salt, lime hanging limp on the rim. Y/N didn’t thank him. Just picked it up and took a long, unbothered swallow.

Silence followed. The jukebox fizzled out into static.. Blood dried in curling stains across the floorboards, blackening into something permanent. The flies continued their buzzing.

Taehyung leaned in a little, elbows on the table. His voice came lighter, almost casual—something slipped under the door instead of knocked out loud. “You into kung fu flicks?”

She didn’t blink, didn’t lift her head much, but something in her eyes shifted—fast, subtle. A flash of recognition. Not quite warmth. Not quite nostalgia. But it stirred the dust.

He saw it. Grinned a little. “The old ones,” he said. “Bootlegs. VHS copies with the tracking lines jumping like crickets. Dubbing so bad it felt like it was from a whole different movie.”

Something broke loose in her chest—a sound that might’ve been a laugh in another life. Rough, breathy, unfinished. “Yeah,” she said, voice uncoiling. “Used to wake up early for ’em. Local station ran ‘em before cartoons. Half the titles were wrong. Didn’t matter.”

She smiled. Small. Crooked. Disappeared before it could mean too much.

“Had five tapes,” she said. “Played ‘em till the reels stretched out. Could quote half of Drunken Master before I could spell my own name.”

Taehyung didn’t speak. Just watched her remember. He liked the way her eyes lit up.

“The dubbing was garbage,” she added, quieter now. “Voices didn’t match the faces.” She took a sip. Winced again. Same bitterness, same fire. “I didn’t care. I was hooked. I read about the styles. Cranes, tigers, mantis. Probably bullshit, but it was fun.”

Her voice dropped. She drank again. It tasted like chemicals and broken air conditioners, but she got it down.

“People thought I was weird,” she said, finally looking at him. “Didn’t say it. But I knew.” A shrug followed—left shoulder only. “Then Jason Mathers tried to grab me in gym class.”

Taehyung’s brow arched slightly.

She smiled again. This time with teeth. “Popped his shoulder out of the socket.”

He laughed. It caught high in his throat and dropped low in his chest, like it hadn’t been used in a while. A few heads turned toward the sound, then looked away just as quick.

For a second, the bar seemed to relax. Even the ceiling fan gave one low groan and spun to a stop. The jukebox didn’t even try to resurrect itself.

She sat back, glass nearly empty, knuckles torn open, lip split. Jaw bruised. But there was something in her posture that hadn’t taken damage. Something behind her eyes that still burned—not like a wildfire, but like a pilot light that never went out. Defiance in its purest form. Not loud. Not reckless. Just unwilling to die.

Taehyung saw it. Sat with it. Leaned back slowly, keeping his gaze on her. He’d seen killers. He’d made a few. Broken more. But this girl wasn’t forged yet. She was still fire and metal, not finished into anything. A knife in the middle of becoming. He could feel it in how she held still. Not with fear, but with control. Like she knew her edge and didn’t care who else did.

“You’re not Jackie Chan,” he said, voice low, something dry threading through it. “But for someone raised on warped tapes and bad years, you’re ahead of the curve.”

His smile came slow. Uneven. Genuine in the way most things aren’t anymore.

Then Taehyung leaned in again, elbows settling on the table. His rings caught a flicker of the busted neon light overhead, purple and sickly, cutting across the knuckles of a man who’d learned more with his fists than most did with their mouths. His voice dropped.

“I’m gonna tell you something,” he said. “But first—” He didn’t blink. “If it leaves your mouth, even once... there’ll be consequences .”

Y/N didn’t blink. Didn’t ask what kind of consequences. Didn’t twitch like someone about to bluff. She just nodded once.

“I won’t tell anyone,” she said.

And Taehyung, who didn’t believe in many things—especially not people—believed her.

He watched her a second longer. She wasn’t tense. Wasn’t performing. She just was.

“Good,” he said. He leaned in just a hair more. Not enough to break distance. Just enough to change the temperature between them. Close enough she could smell him—burnt whiskey and sweat-soaked denim, the sharp tang of powder and metal, leather baked by the sun, the stale bite of something mechanical. “Because if you talk,” he said, voice low but clean, “I’ll kill you.”

She didn’t move.

“You ever made good on that before?” she asked, swirling her glass, ice clinking.

He raised a brow. Let the question hang.

“Once or twice.”

She didn’t dig deeper. She leaned back just slightly, enough to let her spine breathe, let her ribs remember where they were supposed to sit. She studied him. Not the boots. Not the scars. The man. The shape of him beneath it all.

“What did you see in me?” she asked.

He rolled one shoulder. His leather jacket creaked.

“Something familiar.”

She waited.

His eyes dropped to her hands—blood cracked in her knuckles, skin tight over bruised bone, muscles still twitching like they hadn’t gotten the message yet.

“I’ve seen tough,” he said. “And I’ve seen a room full of pussies with their chests puffed.” His eyes met hers. “I can assure you, you’re the former.”

He drew a circle on the table with one ringed finger. Voice low, but steady.

“What you did to Waylon... your body got there before your mind even caught up.”

She let that sit. Felt it settle. Then gave a slow nod. She did not think about these things.

“Yeah,” she said. “Guess it did.”

“Where’d you learn it?”

Her eyes stayed on his.

“Life. You hit first, people stop testing you. Eventually.”

He nodded. Like someone who’d heard it said before, or maybe said it himself, a long time ago.

She watched him a moment longer.

“Doesn’t scare you?”

His head tilted slightly. One brow low.

“Should it?”

She looked down at her drink. The ice was all but gone now.

“Most people either try to fix me,” she said, voice quieter, “or they run.”

He lifted his glass. Raised it halfway.

“I don’t fix people,” he said. “And I don’t run from shit, Alabama.”

She raised hers to meet his. The glasses touched with a soft clink .

Outside, the wind kept scraping leaves across the roof. A semi moaned down the blacktop, its lights flashing through the window and gone before anyone could blink. The jukebox sputtered once, gasped, and then Patsy Cline’s voice crawled out—ragged, beautiful, dragging heartbreak behind it like a rusted chain. Y/N thought about her mother. “Crazy” had been one of her favorite songs.

Taehyung didn’t speak right away. Just stared into his glass, letting the tequila spin slow and sullen, like dirty runoff circling a drain. His hand stayed loose on the rim, thumb dragging against the condensation like he could wear a groove into it if he tried hard enough. His eyes didn’t blink, didn’t flick, just watched the swirl like it had something honest to tell him. And then—finally, like a match catching wind—his voice cut through the stillness.

“There’s people out there,” he said, not with cynicism, not with envy, just with the weight of knowing, “who keep things simple. Fix trucks. Run registers. Marry the first person who smiles and never ask why they stopped.” He looked up. Met her eyes. No smile. No sell. Just locked in. “And then there’s people like me,” he continued. “Maybe like you.”

Y/N could not tell if she believed him or not, but something about him made her second guess her hesitation.

“We live under things,” he said. “Behind gas stations. Under bridges. In the spaces polite folks pretend don’t exist when they say grace. The cracks in the system that people cover with prayer and tax returns.” And she still hadn’t spoken. Just listened. She knew about those things more than most people realized.

“I run a crew,” he said. “We call ourselves the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.”

He waited a beat, watching her. Most people laughed at that part. It was a litmus test—see what the smile meant, if it was fear, disbelief, or just nerves. She didn’t laugh. Her face didn’t even twitch. He almost smiled at that.

“Stupid name,” he said, and his mouth curved a fraction. “Friend picked it. I kept it after he died.” He threw the last of the tequila back, slow, savoring the burn. Then set the glass down with a slow spin, watching it turn. “We’re contract killers.”

He watched her—not her face, but the way her body held the silence. That stillness. That self-control. That rare breed of calm that didn’t come from peace but from the kind of pain that teaches you to breathe around a scream.

“You want someone gone? We make that happen. Two hundred grand gets you in the door. More if they want peace of mind along with the body.” His eyes narrowed. “They’re trained. All of them. But they blend. No one expects the girl in beat-up sneakers. Or the busboy with a lisp.”

He leaned forward. The neon buzzed above, flickering against the metal of his rings. His voice dropped, low and certain.

“I’m not a pimp,” he said. “We don’t sell bodies. We sell death.”

She didn’t react. Didn’t flinch. Her fingers just tightened on the glass.

“I train them,” he went on. “Me and the ones who’ve lasted long enough to matter. Knives. Guns. Close quarters. Vanishing. Walking away clean. No flare. No loose ends.”

Then softer, “How to end someone with your hands—and still remember to feed the dog before midnight.”

Still, she didn’t move. Just held the glass like it might anchor her. And maybe it did. He reached across the table and gently rested his hand on her forearm. His thumb traced a line, just once. She looked at him. He could see she was measuring him up.

“I know where you come from,” he said. “That kind of pain doesn’t show much. It sits in how you breathe. How you stop asking for anything you don’t think you deserve.”

He gave her arm the smallest squeeze Then pulled back, let the distance return. All the while she watched him with that same blank expression on her face.

“You didn’t crack,” he said. “You came out sharp. As sharp as all the others did.”

He leaned back. The booth let out a soft groan. His gaze didn’t leave hers.

“What I’m offering isn’t revenge. It’s not justice. It’s not a fucking redemption arc.” His voice was sandpaper now, worn down to the grain. “It’s a life. Real. Dirty. Paid in scars and years you don’t get back. That’s the cost.”

She traced the condensation ring on her glass.

“You’ll see the world. Make real money. And yeah—you’ll kill people. Most will deserve it. Some won’t. Tough shit.” He spun his glass one last time. Then let it stop. “It’s not clean,” he said. “It’s not easy.” Then, softer. Lower. “And it costs everything.”

He lifted his hands, palms up, empty. He wasn’t selling. He was showing her what the road looked like. Nothing more.

“Your name. Your past. Every person who thought they knew you—gone. You get a codename. You start over.”

Then he stood. The booth gave a tired creak beneath him, the table shivered under the shift in weight, and her glass wobbled in its condensation ring. Taehyung stepped out with that same unfazed grace, boots silent on the warped floorboards. His hand came down on her shoulder, firm and hot to the touch. She didn’t look up.

“I’m going outside,” he said, voice flat. “There’s a cherry-red ’67 Mustang behind the ice machine.” He didn’t wait for acknowledgement. Didn’t reach for her gaze. His own was already turned toward the door.

“If you’re in,” he said, “go left. Get in the car.” A pause. “If not... go right. No hard feelings. You won’t see me again.”

And then—just as quiet, just as strange—he bent and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Quick. Dry. Not romantic. Could’ve meant goodbye. Could’ve meant nothing. Could’ve meant everything.

“Fifteen minutes,” he whispered.

Then he walked away. No backward glance. Just the whisper of the door swinging open, the groan of old wood under practiced boots, and the Longhorn folding around the vacuum he left behind.

She didn’t watch him go.

She stayed right there. Elbows on the table. Palm pressed damp against the warm glass. Her eyes unfocused. The drink wasn’t cold anymore, and when she set it down, it landed off-center with a small, definitive click. It wasn’t loud. But it was enough.

The bar breathed again. Like something had let go. The jukebox stumbled back to life, vomiting up Willie Nelson. Laughter rose from the back—too loud, too sudden, trying to shake off the static that still clung to the walls. A cue ball cracked. A chair scraped. The fan above ticked once. Then again. Spinning. Moving. Like life wanted so badly to pretend it had never paused.

But for her, nothing had started moving again.

She hadn’t broken. She’d just... shifted. A slow click back into place. A truth she hadn’t known was off until it corrected itself. It didn’t hurt. It was relief. Like breathing through your nose after years of congestion. And now her brain was ticking through its lists again.

Find food. Something fried. Don’t taste it. Start a fight. Win it. Don’t bleed. Take a drink. Leave it half-finished. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t ask. Don’t explain.

Then one more line. Slipped in like it had always been there.

Join a crew of contract killers?

It should’ve felt absurd. Surreal. Something from the wrong end of a bad dream. But it didn’t. It sat right next to the other rules, like it had always been waiting for its turn.

She let out a breath—short and jagged. There was too much blood in her mouth. Too much silence in her chest. Too much of this one day shoved into the same body she’d been dragging around for nineteen years. The bar’s light was slanted now, cut into ribbons by grime-streaked windows. The dust caught in it hung like ash. She watched it float.

Somewhere in her mind, her mother’s voice cracked through, scratchy and cigarette-shredded.

The world don’t care about your feelings, girl. It’s gonna keep turning whether you like it or not.

Funny, she used to laugh at her mother. Call her stupid. Crazy how much her mother was right about the world.

And her thoughts spiraled back to fists and bone, to the grip of a cue stick, to the clean contact of knuckle on jaw.

This wasn’t a decision. Not really. It was just the next thing. A step she’d already taken without realizing it. A door she’d already passed through. She leaned back into the booth. Vinyl squeaked, stuck to her bare arms. She folded them tight across her chest.

Her jaw set. Her eyes dropped. There, etched into the table, were initials. Faded. Carved in shallow. Maybe ten years old. Maybe older. A scar in the wood no one had ever bothered to sand down. Her reflection sat beside it, faint in the gloss—just a suggestion.

They used to call her an old soul. Like it was a compliment. Teachers. The old ladies at church. Rhonda Portnoy with liquor on their breath and too many stories that never ended right. 

No one ever asked what it cost to know too much too young. Maybe she was deep. Or maybe they just didn’t want to look long enough to see she was drowning. Her eyes burned. She blinked them dry—twice. 

The Longhorn still stank. Of sweat, beer, bleach, old fry oil. But under it—she could still smell the blood.

What the hell just happened?

She already knew. Even if her bones hadn’t caught up.

A man had walked in. The kind who didn’t need volume to make people listen. He didn’t offer comfort. Didn’t promise rescue. He’d promised a life. Maybe not a safe one, but it was more than she’d had going for her.

And she hadn’t flinched.

What filled her now wasn’t fear. It was interest. It lived in her chest like smoke behind a locked door waiting for a crack.

She reached for her glass again, out of muscle memory. Swirled what was left. It shimmered like a coin tossed into deep water. No answers there. She drank it anyway. The burn barely registered. Her hand was steady.

Willie kept singing. The cue ball cracked. Somebody laughed too loud. The fan overhead ticked on, blades slicing the air with lazy threat.

The Longhorn had moved on, but not her.

Something in her had shifted. Slid into place. And the ache that followed wasn’t a wound. It was release. She felt light. Like she’d stepped out of her old skin and hadn’t quite landed in the new one yet. The girl she’d been was fading fast. Just static now.

One step left and she was gone.

She didn’t move. Not yet. But the voice inside—the one that never screamed, never rushed—was speaking now.

Walk left.

Toward the door. The gravel. The Mustang behind the ice machine. Toward the man who hadn’t lied. Who hadn’t asked for anything but the truth of who she already was. All she had to do was stand.

Could I actually do this?

Because this wasn’t instinct. Wasn’t heat. This wasn’t defending herself. This was choice. A step you didn’t come back from.

Taehyung hadn’t sold her a dream. He’d shown her a blade. This is the life. Take it or don’t. He’d said she had the eyes for it. And he wasn’t wrong.

There was something awake behind her eyes now. The low hum she always carried had risen—quiet, sure. Like a machine warming up after years at rest.

Sick? Maybe. But it felt right.

She’d always known she was off. Not cracked—just tilted. Enough to make teachers cautious, the old bitches from church quiet, other girls keep their distance without knowing why.

She used to kneel on threadbare carpet, rewinding battered kung fu tapes until the ribbon whined. Not for fantasy—for form. Breath, stance, control. The blade under her pillow wasn’t a a made up fantasy, it had been a promise to herself. A promise she’d never acted on.

She never told anyone about the dreams. Not about hurting people. Not about blood. Not about killing her father. Not her mother, too tired to listen. Not the church girls, all soft smiles and sharp whispers.

But she remembered the fire that took her daddy from her. Remembered the nights before it—his shadow in the doorframe, the silence after. She was seventeen when she walked barefoot into the dark, half-packed bag in one hand, his truck keys in the other. The moon spilled over her shoulders like it was waiting for her to speak. She didn’t.

She never looked back. But she thought about that night every day.

And when she couldn’t go back, she started hitting other men. The ones who leaned in too close. Who mistook silence for weakness. Who brushed her arm like they owned it. She didn’t flinch anymore. She struck.

She got good. Because no one expects the punch from the girl who doesn’t raise her voice. Not from the reverend's good little girl who went to church three times a week and spoke on Sundays.

Now here she was. Slumped in a cracked booth that stank of bleach, beer, and too many bad nights. Lip split. Fists aching. Warm drink gone. No sirens. No screaming. Just stillness. 

Nothing had changed. Except everything had.

She stared at the ring her glass left on the table. Traced it once. Faint green glow from the beer sign above caught in the condensation. It looked like an answer. Or maybe a door.

That flicker still burned. The one that lived deep in her chest, behind the ribs, where no drink could drown it. The one that lit up not in fear, not in rage, but in the clean, quiet snap of bone under knuckle. It was still there. Low. Steady. Waiting. Like a pilot light in a dark house. She could ignore it for a while, maybe even forget it—but it never went out. Never really dimmed. And now it was humming. Calling.

Six minutes, maybe seven had passed. She hadn’t moved. Barely breathed. But the thought that had cracked her open when he left hadn’t faded. It had taken root. Sent feelers into her ribs. Started to grow.

What kind of person wants to kill?

Not one who’s good. But she’d stopped pretending to be good somewhere around thirteen. Maybe earlier. Good had been ripped out of her the day the belt came out of its loops, the jingle waking her up out of her sleep.

Ten minutes.

What if I said yes?

A Mustang parked behind the bar like it had been waiting since before she was born. A man she didn’t know, not really—but somehow, he’d seen her clearer than anyone ever had. No questions. No promises. Just a job. A life. Violence that meant something. Hurt that paid.

Right was more of the same. Dead towns with names she forgot before the motels gave her keys. Fights in alleys and parking lots that ended in bruises and nothing else. Rotating faces. Static nights. Cheap whiskey and cheaper exits. Right felt like a story she’d already finished, flipped closed, and tossed aside. It didn’t feel real anymore. Just a rerun on a broken screen.

She didn’t move. Arms crossed. Jaw locked. Her pulse murmured in her ears, each beat a warning or a countdown—she couldn’t tell the difference. Her fingers tapped against the tabletop, quiet and relentless. The ring left by her glass still glowed faint under the beer sign, warped and uneven. She reached out and touched it, pressed her fingertip to the cool wet rim, like it might tell her something.

It didn’t.

She said it anyway, under her breath, to herself, to the moment, to the whole damn weight of it.

“Fuck.”

Then she stood.

The chair scraped back hard, loud in the hush that followed. Heads turned. A glass froze mid-pour. Cigarette smoke spiraled up, caught midair. But no one spoke. No one stopped her. She didn’t look at them. Didn’t give a single glance. Let them stare. Let them guess. They’d already stopped mattering.

Her bag hung from the hook beside her, the same frayed canvas thing that had followed her from shelter to shelter, couch to cot. She grabbed it without flinching, swung it over her shoulder, felt the strap bite into her skin. It was heavy with places that never held her, but it tethered her. Always had.

She walked through. Past the jukebox bleeding out some slow, sad country tune. Past the cracked stools and stained bar and the men too far gone to lift their heads. She didn’t look back. Not once. She walked like she’d already left. The door was just a formality.

Outside, the heat punched her full in the chest. Thick. Wet. The kind of southern night that clung to your ribs. She paused on the warped porch, boards groaning beneath her boots.

To her right: the same spiral. New towns. Same lies. Rotting from the inside. Same weight, different grave.

To her left: gravel crunching under old tires. A red ’67 Mustang parked under a crooked streetlamp, dust dulling its lines. And him—Taehyung. Leaning back against the driver’s side door like he’d never been unsure of anything in his life. Coat loose. Boots crossed. Eyes watching, steady as midnight.

She didn’t hesitate. One breath. Then she turned left. 

Right on time.

The Mustang didn’t sparkle like she expected it to. She crossed the gravel like it was a bridge, not a road. Her shadow stretched long under the lamp’s sickly flicker. She stopped at the fender, turned toward him, met his gaze head-on.

Chin high. Shoulders square. Spine tight and straight.

“Okay,” she said.

No tremble. No emphasis. Just fact. Like she’d known she would say it all along.

Taehyung nodded once. “Of course you do.”

He pushed off the Mustang with that same lazy grace, unhurried and unbothered, and opened the driver’s side door. The creak of it echoed across the lot. She stepped around the front of the car, dust catching on her boots, gravel crunching like bones underfoot. Her hand found the passenger handle, and for a second she just held it.

The roar came out of nowhere—engine high and desperate, headlights screaming white across the dark. A truck barreled into the lot too fast for the space it had. Tires locked. Dust exploded in plumes. The whole lot filled with the sound of friction and panic and that awful skidding pause that always came right before something crashed.

But nothing crashed.

The truck slewed to a crooked stop like it was throwing a tantrum. The door flung open before the dust even settled.

Out came a boy. Mid-twenties. All sweat and noise and denim swagger. Cowboy hat pulled low, shirt stuck to his spine, boots worn past style into utility. He moved with a kind of reckless confidence that didn’t come from experience—it came from never being hit hard enough to change.

“Taehyung! Shit—sorry, man!” he called, jogging toward them. “I lost track of time!”

Taehyung didn’t move. One hand still rested on the door. His silhouette didn’t shift. But something about him changed. The unbothered ease Y/N had come to know was melted away and in its place was a man with sharp eyes and tense muscles.

Y/N didn’t wait. She slipped into the passenger seat without a word. Shut the door. Rested her elbow on the frame and tapped her fingers against the glass in a slow, even rhythm— tick, tick, tick .

The guy noticed her then. Slowed mid-step.

“ Oh ,” he said, dragging the vowel like he wasn’t sure what he’d found. “Didn’t realize you had... company.” His eyes lingered a beat too long. Smile tried to form, didn’t stick. “Didn’t know you had a lady friend.”

Taehyung closed her door. A quiet, measured push. Then he turned toward the boy.

“She’s not company,” he said. His voice didn’t rise, but it filled the air like smoke. “She’s taking your place.”

The guy blinked, smile cracking at the edges. “What?”

“You were late,” he said. “She wasn’t.”

The guy laughed, too fast, and it broke in the middle. “Come on. Her ? I was late, yeah, but—”

“Thirty minutes,” Taehyung said, flat as pavement. “And fate doesn’t wait.”

He reached the driver’s side and stopped. One hand on the handle. The other hovered near the fold of his coat—casual, almost lazy, but close. Deliberate.

“I don’t run a boys’ club,” he said. There might’ve been a smile there, buried under steel. Or maybe just the ghost of one long dead.

Color crept up the other man’s neck, flushed and hot. His fists curled like he didn’t trust his own fingers. His jaw locked. He was building toward something he couldn’t carry.

“Wait. Just—”

Taehyung didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink.

“There’s a gun ten inches from my right hand,” he said. “How close is yours?”

The guy froze. You could see the thoughts rearranging behind his eyes. Anger giving way to math. Math giving way to fear. Then, finally, defeat.

He stepped back. Shoulders loose now, but not relaxed.

“Fine,” he muttered, like it was the last word he had in him.

He turned and yanked open the truck door. Slammed it like it owed him something. Peeled out hard, tires screaming again, dust rising in a curtain behind him as if trying to cover the embarrassment.

Then silence returned.

Taehyung slid into the driver’s seat without a glance. The door thunked shut with that same clean, heavy sound. Leather groaned. The engine turned over—growling awake like something half-feral and starved.

Inside, it smelled like sun-baked leather, old metal, and something harder to name. Heat. History. Maybe a stale pack of Newports. The Longhorn blinked once in the mirror—neon twitching like a dying eye—then slipped away, swallowed by dust and distance.

Taehyung rested one hand on the wheel. The other on his thigh. Just a man doing what he was built for.

“You ready?” he asked.

She didn’t look at him. Just kept her eyes stitched to the road as it unspooled in front of them—blacktop like a scar across the desert’s pale skin, long and cracked and endless, the kind of road that never really took you anywhere, just farther from what came before. Her hands sat locked between her knees.

“Does it matter?” she asked.

Next to her, Taehyung’s mouth twitched—not a smile, not quite. Just a flicker, a shift in the lines of his face. He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The answer was already in motion. He dropped the Mustang into reverse and the tires crunched over the gravel like brittle bone. The gear clicked into drive, and the car moved forward, slow at first, then steady.

They didn’t speak. They didn’t say goodbye. There was no last look at the bar behind them, no sentimental drag to the rearview. The Longhorn blinked out behind them like a cigarette going dark in an ashtray—smoked down, used up, done.

By the time the Mustang hit third, the world behind them was gone.

The wind cut in hard, dry and wild, tangling her hair and slapping it against her face. She didn’t fix it. Didn’t tuck it back or smooth it down. Just let it whip and twist and get in her way like it belonged there.

Taehyung’s voice slid through the hum of the road like gravel dragged across glass. “You ever been to Mexico?”

She turned her head a little, enough for him to see the slope of her jaw, the shape of her mouth. “No,” she said. “But I’ve seen all of Texas. Different towns. Same ceiling.”

He gave a short laugh—low, real, and rough around the edges. “I love Mexico,” he said. “Didn’t grow up there. But it’s where I figured out who I was.”

Fourth gear clicked in like a final decision. The Mustang stretched out, engine dropping into a deeper, meaner hum. The road ahead unfurled in shades of gray and heat. The desert didn’t welcome them—it just made room. Wide, flat, indifferent.

“Mexico’s messy,” he said. “But it’s free. Less noise. Fewer eyes. You want to vanish, you do. You stay vanished.”

He let that hang. No sales pitch. No persuasion. Just another truth left lying in the space between them.

“I bought a place there in February,” he said. “Hilltop. Nothing fancy. Just quiet. No neighbors. No questions.”

He looked over, just a glance. Not searching for approval—just checking for signal. “Think you’d like it.”

She didn’t nod. Didn’t speak. Her fingers curled against the inside of the door. He saw it. Knew she was anxious, but didn’t press the issue. The girl would get over that in time.

He shifted again, and the Mustang eased forward like it was being pulled by something older than maps. Fences blurred by. Power lines strobed overhead like broken film. The desert slipped past without memory. No towns. No signs. Just the land and the dark and the feeling of being farther and farther away from anyone who could spell her name.

The moon climbed up behind them, casting everything in that bruised kind of light. It touched the side of her face, the curve of her cheekbone, the line of her throat. She didn’t notice. But her shoulders loosened—barely. Just enough to tell someone paying attention.

He was. He caught it. Said nothing. Just nodded to the night like it had answered something for him.

“You’ll like it,” he repeated.

Still, she didn’t reply. Didn’t need to. Silence filled the car. Worn in like an old jacket. Engine noise. Wind. The occasional rattle in the dash. The Mustang didn’t ask questions. It just ran.

She didn’t fidget. Didn’t twist in her seat or look out the window for meaning. Just sat there, jaw tight, hands quiet, eyes locked forward. She didn’t know what was coming—not the killing, not the weight of it, not the cleanup or the silence that follows after—but if she did, if some part of her already understood what kind of blood she was signing up to wear, she didn’t flinch.

She just rode.

Chapter Text

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The room was dim. Fluorescent light flickered overhead, throwing thin shadows across the white walls. The air was stale and smelled heavily of ammonium. No one had touched the furniture. The scuff marks on the tile looked frozen in time. A nurse had come by at seven. That was it. The night shift forgot she was even there.

Y/N lay motionless in the narrow hospital bed, swallowed by stiff, scratchy sheets that hadn’t been changed in days. Her body was frail—little more than skin stretched thin over bone, nearly weightless. Her eyes stayed open, dry and unblinking, staring at the water-stained ceiling tiles like they might shift into something that made sense.

Her hair was dry and brittle. It broke off in soft clumps, collecting in the creases of the pillow like dust. She hadn't moved in years. Four of them—long, silent years.

Just above her left temple, a crescent scar curved across her forehead, its edges pale and raised. Beneath it, a metal plate—an ugly, necessary thing. The bullet had missed the vital parts of her brain by millimeters. A miracle, the doctors had called it. But still, she hadn’t woken.

Her vitals were normal. Brain activity, too. Nothing about her looked wrong—except for the fact that she wasn't there. It was like her body had been waiting for her to come back.

The room was quiet except for the machines. One kept time with a soft, patient beep. Another hissed every few seconds, pushing medication into the thin line that disappeared into her arm. A third clicked, slow and metronomic.

A mosquito drifted through the still air. It landed on her forearm, then bit in, feeding on its easy meal.

Then, miraculously, she moved. At first, just a flicker in her fingers. Small. Almost imperceptible. It could’ve been a twitch. A reflex. But it came again—sharper, more deliberate. Her hand lifted and then dropped.

Slap .

The mosquito was crushed. A smear of red on translucent skin. Her hand hovered, trembled, then brushed the remains aside.

Her eyes blinked. Once. Twice. They focused.

She was awake.

Her body convulsed upright in one sudden, panicked jolt. A scream tore out of her—raw, cracked, like something rusted breaking free. Her chest rose and fell in rapid, gasping waves. Breath came in hard and uneven. Her lungs, unpracticed in the chaos of living, struggled against the rhythm machines had held for years.

Her eyes darted around the room. White walls. Fluorescent lights. Machines still whirring, still unaware. A camera in the corner. A door with no window. Nothing familiar.

Then the memories hit.

A chapel. Roses in bloom. Music playing low. A man’s voice—warm, certain. Then light. Then pain.

Her hands flew to her head, digging into her hair. She found it. The scar. The plate. Hard and unnatural beneath her fingertips.

Tap. Tap.

Tink. Tink.

Her throat felt scorched, her voice barely a sound. “My baby,” she rasped.

She clawed at the thin hospital gown. Her fingers slid over her stomach—soft, unfamiliar, hollow. Then they stopped. A scar. Long. Healed. Her hands froze.

The room didn’t. The machines went on without her.

She looked down at her palm and began tracing the lines, slow, methodical—like she was reading tea leaves. One. Two. Three. Four.

Her gaze shifted to the wall across from her. A calendar hung there, pages curled and yellowed at the edges. The year: 2004.

“Four years,” she whispered. The words felt foreign in her mouth.

Something deep inside her cracked.

Her chest tightened. The weight of her own breathing pressed in, sharp and raw. Her lungs fought to remember how to expand, how to fill. But it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

Her shoulders began to tremble—small, uneven shakes, like a warning before a storm.

Then the tears came. Fast. Violent. Not graceful. Not cinematic. They gushed down her cheeks, soaking the pillow, her gown, her tangled hair. Her mouth opened in a wordless cry, her jaw shaking with the effort of trying to make sound happen. Her face, blank for years, folded under the force of emotion—creases of pain, of memory, of things lost.

She reached for the gown again, gripped it in both fists. Twisted hard. The fabric pulled tight across her lap, straining, threatening to tear. Her body convulsed—not from sobs, but from something deeper, more primal.

Beep. Hiss. Drip.

The machines didn’t pause.

She wept. Everything she’d once had—gone. Erased. A life folded closed and filed away somewhere she couldn’t reach. And now here it was, back in front of her, impossible to look at without shattering.

She had carried a heartbeat that wasn’t her own. Protected it. Loved it.

Now there was silence beneath her ribs. Just the machines. Just the room. Just her.

Then she heard it. Step… step… step. Distant, muffled at first, but unmistakable. She froze mid-cry, her swollen eyes snapping open, not with hope, but recognition. The cadence. It cut through the haze of her emotions and hit her with a force that made her heart stutter. Taehyung . The name surged in her chest, filling her entire being. Her mind seized the sound, molding it with memories that had been locked away for far too long. She saw him then—his black leather boots striking the floor with that exact rhythm she had heard before, a sound so ingrained in her mind that it was etched into her very bones. The image played behind her eyes like a film reel, the memory of the chapel flooding back—his presence walking down the aisle, the distant sound of wedding bells ringing, the roses scattering beneath his feet. And then, gunshots. Screaming. Blood on white.

Her breath hitched, and for a moment, she almost believed he was there, just beyond the door, walking toward her like it was a lifetime ago, before everything fell apart. But then, another set of footsteps joined the rhythm—quieter, irregular, wrong. Step… step… squeak. No boots. Rubber soles. She barely moved her head, just enough for her ear to catch the subtle shift in sound. Reeboks. A hospital orderly. Not him.

Her body remained frozen, suspended in the collision between the haunting memory of him and the harsh reality of the present. Her pulse thundered in her ears, and her breath caught in her throat. The room seemed to spin around her, the walls closing in. The illusion of Taehyung’s presence still lingered, fighting for dominance in her mind, refusing to let go of the ghost it had conjured.

And then the voice came, breaking the fragile thread of her thoughts. “She’s right in here.” It was too nasal. Too flat. It wasn’t him. But her brain twisted the words, distorting them with his intonation, layering them with his deeper, smoother voice. The sound of his voice—familiar and warm—cut through the confusion, and her body involuntarily flinched. It wasn’t him. But in that moment, logic didn’t matter. The mind could be cruel, playing old reels at the worst possible times, trapping her in a memory that wouldn’t let go.

Outside the room, there was muffled conversation. Then, three figures appeared behind the frosted glass of the door. One in scrubs, two in mismatched uniforms that had no hospital logos, no stethoscopes. Their presence was commanding—broad, upright, and expressionless.

Her breath narrowed into controlled, shallow gasps. Panic wasn’t an option now. She couldn’t afford to be seen, to make a sound, to break the stillness that had fallen over the room. They couldn’t know she was awake.

In one swift, practiced motion, she snapped back into the bed, flattening herself against the pillow. Her body went limp—limbs slack, jaw loosened. Her eyes fluttered closed, but just barely. A sliver remained, enough to see, enough to plan.

The door opened, and the orderly stepped in first, speaking over his shoulder to the two men who followed. He didn’t look at her. Didn’t even acknowledge her existence. His attention was fixed on the clipboard at the foot of the bed as he scribbled something down, his movements automatic. One of the men scanned the room with a practiced sweep, his eyes flicking from corner to corner, searching for anything that might pose a threat. The other stood stiffly near the door, his posture rigid and watchful, as if expecting trouble to spring out from the walls at any moment.

Y/N remained motionless. Her eyes didn’t blink, didn’t shift. She didn’t breathe a hint of movement. But she saw. She was aware of everything around her. The subtle bulge beneath the jacket of the man closest to her—the unmistakable outline of a weapon tucked under the fabric. She committed their profiles to memory. The way they stood, the way they carried themselves—too controlled, too silent to be hospital staff. Too deliberate, too tense to be just guards.

Her gaze was unfocused, not really on them. Her mind wandered elsewhere—back behind them, past them, to a place where a phantom figure still loomed. The memory of Taehyung remained, his presence almost tangible in the air, as if he were still standing in the doorway, just out of sight. His image slipped away from her every time she tried to concentrate on it, like water running through her fingers. But his footsteps lingered, echoing in the background, following her even here, in this cold, silent room. She felt them, deep in her bones, haunting her with the weight of unspoken things.

She didn’t move. She didn’t even try to force herself into the world she had left. She was a shadow now, a body that wasn’t really alive, a presence that was forgotten in the space between the past and whatever future she hadn’t yet found.

The men moved around her, completely oblivious, as if she were nothing more than a fixture in the room—an object no one had bothered to remember. That was her advantage. Let them think she was nothing, that she was still just a body on a bed. She would let them believe it, until she could learn more, until she had the strength to act, until she had a plan.

She waited, every breath measured, every muscle tense but still. Her eyes were closed, but the world kept moving around her. The door opened wider, the sounds of the hallway spilling in. Footsteps, distant voices, the hum of hospital life carrying on without interruption. And in her mind, the chapel reappeared—the soft crunch of rose petals underfoot, the unmistakable rhythm of steps she had once known too well, then the sudden, sharp crack of a gunshot. Blood spilled over white satin, and pain flared in her abdomen. The last breath of a second heartbeat—the one that had been taken from her.

The orderly turned slightly, moving to the foot of the bed, like he was on autopilot. His motions were bored, almost lazy, as if checking her vitals was just another item on a list of things he had to do. His eyes didn’t meet hers. His hands moved through the motions with no real intention behind them. He glanced at the clipboard, shifted it as if pretending to read.

The men behind him hung back near the door, towering and silent. Their size was enough to make their presence known without a single word. The first man scanned the room again, looking over the machines, the walls, the hall outside. His eyes lingered on nothing, but it was clear he was calculating. The other focused entirely on her—the body in the bed, the woman who hadn’t moved in years. He was watching, waiting, assessing. She could feel it, the weight of his gaze pressing down on her.

Her body remained still. She let her limbs fall limp, let her face slacken with the same blank stare she had worn for so long. But her mind was anything but still. Behind that vacant expression, her thoughts raced. She studied every detail, took stock of every tiny thing. The faded tattoos on one man’s forearm. The way the other’s jacket hung lopsided, weighed down by something hidden underneath. The stench of old sweat and cigarettes clung to their clothes, giving them away. These were not hospital men. Not staff. Not guards. They didn’t belong here. Yet, here they were.

Her eyes were open, wide, unblinking. She let them take her in, let them think they were in control. The game wasn’t over yet.

The orderly shifted, moving to the side of the bed. He pulled the thin hospital sheet back, the rough fabric crinkling as it was dragged. He lifted her gown with a slow, deliberate motion, a kind of crude ceremony. His eyes flicked to the men as he did so, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth, as if he were showing them something worth their attention.

“Now is that the cutest little pussy you ever saw, or is that the cutest little pussy you ever saw,” he said, chuckling like it was a joke between old friends.

One of the truckers—tall, with a pitted face and a voice like gravel—nodded approvingly. The other—shorter, squatter, his arms crossed—shrugged with affected disinterest.

“I’ve seen better,” he muttered.

Y/N didn’t blink, but there was a flicker in her eyes. Not quite a flinch. More like contempt. Barely controlled.

The orderly scoffed, not missing a beat. “Yeah, in a movie - maybe. But I know damn well this is the best pussy you ever saw you had touchin’ rights to. The price is seventy five dollars a fuck gentlemen, you gettin’ your freak on or what?”

He held out his hand. The taller trucker reached into his pocket, peeled off a folded wad of cash, and slapped it into the man’s palm.

The orderly turned back to them, his face dropping into something close to professional. “Alright, listen close. Here’s the rules; Rule number one; no punchin’. Nurse comes in tomorrow and she got a shiner - or less some teeth, jig’s up. So no knuckle sandwiches under no circumstances.”

Both men nodded.

“And by the way, this little cunt’s a spitter. It’s a motor reflex thing but spit or no, no punchin. Now are we absolutely positively clear about rule number one?”

“Yeah,” The taller trucker says. 

The other one just nods again.

“Rule number two; No monkey bites, no hickeys - in fact no leaving no marks of no kind. But after that, it’s all good .”

The Orderly finished counting the money and stuffed it into his back pocket.

“Her plummin down there don’t work no more, so feel free to cum in ‘er all ya wont. Keep the noise down. Try not to make a mess, and I’ll be back in twenty.”

More nods.

He pointed toward the door. “Keep it quiet. No yelling. Don’t knock over anything. And clean up after yourselves.”

Then, as he turned to leave, he paused, reached into his satchel, and pulled out a half-empty jar of Vaseline. He handed it off like an afterthought, barely concealing his amusement.

“Oh by the way, not all the time, but sometimes this cunt’s cunt can get drier than a bucket of sand. If she’s dry, lube up with this and you’ll be good to go. ”

He smirked.

“Bon appétit, boys.”

The door clicked softly behind the orderly, the sound too quiet to be anything but deliberate. It wasn’t the kind of sound that should have been heard—it was the finality of a lock being turned, the certainty of isolation. To Y/N, it felt like the cold embrace of a deadbolt sliding into place. Now, it was just her and them.

Inside the room, the two men laughed—low and wrong, the kind of laughter that carried nothing but malice. It wasn’t amusement. It was nervous energy, the kind that signals the start of something that shouldn't have been allowed. Warren, the larger of the two, fumbled with his belt, hands clumsy, tugging at the leather strap beneath his stomach. He didn’t glance at her; he didn’t need to. She was nothing to him. Furniture. Inventory. Part of the room he’d already written off.

Y/N blinked.

It wasn’t deliberate. Not a flinch. Not fear. Just a reflex. A quiet reclaiming of her body after so long, a whisper of life. Her lashes flickered, just enough to stir in the dim light. But it was enough.

Gerald saw it first. His voice, still playful but with a sharp edge, cut through the haze of laughter. “Hey, Warren... she just blinked.”

Warren didn’t even look up. His focus was still on his belt, the effort slow and unfocused. “He said she can’t blink.”

“I know what he said,” Gerald replied, quieter now, voice dropping an octave. “But I saw it. I’m not imagining it.”

Warren grunted in response, the sound of his pants dropping loud in the tense silence. His hands were heavy, fumbling with his jeans. “Just nerves, man. You’re jumpy. You think I care if her eyelid twitched?”

Gerald didn’t answer. He stood still near the foot of the bed, uncertainty in the way he held himself, his eyes flicking to Y/N like he didn’t know what to make of what he had seen.

Warren, irritated, moved to the bed. His bulk sank it with a groan, his knees pushing into her frail body. Y/N didn’t move. She didn’t flinch. She was stone beneath him. The gown pressed cold against her skin, but she didn’t let herself react. Her muscles were tight, rigid, holding on to the stillness like it was the only thing she could control.

Her heart hammered in her chest. The only thing alive in her body.

She stared past him, eyes dull and empty. A mannequin. A shell. Her mind was a hundred miles away from the man above her, but it wasn’t in peace. She was a captive, caught between the body she couldn’t move and the memories that still haunted her.

Warren shifted his weight, letting out a grunt of discomfort. “Hey, Gerald.”

Gerald blinked, his arms folded as if trying to block out the awkwardness of the moment. “What?”

“This ain’t no damn peep show,” Warren muttered, eyes narrowing. “Go wait outside. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

“Aww, c’mon, you serious right now?” Gerald’s voice was petulant, but it didn’t last long.

Warren’s glare darkened. “Dead serious. Get out.”

Gerald muttered under his breath and shuffled toward the door, his shoulders slumping as he cast one last glance at Y/N before slipping out into the hallway.

The door clicked behind him with finality, leaving the room empty save for the sounds of machinery. The steady pulse of the heart monitor, the hiss of the ventilator, and the hum of the fluorescent light above filled the silence. The air in the room felt colder now, heavier, like the space had closed in on itself.

Warren turned back to her, his eyes roaming over her body with a sneer. “Damn,” he muttered under his breath, bending close as he leaned over her. His breath was sour, stale tobacco and decay, and his eyes gleamed with something ugly. “You really are pretty up close. Like a doll somebody left in the attic.”

He positioned himself over her, hands braced on either side of her head, blocking her view of the ceiling as his lips parted. He leaned in, slow and deliberate, his breath heavy as it neared her.

And then, without warning, she moved.

It wasn’t hesitation or uncertainty. There was no struggle. It was raw action, fast and decisive. Her arms shot up from the bed with brutal precision, hands locking into the back of his greasy hair, yanking his face down toward hers. Her mouth opened, and in an instant, her teeth sank into his tongue.

The sound was immediate—a sick, wet crunch, followed by a strangled, guttural shriek. Blood flooded her mouth, hot and coppery, coating her tongue and throat. Warren jerked back, howling in pain, his hands clawing at his face in panic. The scream was garbled, unrecognizable—his mouth no longer formed words.

He stumbled, tripping over his own pants, blood streaming between his fingers.

Y/N sat up with the suddenness of a corpse reanimated. Her chest heaved as her chin, slick with blood, turned. She spat the severed piece of his tongue onto the floor, the sickening thud echoing in the room.

She didn’t flinch.

Her eyes locked onto him—clear, blazing with life, a fire ignited in her chest.

With a practiced motion, she ripped the IV from her arm. Blood welled from the site, but she didn’t even flinch. The sting barely registered. All she could feel was the rush—the flood of adrenaline, every muscle alive and ready to move.

Warren, now trying to crawl backward across the bed, was still shrieking through gurgles, his eyes wide with disbelief, his hands still clawing at his mouth.

She didn’t wait.

She launched herself at him, throwing her body forward and slamming him down flat against the mattress. She straddled his chest, her fists planted firmly above him. The IV needle, now in her hand, glinted with cold steel under the harsh fluorescent light. She drove it into his left eye.

His scream tore through the room—a pure, primal sound that reverberated off the walls. He bucked beneath her, thrashing, but she held tight, twisting the needle deeper. There was resistance, then a soft, wet pop. His limbs stiffened, his spine arched—and then, with a sickening finality, he went still.

It wasn’t the stillness of sleep. It wasn’t the stillness of unconsciousness.

It was the stillness of death.

But she wasn’t done.

Gripping the collar of his shirt, Y/N shoved his weight sideways. His body rolled toward the edge of the bed, and with a twist of her hips, she sent him crashing into the metal bedframe. The impact rang through the room, a hollow, awful crack that punctuated the silence that followed.

Y/N crouched at the edge of the bed, her body splattered with his blood, her gown clinging to her like a second skin. Her breath came in ragged bursts, each inhale burning, each exhale heavy with the weight of what she had just done. Sweat beaded at her brow, her vision pulsing with adrenaline, sharp and distorted. She scanned the room quickly, making sure there were no more surprises.

Outside, Gerald paced. He’d heard the shift—a grunt, followed by a scream, then nothing. His instincts told him something wasn’t right.

He banged on the door. “Hey! Hey, man, keep it down in there! I can hear your ass from out here!”

Silence.

One second. Two. No answer. No more sounds. Just a deep, unsettling quiet that settled in his gut like a bad omen.

Something wasn’t right.

He hesitated for a moment, his hand hovering over the doorknob. Then, he pushed it open.

“Come on, Warre—”

The sentence died in his throat, stifled by the overwhelming stillness of the room. His eyes scanned the scene, trying to make sense of what was unfolding. His mind struggled to process the violence before him.

Warren was on the floor, crumpled in a heap beside the bed, his limbs twisted unnaturally, like a broken puppet discarded on the floor. Blood pooled beneath his head, so bright and red it looked surreal against the pale linoleum. The bed was in shambles—ripped sheets, soaked blankets, and machines strewn across the floor as if they had been cast aside in the chaos. But the woman…

She was there. Exactly where they had left her. She was flat on her back, eyes open, staring blankly at the ceiling. Motionless.

Gerald blinked, his confusion deepening. His gaze flicked between the bodies, trying to find some logic in the mess. There was too much blood, too little movement. Everything was wrong. He took a tentative step forward, unsure of what he was seeing.

Y/N blinked. It wasn’t a flinch. It wasn’t involuntary. It was deliberate. Her eyes moved, and in the next instant, she acted.

Her arm shot upward in a blur of motion—fast, practiced, explosive. She grabbed the front of his shirt, yanking him toward her with a force he wasn’t prepared for. He stumbled, thrown off balance, and pitched forward, only to meet the cold steel of the IV needle still slick with Warren’s blood. It sank into his temple, and a sickening crunch echoed in his ear. Metal piercing flesh. The kind of sound that made your stomach twist.

Y/N didn’t hesitate.

She twisted the needle, driving it deeper.

Gerald’s body jerked, spasming uncontrollably. His mouth fell open, but no sound came out—just a bubbling, choking gurgle, like drowning in air. His limbs kicked and flailed, but it was too late. His body sagged, heavy and lifeless, hitting the floor with a dull thud.

Y/N released him.

He dropped to the ground beside Warren, a wet lump of dead weight.

For a moment, Y/N stayed still. Her breath was shallow, her body streaked with blood. The adrenaline buzzed through her, but there was no time to savor it. The two men, both much larger than her, lay dead around her, and she hadn’t moved more than a few feet from the bed she had been trapped in for years. But it wasn’t over.

With a quick, fluid motion, she ripped the blood-soaked sheets off the bed and swung her legs over the side. Her bare feet hit the cold tile with a slap, and she tried to stand—

Her knees buckled beneath her. Her body folded like dry paper, crumpling to the floor. Pain shot through her ribs as she hit the hard surface, and a tray of instruments scattered, clattering across the tile like metal rain. Tubes snagged on her ankle, tangling in a mess she couldn’t escape.

She lay there, her cheek pressed against the freezing floor, gasping for air. Her legs didn’t move. They were numb—foreign. They didn’t feel like her own. Panic surged, but she forced it down. Now wasn’t the time. Survival wasn’t going to wait for her fear.

She closed her eyes, focused on her breath.

One second. Two. Just enough to recalibrate.

Then, she heard it.

Footsteps. Not Warren. Not Gerald. Her heart skipped in her chest.

Taehyung?

His name echoed in her mind like a shot fired in the distance, but she didn’t speak it. She couldn’t afford to. Instead, she focused. She focused on what she could control.

Her head turned, just enough to see who was coming.

Gerald's body lay sprawled on the floor beside her, his jacket hiked up from the fall. His belt—still intact—held a trucker’s knife in a worn leather sheath. Y/N’s hand shook as she reached out, her fingers brushing the cool steel. With a steady grip, she grabbed the hilt and pulled.

Click.

The blade snapped open with a clean, satisfying sound. The noise cut through the air, sharp and empowering.

In the hallway, she heard an elevator chime. The doors slid open with a squeak, and footsteps followed, each one slow, deliberate—the orderly. Y/N pressed herself flat against the floor, sliding against the wall next to the doorframe. Her body screamed in protest, muscles strained and protesting the movement, but her grip on the knife didn’t waver. It was steady, cold.

The footsteps stopped. The door opened.

The orderly paused, the mess before him catching his attention. Blood pooled on the floor. Bodies were scattered. Sheets shredded and twisted. The horror of the scene struck him, but not her. Not yet.

“Oh, shi—”

The words never finished. Y/N struck.

In one swift motion, she cut down, the blade slicing through the air with precision. It hit his Achilles tendons—both of them—splitting through flesh, tendon, and bone. His scream tore through the corridor, high-pitched, desperate, and ragged. He collapsed, his legs giving way, folding beneath him as his body crashed to the floor.

Y/N didn’t give him a moment to recover. She crawled toward him, her muscles burning with the effort, teeth clenched against the strain. She grabbed a fistful of his uniform, blood smearing across the floor as she dragged him into the room. His legs twitched uselessly behind him, his body weak and limp.

With a growl, she pulled him toward the door and slammed his head into the frame.

CRACK .

The sound of bone hitting wood filled the room. His scream was muffled, but it only pushed her further. She did it again.

CRACK .

And again.

CRACK .

Each blow sent fresh waves of blood splattering across the floor. His body jerked, limbs twitching in a desperate attempt to escape, but Y/N held him steady. His breath came in ragged gasps. His eyes fluttered open, glazed with pain. And then, they locked onto her.

And he saw her.

His face twisted in terror, raw and unfiltered.

Y/N crouched over him, her breath labored, strands of hair plastered to her face with blood and sweat. She wasn’t just looking at him—she was seeing him. She was past the point of mercy.

“Where’s Taehyung?” she rasped, her voice jagged, like shards of broken glass.

His lips trembled. “I—I don’t… I don’t know—”

She slammed his head into the doorframe again.

CRACK .

He gasped, his body shuddering in pain.

“I saw him,” Y/N growled, voice thick with fury. “Here. In this room. You tell me where he is—or I’ll beat your brains in until you can’t lie anymore.”

“I swear—I don’t—”

SLAM .

The room was quiet now, heavy with the weight of the silence that followed the last blow. Blood seeped from his face, dripping steadily, his breathing short and labored. Y/N didn’t speak. She just stared at him, her eyes narrowing as she caught a glint of something at his neck. A flash of gold caught in the dim light. A thin chain, delicate despite the blood and grime clinging to his skin.

Her hand shot out, quick and sure, and she yanked the chain with all the force she had left. The link snapped with a sharp ping, the tension sending the pendant swinging into her palm. She didn’t hesitate as she examined it. It wasn’t jewelry.

It was a coke straw.

The metal was cold, smooth, worn down by years of handling, the mouthpiece tinted from use, heat, habit. It wasn’t meant to be noticed. It wasn’t flashy. It was personal. Private. And it was deeply familiar.

Her blood ran cold as she realized what she was holding.

She’d seen this before. She’d seen it hang from a neck like this, swinging and tapping against a collarbone in the dim light. Taehyung had worn it, a signature of sorts, like it was part of him. The click of it against his lighter echoed in her mind. The way it swayed when he leaned in close, whispering things that blurred the line between promise and poison.

Now it was here. In her hand. On this man.

Y/N stared at the straw for a long moment, the world shrinking down to that single object—its shape, the cool metal, the heat from the skin it had touched. She felt her chest tighten as she looked down at him.

“Where,” her voice was low, the words cold and cutting, “did you get this?”

His eyes, wide with panic, flickered up to meet hers. His lips barely moved, strained by shock and pain.

“It’s mine,” he gasped.

Y/N didn’t say anything at first. She just stared at him. And then, she laughed—no humor, just disbelief, sharp and biting.

“ Bullshit ,” she hissed under her breath.

Her hand tightened around the doorframe, ready to slam it down again, but something caught her eye. Ink.

She saw it on his hands, faded but still visible. Amateur tattoos. Crude block letters, likely done in a backroom or some dark corner of a prison. The letters stood out against his skin like scars.

B.U.C.K.

F.U.C.K.

The words hit her like a punch to the stomach. She wasn’t just shocked by what they said, but by what they meant.

Her eyes locked on the tattoos, and in that moment, her mind slipped away from the present. It slid into something older, something darker. The memory hit her like a wave.

The room was dim, bathed in the cold glow of security flashlights that cut through the shadows. Y/N lay there, helpless. Trapped in her own body, floating somewhere between a dream and oblivion, unable to move, unable to scream. And then, he’d appeared.

He stood at the foot of her bed like a storm she couldn’t escape, his presence dominating the space. His voice had been thick with a Southern drawl, slick with overconfidence.

“Well, ain’t you just the slice of cutie pie they all said you was,” he’d said, his words dripping with a disturbing kind of charm. “Ma’am, I’m from Longview, Texas. My name’s Buck. And I’m here to fuck.”

She hadn’t been able to respond then. She couldn’t even move. She had been frozen in that hospital bed, paralyzed, unable to fight back. But now, the tables had turned.

Now she was awake.

The memory of him—his tattoos, his boots, the stench of cigarette smoke mixed with rot—had haunted her for far too long. But this time, she wasn’t trapped in a dream. This time, she was fully in control, and he was here.

Her vision snapped back to the present. She looked down at him, cold fury simmering in her eyes.

“Your name’s Buck, right?” she asked, her voice quiet, almost too calm, as if she were confirming the simplest of facts. “And you came to fuck.”

He froze, recognition flashing in his eyes even as blood poured from his wounds. His body trembled, a sick realization sinking in: she knew exactly who he was, and he wasn’t going to make it out alive.

“ Right ?” she pressed, louder now, a challenge in her voice.

“Wait-”

Her grip tightened on the doorframe, her muscles coiling, ready for what came next. And then, with a sharp motion, she brought the door down.

CRACK .

The sound was deafening, final, wet. It ended him. He didn’t move after that—not a twitch. His body was still, lifeless, his breath stilled forever.

Y/N stayed crouched there for a moment, her body slumped slightly, arms trembling from the force of it all. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. Her legs were still numb, unresponsive, like they belonged to someone else. But she didn’t care. He was gone. The weight of him was gone.

The room was silent again, the sterile hum of machines the only sound. The world outside continued to spin, oblivious to the violence that had just unfolded within these walls.

Slowly, she leaned over the body, her fingers working to find something useful. She brushed against the cracked leather of his pocket, tugging out a battered wallet. It smelled of sweat and cheap cigarettes. The faded gold letters on the outside still read, BIG EL PASO PIMPIN’. She curled her lip in disgust and opened it.

A wad of bills, mostly ones and fives, damp from the heat of his body, sat in the wallet. Y/N didn’t hesitate. She shoved them into the inner pocket of her scrubs without a second thought. Her hand brushed against the front pocket next, and she found the keys.

They weren’t just keys. A bulky plastic fob dangled from the ring, shaped like a tacky novelty license plate. Bright yellow, with pink flames licking the sides. PUSSY WAGON in a loopy, absurd font.

Her fingers tightened around it. It was vulgar, ridiculous. But it was hers now, and it was her way out.

She pocketed the keys quickly, then shifted her focus to Gerald’s body. Her arms felt like lead. Her lungs burned with the effort of each breath. But she dragged herself across the floor anyway, leaving a trail of sweat, blood, and fury behind her. She found the knife where it had fallen, still open, the blade slick with old blood. She wiped it clean on Gerald’s pants, then gripped it tightly once more.

She looked back at Buck’s body, still lying in a heap. One more thing to take.

With a grunt of effort, she began to peel his uniform off him. The fabric was damp, clinging to his body, still warm from his flesh. She worked one sleeve off at a time, her arms shaking with the effort, but she didn’t stop. It didn’t matter if the clothes fit. It didn’t matter if they were clean.

It wasn’t about comfort. It was about freedom.

When the last piece of his uniform came off, she pulled it on. It wasn’t smooth, her movements clumsy, but she was determined. Her legs still refused to work. Numb. Unresponsive. But her mind was sharp. Her arms were strong. Her will was unwavering.

She might have to crawl out of here, but she would get out. And she would take whatever she needed to make it happen.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The elevator doors opened with a low hiss, like something ancient trying to stretch itself awake. Flickering fluorescent lights spilled into the dark, damp parking garage, revealing a cracked, oil-streaked concrete floor, stained from years of neglect. The air felt thick—heavy with diesel fumes and dust, as if even the air had given up on movement, resigned to a stagnant existence.

Y/N’s wheelchair shot forward with swift precision. The wheels clicked rhythmically as she pushed, each rotation sending a jolt of pain through her arms. She gripped the rims hard, her palms blistered, pushing herself relentlessly. Her shoulders burned, muscles protesting, but she didn’t stop. Couldn’t. She kept her head down, eyes fixed on the ground, her scrubs sticking damply to her back. The oversized fabric bunched awkwardly around her hips, borrowed from a dead man’s body. Her legs hung motionless in front of her, pale and stiff, like lifeless mannequins strapped to the chair. No feeling. No response. Just dead weight.

At least her arms were working.

The garage stretched out before her, a dim maze of columns and half-lit corridors. Cars sat like dormant creatures, their shapes ghostly beneath the flickering lights. The shadows seemed deeper down here, every sound sharper. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears, louder than the hum of the overhead lights or the distant whir of a ventilation fan.

She maneuvered through the rows, the wheelchair tires rolling over debris and cracks in the concrete. Every few feet, she stopped, scanning the vehicles—make, model, color—matching them to the image etched into her mind. It was in here somewhere.

And then she saw it.

A yellow Chevrolet Silverado, sitting low to the ground against the far wall, half-hidden in the shadows. It stood out like a neon sign in the dark. Red flames curved across the sides, peeling at the edges, as if the paint had been burned on. The word PUSSY WAGON sprawled across the tailgate in bold, fluorescent-pink cursive. Obscene. Ridiculous. Unmistakable.

Her chest tightened. It was real. Not a hallucination, not a memory. After everything—after him, the blood, the pain, and the years locked away—there it was. Still there. Still waiting.

Her hand slipped into the baggy pocket of her scrubs, fingers closing around the key ring. The plastic fob dangled out—gaudy and yellow, shaped like a miniature vanity plate. The same absurd font gleamed beneath the garage lights. She stared at it for a second. Just a moment. Then, without hesitation, she pushed herself forward.

Her wheelchair wheels clicked faster, urgency spiking inside her. When she reached the truck, she didn’t pause. She slid the key into the lock and turned it. The sound of the mechanism snapping open hit her like a blow. Simple. Clean. But to her, it split the world in two. Before and after. Caged and free.

The door creaked open. Warm, stale air rushed out—thick with the smell of vinyl and old sweat. It hit her like the breath of a sleeping animal disturbed too soon. She reached up, bracing one arm against the seat, the other gripping the doorframe. Her fingers slipped a few times, but the third time she caught it.

Her muscles screamed in protest as she forced herself upward, her elbows scraping against the metal. Every inch of her body resisted, but she didn’t stop. She gritted her teeth, a grunt escaping her lips as she pulled with everything she had left. With one final surge, she collapsed into the cab.

Her body hit the backseat in a jumbled heap, her head crashing against the cracked vinyl with a dull thud. Sweat streamed down her face, slipping into her eyes, her arms hanging limp at her sides, trembling from the strain. For a moment, she just lay there, panting like she had run a marathon, the exhaustion from the last few hours crashing over her in waves.

Her legs lay stretched out across the seat, stiff and lifeless, like two pale pillars frozen in time. Her bare feet were caked in dirt, toes pointed upwards in the stillness, as though her legs had never moved at all. She stared at them, her mind reeling with the disconnect between her and her body.

So close. So far.

She nudged the wheelchair with her heel, watching it roll a few feet before tipping sideways and crashing to the floor with a metallic clang that reverberated through the empty garage, loud and jarring like a gunshot. The sound hung in the air, then settled into silence.

Alone. Hidden, for now. Buried in the belly of this forgotten, cold space.

Her eyes shifted to her right foot, her gaze fixating on her big toe. She stared at it as though it held the key to something important, something she had forgotten how to reach.

“Wiggle your big toe,” she whispered. Her voice cracked with desperation.

Nothing.

She repeated it again, quieter this time, as if the words could somehow coax movement. “Wiggle your big toe.”

Still, nothing.

Her eyes narrowed. She focused harder. Her breath slowed, measured. It was that one small piece of her. That tiny bridge between mind and limb. She needed it to move. Just that one thing. It wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

“Wiggle your big toe,” she said, the words now coming with the cadence of a chant, a desperate plea, a silent demand for her body to obey.

No movement.

She wasn’t going to give up. She couldn’t. That toe had four years of sleep to wake up from. And she was going to wake it, no matter how long it took. She wasn’t going back to the bed. She wasn’t going back to that place, that silence. She had a truck, keys, cash in her pocket, blood on her arms, and names in her head—names like prayers she hadn’t spoken yet.

She had a mission now.

But as she concentrated, her thoughts shifted, deepening into something darker, older, more familiar. She wasn’t in the garage anymore. Not fully. The stale air, the cracked vinyl seat, the flickering lights—they all blurred at the edges of her awareness as something colder and heavier slid into her mind like smoke, creeping beneath a locked door.

The faces returned. Not as ghosts. Not as visions brought on by trauma or fever. No, they came as memories—names, histories, real people who had been part of her life. Each face slipped into her mind like a puzzle piece finding its place, fragments of a life she had lived, of betrayals that had shattered it. They came without order, but their presence was a fire all the same.

Yoongi Min.

He had once been her calm in the chaos. Cottonmouth. The quiet one. Always the sharpest in the field, the one who spoke the least but saw the most. For a time, he had been one of the few people she allowed to see her without armor. He was precise, elegant in his violence, the kind of man who would leave a room of people dead without saying a word. She had trusted him, even loved him once, before everything had blurred and bled together.

They had shared secrets, missions that required silence, that left them covered in blood and dirt, unable to speak of the things they’d done. He had been her friend, one of the only ones she had left.

And yet, when the time had come to make a choice—when her name had been spoken in that room—he had stayed silent. He hadn’t argued, hadn’t asked questions. He had simply let it happen. Worse, he had known about her daughter. And still, he had let it happen.

He would be the first.

Not because he was the easiest target, but because he had known exactly what they were doing and had done nothing to stop it.

Then there was Jimin Park.

Copperhead. Her mirror image, her partner in crime, the quiet rebellion in a world of rigid obedience. Jimin was the one who made her laugh when everything else felt like it was sinking. They had trained together, fought side by side, and trusted each other with a loyalty forged in the fires of their past. They both had wanted out—once, briefly, they had even believed it was possible. She had helped him disappear. Off-grid, out of Mexico, up into the hills of California with some girl who dreamed in watercolor. Big eyes, kind voice, a future untouched by blood.

She wondered if he was still there.

She hoped he was.

If he was, it meant he’d made it out. Truly escaped. If he wasn’t, finding him wouldn’t take long. Jimin, for all his sweetness, had a sharp edge. He’d made enemies on the West Coast, and all she’d need was a name, a rumor, a whisper, and she’d find him.

But if he had stayed quiet, like Yoongi? If he had known what they were doing to her and walked away? Then that edge of his wouldn’t be enough to save him.

Her hands curled into fists in her lap, then released.

Brandi Phoenix. California Mountain Snake.

Cold. Beautiful. Calculating. Brandi wore her hatred like perfume—light enough to be unnoticed but poisonous beneath the surface. From the moment she stepped into the fold, Brandi had resented her. For her skill. For her rank. For the space she filled beside Taehyung. For simply existing where Brandi wanted to be.

Their fights were legendary—venom in their words during missions, fists behind closed doors. Brandi was a storm in heels—always circling, always striking. There had been no mystery in her betrayal. It had been coming for years. Brandi had needed only the excuse.

And she got it.

That confrontation would come. Eventually. It wouldn’t be clean. It wouldn’t be subtle. Brandi wouldn’t beg for her life. She’d fight to kill, and Y/N had no illusions about that.

And honestly, she welcomed it.

But Brandi wouldn’t come easy. She’d be close to Taehyung, as always. If Y/N wanted one, she’d have to face the other. When that time came, she’d need to be ready for both.

Then there was Namjoon.

Namjoon Kim. Sidewinder.

Taehyung’s older brother. Stoic, haunted, built like a fortress but just as empty. Namjoon had never truly belonged to their world—not the way the others did. He had inherited the family legacy, a weight he never wanted. Over time, it had slowly broken him, year by year.

He hadn’t been cruel. But he hadn’t been kind, either. He’d simply been... resigned. Watching his own story unfold from behind a wall of glass.

And yet, he had been there. He had participated. He hadn’t stopped it.

That was enough.

She wouldn’t make him suffer like the others would. Her rage didn’t burn as hot for him. But he would die. Quietly. Quickly. No warnings, no speeches. Just a clean ending for a man who had stood silent while she was buried alive.

And then, always at the center of it all, was Taehyung Kim.

The Snake Charmer.

The leader. The architect. The one who had bound them all together with whispered promises and elegant plans. He had trained them, molded them into something more than human. He had spoken of legacy, eternity, while hiding a blade behind his back.

He had touched her like she mattered.

He had promised her a future—a shared future.

A life.

And then, with cold precision, he had signed the order. Clinical. Exact. The same hand that once traced lazy circles on her skin had sentenced her to four years of silence, stillness, stolen breath, and severed motherhood.

He was the father of her child. Her lover. Her executioner.

No one else came close.

She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the pain wash over her. The constant ache in her body had become familiar, a pulse deep within her muscles and bones, a reminder of the years spent in stillness. But beneath the physical suffering, deeper than any physical wound, was the rage. It wasn’t hot anymore. It didn’t burn like it used to. It cut. It was cold, sharp, focused. She opened her eyes, her gaze fixing on her foot again.

“Wiggle your big toe,” she whispered, her voice hoarse but steady.

Nothing.

Her foot stayed still, lifeless. But something in her shifted. There was no disappointment in her face. Only determination.

The silence around her grew thicker, but she was anything but still inside. She could feel the fire inside her, the rage pulsing beneath the surface. She wasn’t done. She wasn’t free yet, but she would be. She would feel the ground beneath her feet again. She would move again. It would start with her toe. Then her foot. Her knee. A step. Then a run. And when she ran, she would hunt.

She knew where to start. Yoongi Min. If he was still alive, he'd be in Korea. And she would find him. She would look him in the eye, and the last thing he’d see would be her.

His face appeared in her mind without effort—soft features, a strong chin, pale skin with freckles in the summer, though he never tanned. His hair was as black as a raven’s feather. He moved like a cat, always calm, always assessing.

Yoongi’s life hadn’t been easy, though he would never admit it. His father never laid a hand on him, but he hadn’t seen his entire family slaughtered, either. Yoongi’s first real encounter with death had come when he was just eleven years old, in the summer of 1981. She couldn't recall the exact date, but she knew it had been hot. He’d told her once, many years ago, how warm the room had been, the sweat dripping down his back, his breath shallow.

Yoongi had been hiding beneath a rusted iron cot in a small apartment on the outskirts of Busan, the kind of place where the ceiling leaked when it rained and the walls were thin enough to hear the neighbors’ every move. He was small, too small for the horrors he’d already seen, too small for what was unfolding now.

He curled into a ball beneath the bed, his limbs bent like fragile paper, wedged between an old pair of sneakers and a half-empty tin of candy. His mother’s candy, the kind she used to sneak into his backpack, telling him to chew quietly during class. Yoongi held his breath, his hands clamped tightly over his mouth, as the cold wood floor pressed into his ribs. Dust filled the air and his nose.

Above him, the room was chaos. His father, still in uniform, sweat darkening his shirt, was fighting three men. They were strangers, but not unfamiliar. They wore dark suits, polished shoes. The kind of quiet that came with practiced violence. They were members of the Chilsung-pa, a crime syndicate as old as the neighborhood itself. These men were no thugs. They were trained, hardened, and they were here with purpose.

One of the men carried a blade longer than Yoongi’s forearm. Another moved with the calm assurance of someone who didn’t need to rush—because he never needed a second swing.

The first man lunged. His father, once a sergeant, met him head-on, muscle and instinct colliding. The sound of their struggle filled the room, the shuffle of feet, the crash of furniture. The man’s neck snapped loudly, cleanly, like a branch breaking in a storm.

But it wasn’t enough.

The other two were faster, smarter. Steel gleamed in the dim light. It cut through air, then flesh.

Yoongi couldn’t see the details—only flashes of motion, grunts, and the spray of blood. Red splattered across the walls, the floor, the photograph of his grandfather pinned crookedly to the wall. His father made a sound—half snarl, half gasp—and then he collapsed. A heap of blood and breathlessness.

Yoongi didn’t scream. His voice had vanished somewhere in the violence. He didn’t blink. He didn’t cry. He just watched, frozen, as the world around him shattered.

They dragged his mother into the room, barefoot and frantic, wild with fear and anger. Her resistance was relentless, a last stand against everything that had already broken her. She fought like someone who still believed there was a way out—kicking, clawing, her body a whirlwind of desperation. Her curses filled the air, her cracked lips spitting venom. Her teeth snapped at the hands that tried to control her. But even in her fury, they moved her with ease. The bed loomed ahead, and she was shoved toward it.

Yoongi watched from his hidden spot, trapped under the bed, unable to move, unable to help. His eyes were locked on the struggle above him, his heart hammering in his chest. Her foot struck one of the men holding her, and for a moment, it seemed like she might break free. But then came the backhand—hard, sharp. It landed with a hollow crack, and she crumpled.

They didn’t hesitate. Two of them hauled her up by the arms, dragging her limp body the last few steps. She was crying now, but not out of fear—this was pure, unbridled fury. Her body shook with the force of her grief as she was thrown onto the bed. The mattress sank under the weight, groaning with the strain. The bedsprings screeched, the dust falling through the seams in the wood.

Yoongi’s breath caught in his throat. He could smell her—citrus and talc, warm and familiar. But that scent was quickly overtaken by the metallic stench of blood and sweat and something darker, something far worse. He clamped his eyes shut and pressed his hands over his ears, hoping for silence.

It didn’t help.

The noises started—sickening, unrelenting. The sound of bodies colliding. Her screams started out defiant but quickly turned into broken gasps, half-screams, choked sobs. The kind of sound you make when all hope is gone, when you’ve lost everything that could save you.

Yoongi was frozen. Trapped in his own body, not by fear, but by the sheer magnitude of his helplessness. His hands balled into fists so tight his nails broke the skin on his scalp, but his body refused to move. His teeth ground against each other, the pressure building until a molar cracked, but he barely noticed. He pressed his face into the splintered floorboards so hard his nose bled, warm blood trickling down his lip and pooling in the dust beneath him.

But none of it mattered.

The bed above him dipped and rose, groaning under their weight. The rhythm of the violence was sickening, steady, relentless. The sounds—every thrust, every scream—carved themselves into him, deep, permanent. It was like being marked, like each noise was a chisel, shaping him into something different.

Time stopped. The seconds stretched into eternity, each one slow and distorted. Reality blurred like smoke, like the edges of a dream slipping into something darker. He felt as though he was underwater, struggling to reach the surface, but never getting any closer.

And then, through the chaos, came a whisper. A sound so small, so broken, it nearly crushed him.

“Yoongi…”

Her voice. His mother’s voice. It was a breath, a prayer, shaped by pain and defeat. Her words were barely audible, muffled by her suffering. She wasn’t just calling out to him; she was reminding herself that he was still there. Still alive. Still hers.

That one word broke him. It shattered the last of his resolve. He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t help her. He couldn’t do anything.

So, he stayed there. Silent. Hollow. No tears left.

He was still staring into the dark when the blade came down. It sliced through the mattress with a sickening crack, cutting through flesh and bone with a brutal, decisive force. The sound of it—sharp and final—was one Yoongi would carry with him for the rest of his life. His breath stopped in his throat, his body freezing in the moment, as if everything had paused with the strike. The tremor that shook the frame seemed to ripple through the world itself, as if the earth itself winced in response to the violence.

Blood soaked through the mattress slowly, cruelly. The warmth of it was thick, spreading downward like it had all the time in the world, creeping into every fabric thread, darkening the cotton, turning it maroon, then black. One drop fell through the mattress and landed beside Yoongi’s eye. Then another, splattering his cheek. It didn’t stop—more followed, dripping onto his lips, his forehead, like a slow rain.

The blood clung to his skin as though it had been there forever, like his mother’s touch had once clung to his hand. And just like that moment—he couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t fight it. He lay still beneath the bed, covered in her. Still, he made no sound. No scream. No breath.

It was over.

Not just the violence. Everything.

The room seemed to hold its breath, a heavy pause that hung thick in the air. Then, one of the men spoke, his voice low and calm, almost bored. Yoongi couldn’t make out the words. He didn’t want to. His mind had gone white, the kind of empty stillness that comes when everything around you has shattered. He floated somewhere above the horror, detached from the mess unfolding above him. But still, his eyes didn’t leave them.

He saw the man move to the side of the bed, wiping the blade clean on the edge of a pillow. Watched as he straightened his tie, adjusted the cuffs of his suit as if he were stepping out of a business meeting, not a slaughterhouse. The man’s face was composed—cold, calculating. A scar marked his right cheek, a thin line, old and worn. The kind you get when you’ve been in the thick of it, up close, and survived. His eyes were dead—dark, lifeless coal that had long since lost their light.

Shin Ji-Sung. They called him Boss Shin. Yoongi never forgot that face. Not then. Not ever.

He stayed there, unmoving, until the door slammed shut behind them, until their footsteps faded into the stairwell, and the quiet resumed. The rain had started again, tapping lightly against the glass, like it knew it couldn’t do anything but bear witness.

Only then did Yoongi crawl out. His knees slid in the blood as he pulled himself forward, inch by inch. His movements were slow, mechanical, drained of everything but the force of will. When he reached the edge of the bed, he stopped. He looked up.

His mother’s body lay twisted, her eyes wide open but unseeing. One arm hung over the edge of the bed, her fingers curled toward nothing. Her mouth was slightly open, as if still trying to say his name.

Yoongi stared at her for what felt like forever—minutes, hours, maybe more. He couldn’t tell. His own mouth was open, but no sound came. Not a cry. Not a breath. Just a hollow, unbearable stillness.

Yoongi was eleven years old, half-Korean, half-Japanese, a base kid—an accident in a country that barely acknowledged his existence. But even at that young age, something inside him survived. It wasn’t his innocence—he lost that the moment he was forced to witness violence beyond comprehension. It wasn’t his sense of safety—he never had that to begin with. But something deeper, something colder, remained. A promise. Silent. Absolute. Forged in blood and etched into the marrow of his bones.

He would survive. That was his truth. And when the time came, he would rise. The men who had done this to him—he would find them. All of them. He would track them down, one by one, and make them bleed.

The world had broken him in so many ways, but it had also shaped him. He had learned to live with the pain, to swallow it whole and keep moving forward, even when every instinct told him to stop. And one day, that hunger for retribution would fuel him. He would find Boss Shin. The man who had sealed his mother’s fate and shattered his life. The man who would pay in ways he couldn’t yet fully comprehend. But Yoongi would make sure he bled. He’d make it hurt.

In the cruelest twist of fate—or perhaps the cruelest design—Yoongi wouldn’t have to search far. Boss Shin, for all his power, for all the fear his name inspired, carried one fatal flaw. A craving. A hunger for boys who looked just like Yoongi. And in time, Yoongi would give him exactly what he wanted. He would become the thing that haunted Boss Shin's every nightmare. And when he did, there would be no escape.

By the time Yoongi Min turned thirteen, he had stopped being a child. He had learned to stop asking questions, to lower his gaze, and let silence speak for him. He had perfected the art of stillness—watching without being seen, listening for what wasn’t said. He had learned to hear the meaning beneath words and the threat behind a smile. He spoke less but saw more.

But what he had learned most of all was patience. Not the kind you’re taught in school or the kind that’s scolded into you by tired parents. This was something darker. A patience that comes when you’ve been hollowed out, when the only thing keeping you upright is the shape of the rage you’re saving for later.

He waited. Not for days or months, but for years. He moved through the system like smoke—foster care, state programs, shelters with locked food cabinets and bars on the windows. He was polite, obedient, invisible. Until the moment came.

And when it came, it wasn’t gentle. It came with blood.

The room reeked of false luxury—gold-leaf frames on the walls, velvet drapes drawn tight against the light, the lingering scent of expensive cologne. It was all soft, muted. Except Yoongi.

Boss Shin, the man on the bed, was nearly asleep, his eyes heavy from wine and narcotics, his body limp from a life of routine depravity. His breath came shallow and uneven, a smugness laced in every exhale.

Yoongi stood over him. Smaller than he would ever be again—thirteen years old, narrow-shouldered, wiry, but taut with focus. His hair was jet-black, tied back beneath a wig, and he wore a schoolgirl’s uniform—pleated skirt, white blouse, knee-high socks. He had spent weeks preparing. Days enduring. It wasn’t shame; it was strategy. Because Shin liked boys who looked like girls. Everyone knew that. And Yoongi had made sure Shin noticed him.

Now he was here.

Yoongi climbed onto the bed, his knees sinking into the mattress without a sound. Shin’s eyes fluttered open, unfocused, the haze of his stupor thick around him.

And then the blade came down.

There was nothing delicate about it. No finesse, no grace. It was raw. A thick military-grade combat knife, taken from a dead man months ago, plunged into Shin’s chest with a grunt of effort. The steel slid between his ribs. Shin’s eyes snapped wide, and a wet gasp tore from his throat.

Yoongi didn’t stop.

He twisted the blade. Blood erupted—hot, arterial—splattering across his neck, his chest, the pale blue sheets. Shin thrashed, his body arching in agony, but Yoongi held him down, straddling him like iron. The man’s strength already began to fail, his nails scraping futilely against Yoongi’s skin.

Yoongi watched it all. Not with hatred. Not even with satisfaction. But with cold, clinical detachment.

This wasn’t revenge. It was correction. A realignment of the world.

When the light finally left Shin’s eyes, Yoongi pulled the blade free and exhaled. The silence that followed was brief.

Shouts thundered from the hallway. Heavy footfalls. Yoongi moved quickly, slipping off the bed and into the shadows beneath it, blending into the folds of the velvet bedskirt like he had rehearsed a hundred times.

The pistol was already in his hand, taped beneath the bedframe for days, waiting. A small .22, stolen, modified for close-range, silent, deadly. It felt cold in his hand, familiar. He didn’t need to think. He was ready.

The door crashed open, the hinges groaning under the weight of the men rushing in. Two of Shin’s enforcers. Guns half-raised, but their bravado faltered as soon as they saw the scene inside. Blood-soaked sheets, their boss’s lifeless body slumped across the velvet pillows, red dripping from the mattress and pooling on the floor. They froze, not with grief, but confusion. Fear. Real, raw fear that shot through their chests like ice.

They didn’t see Yoongi yet.

He was hidden beneath the bed, crouched in the shadows. His knees pressed to his chest, pistol steady in his hand. Silent. Still. Waiting.

The first man stepped forward, cautiously, barking orders at the dead. His boot heel thudded just inches from Yoongi’s face.

Bang.

A clean shot to the chest. The sound cracked through the air like thunder. The man dropped instantly, a startled gasp leaving him as he flailed briefly before crumpling onto the marble floor. Blood pooled beneath him.

The second man reacted in panic, shouting and lunging toward his gun.

Yoongi was faster.

He rolled left, coming up on one knee, and fired twice.

Bang. Bang.

The first bullet ripped through the man’s throat, the second hitting him in the shoulder mid-fall. He spun into the doorframe, hitting it hard, and slumped to the ground, coughing up blood. His body twitched once, then stilled.

Yoongi stood slowly, his movements controlled, calm. There was no thrill in his actions, just the weight of inevitability. The pistol hung loosely in his hand, blood drying on its grip. In his other hand, the knife remained, still warm and dripping.

His breath was steady, his eyes cold. No fear. No exhilaration. Just motion.

The suite was filled with the scent of death now. The thick, coppery smell of fresh blood mixed with sweat and fear—fear that filled the air with every dying breath. It clung to the velvet curtains, soaked into the carpet, streaked across the cream-colored wallpaper like blood-written script.

Yoongi moved through the rooms methodically. He knew this place. He knew the layout. The blind spots. The shift changes. He’d memorized everything.

The guards were nothing. Complacent. Half-drunk. Slumped in side rooms, slack faces illuminated by the glow of TV screens. He ended each of their lives with the same quiet efficiency. A gun to the head. A knife to the throat. No cruelty. Just necessity.

There were no screams. No pleading. Just footsteps, soft thuds, a few strangled gasps—and then silence.

When it was over, the suite was still. Nine dead. One boy standing. Yoongi didn’t pause to admire it.

He moved through the same route he had come in: down the hallway, past the empty kitchen where the cooks had abandoned their posts, through the swinging back door that led to the stairwell. He descended three flights in silence.

No one stopped him. No one even looked. The staff knew enough to avoid the scene. Whatever had happened in that room, it was better left unseen.

He stepped out into the alley just as the rain began to fall again. Soft, warm drops washing away the blood from his bare calves but not from his hands. A cab waited at the curb, just as planned.

The driver didn’t ask questions.

Yoongi slid into the back seat, the worn leather sticking to his bloodied thighs. The wig, matted and soaked, was shoved into a plastic bag beside him. His socks were damp, crusted with blood, but his eyes were clear. Sharp. Focused. He sat still, watching the rain blur past the window as the cab pulled away. Tires hissed on wet asphalt.

He didn’t look back. Not once.

There would be no news reports. No police inquiries. No rumors of retribution whispered through the backrooms of politicians or mob bosses. Boss Shin had surrounded himself with loyal men—men willing to die for him, and the ones left standing would know the cost of speaking his name. It was a code. A simple one. You spoke his name, you joined him in the grave.

Justice, as Yoongi understood it, had been served. Not through courts or lawyers or long, drawn-out appeals. Not behind prison walls or slow deaths at the hands of officials. No, it had come in the form of a blade, a gun, a thirteen-year-old boy, and a vow whispered in the dark. Simple. Final.

And yet, as the city lights flickered by, streaked across the rain-smeared window, Yoongi didn’t feel peace. He didn’t feel anything at all. The blood had been spilled, and the world had kept turning, indifferent to what had been done. To what he had done.

By the time Yoongi Min turned twenty, his name had become an echo, heard only in the darkest corners. His name wasn’t on any official documents. It wasn’t part of any police briefings or secret intel files. It didn’t show up in headlines or trending topics. Yoongi’s name existed in whispers, passed between powerful men who only ever spoke of him in shadows. They never looked at him directly, never dared to. They only saw the consequences of his presence—the bloodshed, the chaos, the power shifts that seemed to follow in his wake.

Yoongi didn’t have a country. No flag to swear loyalty to. No passport, no fingerprints. He had no past anyone could prove. But he had a record. Not an official one. No papers to file. His record was a trail of disappearances, accidents, and sudden, unexplained shifts in power. A collection of bodies scattered across continents. And those who saw Yoongi Min knew it was already too late. Those who didn’t? They were the ones he preferred.

He was a ghost with a pulse. A master of stillness, of precision, and of murder. The kind of man who didn’t need orders. He needed only coordinates.

On a rooftop in the blistering heat of a Central American capital, Yoongi lay flat against the sun-baked concrete. He had been there for hours, and he would stay as long as it took. Sweat trickled down his face, caught by the bandana beneath the brim of his cap. His black-gloved hands gripped the matte body of a custom-built sniper rifle, the stock pressed tight against his shoulder. The barrel extended out beyond the ledge, covered with a heat-shielded tarp that blended seamlessly into the rooftop’s gravel.

The scope was adjusted with practiced precision. The crosshairs found their target without hesitation. Yoongi didn’t guess. He calculated. Every move, every angle, every second was mapped out in his mind before he made it.

Three stories below, a silver SUV inched through midday traffic, its armored exterior reflecting the sunlight. The SUV was flanked by two motorcycles, the lead bike carrying two men in mirrored sunglasses, the second one already scanning rooftops too late. Yoongi watched as the SUV slowed to a stop at a red light. The noise of the street, the shouting of a vendor trying to sell mangos, the squawk of a parrot from a balcony, all of it faded into the background. It was chaos, a mix of life, sound, and color. But in the scope, there was only stillness. Only precision.

The backseat window caught the sky for a split second before dipping down, revealing his target: General Ernesto Gaviria. Former intelligence chief turned cartel-backed politician, with private prisons and private armies to his name. He’d once been a revolutionary. Now, he was just a parasite feeding off the system he helped create.

Gaviria was laughing, his head tilted back, his stomach heaving in amusement, a man who hadn’t fought a battle in years—or perhaps never had. Two women sat beside him, their bodies rigid and poised in a way that made it clear they were well-practiced in the art of silence and beauty. Miss Panama and Miss Venezuela. Their sashes shimmered under the light, the fabric clinging to bodies sculpted with wealth and threats.

The general's hands rested casually on his knees, a pose of entitlement, the kind of careless dominance that came from too much power. Yoongi exhaled slowly, his breath measured, pushing out the heat, the noise, the weight of the past. His finger found the trigger. It curled around it like a whisper, soft but steady.

And then, with the crack of the rifle, it all shattered.

The sound was sharp, godlike, a roar that cut through the thick, humid air. The shot sliced the afternoon in half. Inside the SUV, the top of the general’s skull disappeared in a burst of red mist, a violent bloom of blood, bone, and gray matter that exploded upward, splattering the ceiling with gore. The noise was muted by the glass, but the image—crystal clear, forever etched—would never fade.

The woman to his right screamed, recoiling as if struck. The other froze, her mouth open, eyes wide with the horror of what she'd just witnessed. Yoongi didn’t watch. He didn’t need to. He was already moving, his body in motion before the chaos began to unfold below him.

The casing rolled near his elbow, catching a brief flash of sunlight before falling silent on the rooftop. He dismantled the rifle with mechanical precision, his movements smooth, practiced. Each action was like muscle memory—barrel unscrewed, stock folded, scope detached and secured. The rifle slid into a slim, matte-black case, nondescript, efficient, forgettable.

He didn’t confirm the kill. He never did. He knew.

By the time the chaos bloomed beneath him—sirens wailing, screams cutting through the air, armored boots pounding against pavement—Yoongi was already gone. He was down the stairwell, through a service door, and around a corner into the skeletal remains of an abandoned church. The cameras never worked there. It was a place no one could trace.

In less than sixty seconds, Yoongi changed clothes—dusty jeans, a bleach-stained T-shirt, a cheap knockoff Dodgers cap. He walked into the market square like he belonged, just another face in the crowd that moved like water, undisturbed by disaster.

The cab that picked him up blended in, too. The driver said nothing. The cash was exact. The route was direct. By the time the sun dipped below the horizon, Yoongi was already out of the city, no trace, no trail. He didn’t leave behind a name spoken aloud or a footprint anyone would follow. He was just another ghost, fading into a world full of them.

Another job done. Another name crossed off a list no one would ever see.

For Yoongi, it wasn’t personal. It never was. But that didn’t mean he didn’t feel something. In the space where others might find relief, guilt, or satisfaction, Yoongi Min felt only one thing: momentum. And it was pushing him somewhere darker.

At twenty-three, Yoongi Min became the latest name on an infamous ledger—a list that didn’t exist on paper, kept out of sight in rooms the world preferred to pretend weren’t real. It wasn’t an organization, not really, but a design—precise, efficient, built for one purpose: death. Officially, they were known as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, but in the underworld, they were simply called the Vipers. A name that spread like poison through intelligence channels, whispered in black-market ports, and muttered by the dying who understood what it meant to be hunted by one of them.

Now, Yoongi stood in a windowless room, somewhere outside any country that mattered. The space around him was cold and sterile—unpainted concrete walls, a single overhead light casting long, calculated shadows. There was no clock, no insignia, no way to tell if they were underground or above the clouds. The silence hung heavy, pressing against the air like it carried weight.

Yoongi didn’t break it. He stood alone at one side of the table, still and deliberate. His frame was narrow but lean, his body honed, not hardened. Black boots, black pants, black shirt—no adornments, no flash. He didn’t look dangerous in the way most people would imagine. He looked precise, like a man who knew the exits before he entered the room, who understood the angles and could turn anything into a weapon if needed. He wasn’t there to impress anyone. He was there to belong.

Across from him sat Taehyung. Older, with sharp features and a clean-cut look that seemed timeless. He looked like he belonged to every decade and none at all. His eyes, however, were sharp and studying, as if he could see through Yoongi and straight into his bones. He sipped tea from a porcelain cup with a calmness that suggested he’d ended more lives than heart disease. His suit was dark and crisp, but unbuttoned—relaxed, but not in a way that suggested comfort.

“I’ve heard stories,” Taehyung said at last, his voice smooth, warm, and quiet enough to pull attention. “I don’t usually believe them. People romanticize this work too much. But your record?” He gave a small, appreciative nod. “That—I believe.”

Yoongi didn’t respond. He didn’t smile. He didn’t blink. He just watched—his silence as controlled as the room was filled with power.

Beside Taehyung, Y/N leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. She was younger then, early twenties, her jawline still sharp with defiance. The blood on her hands hadn’t yet dried into ritual. Her hair was longer, tied back loosely but with intent. She wore scuffed boots, a jacket two shades too dark for the room, and eyes that didn’t stray from Yoongi. There was no warmth in her gaze, no judgment. Just calculation. She wasn’t impressed, but she wasn’t dismissive either. She was reading him, watching every muscle shift, every subtle movement.

After a moment, she tilted her head and spoke, her voice dry. “He doesn’t talk much.” She paused, then added, “Is that part of the act, or do you just enjoy being cryptic?”

Yoongi’s voice, when it came, was low—measured and quiet, almost like the tail end of a threat that hadn’t been fully spoken yet. “I talk when it matters.”

Y/N’s eyes narrowed slightly—not in challenge, but in recognition. She knew exactly what kind of man stood before her.

Across the table, Taehyung let out a slow exhale, his eyes glinting with something that might’ve been amusement. He set his teacup aside and leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees, his posture casual but calculating. “Cold,” he said, eyes never leaving Yoongi. “Controlled. Surgical. But you’ve never worked on a team. Not like this.”

Yoongi nodded once, the gesture brief but firm. “Then I’ll adapt.”

There was no arrogance in his voice. Just a quiet certainty. A fact.

Taehyung glanced sideways at Y/N, as though looking to her for confirmation. She didn’t break her gaze from Yoongi, not a blink, not a shift. The air between them was thick, charged, but she remained silent.

Taehyung turned back to Yoongi. “He’s fast,” he said, a statement that seemed almost to float between them. “Not emotional. Not reckless.”

There was a beat of silence, then Y/N gave a small, reluctant nod, just enough to signal that she had made up her mind. “Then give him a name.”

Taehyung didn’t hesitate. “Cottonmouth.”

The name landed in the room like a verdict, heavy and sure. Yoongi didn’t flinch. He didn’t acknowledge it with any outward response. It didn’t matter. The name slid into him, as if it had always been there, waiting to be said. He accepted it without question, without ceremony.

No formal welcome. No applause. No blood oath. Just a room full of silence. And a name.

And a shift.

By the end of the week, Yoongi had a new passport, new directives, and a kill list that spanned five continents. His first target was dead in three days. His second never even made it off the runway. No one ever saw his face, but governments knew when he passed through. They just didn’t know how to prove it.

He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t leave traces. He didn’t miss.

He left for Korea after that, and Y/N was sent to him a few months later. Taehyung had been too busy to teach her about swords and Yoongi had taken her under his wing. Within the six months she was there, their relationship went from nothing to meeting up in his bath room. They would explore one another for hours, and Yoongi made her feel good.

She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done that.

There were no declarations, no promises, no softness. Just need. Just impulse. Just adrenaline, control, and something neither of them ever bothered to name. It didn’t matter that she belonged to Taehyung’s crew. At that point, she didn’t belong to anyone.

She was his Rabbit, and over the years they’d grown an understanding. Taehyung sent them on missions together frequently after her time with Pai Mei the year after she’d left Busan. In those hotel rooms she’d find herself able to slip away from being Black Mamba. With Yoongi, she’d felt like she was back home in Abbeville and he looked at her the same way Sam Wallace had before he’d died.

One of her favorite memories came without much effort.

In an out of the way hotel room overlooking a vantage point, Y/N clutched the bedsheets as she was pounded from behind by a smirking Yoongi. Y/N fought down her groans, not wanting to give her showman a teammate the satisfaction of vocalizations, even though she knew that Yoongi could feel how wet she was and how deep he was getting hit.

" Anata no soba ---" Yoongi began before clearing his throat, pulling out. "Get on your side."

Y/N sighed at the unwelcome interruption as she lied on her hips, raising her leg like a tame dog as Yoongi entered her again, torturously working back up to his original tempo as Y/N fought to keep her breathing under control, the disappointment and anticipation being all a part of the kill for her friend. She found her right breast being squeezed as he began to pick up speed, sneaking there when she was distracted. 

"Tch!" Y/N betrayed her surprise as Yoongi kept hammering away in her, tweaking her erect nipple in between his fingers. Y/N gave up, letting out a subdued moan as she came. Yoongi, not really surprised in any sense of the word, turned his head to pridefully peck her on the lips.

Afterward, Yoongi moved with the quiet finality of a man who was used to following through. He didn’t speak, didn’t rush—just slipped out of bed, his bare feet barely making a sound against the worn hotel carpet. The room, dimly lit by a single bedside lamp, felt still in his absence. The click of the bathroom door, followed by the soft hiss of running water, filled the space between breaths.

Y/N lay on her back, her eyes tracing the cracks in the ceiling like they might somehow form a map of something that made sense. Her chest rose and fell slowly—not from exertion, but from the familiar weight of being close to someone and still feeling the air too thick to fully exhale. Her skin hummed, warm and flushed, but not from love, not from longing—just connection. The kind that lingers long after the adrenaline is gone.

The faucet stopped. A moment later, the door creaked open. Yoongi returned with two bottles of water—one of which he tossed to her without needing to say anything. She caught it mid-air, cracked the seal, and drank deep. “Thanks,” she murmured, her voice a low hum of acknowledgment.

He slid back into the bed beside her with the ease of someone who had long since mastered the art of not being noticed. His skin was cool from the tap, and when his arm brushed hers, she shivered just slightly. He was already folding into the sheets like he’d always belonged there.

“You alright?” he asked, his voice low and nonchalant. The kind of check-in between old friends who’d long stopped asking just to be polite.

She smirked. “I’m good.”

They lay there in the quiet for a moment—just the hum of the city seeping through the barely working air conditioner, the occasional honk from traffic five floors below. Then Yoongi turned toward her, propping his head up on his arm, eyes catching hers in the dim light.

“Your breathing was off,” he said, his tone almost casual.

Y/N gave him a sideways glance. “You keeping stats on me now?”

“Maybe,” he said, his eyes flicking to her with an almost imperceptible smile. “You usually exhale on the upstroke.”

She snorted. “Creep.”

He shrugged. “Observant.”

A quiet laugh passed between them, easy and familiar. She nudged his shoulder with hers, and he leaned into it slightly. Their bodies fell back into the same rhythm they always had—no tension, no need. Just proximity. His hand settled on her waist, fingers drumming lightly against her hip.

“You ever gonna tell me what you think of Taehyung?” she asked, not bothering to look at him.

Yoongi sighed through his nose. “He’s interesting. Don’t care for him much outside of work.”

“You jealous?”

He scoffed. “No. He’s not my type. I like pretty boys, baby.”

She rolled her eyes. “You think I’m gonna sleep with him?”

“I think you might,” he said, his voice unexpectedly honest. “But not for the reason you think.”

“Oh?”

“You’re strategic. You don’t get close unless you mean to. But with him... I don’t know. Maybe it would just feel easy. Wouldn’t be for love, I could tell you that right now.”

She was quiet for a long moment, fingers absently tracing the ridge of his forearm. When she finally spoke, her voice was softer. “You think I’m trying to survive him?”

Yoongi didn’t answer immediately. He studied her face in the dim light, then reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with unexpected tenderness.

“I think you survive everyone,” he said, his words settling between them. “Even the ones who don’t want you to. Even me.”

Y/N blinked, then looked away, irritated with herself for the way his words hit too close to home. She hated it when he said things like that—too real, too quietly, like he didn’t mean to drop it in her lap but couldn’t help himself.

She liked to think herself in love with Taehyung Kim. Why else would she put up with his ass? It’s obviously real love because he disgusts her and puts up with him willingly when not many others would. Maybe Brandi would, but Brandi was insane and didn’t care about his more… unsavory traits. At least, none that she ever showed. She had to be in love with Taehyung. It was the only way any of this made sense. Even when she stopped thinking about him the second Yoongi came to visit, she knew that she loved him.

Y/N did not want to think about it anymore. It was too confusing.

She rolled toward him, curling into his side until her forehead pressed gently against his collarbone. He didn’t flinch. He just adjusted the blankets with one hand and wrapped the other around her back.

“You’re warm,” she mumbled.

“You’re cold,” he replied, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head.

They stayed like that for a while—tangled in sheets and silence. No urgency. No plans. Just the kind of closeness that comes from knowing someone too long and too well to lie to them.

Y/N felt his breathing start to slow beneath her cheek. His hand continued its slow rhythm against her back, each gentle motion lulling her closer to sleep.

“Yoongi?” she whispered.

“Mmh?”

“Thanks.”

He didn’t say anything at first. Just kissed her hair again, slower this time.

“For what?” he murmured.

“For always coming back.”

He was quiet for a moment before pulling her a little tighter. “Where else would I go?”

Y/N smiled, her eyes slipping closed. She didn’t know what this was between them, and she didn’t need to. Not that night or any other night.

Their relationship ended three years later, when Y/N and Taehyung started seeing each other differently. Or, as Taehyung had put it, she began acting like a grown woman. The others said he’d just waited until she was old enough to avoid looking like a creep. Y/N didn’t dwell on it. She’d always been with older men. This wasn’t new.

Yoongi, ever practical, accepted the shift, acknowledging their sexual relationship had run its course. Lynn Easton, his longest friend and most prized possession, swooped in to care for him like a mother. She was glad to be rid of Y/N’s presence. Jealous little rat. They left Mexico for Korea, returning only for missions tied to Taehyung’s operations. The bond between Yoongi and Y/N wasn’t the same, but it remained, still strong despite the distance. Y/N cared for Yoongi, and she knew he felt the same.

Four years ago, in the year 2000, on a West Texas morning beneath a bleached sky, a wedding turned into a massacre. It was meant to be quiet, intimate—far from politics, cameras, and consequence. The chapel, small with whitewashed walls and hand-carved pews, was made for whispered vows and fragile beginnings. The bride chose every detail: pale ribboned flowers, a sun-worn guitarist in the corner, an officiant who spoke briefly, knowing this was something sacred, not to be overstretched.

There were only a handful of guests—people she trusted, loved. No reporters. No guards. Just light spilling through stained glass, the faint hum of music threading through the silence. Everything was still. And then, the doors opened.

The gunshots were everywhere. In less than a minute, eight people were dead: Tommy’s parents, his sister, a last-minute college friend, the guitarist who didn’t even drop his instrument before he fell, the man with the Bible who’d asked them to join hands. And then Tommy himself.

The bride, dressed in white, life growing inside her. She didn’t see who fired first, only felt the light leave her and something tear through her chest like fire. The impact folded her in half. Her knees buckled, fingers reaching for something that wasn’t there.

She fell hard, stained-glass light still dancing around her as she hit the floor. Blood soaked her lace midsection, blooming quickly—bright at first, then darkening, the white dress drinking it in. From the floor, she saw him.

Not the one who shot her. That was Brandi—smiling like she was doing God’s work. No. It was the other one. The one who didn’t smile. The one who moved like smoke.

Yoongi Min.

He hadn’t fired the shot that dropped her, but he had ensured no one else could rise to stop it. His job was taking out her groom. Silenced pistol in hand, he moved through the chaos with the precision of someone far removed from it all. No tremor in his hand. No hesitation. He stepped over the dead without a glance.

When she writhed on the floor, bleeding, breathless, Yoongi held her down. He didn’t spit at her, insult her, or speak. He just pinned her shoulders to the blood-slick wood while Brandi Phoenix did what she did.

None of them expected a heartbeat to survive that day. They didn’t rush to leave. No panic. No second glances. No double-checking for survivors. They were professionals. The job was done. Eight confirmed kills. One silenced chapel. No cries. No movement.

They should’ve killed nine, but they didn’t. Because Y/N didn’t die.

She remembered everything. Not in flashes, not like a dream, but in brutal clarity. The crack of gunfire echoing off vaulted ceilings. The splintering pews. The sound of bodies hitting the floor. Her own strangled gasp as the bullet hit, knees buckling like broken beams.

She remembered the color of her blood, soaking through the lace of her dress—bright at first, like a flare, then darkening. The smell—the mix of roses, gunpowder, and iron. The weight of another body near hers, warmth spilling onto her bare shoulder. The sticky wetness. The stillness.

Yoongi Min stood over her, not a drop of blood on his face. Blood caked her lashes, but she saw him clearly. His face unreadable, no curiosity, no cruelty—just focus. He didn’t look at her like a woman or a target. He looked at her like a loose end. He helped the others finish her off once the others were taken care of.

Then came the darkness.

Four years. Four years of machines, wires, and strangers’ prayers. Two times, she was declared brain-dead. Two times, a doctor marked the time on a clipboard and walked away. She was kept alive by a nurse’s pity—hidden, forgotten, buried alive. Until the moment she started to wake.

It wasn’t pretty. It didn’t come all at once. It was slow, violent, like pulling herself from wet concrete—blind, gasping. Her mind clawed its way back long before her body did, trapped inside, screaming silently.

Now, she lay curled in the backseat of a stolen truck beneath a blanket that smelled of engine grease and stale air. Parked between desert scrub and rusted fences. The road behind her was gone, the road ahead uncertain. Her body was broken—foreign. Her skin too tight in places, numb in others. Her muscles sagged, deflated. Her legs, stiff as wax, stretched out. Her fingertips tingled. Her breath shallow, lungs relearning survival.

But her mind—her mind was wildfire.

She could feel the hum of memory beneath her skin, relentless and alive. Her pulse thudded in her neck, fast and heavy, reminding her she was alive. She couldn’t remember her face anymore, couldn’t picture her reflection. But she remembered everything else. The echo of her name, shouted just before it was drowned out. The scrape of her nails against the chapel floor, as she tried to crawl. The flutter beneath her ribs—her child—growing still. And Yoongi Min. Silent. Still. Pressing her down while someone else tore her apart.

She hadn’t died. And because of that, because they hadn’t finished the job, they would all pay.

Her body lay in the dark, breath shallow, skin slick with sweat gathering in the hollows of her spine, soaking into the seat beneath her. The air in the truck thick—humid with oil, dried blood, and the sour scent of fading adrenaline. Outside, the desert heat pulsed like a living thing. Inside, time collapsed into nothing but stillness and breath.

Her eyes drifted down her body. Slowly. Deliberately. Past the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Down to her right foot, unmoving. Pale. Slightly curled at the toes. Still. Dumb. Useless.

It looked like it belonged to someone else—like it had been sewn onto her by mistake.

Her jaw tightened, and her hands curled into loose fists on her thighs. Every nerve in her body screamed with confusion, as though someone had rewired her and then left without a trace. She took a slow, steadying breath, thick with resolve. Whatever had been done to her, whoever had taken control of her body, they would pay. She would walk again. She would hunt them down. And when the time came, there would be no mercy. Yoongi might have been the shadow in the chapel, but she was the fucking hurricane.

“Wiggle your big toe,” she whispered, her voice barely audible, as if the simple command could bridge the distance between her and the action she craved.

Her eyes narrowed, focus tightening like a vice. She stared at her foot, willing it to move, as if sheer force of will could make it obey.

“Wiggle your big toe,” she repeated, louder this time, her voice sharp with impatience.

Still nothing.

Then—

A tremor.

Just a flicker. A subtle, almost imperceptible twitch that disturbed the dust on her skin.

She blinked hard, heat rushing behind her eyes, the sting of tears threatening. Her throat tightened. But she didn’t cry. Not yet.

She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the silence settle around her, like the stillness after an explosion.

The toe had moved.

And that was enough.

Her cracked lips parted, voice raw and thin. “The hard part’s over,” she muttered to herself, her words barely a rasp. “Now let’s get the rest of these piggies moving.”

It took an hour just to sit up.

Every second felt like war.

Her arms trembled beneath her, muscles unfamiliar and weak. Her shoulders burned, her breath shallow and frantic. Sweat dripped into her eyes, but she didn’t blink it away. She focused only on the task ahead: moving. Dizziness pulled at her, nearly swallowing her whole. Twice, her vision blurred, her fingers going numb. But she kept going. One breath at a time.

Finally, after what felt like forever, she was upright.

Slumped forward, shaking, soaked in sweat, gasping like she'd been pulled from the sea. Her hospital gown clung to her, a reminder of the fragility she still carried. But she was sitting. That was something. That was power.

She let her head fall forward, staring at her left leg.

“Your turn,” she whispered.

She focused, hard. Her body wasn’t responding; it was remembering, like each limb needed to reacquaint itself. Her left foot didn’t move at first. Then, a twitch. A faint tremble in her calf. A sudden jerk in her thigh, more seizure than progress.

But it was something.

“Again,” she murmured, voice shaky. “Come on.”

Her hand gripped the edge of the seat, knuckles white. She slapped her thigh—once, twice. Hard. Not out of frustration, but command.

Another minute passed.

Another tremor.

She let out a breath that caught in her throat, threatening to choke her before she smothered it with the back of her hand. She couldn’t fall apart. Not yet. But the tears came anyway. Not from fear or pain, but from the weight of it all. Years of silence, stillness, being trapped in a body that didn’t obey. She breathed through it, let the tears fall, wiped them away, and kept going.

By hour seven, the tremors were constant, though still uncoordinated and unpredictable. Her limbs were waking up in fits and starts, like a machine that hadn’t been used in years, sputtering to life. Her muscles spasmed, kicked, locked up, then released. At one point, she reached for the window frame for balance, but instead collapsed sideways, her shoulder slamming into the door, rattling the hinge. She gasped, cursed, and kept going.

By hour ten, one leg dangled over the side of the seat, scraping the truck floor uselessly—a dead weight. But it was down. It was gravity. It counted. Then, with a grunt, the other leg followed—slow, twitching, her breath ragged as she forced it over the edge. Her body ached like it had been beaten from the inside out, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

By hour thirteen, she was ready. The truck was stifling, the air thick with heat and the smell of sweat. Her gown clung to her skin, her back soaked through, hair matted to her forehead. The seat beneath her was stained with sweat and grit from where she’d braced herself. Her hands were filthy, coated in dirt from every inch of the cab she’d used to steady herself. But now, she had two feet on the floor. Her heart pounded in her chest, a warning reverberating in every bone.

She took a shallow breath—pained, but enough—and then she pushed.

Her legs shuddered beneath her, like old, rusted machinery fighting to move. Her thighs jerked with violent tremors. Her knees buckled—not from her weight, but from the shock of standing. Her back arched, muscles protesting. Her fingers dug into the seat, nails biting into the leather, arms straining to keep her upright. Every tendon screamed. Every nerve burned.

Her breath caught, high in her chest. Her jaw clenched so tight her teeth ached. Darkness crept at the edges of her vision, urging her back to the place where nothing moved, and everything was still. But she didn’t let it. She fought it.

She stood.

Her body bent forward like a reed battered by a storm, elbows locked against the truck seat, spine curved with the strain. Her legs shook violently, unfamiliar with their own weight, but she was up. Her eyes fluttered closed, sweat soaking her lashes. Her lungs rasped, desperate for air. Her body swayed once—enough to threaten collapse—but she caught herself, held steady by willpower alone.

With a voice cracked from hours of silence, she whispered, "The hard part’s over."

There was no triumph in her tone. No victory. It wasn’t a declaration—it was a vow. Then, she smiled. Not wide. Not bright. It was a smile forged from iron and exhaustion—bent at the corners, all teeth and rage. A smile born from blood and memory. A smile no one had seen in four years. A smile like steel pulled from fire. And now, she was fire.

When the first light of morning touched the horizon, soft and golden against the desert, Y/N swung open the backseat door. The hinges groaned under the weight of the moment, and the air outside smelled of dust, fuel, and the heat to come. Her bare foot hit the pavement first, the shock of raw skin against gravel stinging. She winced. The earth was tender, soft like it had never been touched, but she didn’t stop. She settled her heel, then her arch, then her toes. She hissed through her teeth, then brought the other foot down beside it.

Both feet. On the ground. Standing.

She took a breath. It hurt. Her ribs protested, her chest constricted, but it was a breath nonetheless.

And then, she began to walk.

Her gait was uneven, her balance uncertain. Her knees locked at odd angles. Her arms reached for anything to steady herself. She looked like a newborn deer—legs and uncertainty, driven by furious determination. Each step was a silent scream. Each second, a battle. But she kept going. Around the truck, her hand dragging along the scorched metal, her palm leaving a smear of sweat against the door. She reached the driver’s side, gripped the hot steel with one hand, and reached for the handle with the other.

She pulled the door open and climbed in.

The seat was too high. Her hips protested. Her back pulled tight with the warning of strain. But she got in.

It felt surreal—sliding into that seat again. A place that once belonged to someone else, someone cruel, someone arrogant. Someone whose blood still stained the floorboards beneath her bare feet. She could still smell Buck—cologne of bad whiskey and burnt plastic. Fast food wrappers rotting in the door pocket. Cigarette butts jammed into the ashtray.

The keys were still in the ignition, dangling from the garish yellow “PUSSY WAGON” tag. She reached for them, fingers closing tight around the plastic. The key turned with a low mechanical thunk.

The engine coughed to life, then roared—a deep, guttural sound, like an old beast shaking off its sleep. The dash lights flickered, and the vents blasted warm air into her face. The whole truck vibrated beneath her.

She gripped the steering wheel, hands steady for the first time in a long while. Her gaze flicked to the dashboard, where a pair of sunglasses rested, shoved against the edge of the windshield. Plastic. Cheap. Gold-rimmed knockoffs. Elvis-style. Gaudy. Stupid.

Without thinking, she reached for them, turned them over in her hand, then slid them on. They sat crooked. She adjusted them, fixing the angle until they felt right. Now, they were perfect.

She glanced up into the rearview mirror. The woman staring back wasn’t the one who’d bled out in a wedding dress. She wasn’t the one who had cried silently in a coma or been broken into pieces.

No, this woman had bruises under her eyes, chapped lips, skin stretched tight against bone. A large scar on her forehead where they’d taken the bullet out. But her eyes—they were alive. They were awake, alert, burning with something cold and sharp.

Y/N reached for the gearshift. Her hand didn’t shake this time. She dropped it into drive, the truck lurching forward with a growl as gravel kicked up behind her.

It was time to start the list. Eight names. One by one. And the first name was Yoongi Min.

Chapter Text

Morning broke heavy, like a bruise—gray, dull, thick with humidity. The sky hung swollen and colorless, not a hint of rain. Everything outside was washed out, like an old photo left too long in the sun. It wasn’t a day; it was a memory, lifeless but still buzzing. April of 1987, and the first signs of spring were starting to show in the trees.

Y/N stood naked in front of the mirror, a thin trail of smoke curling from the Camel between her lips. The overhead bulb flickered, casting her in dull amber. She didn’t look at herself. She studied the wreckage—ribs too sharp, skin too pale, eyes heavy with sleepless dark. Sixteen, bow-legged, sweat clinging to her neck. All bone, no grace. A woman unfinished.

The robe was the only thing left that fit. And it wasn’t hers. Black wool, moth-eaten. Her father’s. She slipped it on slowly, as if it might resist, the weight of it sinking onto her shoulders. Burned tobacco, coal dust, cheap beer. No warmth. No cologne. Just him. She pulled it close, closed her eyes, and let herself pretend. That he was there. That he hadn’t left pieces of himself scattered across the house. That the ache in her stomach wasn’t crawling. But it was—low, sharp, alive.

The robe swallowed her whole. She didn’t laugh anymore.

In the kitchen, light flickered from the busted TV in the corner—blue, static-heavy. MTV reruns whispered. The rest of the house sat dim, corners thick with old shadows. Mama sat at the table, hunched behind the newspaper, wearing the same blank look she’d worn since Daddy died. The paper was a wall. She never looked over it.

Y/N moved past, her bare feet peeling against the linoleum. The floor still carried the echoes of fights no one mentioned. She muttered something on her way through—greeting, maybe. Warning, maybe. Mama didn’t react. Just turned the page.

She opened the liquor cabinet—more altar than cabinet now. Dust curled as she reached for the bottle—brown glass, half-full, untouched since the funeral. Her hand came back gray. She tucked it under her arm like stolen goods and headed for the door. The house groaned, settling, remembering. Hinges whispered as she eased the screen open.

“Be back by noon,” Mama rasped, eyes still on the paper. “The laundry needs hanging.”

Y/N paused. Something sour caught in her chest. “Sure, Mama.”

It barely rose above the hum of the TV.

She stepped out like off a ledge. The porch creaked beneath her. Morning hit hard—sour, blistering heat. Not the kind that blooms, but the kind that burns. The grass was yellow and brittle, clinging to dirt gone gray under winter’s weight. Her knees buckled before she reached the steps. She dropped where she stood, the robe pooling around her. The bottle was already open. The cap rolled into the yard. She didn’t look.

The whiskey hit like always—fire, memory, regret. It burned, punched, curled. She coughed, wiped her mouth, drank again. There was no getting through the day without it. Maybe not even with it.

The robe slipped from her shoulder. Her collarbone caught the light—sharp, pale. Flies circled, drawn by sweat, skin, and the bottle’s breath. The air stank of rotted magnolia, soaked wood, old liquor, and ghosts.

She dragged herself to her daddy’s old truck. A black Ford, dead for years. Rusted, tires sagging, paint peeling. She dropped the bottle in the passenger seat and climbed behind the wheel. No keys. Didn’t matter. It wasn’t about going anywhere. Just sitting where he had. Just hoping—if she looked hard enough—she might see his face in the rearview. Some version of herself she hadn’t ruined yet.

The robe clung to her shoulders. The bottle, now warm, pressed into her thigh. She stared through the cracked windshield, watching the sun crawl up like it hated the job.

For one long, scorched second, she pretended. That time hadn’t moved. That her father wasn’t gone. That her body wasn’t broken, hollow, and carrying something nameless.

She sat still, wrapped in dead fabric and half-lit hope, and let the world pretend with her.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

Y/N stood alone at the pulpit, the Bible open in front of her. Its thin pages stirred with each breath of dusty air drifting through the rafters. Her voice cracked on the last word—Isaiah, her father’s favorite. The sound dropped heavy in the space, dry and uneven, like stones in a well.
“‘...they shall walk and not faint.’”

The silence that followed didn’t feel holy. It pressed in, tight and shaped, like breath held too long. The pews creaked under their congregation—widows in tired hats, sun-burned farmers, restless children with spit-slicked hair. Their stares stuck to her, full of hunger they didn’t name. Some wanted salvation. Some wanted resurrection. She had neither.

She gripped the lectern. Her fingers went pale against the wood. The whiskey that steadied her earlier now churned hot in her gut, clawing behind her eyes. Her head throbbed with a mean rhythm. She couldn’t tell anymore what was nerves and what was rot. She just knew she shouldn’t have made it here at all.
The thought came sharp, unwanted: a wheel turning wrong, a ditch waiting in the dark, headlights swallowed by dirt. Cleaner than this.

“I… I think that’s it for today,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like hers—thick, slow, dragging like a sentence underwater. The words didn’t lift. They sank. She swallowed hard and forced out her father’s old benediction.
“Have a blessed day, and may peace be upon you.”

A familiar shuffle followed—coats, bags, children yanked from stillness. The service was over. Ritual resumed. Y/N moved among them like she belonged, like she wasn’t shaking inside her skin. She slipped the Bible under the lectern with care, and with practiced guilt, slid a pack of Camels from behind it into her purse. A second testament. Smaller. Hotter. More honest.

She wasn’t done yet.

Constance Hayes stood by the door, hands folded, unmoving. That quiet resistance only old women could master. Y/N took a breath, pulled her face back into shape—the preacher’s daughter, the borrowed shepherd, the girl-shaped shadow of a better man.

“I’m so thankful for what you do,” Constance said, voice low and steady. Her hands found Y/N’s, firm and warm like river stones. “Your daddy was the best preacher this town ever saw. It’s dimmer without him. But today—Lord, when you read that verse—it was like he was standing right behind you.”

Y/N smiled. It cracked. “Thank you, Mrs. Hayes.”

“I know some folk don’t think a woman should stand up there, but those folk ain’t the Lord. This town needs you. You go on. Make your daddy proud.”

The hand on her shoulder was soft, but it landed heavy. Y/N took it like a punishment.

“I could go on,” Constance said with a short laugh, “but John’s in the truck, and if he misses kickoff, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I’ll see you next Sunday,” Y/N said. The lie barely stirred the air.

“Oh, I know you will,” Constance said, already halfway out the door. “You ain’t going anywhere.”

And just like that, she was gone.

The last echoes of the crowd faded. What was left wasn’t peace—just a silence that pressed. The sanctuary breathed differently when empty, swollen by the absence. Light bled through stained glass, dim and sour.

Y/N dropped her purse. It hit the floor with a dull thud. She moved to the corner pew like pulled by something. When her knees buckled, they went all the way. She folded forward, hands braced on old wood still slick with the ghosts of touch and time.

Her stomach twisted. Sharp, fast. She vomited. Right there. Bitter bile soaked into the boards, acrid and yellow, like spoiled wine at a broken altar. She didn’t wipe her mouth. Just stared at it, shaking, as if waiting for the mess to speak.

Above her, the tapestry hung—Christ in white, gold-stitched, one hand lifted. Not judgment. Invitation. A gesture meant to save.

She tilted her head. Her voice rasped, dry and wrecked.
“Damn whiskey. Never liked it much.”

The stink clung to her teeth. She didn’t clean the floor. Just pushed herself upright slow, like each joint was a sentence. Straightened her robe. Smoothed her skirt. Picked up her purse. Her face settled into something unreadable—not calm, not kind, just hollow enough to pass for strong.

Anyone watching would’ve seen the Reverend’s daughter—poised, composed, clean-lined grace.

They wouldn’t have seen the Camels behind the gospel. The bottle under the truck seat. The ache in her hands that wasn’t pain, just need. They wouldn’t have seen the girl slumped in her own filth, praying not for forgiveness, but to disappear.

They wouldn’t know the truth.

They never did.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

Smoke curled from Y/N’s cigarette in slow spirals, rising through the still air like something ancient. The ember flared, then died as she crushed it into the chipped ashtray. It hissed, faint and final.

Across the table, Mama watched—quiet, hollow-eyed. Not judging. Just watching, the way people do with lit matches near curtains. She didn’t comment anymore. That fight had burned out years ago. Once, she'd slapped cigarettes from Y/N’s hand, warned her they’d kill her before a man could. Now, she just stared at the smoke like it might say something she couldn’t.

Y/N had lit her first cigarette the night they buried her father. Still in her church dress, sitting on the cold brick steps while the town murmured over casseroles. Sixteen, stiff-backed, wrecked. She never quit. Some people wore grief. She burned hers. One drag at a time. Mama had stopped praying about it. She’d stopped a lot of things.

The kitchen buzzed under the flickering light. The silence between them wasn’t empty—it pressed. The room smelled like burnt meatloaf and old grease. A plate sat in front of Y/N, untouched. Gray meat, sweating into cold porcelain. She poked at it with her fork, shredding it without eating. Hunger didn’t come around much anymore. Her body was going piece by piece—bones sharper, clothes looser—but Mama hadn’t mentioned it. Not since Daddy died.

“You hear about the Portnoys’ boy?” Mama said suddenly, her voice flat. Like weather.

Y/N looked up, eyes bloodshot. “No. What about him?”

“He’s dead. Bomb strike. Somewhere over there in that mess. Brought him back in a brown box. A finger and a certificate. That’s all that made it.”

She said it like she was reading the mail. Took a drag from her own cigarette—cheap, stale—blew the smoke out slow.

“Some Arabian place. They always are. Twenty dead, they said. Just a few, by numbers. But that’s all it takes. One for each house on a block like this. One body to ruin a street.”

No sorrow. Just tired grit. Y/N pressed the fork into her plate, dragging meat across china. “Damn shame.”

Mama nodded. “You should go see her. Rhonda. Y’all used to be thick, remember? She’ll need someone.”

“I’ll go this weekend.”

But they both knew she wouldn’t. The words were just noise. Mama didn’t respond, just glanced up at the spreading stain on the ceiling—veins of mold curling outward, slow and sure.

“I feel bad for all of ‘em,” she said. “It’s all so sad.”

Y/N gave a dry smile. “He signed up for it. Nobody made him.” She stabbed the plate again. “Maybe it’s his fault.”

Mama blinked once. Not shock—just the shadow of it. Disappointment wrapped in old silence. She looked at Y/N like she might say something that mattered. But nothing came.

“Well,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s sad?”

“Sure.”

That was all. The quiet settled again, thicker now, laced with smoke and things left unsaid. The light overhead buzzed like it might burn out. Mama looked away, further this time—into memory, maybe, or just nowhere.

“How was church?” she asked, her voice barely there.

“Awful,” Y/N said.

Mama wasn’t listening. Her eyes had gone distant, her lips parting just enough to whisper a lie.

“Good… That’s good.”

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The voice came through the cracked front door, thin and worn: “Hol’ on a second.” Rhonda. Same old drawl, rough with tears or smoke or both.

Y/N stood still on the porch, her father’s coat hanging heavy on her shoulders. The late sun stretched long across the boards, painting the chipped wood gold. The “Welcome” mat was threadbare, half unreadable. From inside came the sharp, furious cry of a baby—not scared, not hungry. Just angry, the way babies get when nothing in the world is right.

She clutched her purse between her knees, hands buried deep in the coat’s pockets. Her fingers trembled. The crying didn’t stop. It clawed at her, not with pity—just nerves worn thin. She thought of field lights, beer cans, Rhonda laughing too loud in the backseat of somebody’s truck. Back when Rhonda still believed she might outrun this place.

But Y/N had always known better. Some girls don’t get out.

The door opened with a groan. Rhonda stood there, baby on her hip, exhaustion on her face. Hair pulled back, skin slick with sweat, eyes ringed dark. Her smile came slow, crooked.

“Well, if it ain’t the preacher’s girl,” she said, dragging each word. She kicked the door wider. “Come on in, Y/N. Ain’t seen you in a minute. You hungry? Want somethin’ to drink?”

“I’m good.” Y/N stepped inside, automatic. She slipped off her flats, dodged a chewed-up dinosaur near the door. The house was stuck in time—sunken couch, shag rug, a living room that hadn’t changed in decades.

Mason Portnoy Sr. sat like furniture, slumped in his recliner with a bag of Funyuns on his gut. The TV hissed static.

The air inside was thick—diapers, sour milk, something sharp underneath it all.

From the kitchen, the baby screamed louder. Rhonda disappeared through the doorway, calling back, “C’mon, Dylan. You been cryin’ since sunup. Quit already, would you?”

A grunt from the recliner. “Rhonda?”

“Yes, Papa?”

“Who the hell was at the door?”

“Y/N Y/L/N.”

“Who?”

“Vern’s girl. From church. She’s visitin’.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

Y/N stood stiff by the coat rack, unsure where to land. The baby’s wailing gnawed at her. Her head throbbed, but she kept her face still.

Rhonda returned, wiping her hands on a stained dishcloth. “Sorry,” she said, nodding toward a chair. “He’s colicky or possessed, take your pick. How you been, huh? You look skinny as a fencepost.”

They sat across from each other. The table was buried under cereal bowls and unopened mail. Rhonda’s face had softened with time, eyes sunken, skin loose. Y/N looked the same—drawn, dim. Two people worn down, like photos left in the sun.

“I heard about Mason Jr.,” Y/N said, low. “Mama and me… we’re real sorry. He was a good boy.”

Rhonda’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not a frown. Her eyes filled fast, catching the light.

“Sure was,” she whispered. “But that’s how it goes. Boys die early. Daughters live long enough to get wrecked.” A dry laugh. “Sometimes I wonder who’s got the better deal.”

Y/N stayed quiet. No scripture. No comfort. Just stillness.

Rhonda dragged her finger over the table’s grain. “Papa always said Mason was the one who’d get out. Said girls don’t bring home paychecks—just trouble and stretch marks. Called me a drag on the family. But Mason…” Her voice caught. “He was gonna be somebody. College. Office job. He wanted that for him. Not for me. I was just… the leftover.”

She scratched at a dried stain on the table. “But Mason didn’t want any of that. Not really. Watched too many action movies. Wanted to be a hero. So he signed up. Said he was gonna be part of something bigger. Said he’d make us proud.”

She blinked hard. “Now there’s nothin’ left but a goddamn finger in a box.”

Y/N nodded. Her throat locked.

Rhonda’s voice cracked. “You wanna see it?” The silence that followed felt thick, metallic. “The box?”

Y/N nodded again. There was nothing else to do. Not here. Not in this town that ate boys and gave their mothers something to bury.

It sat on the mantel. Small. Too small. The kind of small that made your stomach turn. Mahogany, polished, the size of a lunchbox. Gold flourishes curled around the edges, trying to make it look sacred. But nothing about it was holy. It was too clean, too out of place for this house—like grief had been boxed and sealed by someone who didn’t understand it.

“I ain’t gonna open it,” Rhonda said. Her voice shook now. “Don’t think I could take it. But you know, right? You already know what’s in there.” She looked away. “That’s all they found. After the strike. One finger. Left hand. That’s it.”

Y/N stared at the box and felt the memory crack open. Mason Jr., seventeen, tall and awkward, that chipped front tooth from the church roof, freckles across his nose. Always quiet. Hoodie strings in his mouth. Vanished into rooms without a sound. Carved the ham at Christmas. Took the smaller gift. Gave his sister the wishbone.

Six-foot-two and kind, gone before he got to be either a man or a boy.

Now he fit inside something she could carry under one arm.

“Is there gonna be a funeral?” Y/N asked. Her voice came up rough, like gravel.

Rhonda nodded. “Yeah. Not much of one. We can’t afford a casket, and it’s not like there’s anything to put in one anyway.” Her laugh cracked. “What’re we supposed to do? Bury a goddamn finger?”

Y/N said nothing. She didn’t have to. The house had gone quiet, except for the baby crying in the next room—less rage now, more fatigue. Even it sounded tired of screaming.

Y/N stared at the box. Something in her chest started to give. Not break—just crack, slow and quiet. She’d seen this too many times. Heard it in too many kitchens. Folded flags. Hollow sermons. Mothers gutted and left standing.

Boys sent off in one piece, returned in silence.

And it would happen again.

Another boy. Another mother. Another light box that didn’t weigh enough to grieve.

Again.

And again.

And again.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

She was halfway down the porch steps when Rhonda called out—soft, worn, like lace gone thin.
“Take care, you hear?”

It wasn’t a question. Not even a goodbye. Just one tired woman offering another a blessing stitched from habit. Rhonda held the screen door open with her elbow. The baby sagged on her hip. The porch light buzzed overhead, casting a sickly glow that deepened the hollows in her face. There was no more life in her than in that bulb.

Y/N didn’t look back. Just lifted her hand in a lazy wave and let it drift down like smoke. She walked. Gravel cracked underfoot—loud, final. Her father’s coat hung heavy, like it meant to drag her into the dirt.

The road ahead was barely a road—just memory under a bruised sky. Her breath sat thick in her chest. Not grief. Not yet. But it was close. She knew this was the last time she’d see Rhonda Portnoy. She did not want to step foot in that house again.

But she didn’t go home. Home wasn’t a place anymore. It was a sentence.

Instead, her feet took her down the back road—concrete split by weeds, the Sunoco station glowing faint at the edge of town like a dying thing. Same as always: dusty windows, broken vending machine, neon sign flickering like it wanted out.

Across the street, her old high school sat hollow. Glass gray with dust. Bleachers rusted to hell. Parking lot cracked like old skin.

Inside the gas station, the air was sharp with cleaner, jerky, and old oil. Behind the counter stood a boy—or maybe a man—half-familiar, like a face warped by rain in an old yearbook. If he knew her, he didn’t show it. Just looked through her. That was fine.

She dropped the six-pack on the counter. No ID. No talk. Bills exchanged. Lights buzzed overhead like they were tired too.

Outside, the sky had turned bruise-purple, bleeding into black. Stars blinked on, soft and unsure. She walked toward the football field—hers, even when she hated it. Her legs moved on memory: grass, beer, sweat, hands under blankets, gum kisses and loud songs.

The field was still. Bleachers groaned when she climbed them. She knew which ones would bite. At the top, she cracked a can. The hiss cut the quiet. She drank fast. Bitter. Familiar.

She let the silence settle, thick as attic dust. Cicadas screamed. Her mind dragged her backward: Rhonda laughing through soda, Sam tracing her wrist like it meant something. The scoreboard still read 31–10. Some losses don’t change.

She stood. Walked the field. Let her fingers trail the chain-link fence just to feel the metal rasp. To prove she was still here. Behind the bleachers was where she’d kissed a boy she never saw again. The dandelions were still clawing through the cracks. The end zone still blackened where a quarterback had bled out under Friday night lights.

It was all still here. Ghosts rooted in dirt and steel.

Then she danced. No rhythm. No music. Just motion. Just need. She spun until the stars smeared. Cracked another can. Poured it over her head like baptism. Beer soaked her shirt, ran down her back. Arms wide, she howled—raw, laughing, feral.

No one heard. That was the point.

She dropped into the grass like a body left behind. Arms flung wide. Back damp with dew. Ribs sore from laughing. Eyes blurred on the cold, far stars.

She let herself breathe. Like it meant something.

Mason Portnoy Jr. was dead. Her father, dead. Her mother hadn’t left the house in two years. The dishes were rotting. The streetlamp hadn’t worked since New Year’s. And she was the worst preacher this town ever stuck behind a pulpit.

But tonight—just tonight—she was loud. Drunk. Defiant.

Beautiful.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

She came to the church like wreckage—filthy, hollow, spit out by whatever storm she’d crawled through. Her dress, once soft blue, was stiff with dried beer, crusted like salt from sweat and ruin. She smelled like yeast and dirt and something animal, like she’d spent the night buried in the fields. Her hair hung in matted ropes, dew still clinging. Her shoes squelched on the gravel path—flats soaked, shapeless. Grass stains marked her knees like bruises, but they weren’t from prayer.

Inside, the congregation was already seated. Sunlight knifed through stained glass, casting blood and sapphire across the pews. Even the saints on the windows looked away as she stepped inside. She stood in the doorway, a slouched shadow warped by hangover and memory. Her steps were uneven, dragged from some deeper place. Not walking—hauling herself forward like her bones hated her.

Heads turned. Not from welcome, but reflex. The heat in the room shifted. Thickened. You could feel it in the rafters. In the silence. In the way every eye said the same thing:
This ain’t right.

Judgment didn’t speak. It shifted in seats, clicked in throats, clenched in jaws. Someone cracked the door again—maybe for air, maybe to go. Each time it opened, the sun cut through the dark like a blade. Too late to save.

She reached the lectern. The Bible lay open, pages stirring in the fan’s breath. She stared at them, but the words blurred—lines and ink, meaningless shapes. Could’ve been math. Could’ve been a map. Nothing landed. Her head buzzed. Her mouth tasted like pennies.

She was still drunk. Maybe sobering. Maybe not. The beers she’d downed on the walk hadn’t dulled the heat behind her eyes or the twitch in her fingers. Her heart thudded like an old machine running out of parts. And they were still waiting—watching her like she had something worth giving. Like she hadn’t come in empty.

She snapped the Bible shut. The crack echoed—sharp, final. It hit the rafters and bounced back, rattling the saints. Everything went still.

Her hands shook. Her mouth opened. The words came out raw.

“My daddy, he… he had this little book of Psalms. Kept it by my bed when I was a kid. Used to read from it every night.”

Her fingers clawed at her wrist, unconscious and frantic. Skin split. Blood welled—bright and sudden. Every night…

“There was a time,” she said, softer now, “when I could recite the first sixteen by heart. Psalm One, uh…” She blinked. Swallowed. “Blessed is the man who…”

She faltered. The words unraveled.

“Blessed is the lamb… whose blood flows…”

A pause.

“No. That ain’t it.”

Then her voice broke. Cracked, then folded. The sobs hit hard—loud, shaking. She bent over the lectern like it might hold her up, her face buried in her hands.

Mascara streaked. Her back heaved. The dress clung, wet and cold, tugging with each breath like it meant to peel her apart.

When she looked up, the pews were empty. All but two. Even Constance Hayes was gone. Only a pair remained near the back. She blinked, trying to place them. A rustle of fabric. A soft shuffle. Then:

“Y/N?” A woman’s voice. Low. Familiar. “Y/N, honey, what’s the matter with you?”

She looked again. Mrs. Wallace stood near the last row, her face caught between horror and something deeper—recognition. Not of the breakdown, but the break. The truth beneath it. Mr. Wallace stood behind her, arms crossed, jaw clenched. Neither had come back to this place since Sam left. Since the boy who haunted Y/N’s bones disappeared for good.

“Honey…” Mrs. Wallace stepped forward, hand out like she could pull the girl back from wherever she’d gone. “Talk to me. Are you okay?”

Y/N couldn’t answer. The words were dust in her mouth. She shoved past them—head low, hands curled into fists, shame buzzing under her skin like a fever.

“Dunno,” she muttered. “I just… I just need to go home.”

Her legs fought her. The aisle stretched long. But she made it. Reached the doors. The sun hit her like a slap. She stepped into it with her eyes shut, let the door groan shut behind her.

Inside, the quiet settled again. Not holy. Just heavy.

Mrs. Wallace stood still, her hand still raised like she hadn’t realized Y/N was already gone.

Her husband stepped beside her, resting a hand on her shoulder.

She whispered it—barely a breath.

“Lord… dear Lord.”

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The sun was already sagging behind the line of cypress trees when the screen door groaned open again, the sound swallowed by the thick, breathless heat that soaked the house like a fever. The walls themselves seemed to sweat. The air hung motionless, saturated with the staleness of fried oil and old grief, the scent of something unspoken rotting beneath the wallpaper. Inside, Mama sat like she always did—folded into the same frayed corner of the couch she’d worn into a cradle with the weight of her bones, the heel of one foot jammed into a threadbare cushion, her polyester robe cinched tight across her sagging body like she was afraid even her own skin might leave her if it had the chance. The television murmured from the corner, a steady loop of game-show banter playing to no audience, its technicolor optimism bleeding garishly against the yellowed walls. The Price Is Right. Again. Always. The volume just high enough to drown out the world, but low enough to pretend she might still hear if someone needed her. No one ever did.

She turned her head just enough to acknowledge the figure silhouetted in the doorframe, her eyes squinting against the last gasp of daylight before turning back to the screen without comment. Y/N stood there like a shadow pulled too far from its source, soaked in the last embers of sun, her body slouched and brittle in her father’s old coat, the hem of her dress crusted stiff with dried beer and grass stains, her arms limp at her sides. Her hair hung lank around her face, sticky with sweat and dirt, her breath sour and labored. She didn’t look like she’d come home—she looked like she’d crawled back from something that had tried to keep her. She stayed there in the doorway, caught somewhere between inside and out, as if the floor might give way beneath her if she took another step.

“Where you been all night?” Mama asked, not looking this time. Her voice was a dull scrape, the sound of rust flaking off old iron. Not sharp, not soft, just... used. The tone of someone who’d stopped expecting answers years ago but still asked out of habit, because silence would mean letting go, and letting go would mean it was all real.

Y/N exhaled like she was coughing up dirt, her voice little more than the ghost of a growl. “Out.”

“Christ,” Mama muttered, flinching at the smell. “You stink like a brewery.”

“So?” It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t even defense. It was detachment, said like someone commenting on the weather. There was no fight in it—just the low thrum of a person too tired to hold herself together, too used to not being heard.

Mama turned her eyes, narrowed them like she might say something worth the breath, but stopped. Whatever she might’ve meant to ask was already too far behind them. “Don’t tell me you went to church like that.”

“So what if I did?” Y/N replied, with a lopsided shrug that nearly pulled her off balance.

Mama’s eyes flashed for a second, the old instinct of judgment sparking through exhaustion. “What would your daddy think?”

That did it. Y/N’s mouth curled into something that wasn’t a smile. “Why should I give a fuck what he thinks?” Her voice cracked, thin and cold. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

“Don’t use that word.” Mama didn’t even blink, but her hand fluttered to her chest like a moth to flame, reacting out of muscle memory more than conviction.

“Don’t tell me what to do.” The words dropped flat, dull as ash, and the silence that followed stretched long and raw.

They stared at one another across the sagging guts of that living room—mother and daughter, burnt-out star and battered satellite, two celestial bodies circling the same dead sun. The air between them was heavy, thick with years of silence and heat, with the scent of stale biscuits and lost chances. Mama’s eyes lingered just long enough to register her daughter’s return, then flicked back to the television with mechanical disinterest. Bob Barker’s voice buzzed from the speaker, a pitch-perfect cheerfulness that had nothing to do with them. That jingle, that goddamn jingle, it danced through the room like a ghost in tap shoes—bright, insistent, and unbearably hollow. The soundtrack of their shared unraveling.

But something old and patient was crawling up inside Y/N. Not rage.  It didn’t come all at once, didn’t explode. It seeped, crept. It slithered out from the dark corners of her memory like a leak under the floorboards, slow and devastating. It was the kind of fury that didn’t set fire—it froze. Frostbite in the marrow. It wound around her spine and filled her mouth with all the words she never said. The soft, broken ones: Mama, my stomach hurts. Mama, why’s he look at me like that? Mama, why does he touch me funny? Mama, please don’t ignore me. Mama, I’m bleeding. Mama, I’m scared. Mama, I love you. Please. But none of those words had ever landed. They’d passed right through the room and out the screen door, swallowed by cicadas and silence. And now, all those swallowed cries had hardened into one glacial truth that made her bones ache with its clarity: it never mattered. Not then. Not now.

“I’m leaving,” Y/N said, and the words were calm, measured, stripped clean of drama. They didn’t land like a bomb. They landed like a gravestone. “I’m leaving this backwater shithole, and I’m leaving Alabama, and I swear to God I ain’t never coming back.”

Mama didn’t blink. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, as if that was still enough to close a wound. She didn’t even lift her eyes, just reached lazily for the slice of bread wrapped in a napkin beside her like it was sacrament.

“I’m not,” Y/N said, and now her voice had something to it. Not heat. Not volume. But steel. A tremor pulled her breath sideways, but she righted it. “I’m finally doing something that’s mine.”

“You’ll come crawling back before sundown,” Mama mumbled, chewing now, the words thick and wet in her mouth, like they’d been waiting there all day to be used. “You always do.”

But something in Y/N’s face, her posture, the dead calm of her stare—it had changed. Mama might’ve felt it then. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was just too late for either of them to know when the earth had shifted beneath their feet.

“I mean it,” she said, stepping back toward the open door, the porch behind her glowing with the last smears of orange daylight. “Next time you see me, you’ll be six feet under, and I’ll be leavin’ you flowers.”

And this time, Mama turned. This time, the words cracked something open. Not because they were cruel—God knows they’d said worse—but because Mama saw something in her daughter’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. A severance. Not a wound. A cut. Clean. Final. And it scared her.

“Y/N,” she whispered, as if calling someone back from the edge of a cliff. “What’s gotten into you?”

Y/N didn’t reply. She didn’t have to. Her silence was louder than any scream she’d ever held in. She stepped through the threshold, the screen door moaning open behind her like it, too, was reluctant to let her go. A second later, the old truck's engine growled awake—violent, uneven, like a wounded thing begging to run. It hiccupped, sputtered, and then pulled away, wheels spitting gravel as it rolled toward freedom.

Inside the house, nothing changed. The couch sagged. The walls held their breath. The television glowed. A contestant spun the big wheel. Mama sat, still holding her bread like a Bible, her eyes glassy, not quite watching anything. The screen door swung gently on its hinge, a soft creak marking time. And outside, the breeze caught a forgotten can and rolled it across the porch until it fell into the grass with a hollow clatter.

That was all that remained of Y/N Y/L/N: the echo of an engine, the hush of a parting, and the slow drift of an empty aluminum ghost.

Her mama didn’t know it then, not truly, but that would be the last time she ever saw her daughter’s face.

The wheels of the truck murmured against the scarred backroads, whispering along the cracked skin of blacktop like fingertips brushing the face of a forgotten lover. She didn’t press the gas hard. There was no need for speed. The urgency had never been about where she was going—it was about where she wasn’t. The sun had already vanished behind the cypress trees, dragging its bloodshot hues with it, leaving the sky to fester in bruised purples and sullen golds. Y/N’s hands, clammy with sweat and the dregs of warm beer, clung to the steering wheel like a lifeline. Not for control—just to feel something solid. She had no destination in mind, only a direction. North, maybe. Or east. Just somewhere that wasn’t south. Somewhere the air didn’t taste like old sermons and forgotten dreams. She didn’t need a map. The only compass she needed was the hollow ache in her chest pointing her anywhere but back.

The town peeled away behind her in pieces, shedding its landmarks like scabs. Samson Wallace’s place, hunched behind its screen of pines, porch light still flickering like a heartbeat on life support. The red-brick church, stoic and stiff, the readerboard still stuttering out its message like a broken promise: GOD LOVES YOU. The Burger King, paint peeling, its pylon sign jutting from the earth like a rusted jawbone, the same place where a boy once made her feel wanted for fifteen seconds behind the dumpsters, swearing he’d marry her when he sobered up. Every place a tombstone. Every shadow a ghost. The truck crept past them, steady and unsentimental, grinding the past into the dust without ceremony. She watched through the side mirror until Abbeville shrank to a single blur of light swallowed by trees.

And before long—because it always happened—those front-porch prophets would start their song. Damaris Fairchild would be the first to speak, chin perched like royalty on her papery hand, voice thick with piety and poison. “You hear about Y/N Y/L/N?” she’d ask, and the women would lean in like blooms toward sunlight.

“The preacher’s girl?” Betty Oliver would breathe, eyes wide with choreographed concern.

“Mmm. That one.”

“What now?”

“She went and gave a sermon drunk. Slurring like a godless heathen. Then left town. Vanished. Poof.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“I ain’t. Ask Constance Hayes if you don’t believe me. Sat through the whole thing.”

Their heads would nod in rhythm, teacups trembling in their hands like tiny porcelain saints. “Poor thing,” Ella May would sigh. “Ever since Vern passed, that family’s been cracked down the middle.” One of them would cross herself. Another would murmur about missed sermons and missed chances and how the Lord must be sorely disappointed. They’d mourn the girl like they mourned the past—loudly, briefly, and with just enough sugar to cover the rot.

Maybe, if the wind was right, Constance would offer up her own benediction, soft as a moth’s wing: “Lord… watch over her.”

And then the silence would settle in. Thin, uneasy. Until one of them changed the subject, and by sunset, Y/N Y/L/N would fade back into the ether. A name with no body. A daughter-shaped hole in a town too tired to remember the shape of absence.

But Y/N? She’d still be out there—somewhere between nowhere and never again—driving like a ghost in reverse. Leaving Abbeville like a cigarette tossed from a moving truck. Smoke trailing. Fire gone. Just the cherry ember catching the wind.

She smiled faintly at the thought, lips cracked and dry. Then she turned right at the fork that led into the woods, the sign for WELCOME TO ABBEVILLE catching her taillights for just a second before vanishing under a veil of kicked-up dust.

Thirty miles later, past cotton fields turned to weeds and creek beds dried to scars, past abandoned mills whose bones still whispered of labor and grief, she found it—the house. A crooked relic squatting at the edge of a clearing, draped in shadow and silence. The trees had claimed it as kin, their limbs arched protectively over its sun-starved roof. No one had lived there in decades. No one except her. And once, Samson Wallace. Wherever he was now. Buried. Lost. Or worse—still out there, walking the same edge she was.

She parked the truck beneath an old white oak and didn’t bother with the keys. If the earth wanted to reclaim it, she wouldn’t stop it. She stepped out barefoot, feet hitting the cold dirt like an offering. The air was knife-sharp, quiet as prayer.

The door groaned when she pushed it open, wood protesting the memory of her palm. The dark inside was thick enough to hold. Curtains like gauze sagged in the windows. Dust stirred with her breath, rising in slow spirals, turning the light into fog.

She leaned her back against the inside of the door and struck a match, the sulfur flaring sharp and angry against her fingers before giving way to a soft, hungry glow. The darkness of the house folded in around her like a blanket that hadn't been washed in decades. There was no power—hadn’t been since long before she or Sam ever set foot here—but her memory did the work better than any bulb. She didn’t need light. The house spoke to her through muscle memory. She moved through the shadows like a sleepwalker: one step past the doorframe, the slouch of the old couch pressed into her hips, the low groan of that one warped board near the hearth, the faint smell of mold and cedar and time left too long alone. Everything was still where it had always been. It hadn't changed. Just grown older, like a scar or a ghost.

The match guttered low, burning down to her skin. With its final breath, she lit a cigarette, then dropped onto the couch, which hissed beneath her weight like it was exhaling some long-held grief. The first drag settled in her chest like a warm brick, and she let the smoke trickle out slow, like a soul she wasn’t sure she wanted to keep anymore. That’s when she saw it, half-obscured by dust and the curl of old air: a photograph on the coffee table, laminated, worn down to its memory. The edges curled like a dried petal, corners frayed with fingerprints from another life.

She reached for it and held it in both hands. It was them. Her and Sam. Jesus. He had a black eye and that crooked, defiant grin like he’d just gotten away with something unforgivable and hadn’t yet been caught. She was beside him, her hair a tangled mess, eyes too wide, too bright, smile caught halfway between truth and trying. Behind them loomed the Pike County High sign, one side of it flickering out like a dying star. The sky above was that perfect lie of high school days—endless, blue, untouched by regret. But the photo was warm in her palms now, either from the sun or from memory or just the heat of grief radiating off her skin. She couldn’t tell which. Her breath caught in her throat, and her vision went watery. That day came back like a movie reel pulled tight and clicking.

She’d been fifteen. First day of junior year. Sitting under the flagpole out front, boots scuffed, cigarette between her fingers like a weapon she didn’t know how to use. The sun hadn’t burned the dew off the grass yet, and everything smelled like bleach and nerves. She wasn’t waiting for anyone. Never had. Most kids walked past her without looking. Some stared too long. Nobody said anything. Nobody ever did. And then there he was—Samson Wallace, all angles and shadows, clutching a class schedule like a lifeline and squinting at it like it was written in a dead language. His backpack hung crooked on one shoulder, and the sleeve of his shirt was rolled just enough to show the bruise blooming along his forearm. A fresh black eye marred one side of his face. He looked like trouble. Or someone who’d been in its path one too many times.

He stopped when he saw her. Didn't hesitate. Just walked right up, like fate had dared him.

“Hey,” he said. “You smart?”

She looked up, smoke curling around her mouth. “Yeah?”

“Good,” he said, crouching down like he’d known her all his life. “I’m not. Can you help me find Trig?”

She should’ve ignored him. Should’ve waved him off, like she did with most boys. But something in his voice—it was careful, deliberate. Like he was trying not to spill something fragile. And that bruise. That black eye. She knew that kind of wound. Not the schoolyard kind. The kind you earned at home. The kind that taught you early to shut your mouth and keep your distance. She didn’t ask what happened. She didn’t need to. She just took the schedule from his hand, read it, and nodded. “I got Trig first, too.”

He grinned like that meant something. “Show me?”

She nodded again, slower. “Sure.”

Even then, she could feel the way his presence filled the air like static. He was taller than her, but not by much. His clothes were too big. His smile was crooked, unsure. His hair looked like he’d tried to comb it and then given up halfway through. And when he said the word “dad,” his whole body stiffened, just a little. Barely enough to notice—unless you’d learned how to watch for it. She had. She’d spent years watching her own reflection flinch in the mirror.

He didn’t have to explain. She already knew the whole story. She could see it in the way he didn’t let his bag swing freely, the way his voice dropped to a hush when talking about home. She’d lived that kind of silence, too.

They were just about to cross the threshold of that miserable school, the one that always smelled like bleach and forgotten futures, when a voice cut through the haze—sharp, shrill, and too damned cheerful to belong in the morning light. “Hey!” it rang out, slicing the moment wide open. Stacy Reeves came strutting across the grass like she owned the damn sunrise, her camera thudding against her chest like a plastic heartbeat. She was the school’s resident memory collector, senior yearbook photographer and part-time gossip merchant, her ponytail swinging with self-importance as she waved them down.

Y/N froze mid-step, the toe of her boot catching on a crack in the sidewalk. Her body went stiff, like an animal sensing a trap. “What for?” she asked, voice low, half-choked on suspicion. She didn’t trust people who smiled too easily.

“Yearbook!” Stacy sang, already raising the camera. “It’s for the ‘First Day’ page. Come on, y’all look cute.”

Y/N’s eyes narrowed, but Sam—bless his dumb, bright heart—was already standing, already grinning. “Sure,” he said with the kind of blind enthusiasm only boys who’d never been made into a punchline could manage. He turned and held out his hand to her, open, unassuming, not reaching but waiting. She stared at it like it might burn her. But there was something in his stance—something calm, careful, nothing like the boys who clutched and took and made their affection a threat. So she gave in. Slipped her fingers into his. Let him lead.

They moved beneath the rusting flagpole, where the wind toyed with the frayed rope, tapping it against the metal like a cracked metronome. It was a strange rhythm, the kind you might hear in a dream that keeps turning into a nightmare. Stacy called instructions like a drill sergeant in ballet flats. “Closer—yep, right there. Little to the left. Perfect!”

Then, quieter, just for her: “Can I put my arm around you?” Sam asked, his voice gentle, not out of fear but out of respect, as though he knew how easy it was to break something already fractured.

She almost said no. She always almost said no. But the way he looked at her—like he wasn’t asking for anything but permission—unlocked something deep and rusted in her chest. She nodded, once, small.

He moved like someone handling a delicate machine. His arm wrapped around her waist without pressure, like he was just borrowing a piece of her gravity for a minute. She didn’t lean in, didn’t smile. But she didn’t pull away either. She just stood, still and breathing, and let the sun hit her face while someone touched her without expecting her to flinch.

The camera clicked. Once. Then again. The sound echoed down into her bones like a hammer on old pipes.

“Yearbooks drop June first!” Stacy called over her shoulder as she trotted off to capture more victims, already forgetting them. “Make sure y’all buy one!”

Sam let his arm fall, easy and unbothered, hands in his pockets like a gentleman from some black-and-white movie. “You ready to go?” he asked, like nothing had happened, like the moment hadn’t pulled something loose in the air.

But Y/N didn’t hear him. Or maybe she did and couldn’t speak. Her heart was thudding in her chest like it was trying to punch its way out—raw and alive and reckless, after too many years of ticking like an old watch under dirty water. She didn’t know what the hell had happened. Nothing, really. Just a boy with a bruised eye and a hopeful smile, with the scent of smoke and leather and last chances hanging off his coat. Just a photograph. Just a soft voice asking, not taking. Just a heartbeat that had remembered how to beat.

But it had happened. Christ, it had.

And for the first time in forever, she remembered what it felt like to be moved.

She never ordered that damn yearbook. At the time, it had felt unnecessary—another souvenir from a life she wasn’t planning to remember. A high school memento for a chapter she hoped would blur with distance. But Sam had. Sam, with his crumpled dollar bills and lint-flecked pockets, had bought it like it meant something. That reckless, crooked smile on his face, the one that made him look like a boy trying on manhood like a borrowed coat—too big, sleeves dragging. He’d held it like it was a promise. And in a way, maybe it was.

They’d flipped through it together in this very room, on this same sagging couch that now gathered dust and shadows in the failing light. It had been four years ago, or maybe a lifetime—back when the world still seemed pliable, like clay they could shape with their own stubborn hands. The book had smelled of ink and glue, the scent of hallways and linoleum floors and a thousand footsteps layered in memory. He’d laid it across both their knees like a shared altar, fingers thumbing through until they found the page. There it was—their picture. Just two kids beneath a weather-worn flagpole, frozen in the moment before the world had its way with them. They were still soft then. Still whole.

He’d laughed, quiet and disbelieving, holding the page like it might vanish if he blinked too hard. “Remember this?” he said, eyes fixed on the photo while his other hand worked the blade of a dull pair of scissors. And she had. Of course she had. That day had sunk its teeth into her bones. He cut the photo free with the tenderness of a surgeon, his grin wide, almost innocent, like a boy showing off a treasure dug from the dirt. And then—just like everything else that mattered—he’d left it behind. Forgotten it on the coffee table as if it were nothing, as if they were nothing. Neither of them ever came back for it. The house took it in like a grave takes bones—quiet, undisturbed. For years, it sat there. Dust gathered. The corners curled. But the image remained. Untouched. Waiting.

His yearbook still lived in the basement of his childhood home, probably buried beneath toolboxes and rotted books, with a neat little square carved from one page like a wound that never scabbed over. And Y/N—sitting here again, years later, that photo back in her hands—felt the edges of her heart go soft and then jagged, all in the same breath.

She didn’t know much about love. No one had ever taught her in a way that didn’t bruise. But maybe this was what it looked like: a picture cut from a book, a blank space left behind, a memory so vivid it hurt to hold. Maybe love was less about who stayed and more about who left a shape behind.

Her eyes stung. She flipped the photograph over and laid it face-down on the table. Couldn’t look at it anymore. The silence in the room pressed in around her, thick and unforgiving, more accusing than any voice. If she stared one second longer, she knew something inside her would snap. And there’d be no stitching it back.

She stood without knowing why, body moving on some ancient reflex—grief, maybe, or instinct—and drifted toward the kitchen. Her feet were unsteady, her path wavering like someone wading through smoke. She hadn’t had a drink in hours, but she still felt drunk on memory and ghosts. The hallway twisted under her gaze. Her breath dragged from her lungs like sandpaper over stone.

The kitchen greeted her like a crypt. Stale air, still heavy with the smell of mildew and old grease, curled in her nostrils. She reached for the counter out of reflex and felt the brittle crumble of dust beneath her palm. Her fingers left streaks, black and smudged, like soot sketches of bones. The counter, once polished marble, had dulled to a gray nothing. Everything had faded. Just like her. Just like Sam.

The house moaned softly in the walls, as if shifting under the weight of all it remembered. Or maybe it was her, finally collapsing. Some internal scaffolding giving way. Whatever had held her upright for this long—pride, rage, dumb stubbornness—it cracked under the pressure. The weight of absence. The ache of what never came to be. She slid to the floor like she’d been dropped, knees hitting tile, arms wrapping around herself in some pathetic attempt at warmth.

She didn’t cry. Not right away. Instead she just knelt there, letting her body hum with pain and silence, the air pressing down on her like a hand. This position—kneeling, alone, wordless—wasn’t new. She’d lived in it. Slept in it. She’d folded herself this way in trailer park kitchens, on borrowed mattresses, in motel bathtubs with the shower running just to drown out the silence. She had waited like this—for Sam, for answers, for the girl she used to be to find her way back. But all that ever came were footsteps that weren’t his, voices that didn’t care, hands that only took.

Maybe she hadn’t been waiting for Sam at all. Maybe she’d been waiting for herself, for the girl who once stood beneath a rusted flagpole and let someone touch her without flinching. Maybe she’d left that girl behind here, hidden in the corners of this broken house like something too precious to look at directly. And maybe this place had kept her safe, in its own ruined way. A shrine made of silence and decay.

The house said nothing. It had no answers, no wisdom, no comfort to offer. It simply existed, hollow and indifferent, breathing in time with the wind through its broken bones. The rats whispered in the walls, their scurrying a kind of low confession, and the curtains—thinned by sun, eaten by mildew—swayed in a draft too soft to be named. Outside, the moon hung like a judge in the sky, high and pitiless, swollen and pale, casting silver light through cracked panes and across a floor littered with the dust of the years. It was full—round and whole in a way Y/N had never felt, not even when she’d been young and unbroken, not even when she’d believed in things like good luck and fresh starts.

She stared at that moon a long time, her eyes burning with the weight of it, and for one strange, impossible second, she imagined it staring back. Silent. Unmoved. Watching her from above with a cold omniscience, as if it had seen everything and pitied nothing. And in that moment, she felt every jagged edge of her own body. She was not whole. She was not silver or distant or clean. She was a smudge on the earth. A wound trying to scab over. A breath that should have stopped a long time ago, and hadn’t.

She sat there on the linoleum floor, her bones beginning to ache from the cold, her frame folded in on itself like a crumpled receipt. Hours passed, maybe more. She couldn’t tell anymore. The light changed and then disappeared entirely, folding over her like the end of a song. She didn’t have a plan. No gas money. No real destination beyond “not here.” All she had was a cigarette burn on her jeans, a face-down photograph in the next room, and the stubborn thud of her own heart, still beating against its cage like it hadn’t learned when to quit.

There had been laughter in this house once. Once, when Sam was still hers and the world still had room for wonder. She remembered the sound of it—low and wild, bouncing off the walls, mixed with music and the smell of weed and gasoline. Long drives through nowhere towns, the truck windows rolled down, the radio playing something old and holy. Sam’s hand on the wheel, tapping out drumbeats with callused fingers, his eyes on the horizon like it was a promise. And her, always watching him instead of the road. His throat when he sang. His profile in the sun. The way he moved like the world couldn’t touch him, like he wasn’t afraid of anything but standing still.

Her mother had hated him. Said he looked like trouble. Said he was “all wrong.” That boy with the torn jeans and the bruises he never explained. That boy who smiled too much for someone carrying that much hurt. But Sam hadn’t liked home either. Not his. Not hers. Not anyplace with walls and rules and fathers.

So they left. Again and again. Two fugitives of the ordinary, fleeing nothing and everything at once. Every road trip, every cigarette lit in the dark, every motel room with peeling wallpaper—they’d made a world out of that motion. A love story in transit. A romance that bloomed like mold: hidden, persistent, and never truly clean.

“Where’re we going?” she’d asked him one summer night, her legs tucked beneath her in the passenger seat, sticky from the heat, the air thick with pine and dust.

“Somewhere nobody else has been,” he’d said, not looking at her. “Somewhere brand new.”

That night they found the house. This house. The one she was in now. He saw it from the highway—half-sunk in trees, porch buckled, paint flayed from its bones—and swerved into the gravel like fate had tapped him on the shoulder. She had laughed, back then. Rolled her eyes at the idea of finding something special in a place like that. But he jumped out of the truck like a boy seeing snow for the first time, shouting, “It’s perfect!” like the whole goddamn place wasn’t rotting to pieces.

“I know it ain’t much,” he said, pushing the front door open with a flourish. “But it’s ours. Ain’t that enough?”

She’d muttered something sarcastic, half-smiling. “We’ve got three hours to kill. You better make 'em count, prettyboy.”

But they hadn’t fucked. Not that night. Not yet. There’d been chances—more than once. A locker room, a backseat, that time behind the train depot where they undressed just to see each other, to know what soft skin looked like in daylight. But they always stopped short. Held breath instead of bodies. Sat still in their own want like it was a prayer. They didn’t need sex to bind them. Talking had always been enough. For a while.

That night, they smoked. Sam passed her a joint, the paper sloppy and damp at the end, but she took it. Her mama would’ve fainted at the smell, but that just made her drag deeper. Sam talked about fixing the place up, about getting tools from his uncle’s shed, about scraping the walls and maybe putting a porch swing up. Like they were married already. Like love was drywall and second chances.

“What do you mean, ‘we’?” she teased, flicking ash into a broken mug.

“You and me,” he said. “Who else is there?”

And something in her stilled. She stared at the cuckoo clock above the busted TV. It hadn’t worked in years, but it still hung there. A symbol. A warning.

“Don’t you wanna get out?” she asked him, suddenly small. “Get away from here?”

He shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Do you?”

She thought about it. Really thought. Not just about the highways, but what lay beyond them. The places where no one knew her name, or what her father had done, or who she’d slept with, or how often she cried. She thought about silence. Clean silence.

“I dunno,” she whispered.

He cracked open a soda, the sound sharp as glass breaking. “You don’t like Alabama?”

“It’s fine,” she said, her voice tight. “It’s just… living here feels like living in God’s armpit. It’s hot and it stinks and everybody’s in your business and you can’t breathe without someone sayin’ it’s a sin.”

Sam laughed. “So where should we go, preacher’s daughter?”

“Anywhere far. Far as we can.”

“Like California?” he asked, smirking.

She turned to him with mock disgust. “California?”

“What? It’s far.”

And she laughed then, really laughed. That kind of laughter that doesn’t come from something funny but from something cracked wide open inside you. She loved him in that second, more than she could bear, more than she could say.

California had become their word, their spell, their whispered incantation for escape. It was never just a place—it was a promise they knew they'd likely never keep, a code they clung to when the bruises were fresh and the days too long. Whenever Sam showed up bleeding, limping slightly with one side of his mouth split open, he’d lean against her doorway, blood drying on his knuckles, and say, “Wanna drive to California?” And Y/N, no matter what mood she’d been in before, would nod like it was gospel. When Mama asked why she was late, where she'd been, who she was with, Y/N would shrug and say, “Can’t stay long—I’m headed to California.” The word grew between them like ivy on a wall, twisting and green, always climbing toward some light they couldn’t quite reach. Lovers always invent their own language, and this was theirs: a single word standing in for all the things they couldn’t name—freedom, hope, home.

But now, years later, she was still inside the house they never fixed. The one they’d dreamed about painting, furnishing, filling with noise and maybe kids, if they ever figured out how to raise them different from how they’d been raised. No porch swing ever got hung. No lights rewired. No garden. Just rot, memory, and a faint echo of a boy who once swore to take her to the Pacific. Her knees ached as she climbed the stairs, her back a dull, constant throb, her chest tight with something that wasn’t grief exactly—just the residue of having lived too long with it. But her heart still beat, slow and steady like a drum in the dark, and in her ears, she could still hear his voice, low and uncertain: “Wanna drive to California?” And even now, broken and alone, with nothing but silence to answer back, she almost said yes.

California might as well have been the moon. She closed her eyes and tried to conjure it, the way one tries to remember a scent from childhood: golden hills rolling like waves, pine trees looming tall and still as sentinels, the ocean wide and violent and clean. She pictured Sam waiting in a motel off Highway 1, lit only by a crooked lamp and the red ember of his cigarette. She imagined him glancing up when she walked in, giving that smile—the one that said he knew she’d come. But that was fantasy. She didn’t know where Sam was anymore. Maybe he made it to California, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he made it five times and never stayed. Promises are strange that way—not always broken, just unfinished. They fray and unravel, trailing behind like thread from an old coat, winding through your ribs until one day you die still holding the loose end.

She couldn’t sit with that. Not tonight. Not with her mind already walking too close to the edge of something bottomless. Barefoot and aching, she crept up the stairs that groaned beneath her weight like they remembered too much. The attic hadn’t been built for sleep, but they'd made it theirs anyway. Youth will do that—shape ruin into romance, make homes out of half-empty spaces. Sam had shown up with a mattress lashed to the roof of his truck like a corpse in a burial shroud. It sagged in the middle, stank like old coffee and mold, and jabbed them with coils whenever they turned over. Still, what she wouldn’t give to feel it collapse under his weight beside her again.

She crawled into the bed alone, her limbs heavy, her breath uneven. Her fingers traced the indentations in the fabric, reading the mattress like scripture, like a relic of something sacred. She remembered the first time they made love in that attic. The cedar smell in the wood, the humidity thick enough to choke, their bodies both trembling—not with fear, but with reverence. She bled a little. It didn’t hurt much. He’d been so gentle it nearly broke her. Afterward, half-asleep and naked, he got up and went downstairs, came back with a warm rag, and knelt beside her like someone praying. He wiped the blood from between her legs, whispered, “Your mama’s gonna kill me now,” and she just sighed, unable to move, staring at the ceiling with a strange detachment, like her body had become a place she no longer lived in.

He lay down next to her, his chest slick with sweat, his breathing slow. The room had smelled like sex and salt and something colder—something permanent. She searched for the warmth of what they’d just shared, but all she felt was the distance between her ribs, the vast hollowness that came after intimacy had left the building. She turned toward him, eyes brimming. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

He rolled onto his side, exhaustion draped across his features, but his voice was calm. “Then tell me.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Why not?”

She stared up at the ceiling again, the cracks in it like veins in a dying thing. “Because once I say it, it’ll be real. And I don’t want it to be real.”

“Then pretend it’s just us,” he murmured, brushing her hair back. “No one else in the world. No cars, no people. Just me and you.”

Her throat caught. “Was I your first?”

“Yes.”

“You weren’t mine.”

Silence. Heavy, sharp. She expected his face to change, to darken, for the air to shift into something dangerous. Her father’s rage haunted every pause. But Sam just touched her hair again, his voice soft as cotton. “Don’t matter. I’ll be your first if you want me to be.”

And she broke. Her voice cracked open, and all the grief she’d swallowed since girlhood spilled out. “My mama would say the same thing about me she says about you,” she whispered. “That she always knew I was spoiled.”

“She ain’t here,” he said. “She died with the rest of them. It’s just us now.”

She curled into him then, pressing her cheek to his chest, listening to his heart. In that moment, she realized what had always been true: she loved Samson Wallace. Loved him with a fever that wouldn’t break. Loved him like her bones were wired with his name.

Now, lying on the same ruined mattress alone, she listened to the silence. It didn’t smell like him anymore. Didn’t smell like anything but dust and decay. The magic was gone. The sanctuary they'd made had crumbled, just like everything else. She was the only one left, and she was lonelier than she’d ever known a person could be.

She craved a drink—not something gentle or sippable, but the kind that went down rough, mean, the kind that scraped your throat on the way in and lit your chest like a fuse. A drink with fire in it, the kind that could melt the ice that had built up behind her ribs and make her feel something besides hollow. She liked to pretend it all started the night her father burned, when the fire devoured everything he'd ever been and left behind only smoke, bone, and whispers. But that was a lie she told herself to keep the real story at bay. The truth was simpler, sadder: the drinking started when Sam left. When the truck stopped coming around. When the warmth in her chest turned to static. She drank to drown the ache he left behind—the ache nothing else could touch.

Marriage had been a word passed between them like something cursed, a lit match they couldn't help playing with. In Abbeville, girls got married young because it was the only door out that didn't involve a jail cell or a casket. Sam’s mother, sharp-eyed and already half-defeated, wanted him to get out for good—wanted him to be more than the dirt that raised him, wanted college, clean living, a desk job, something unbroken. But clean had never been an option. Clean was for people who hadn’t been running their whole lives. And Sam had been running since he was old enough to walk. They both had. California was just the word they gave the direction they were always running toward.

“She wants me to get into college,” he’d said once, the words flat and half-defeated, a cigarette trembling between his fingers as he leaned out the attic window, exhaling smoke like it hurt. “Don’t know how she expects me to. I’m a fuckin’ idiot. Can’t read for shit. Got held back two years ‘cause I couldn’t even sound out a damn menu.” His voice was bitter, laced with shame he tried to hide behind his usual grin, but even that couldn’t hold under the weight of what he believed about himself.

“You don’t have to go,” Y/N had said, quiet.

“I know. But we’ve gotta get out somehow, don’t we? Don’t you wanna see California someday?” His voice softened. “I’ve been thinking. I’ll go to school in Mobile. Get a degree. Save up. Buy us a house. Then we can get married. Don’t that sound good?”

But it didn’t. Not to her. It sounded like goodbye dressed up as a promise. It sounded like the first step toward him forgetting her. What if Mobile gave him something better? What if he realized there were girls who didn’t come with baggage and broken pieces? What if she just… disappeared?

“You’ll still call from Mobile, won’t you?” she asked, trying not to let the fear seep into her voice.

He looked at her, eyes all soft edges. “Course I will. And I’ll be back for Christmas.”

That night she went home aching everywhere—her thighs, her heart, the part of her brain that still dared to dream. The next morning, still sore and sunburnt from yesterday’s sun, she looked her mother straight in the eye over breakfast and said, “I’m gonna marry Samson Wallace.”

Her mama blinked at her like she’d just said she was running off to join a circus. “He ask you yet?”

“No. But he’s gonna. Four years from now.”

“Hm,” her mother muttered, reaching for the salt. “Maybe by then you’ll find someone better.”

“I won’t,” Y/N said, like it was fact written in scripture. “I’m gonna marry him and we’re gonna leave.”

“Uh-huh. Pass the butter, honey.”

“Mama, I love him.”

“And I love fried Oreos. Don’t mean I’m gonna marry ‘em.”

Y/N blinked hard. You didn’t cry in front of your mama over a boy unless you really, truly meant it.

“Why don’t you like him?”

Her mother let out one of those long, bone-deep sighs, the kind that seemed to come from every disappointment she’d ever swallowed whole. “Because he ain’t good enough for you, Y/N. You’re a good girl from a good family. You should be with someone decent. Not some kid can’t sew up his own jeans. That boy’s gonna break your heart. I don’t want to watch it happen.”

Y/N didn’t argue. Didn’t yell. Didn’t beg her mother to see it differently. She just dropped her fork so hard it rattled the china, stood from her chair like the ghost of something sacred, and stormed out the door. The screen banged shut behind her with a crack loud as thunder. She didn’t look back. There was no use in speaking when absence was the only language her mother respected.

And sure enough, Mama had been right.

Samson Wallace did break her heart—but not in the way she expected. Not with betrayal or distance or some other girl. He broke it clean. Surgical. Quiet. He carved a space into her soul, took up residence there, and then vanished, leaving it hollow and echoing. He didn’t have to say goodbye. He just stopped showing up. Some nights she’d lie awake wishing she could undo it all—wishing she’d never sat beneath that flagpole that first day, never noticed the black eye, never answered when he asked if she was smart. But if God Himself came down, hand extended with a chance to rewrite the whole damn thing, she’d still take the pain. She’d take every bruise, every stupid laugh, every sleepless night full of longing and static and woodsmoke. She’d take it all, if it meant one more night with him. One more hour. One more second of his body pressed against hers in the dark.

Sleep was a stranger. Her body, wrecked with memory and time, ached in places that felt bone-deep, joints creaking like an old porch left too long in the rain. Her chest was splintered—something sharp wedged beneath the breastbone, not enough to kill her, just enough to hurt every time she breathed. She rose from the mattress like it weighed a thousand pounds, crawling onto her knees, folding her hands not because she believed but because she was desperate. Prayer wasn’t part of her life anymore—not really—but when silence was too loud, when grief rose like bile and the whiskey was gone, she still knew how to clasp her fingers together and beg the dark for something kinder. When her voice cracked, when her tongue couldn’t form a proper plea, she let her silence speak in its place, let the stillness become the prayer.

She prayed that her mother might finally learn to live alone, to find some peace in the quiet she'd never made peace with before. She prayed that Rhonda Portnoy—so worn and weary and ghosted by loss—might finally be able to sleep through a night without dreaming of body bags or empty chairs at dinner. And she prayed for Sam, wherever the hell he was—California, Mobile, buried in some anonymous ditch along I-65—that he was safe. Warm. Alive. Still laughing at his own jokes, still leaning out of windows with a cigarette between his teeth and that crooked grin that made her chest ache like a bruise. She prayed for him like a widow might pray for a man she never married, like he was both her ghost and her god.

And if all that was too much, if the heavens had long since closed their doors to girls like her, she asked for only one thing, the one she knew she'd never stop asking for: Keep him safe, Lord. I can’t be there. I can’t watch him anymore. Keep him safe for me.

The day he left had seared itself into her memory with a clarity so cruel it felt like punishment. It was one of those days where the air carried something unnatural, something charged. The clouds didn’t roll in gray—they came in black, thick as coal smoke and mean as dogs. Even the wind felt electric, brushing the hairs on her arms with the promise of a storm. Nature had braced itself for change, and she should have done the same.

She was walking home from Packie’s, her apron sticking to her damp skin, feet sore from the tile, hands still raw from wiping down counters, when old Credence Gordon hollered from his porch, voice rasped with cigarette years. “Gon’ be a big one,” he warned, pointing toward the horizon where the clouds boiled and bruised. “Tornado, prob’ly. You best get on home, girl.”

She barely had time to toss her apron and unlace her shoes when the knock came—not at the front like normal folks, but at the back door, the way only one soul ever came.

Sam.

He looked like the storm itself had spit him out—hair soaked, shirt clinging to him like a second skin, eyes bright with something dangerous and eager. That grin was still there, crooked and easy, the kind that could undo her with one look. Her chest clenched like a trap snapping shut.

“Your mama asleep?” he asked, whispering like a teenager sneaking in through a window.

“Uh-huh,” she murmured, stepping back to let him inside, even though she already felt the edges of the world shifting.

“I got somethin’ big to tell you,” he said, stripping off his soaked jacket and flinging it onto the couch like it owed him money. “And I mean big. Real big.”

“Alright, alright,” she said, half-smiling. “Jesus, what is it?”

“First—grab me a Coke?” he asked, grinning like a fool.

“Fuck you, Sam,” she muttered, already heading to the fridge because she always did, even when she shouldn’t have.

He cracked the can open like it was celebration champagne, took a long swig, drew it out, soaking in the moment. She could see it on his face—that boyish joy, lit from the inside like Christmas lights on a dark night.

“Okay,” he finally said. “You ready?”

“Been ready,” she replied, bracing herself.

“I got a job,” he said, eyes blazing. “A real job. Eighty grand a year. My uncle’s got a car factory up in Chicago. Called my mama this morning. Said he needs help running the repair side. Said he remembered how much I like fixin’ shit. He’s flyin’ me out next week.”

The room tilted. The air sucked itself out of her lungs. She blinked and tried to smile, but her face wouldn’t quite obey. “Well. That’s… that’s great, Sam.”

He nodded like a boy showing off a trophy. “Can you believe it? Chicago.”

“That’s real far.”

“Yeah.”

“So what day are we leaving?”

He looked at her like she’d spoken in another language. “What do you mean?”

“What day, Sam?” Her voice was still soft, still measured, but something inside it trembled.

“Well… it’s just me. He’s only payin’ for one ticket.”

It landed like a fist to the stomach. Her vision went tight around the edges. “Oh. So what day is it?”

“Next Thursday. Gotta get up early to catch the plane.”

“For how long?”

“Dunno. As long as it takes to save for a house. I ain’t draggin’ you to my uncle’s basement.”

“That could be years.”

He shrugged. “Could be.”

She stood still, her hands loose at her sides like they didn’t know what to do. The whole thing spun inside her head like debris caught in a tornado, fast and disorienting. Sam—her Sam—was leaving without her? It didn’t register. It couldn’t. Her life had been wrapped around his like a vine around a post. She’d built her future in his image.

“But… what about me?” Her voice cracked, so small it barely made it out.

He took a breath like he’d been waiting for that question. “C’mon, baby. You’ll be okay. I’ll call you every day. Maybe once I get settled, I’ll fly you out.”

She looked down at the floor, hoping it might open and take her away. “I don’t care where I am, Sam. I just don’t wanna be without you.”

He stepped toward her. Tried to put his arms around her.

She stepped back.

“You think I wanna leave you?” he asked, voice rising. “This ain’t easy, Y/N. I’m doin’ it for you. For us. Don’t you want a real life?”

“If you were doin’ it for me,” she said, arms crossed tight over her chest, “you wouldn’t leave.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, that old bruise beneath his eye catching the light, faint but still there. The first mark she ever noticed on him. The last she’d ever see.

“I do love you,” he said. “And I am leaving.”

“Then go,” she snapped, voice shaking. “Go on and leave, Samson Wallace. And you best pray I still remember your name by the time you come back.”

His face broke then, just a flicker, like something caving in. His jaw clenched and unclenched. His eyes shimmered. But no tears fell. They never did.

“Sounds like you’ll have no trouble forgettin’ me anyway,” he whispered.

And then he left. No fanfare. No apology. Just turned and walked out the back door like he always had, only this time, he didn’t turn back. She watched him go across the wet yard, his figure shrinking into the storm, until the trees swallowed him whole.

She knew the moment he vanished behind the treeline that she’d made a mistake. A terrible, irreversible mistake.

Samson Wallace became the second man to leave her. The first had been her father.

Alone in the kitchen, her back hunched against the cabinets like a woman twice her age, the bottle of Jack pressed tight to her lips like a communion chalice for the damned, Y/N had nothing but time and too much of it. The whiskey moved like tar down her throat, coating everything it touched, burning as it went—as if pain could be cauterized by more pain, as if the fire in her gut might purify what was already long-since ruined. Her thoughts spun mean and wild, a carousel of if-onlys and what-ifs, and for a split second she imagined running barefoot into the storm, slicing her feet open on gravel and glass, showing up at Sam’s porch dripping blood and rain, beating her fists against his door until they broke open like fruit, until he forgave her or kissed her or killed her. But outside, the storm had already arrived, loud and ragged as grief.

Just like Credence Gordon predicted, it tore into Abbeville with the fury of some long-neglected god, a thing hungry for repentance and deaf to mercy. It wasn’t rain—it was judgment. The sky peeled back its skin and screamed, and the wind moved like a wrecking ball through the trees, yanking them up by their roots like weeds in God’s garden. Roofs peeled off like tin can lids, fences flew like matchsticks, and power lines danced and spat blue lightning into puddles like vipers in water. The news said three died that night—confirmed, counted, buried. But the sheriff, a man who’d aged twenty years in one long evening, his boots caked in red mud and his eyes like open graves, told anyone who asked that the truth was worse. That the storm had taken more. That some absences would never be filled.

Samson Wallace, eighteen, was among them. Officially, unofficially—gone.

When the winds died down and the first stunned survivors crawled from cellars and closets and bathtubs, Y/N walked. Not home. Not to her mother’s. She walked through what the storm had left behind—a town stripped bare, dirt in the air like gunpowder, sky the color of spoiled milk. Her arms were limp at her sides, her eyes locked on nothing, her dress clinging wet and ruined to her skin. She stopped in front of the Wallace place, and when Mrs. Wallace opened the door, squinting at her like the sun was too much, she said, “Sam?” in a voice that already knew the answer.

“I thought he was with you,” Y/N said, her voice brittle as ash.

“No... he left early last night,” Mrs. Wallace replied, crossing her arms, her mouth a flat, bloodless line. “I haven’t seen him. Sorry.”

And then the door closed like the world does when it decides it’s done with you.

She didn’t go home. She walked. Past the downed telephone poles and the silent gas stations, past the ruined church with its steeple lying like a snapped neck across the parking lot. She wandered until her feet blistered and bled, until she was standing under the sputtering neon of the Burger King sign blinking like a pulse. The sheriff came later that night—hat in hand, sorrow carved into his face like a confession.

They found Sam’s truck. Out past Mobile. Upside down in a ditch, windshield cracked like a spiderweb, blood smeared on the passenger seat. No body. No prints. No footprints. Just the wreck and the wreckage it left in her.

The story they gave her was thin and quiet and terrible. They said he must’ve left in a fury, hit the backroads, tried to outrun the storm and failed. Maybe he crawled away after the crash, confused and bleeding, walked off into the trees and got swallowed by them. Maybe he’s still out there, some ghost with cracked ribs and a compass that only points west, still walking toward a dream called California, a place too big and too far for the likes of them.

But he never came back. Not that night, not the next, not in all the nights that followed. It was as if the earth itself had consumed him, plucked him from time, and folded the map shut behind him.

She drank every day after that. Not in bars. Not around people. Alone, in silence, in rooms that remembered. The bottle was her clock now—one drink to mark the morning, one to pace the afternoon, a handful to quiet the night. She saw him everywhere. The flash of his smile in the mirror. The shape of his shoulders in a passing stranger. The heat of his last words echoing in her bones like tinnitus. She had told him to go. She had watched him leave.

And when she cried, it was not for forgiveness. It was for memory. For the knowing. She wept into her mother’s lap, sobbing like a child who’d scraped both knees on God’s front steps, and her mother stroked her hair the way mothers do when they don’t know how to fix something.

“Maybe it’s for the better,” her mother had murmured. “Now you can forget about him.”

But she didn’t want to forget. Forgetting him would mean he had truly gone.

She whispered his name in pews. She scribbled it into journals she never meant to read. She drove to the edge of town and waited, hour after hour, for the battered silhouette of his truck to crest the hill. She went back to that abandoned house near Mobile, the one he called their California. She walked through the ruin, through all the dust and mold and silence, and found nothing. Not a hair. Not a footprint. Not a trace.

He hadn’t run.

He had disappeared.

And yet, something in her refused that version of the story. Her soul didn’t believe in vanishings. A boy like Sam didn’t just dissolve. He left a mark. Somewhere. She felt it. A scent on the wind. A smudge on glass. A word unsaid but still vibrating in the air.

Curled on the mattress where he once held her, she let the tears come quiet and slow. No sobbing now. Just the slow leak of grief that never healed. The bedsheets absorbed it like scripture, salt-and-water gospel written in flesh. Her throat burned—not from drink this time, but from words she couldn’t force out.

She remembered a night, long ago, when they lay tangled together in that same room, all sweat and skin and promise. The heat between them still humming through her like a prayer she didn’t understand.

“What’re you scared for?” he asked, voice thick with drowsiness, his breath a whisper against her shoulder.

“I dunno,” she’d said. “Never had anything good before. I’m scared you’ll go away.”

He kissed her shoulder, slow and warm. “Aw, I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“What if you die?”

“I’ll crawl outta that casket just to see you again.”

She’d turned, their faces inches apart in the velvet dark. “What if I die?”

“Then you’ll die mine.”

And at the time, that had been enough. It had stilled her fears. It had sent her to sleep.

But now the dark was cruel. The dark did not cradle. It suffocated.

She dragged herself up from the bed, knees creaking, lungs tight. She crawled to the window like a thing dying, flung it open, and screamed into the wind. Not words. Not a name. Just a sound—raw and brutal and human.

When the morning came, pale and thin as hospital light, she slid her feet into her shoes and walked out the door. No bag. No toothbrush. No goodbye. She didn’t know where she was going. Maybe Mobile. Maybe nowhere. But it had to be away. Away from this house, this graveyard, these goddamn ghosts.

Maybe Sam had vanished. Maybe she would too.

Maybe California wasn’t a place but a myth—something you chased and never caught. Maybe both of them had just walked into the fog one day, hearts full and unfinished, and never came back.

Maybe that’s how the story ends.

Not with a funeral.

But with a long road and an empty seat.

She drove until her spine ached and her hands felt numb from gripping the wheel too hard. The roads unraveled like ribbon beneath her tires, slick with recent rain, hemmed by cypress trees and cotton fields long since harvested. Mississippi looked a lot like Alabama if you squinted—same flat towns with their gas stations doubling as diners, same half-burnt churches sagging under the weight of their crosses, same tired dogs roaming the shoulders like ghosts on patrol. But it wasn’t Alabama, and that was enough for now.

She didn’t remember crossing the state line. Might’ve been near Meridian. Or maybe she’d passed it somewhere on Highway 84 without even noticing, her mind adrift, her eyes locked on the road like it might deliver her somewhere worth being.

The sun had long since dipped behind the tree line when she pulled into the parking lot of a sagging roadside motel—The Delta Drift Inn, according to the peeling sign out front. Half the letters flickered or didn’t light up at all. Vacancy buzzed red like a dying star.

She killed the engine and sat in the car a long minute, the silence rushing in to fill the void where the radio had been. Her legs ached. Her throat felt like it had been lined with cotton and smoke. She could smell the miles on herself—sweat and old denim, cigarette ash and the faint trace of motor oil from that janky gas station pump back in Lucedale.

The office door gave a half-hearted jingle as she stepped inside, a brittle sound like bones knocking together. The fluorescents buzzed overhead with that sickly, uneven hum only old motel bulbs could make, casting everything in a pale, hospital-light haze that made even the air look unclean. The front desk was cluttered with paper scraps and off-brand gum, and behind it sat a man in his fifties—or maybe older, the kind of face that time had stopped counting years on and just started eroding. His hair clung to his scalp in thin, greasy wisps, and his skin was the color of old paperbacks left too long in the sun. He didn’t glance up when she walked in, not even when the bell announced her like some broken-down bride.

The television beside him blared some dead-eyed infomercial—cheap knives cutting through cinderblocks, some slick host grinning like he’d just figured out how to cheat death. The man’s eyes flicked to her just long enough to do a quick tally—woman, road-worn, alone, maybe dangerous if pushed—but he didn’t ask questions. Places like this never did. They were designed to forget you the second you left.

“How much for a room?” she asked, her voice dry as ash, brittle around the edges like it had been used too hard too long.

He kept scribbling on a form that didn’t need filling. “How much you got?”

She didn’t blink. “Ten dollars.”

A pause, just long enough to taste the silence. “Ten’s plenty.”

The key he handed her wasn’t a card but a brass relic with chipped green plastic, stamped with the number 9. No paperwork. No ID. No warning. She took it, nodded once, and left the office like a ghost.

Room nine smelled like forgotten things. Mold, sweat, bleach that hadn't won the war. The light flickered when she hit the switch, sputtering like it resented the effort. The walls were yellowed from a hundred smokers before her, the wallpaper peeling at the corners like it had tried to run once and failed. The bed was a slab, the sheets stiff and starched with time, the kind that crackled when she threw herself down like a body dropped into a coffin. The sink coughed when she turned the faucet, then spat out brown water for a few seconds before giving up entirely.

She didn’t complain. She cleaned what she could with a thin towel and the edge of her sleeve. Straightened the bed out of habit, not hope. Opened the curtains to a view of nothing—just a cracked parking lot, a broken Coke machine, and a flickering gas station sign across the road that read ICE • BEER • PRAY like some accidental gospel.

Sleep didn’t come. Her body was begging for it, muscles slack with fatigue, head heavy, but her mind chewed through the dark like a feral thing. She watched the shadow of ceiling fan blades cut across the wall, heard the occasional shuffle of other lives behind the walls—some man coughing, a television murmuring a crime show, a baby crying or a woman pretending not to.

By one a.m., the room had turned into a coffin. Too hot, too still, the kind of air that pressed down on your chest and made you remember every wrong thing you’d ever said, every door you didn’t walk through. The silence wasn’t silence—it was pressure, humming beneath the walls like a held breath about to snap. Sleep had abandoned her hours ago, maybe days, maybe forever. She gave up trying, slid off the stiff bed like something molting, and stepped out into the hallway barefoot, the motel carpet rough under her feet, the cold air wrapping around her like judgment.

The night was sharp now, cooler than it had any right to be in a Mississippi June, the wind tugging at her hair, chilling her bare arms. She leaned into the railing with the weight of someone who didn’t care if it held or gave way. A cigarette burned between her fingers, its ember flickering like a weak heartbeat. She inhaled deeply, like smoke was the only thing still filling her with heat. Below her, the parking lot stretched out—cracked asphalt, her battered truck, a dead vending machine, and a van with rust curling up its side like ivy. The only lights were from a busted streetlamp and the pale hum of a gas station sign across the road, casting everything in a jaundiced, washed-out glow.

Behind closed curtains, lives moved. Room six was rhythm and breathless grunts—sex without love, or maybe love with too much baggage. Room seven crackled with anger, a man shouting into a phone, curses flung like darts. Room eight held something quieter: the soft sound of a boy pressing his face to the window, watching the nothing of the sky, trying to believe there was more.

She smoked in silence, letting the night crawl under her skin. Her thoughts, as always, turned to Sam—how things ended, not with a fight or a bang but with a silence that expanded until it drowned her. He didn’t walk away; he evaporated, leaving only questions and the taste of his name on her tongue. The memory of his hands, the sound of his laugh, the feel of him leaving. The wind brushed her hair across her face, and she let it. It felt good to be moved, even by something as meaningless as weather.

Then came the sound. A door opening—sharp, sudden, like a shot fired down a long hallway of memory. She flinched before she realized she had. Her heart jumped, a reflex that had never unlearned how to brace for pain.

A man stepped into view, lit a match, and cupped it against the wind with a quiet elegance. He wasn’t young. Mid-thirties, maybe more, his face a roadmap of old fights and worse nights. The match burned orange in his hand, casting a flickering glow over his features—sunken eyes, bruised jaw, lips pulled tight around the cigarette. For a moment, he didn’t see her. Then he did.

Their eyes met, and something old and unspoken passed between them—something hungry, something lonely, something that didn’t ask for names. He walked over, slow and unbothered, and leaned on the railing beside her, close but not touching. He didn’t ask if he could. He just did. No words passed at first. Only smoke. Only breath. Only silence shared between two strangers orbiting the same dark.

She remembered something her mama used to say in the kind of tone that was more warning than wisdom: Don’t talk to strangers, honey. Not unless you wanna get kidnapped—or worse. Fall in love.

The night clung to her skin, tight and damp, as she glanced at him through the haze of smoke and broken sleep. He didn’t speak right away. Just exhaled and stared off into the horizon like it owed him something.

“Shouldn’t be out here alone this late,” he said eventually, not looking at her.

She crossed her arms over her chest, holding herself together like she might come apart otherwise. “Just needed a smoke.”

He nodded, dragged on his cigarette. “Who broke your heart?”

The question wasn’t playful. It was matter-of-fact, like he was asking what time it was or if she believed in God.

She blinked. “What?”

“That’s the only reason anyone smokes out here at one in the goddamn morning,” he said, eyes still on the dark. “It’s heartbreak. Always is.”

She looked at him then—really looked—and what she saw wasn’t charm or danger, but damage. The kind that wore its scars like medals, not because he was proud, but because he didn’t have the energy to hide them anymore. The busted lip, cracked and swollen, looked weeks old but angry still. The gauze on his right hand was wrapped tight and stained through, and he flexed it sometimes like it still ached. But it was the posture that said the most: shoulders hunched like he expected every sound to be a threat, every footstep to lead to trouble. He carried the kind of tension that didn't come from nerves—it came from survival. He looked like a man who’d taken too many hits and stayed standing anyway, not because he was strong, but because he didn’t know what else to do.

“Jesus,” she muttered, half-laughing, her voice thinned by smoke and fatigue. “You want me to count?”

He smirked, though it pulled awkward on the bruises. It wasn’t cocky. It wasn’t even confident. It was tired and half-broken and strangely gentle. “Don’t need numbers,” he said, voice low. “Just stories. And I’m in room twelve if you change your mind.”

The pause that followed wasn’t heavy with tension. It hung in the air like smoke does—lazy, natural, maybe even inevitable. Not a yes. Not a no. Just something hanging there between them. Then he stubbed his cigarette out on the metal railing, flicked the filter into the dark like a dead firefly, and walked away. Didn’t look back right away—just near the end, when he reached his door, casting her a glance over his shoulder. Not a question. Not even a real invitation. Just a look that said, you know where to find me.

She should’ve gone back inside. Should’ve shut the door and locked it and buried herself in a pillow and the scent of bleach and old fabric softener. But something about the way he walked away—shoulders bowed, steps slow like he wasn’t sure where he was going or why—made her linger. Something in his stillness echoed Sam’s old silences. That way he never quite said what he felt, but wore it anyway—in the slump of his spine, in the twitch of his jaw. She hadn’t seen that kind of sadness on a face in a long time. It pulled her like gravity.

And maybe that was all it took.

She sat on the edge of something—his world, her breaking point, maybe both. Like a stray animal at a doorstep, rain-soaked and trembling, not brave enough to push through the door but too tired to run again. She’d spent the whole damn day wandering streets that didn’t want her, looking for scraps—food, gas, clarity, something to give her a reason to keep moving. All she found was the edge of her own breath and the ache in her soles. It was either room twelve or the hollow of the concrete overpass she’d passed an hour ago. One had heat and walls. The other had rats and rain.

She knocked. And waited.

The door creaked open slow, hinges groaning like they knew better. He stood shirtless in the soft amber motel light, jeans hanging loose, a fresh bruise blooming just above his hip. A faded tattoo curved across his collarbone—a name, maybe a warning. The room behind him was nothing but shadows and dust and the sharp scent of smoke embedded deep in the carpet. He didn’t say much. Didn’t need to. Just stepped aside and let her in.

“Want something to drink?” he asked. His voice wasn’t smooth, but it was quiet. Careful. Like someone used to loud rooms who’d learned to speak soft.

She shook her head, eyes fixed on the floor. Couldn’t look at him yet. Couldn’t afford to see whatever it was that might make her hesitate. He watched her the way people watch strays—curious, cautious, like maybe she’d bolt if he moved too fast. Like maybe she wasn’t entirely real.

He pulled out a chair for her and took the one across, elbows resting on his thighs, hands hanging between his knees. His fingers were twitchy, the gauze a dull white flag across his knuckles.

“You done this before?” he asked. No judgment. No edge. Just a fact-finding question, like checking the weather before a long drive.

“Uh-huh.”

“If you changed your mind, the door’s right there.”

She didn’t answer. But she didn’t leave either.

It wasn’t the shelter she needed—God, no. Not the roof over her head or the wafer-thin mattress or the television bolted down like it might try to escape. It wasn’t even the bed. What she needed was that stillness. That brief moment where someone else’s breath filled the room. When two bodies didn’t have to mean danger or regret. It had been too damn long since someone touched her without needing her to disappear after. Too long since someone looked and didn’t see a debt, a mess, a means to forget someone else. She’d been circling the hollow Sam left behind, orbiting it like something small and burning. Sam had vanished into a ghost, and with him, she’d shrunk into the empty space he left. She wasn’t trying to patch the wound. Not really. But maybe, just for this night, she could press herself against the wreckage of another soul and feel something besides cold.

When he kissed her, it wasn’t sweet. It was fire and teeth and the smoke still caught behind his molars. And it made her shiver—not from fear, but from the recognition of it. That old taste of nicotine and need. She’d leaned into it, let it brand her, let it whisper yes across her nerves in the only language she still understood. There wasn’t grace in it. There wasn’t even hunger. There was just escape.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

Weeks passed like smoke—slipping through her fingers before she could name them. She and the man who called himself Hunter Soto moved through Mississippi like ghosts with nowhere else to haunt, crossing backroads and low-rent towns, trailing motel receipts and forgotten gas stations in their wake. She wasn’t any closer to California than she’d been the day she walked out of her mama’s house, but she wasn’t alone anymore, and that was something. Maybe everything. From one sagging mattress to the next, she followed him, and Hunter never seemed to mind. He had the look of a man who'd long since stopped expecting company, but didn’t flinch when it came anyway.

He told her things sometimes, not always in order. That he was from Virginia. That the cops got him for fraud—check kiting, mostly—and that he did time for it, not much, but enough to lose everything. His kids were gone, his ex-wife back in Indiana, and his family, what little of it there was, had scattered like roaches when the law came down. He talked like none of it mattered, like he was already ash. She pretended to understand—nodded at the right moments, smoked when he smoked—but they both knew she didn’t. She was sixteen. And what they were doing, what they’d already done, crossed lines that couldn’t be uncrossed. But neither of them said the word for it. Neither of them tried to stop.

No one asked her age. No one wanted to. She looked old enough, moved like someone with sorrow stitched into her bones. And Hunter had a way of keeping attention off them when it mattered. He could be charming if he wanted, meaner than hell when he didn’t. She saw it once, outside a convenience store in Starkville—some drunk who got too curious, asked too many questions. Hunter didn't raise his voice. Didn’t have to. His knuckles did the talking.

At night, she curled into his side beneath threadbare blankets, her cheek pressed to his chest, listening to the rough thud of his heart. The rooms were always the same—walls yellowed by years of smoke and silence, an air conditioner struggling against its own decay. But in the dark, she wasn’t alone. That counted for something.

“How long we gonna keep doing this?” she asked one night, her breath warm against the bandages wrapped around his hand.

He didn’t open his eyes. Just muttered, “’Til you run.”

She almost answered. Then I won’t. But the words stuck behind her teeth, fragile and dangerous. She wasn’t sure they were true.

She gathered him in pieces, like broken glass. A patchwork of memories and half-told truths. He’d never say exactly how old he was—maybe thirty, maybe more—but she knew he’d lived more than most men twice his age. There was weight behind his silences, a kind of gravity that pulled her in. He hated stillness, hated routine. He said walls made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. So he drifted—job to job, town to town—always one step ahead of whatever ghost chased him. He burned fast and never looked back. She loved that about him. Loved that he was fire, even if she knew fire never stayed.

And like anything on fire, it eventually blew up.

Maybe it was a Tuesday. Maybe not. Days lost their meaning in that kind of life. The motel door shuddered under a heavy fist, the voice on the other side already halfway to shouting. Hunter pulled on his boxers, swearing under his breath, already halfway to the door.

“Time’s up, Soto,” the owner growled, tobacco thick in his mouth. “You’re done here.”

“I’m payin’ you tomorrow—”

“You said that yesterday.”

Hunter squared his shoulders, jaw clenched. “Didn’t have it yesterday.”

“You got it now?”

“Maybe.”

“Then maybe I’ll throw your sorry ass into the street.”

She didn’t flinch. Just dressed in silence, her hands shaking only slightly. Shouting didn’t rattle her the way it used to. Not after the fire. Not after the hole her daddy left behind. Her anger didn’t come loud anymore. It came cold, creeping like frost along her spine.

They didn’t wait for the door to slam. They were already on the bike, her arms around him like a prayer. He didn’t say a word, but she could feel it in him—the tension, the fury, the quiet storm brewing beneath his skin. They tore out of the lot like they were being chased, gravel spitting beneath the tires.

“Where we goin’ now?” she asked, voice half-swallowed by the wind.

“Somewhere,” he said.

“But we got no money.”

He didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was thin and sharp. “Sure we do.”

He pulled into the lot behind the old bank like he’d done it before, like his hands already knew the weight of a crowbar and the shape of bad decisions. The place was a grave—shuttered windows, rust crawling down the awning, a crooked SouthTrust sign faded to the ghost of itself. Nobody had breathed life into that building in years, and even the weeds seemed too tired to grow through the cracked asphalt. It was the kind of place the world forgets on purpose.

Then something inside him shifted. The loose way he usually moved—the lazy roll of a man half-asleep at the wheel of his own life—snapped tight. His eyes went sharp, his breath faster. He moved like a cornered dog, like the kind of man who knew he was already too far gone to turn around. From the bag came a crowbar, long and scraped and mean-looking, and when he gripped it, his hands didn’t shake. His shoulders squared like he was squaring off against God.

“What are you doing?” she asked, voice thin and cracked, dread rising in her throat like smoke from a dying fire.

“Keep quiet,” he said without looking at her.

She stepped back, not sure if she was more afraid of what he was about to do or how easy it was to let him do it. The crowbar came down hard—once, twice—teeth on metal. Screeches filled the air, bolts snapping loose like bone under pressure. The ATM shrieked as he tore at it, like it had done something personal. Sweat beaded at his temples, his shirt darkened down the back, and still he didn’t stop. It wasn’t rage—it was something colder. Determined. Like survival.

She watched as he looped a frayed rope around the guts of the machine, tying it off to the back of the bike with hands that had been bandaged more than once in the last few weeks. Every movement was fast, rough, urgent. Like he wasn’t just stealing—he was running from something that hadn’t caught him yet.

“Drive,” he barked.

She blinked. “What?”

“Drive, damn it!”

There was no room for questions. No room for the old fear that rose up whenever she was asked to act instead of survive. She climbed on, her fingers locking around the grips like they were lifelines. Her chest felt tight, like it used to when her father’s boots stomped too loud down the hall, when the smell of whiskey filled the house before the yelling even started. The cold cut through her shirt, through her sweat, but it didn’t stop her. Nothing ever had. She kicked the stand back. Jammed the gear. The bike bucked under her like a thing waking up angry. Her hands didn’t shake. Not anymore.

Then came the sound. A metallic shriek—ugly, furious—the rope tightening and yanking until the front of the machine exploded open like a ribcage giving way. The noise echoed down the empty street like a church bell made of teeth. And something in her broke right then, or maybe it was something old that had finally finished cracking. She didn’t look back.

The wall rushed toward her, and for a breathless second, it felt like flying straight into the edge of the world. She hit the brake hard. The tires screamed. The bike jerked to a stop, her body lurching forward with it. The silence after was thick—no sirens, no birds. Just the thunder of her heart, thudding against her ribs like it wanted out.

And then came Hunter’s voice—ragged, breathless, laughing like a man who’d stared into the void and seen his own smile grinning back. “Jesus Christ! Goddamn. We hit the fuckin’ jackpot, baby.”

She turned to see him coming at her fast, dragging a duffel that bulged with cash, his other hand flinging bills into the night like they were rose petals at a funeral. The wind caught them, scattered them like ashes. He didn’t care. The bag was full. That was all that mattered.

“Hold onto that,” he said, tossing it to her like it was nothing.

She caught it on instinct. The weight hit her arms and her gut at the same time. He swung up behind her, one fluid motion, his arms wrapping around her waist just as the bike roared back to life.

They left the town like a bullet fired into darkness. The highway unspooled ahead of them—endless, black, humming with danger. The stars were distant pinholes, watching without blinking. Her hair tore behind her, her cheeks burned from the cold, and behind her, Hunter was laughing again. That wild, weightless laugh of a man with no exit plan and too much heat in his veins. He pressed tighter against her back, and she leaned into him like she might fall without him there. It wasn’t love—not exactly. But it was something close. Something raw.

They crossed into Alabama sometime near dawn, their shadows stretching long behind them. The next motel was worse than the last—stained carpet, sour air, wallpaper peeling like old skin. The duffel slumped in the corner like a dead thing, bleeding green onto the floor. They didn’t speak much. Words didn’t have a place in what followed.

He kissed her like he was trying to brand her. Rough, desperate. Their clothes came off in silence. No sweet talk. No promises. Just hunger. Just bodies trying to erase everything they couldn’t outrun. They moved like addicts, limbs tangled, pain and want laced so tightly they couldn’t tell one from the other. When it was done, they lay there, breath heavy, the air thick with sex and sweat and regret.

She wiped her mouth, smirked faintly. “Hunter,” she whispered, “I think I love you.”

He didn’t look at her. Just stared at the ceiling, like the cracks might spell something out. “What would your daddy think if he heard you say that?”

She rolled over, the smile turning hard at the edges. “He’s seven years in the ground. Don’t think he’s got opinions anymore.”

“Your mama, then?”

“She’d call me stupid and go back to her game show.”

He didn’t laugh, but something in his face changed. He looked at her like she was a puzzle he didn’t want to solve—like maybe he already knew how it ended. She was sixteen. Just a girl on paper. But grief aged her. Sorrow wrapped around her like second skin. Maybe he saw a little of himself in the way she stared out windows like they were escape hatches. Maybe she saw a little of Sam in the way he moved like he couldn’t sit still for long. Or maybe they were just two wrecks who’d collided, bleeding into each other out of need, not fate.

“C’mere, girl,” he said, voice rough.

She pressed into him like she meant to disappear there—skin warm, breath slow, her damp hair clinging to his chest in tangled strands. He didn’t move, didn’t speak, just let his arms wrap around her and inhaled the scent of sweat, motel linen, and something else—something like grief. The room around them was dying a quiet death, wallpaper curling inward like burned leaves, the AC sputtering weak air into corners that had known too much smoke, too many secrets. But wrapped up in her, with the bag of stolen bills slumped in the shadows like a sleeping dog, it felt like enough. Just for that moment, that breathless, borrowed hour between midnight and sunrise—it felt like maybe they could make it through the night without the world collapsing.

She was the kind of girl who slipped under your skin without trying. Not loud, not flashy, not some neon flare of a woman who left lipstick on collars or perfume in the air. No, she was the opposite—quiet and unshakeable, like smoke in the rafters or blood in the water. The kind of girl you didn’t remember by name, but by what went silent when she was gone. The hollow her absence made in a room, the way music never sounded quite right after. And Hunter, who had known plenty of girls, plenty of nights, knew without needing to be told that she’d live in his bones long after this. Not like love. Not like regret. Like a ghost that didn’t need haunting rights—just space to linger.

He watched her sleep. Watched her chest rise and fall like a metronome for all the things he couldn't say out loud. There was something sacred in her stillness, even if nothing about either of them was holy. Outside, a semi growled down the interstate. Tires whispered across wet pavement. Somewhere a dog barked, unanswered. And still he lay there, wide-eyed and wired, feeling the weight of her curled up against him like the storm she was—gathered in his arms, soft and dangerous.

He didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. Not with that kind of girl breathing against him. Not when part of him already knew—sooner or later, she’d leave, or he’d make her. And either way, he’d be wrecked. Not in the loud, dramatic way of movie heartbreaks, but in the quiet, enduring kind. The kind that stains your mornings. The kind you don’t talk about because it never really ends.

She made a sound in her sleep—a small one, like a memory escaping. He held her tighter. Not because he thought it would keep her. Just because he knew it wouldn’t.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

At night, they crumbled into roadside motels like ghosts seeking shelter—blue-lit sanctuaries with thin walls and thinner curtains, where the ceilings pressed low and the wallpaper peeled in strips like tired skin. The beds were stiff, haunted by the sweat of past travelers and sins too old to name, but to Y/N they were almost holy. Not for comfort, but for stillness. There, beneath the breathless hum of window units and the faint rustle of life outside, she lay curled against Hunter’s back or chest or whatever part of him was closest, and it was enough. Sleep rarely lasted long, often broken by shifting limbs or a sudden gasp—sometimes his, sometimes hers. In the silence, they clawed for each other like addicts, their bodies aching for touch, for heat, for anything that made them forget. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even comfort. It was survival, stitched together by hands that didn’t know how to hold gently.

By day, they were wilder things. Creatures of sun and speed, burning westward down state highways and service roads, always hungry, always fleeing. Maybe it was the law on their heels. Maybe it was ghosts. Maybe it was just the memory of the people they’d once been, trying to catch up. The motorcycle roared like a promise beneath them, and Y/N sat with her arms locked tight around Hunter’s middle, her cheek pressed to his back, her eyes burning behind squinted lids. Her skin was burnt raw by sun and road dust, her jeans stiff with grit and sweat, and still she rode—because movement was the only way to keep from sinking. Stillness felt too much like death.

Hunter didn’t talk much. His world was narrowed down to the road and the throttle, the occasional grunt or flick of ash his only real contribution to conversation. But sometimes, in that brief lull between miles—when the engine calmed and the world got quiet enough to breathe—she’d press her face against the sweat-slick curve of his neck and ask, “Do you know where we’re going?”

And always, the same answer, low and unbothered: “Somewhere.”

Somewhere. It echoed in her like gospel. She clung to the word the way people cling to rosaries or childhood songs—like it meant something more than it did. Somewhere wasn’t a place. It was a belief. A fever dream. A dirty little hope scraped together from nothing. But the way he said it, with that slow certainty, made her believe that maybe they could find it. Not on any map. Not in any town. Just out there. Waiting.

And maybe that was all they had. Not each other. Not love. Just the idea that out there—past all the places that hurt, past the fathers who died and the boys who left and the voices that screamed behind doors—there might be a somewhere meant for them. A nowhere built by runaways. A town that didn’t need their names, only their hunger.

He never asked about her past. Never needed to. She came with grief on her breath and fire in her belly, and he carried his own weight like a second spine. She didn’t ask what the tattoos meant or where the scars came from or who he called in his sleep. And when she cried—quietly, in the dark, when she thought he was out cold—he didn’t say anything. Just moved closer. Just kept her warm. They were the same breed of broken: the kind that doesn’t scream, doesn’t beg, doesn’t explain. They just move. Fast and forward.

They didn’t talk about what came next. The future was a cracked thing—too fragile to speak aloud. She didn’t ask what they’d do when the money ran dry or the bike gave up or the law caught up. Sometimes she imagined waking one morning and finding him gone. No note. No reason. Just gone, like the others. And maybe she’d keep riding anyway. Maybe that’s what “somewhere” meant in the end: the absence of someone to follow.

By the time they hit a town called Somewhere, Mississippi, she couldn’t tell if it was fate or irony. The Broke Spoke Bar sat at the edge of a county no one cared to name, its siding rotted soft, its neon half-dead, buzzing in the humidity like a bug too stubborn to die. The smell hit her before the door did—old beer, pine cleaner, and cigarettes soaked into wood grain. If she closed her eyes, she could almost believe she’d never left Alabama. That Sam was still alive. That her mama was still watching The Price Is Right in the kitchen with her bathrobe open and a cigarette in one hand.

Inside, the Broke Spoke was more rot than refuge, a swamp of shadows and low murmurs where neon signs buzzed half-dead and the jukebox played songs like lullabies for lost causes. The place stank of bleach and spilled beer, of lives worn thin and never quite rinsed clean. Hunter ordered them drinks without a glance, the way he always did, as if deciding for her was second nature now—or maybe just easier than asking. She didn’t mind. Not anymore. Whatever he slid across the bar, she took it without question, without care. The taste didn’t matter. The burn didn’t matter. Not the glass, not the label, not even the price. The only thing that mattered was that they’d made it through another day and that there was still night left to fill.

Somewhere, she thought, tipping the liquor down her throat until it settled warm and sharp in her belly. Somewhere that wasn’t here. Somewhere you stopped being a ghost wearing someone else’s grief. Somewhere no one asked what ruined you or how long ago the breaking started. Somewhere you could be just a girl, not a story stuck on someone’s tongue.

She looked across the scarred table at Hunter, his knuckles bruised and bandaged, his grin slouched and knowing like always, and for a flicker of a moment—brief as lightning—she thought maybe California was never coming. Maybe it had burned up in Sam’s rearview mirror and she’d been chasing the smoke ever since. But that thought didn’t sting the way it used to. Because maybe, just maybe, “somewhere” wasn’t a place you arrived at—it was a person. A night. A feeling that wrapped around your ribs and told you to keep breathing, even when it hurt.

She remembered being a kid, lying in bed with the fan rattling overhead, imagining California like it was heaven with a coastline. Blonde strangers and easy smiles, waves folding against sand like lullabies. A place where everyone wore sunglasses and nobody raised their voice. But the farther she got from home, the more she saw the truth—America was wide and broken. Empty towns bleeding together like bruises. Storefronts sagging under decades of dust. Gas stations that sold prayers in Styrofoam cups. Nothing magical. Just grit. Just rot. Just the same hurt in different packaging.

Mississippi was no different. It had that same bloated heat, that same air heavy with unspoken things. Same slow voices. Same men who looked at you like you were already half undressed. The bartender had her mother’s voice—molasses and smoke. “What’ll it be?” he asked, eyes flicking over her like she was a curiosity in a museum nobody paid to see.

“Scotch and soda,” Hunter said, his voice a gravel drawl, hands flat on the bar like he might hold the whole world steady with his palms.

“And for the lady?”

She didn’t blink. “The same.”

Hunter grinned sideways at her, half teeth, half dare. “Sure you can handle Scotch?”

She leaned in a little, voice low and close. “Boy, I used to shoot whiskey for breakfast. You think this’ll scare me?”

He chuckled, but the sound didn’t quite reach his eyes. There was always something distant there—like he was watching the world from the bottom of a well. And maybe he was. Maybe they both were. Two people who’d sunk so far they’d grown used to the dark.

The jukebox crooned something soft, something old, and she let her mind drift. Sam would’ve known the name of the song. He was always good with that—always cataloging music like it meant more than memories. She felt that hollow ache crawl up her throat but swallowed it down with the last of the Scotch. No more ghosts tonight. No more graves.

She didn’t hear what Hunter said next. He was leaning into the bartender, trading low words and cash, and she let herself drift. That’s when she felt it. The stare. Cold and direct. She didn’t need to look to know. That kind of gaze always hit the same—like hands sliding over you without permission. She glanced. A man by the pool table. Leaning. Watching. Not blinking. The kind of man who thought hunger was a compliment.

“I’m gonna take a leak,” she whispered, brushing past Hunter’s shoulder.

He nodded, distracted. “You go ahead.”

Outside, the air clung to her like sweat. Damp, heavy. She leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching headlights blur past like memories that didn’t belong to her anymore. She hadn’t liked that look the man gave her. Not because it was new. Because it wasn’t. Because it always meant the same thing. She’d seen that look since she was thirteen. She knew what came next.

A bird—bright and red, a cardinal maybe—landed near the edge of the parking lot, hopping through brittle weeds. It pulled a worm from the dirt, quick and neat. Death, efficient and unceremonious. She watched like it meant something, though she didn’t know what. Maybe it just reminded her that survival wasn’t always elegant.

The man’s voice hit her like cold breath. “Good evenin’, sugar.”

She didn’t look up. “Good evening.”

“You lookin’ to get a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“You got somewhere to stay?”

“Already do.”

“You sure about that?”

“I got a man,” she snapped, still calm but sharpening.

“That so?” He stepped closer. Too close. She backed away and still he came, hand closing around her wrist like he’d bought the right to it.

“Let go of me,” she hissed, yanking against his grip. “Now.”

“You don’t gotta act scared, darlin’—I’m just bein’ friendly.”

“My boyfriend’s inside,” she said, words quick and clipped. “He’s probably watchin’ us right now. He’s the type who doesn’t ask questions first.”

“You act like he’s the damn Boogeyman,” the man laughed.

“Talkin’ about who?”

The voice came like a blade drawn slow—a cold thing with no warning, slicing clean through the night. Hunter stood at the edge of the light, right where the bar’s neon flickered out, and he looked carved from something ancient. His whole body was held still in that dangerous, heavy way—coiled like a snake just before the strike, like violence lived in his bones and was only ever sleeping until called.

“This your girl?” the drunk asked, his mouth twisted in something that was trying to be a grin but couldn’t quite remember how. The shape of it was wrong. Off-kilter. He was trying to sound brave, but the tremor in his voice betrayed him.

Hunter’s words came low and steady, soaked in gasoline and warning. “Yeah,” he said. “She’s mine. What about it?”

The drunk should’ve backed off then. Should’ve seen what was standing in front of him and stepped the hell away. But liquor makes fools of men, makes them believe they’re ten feet tall and fireproof. His grin turned sour. The bravado rose up like bile.

“How much I gotta pay for her?”

The words hit like rot—foul and thick and crawling. The kind of words that hung in the air, heavy and impossible to swallow. Y/N felt the shift in the earth beneath her before Hunter even moved, like something old and terrible was about to snap. It was as if the world had pulled back its breath, waiting for the storm to land.

And when it did, it landed like thunder. Hunter exploded forward, his body a weapon of instinct and fury. There was no hesitation, no shout, no threat—just movement. Pure, savage motion. His fist met the drunk’s jaw with a sound like a bone splitting, and the man’s head snapped sideways, knees buckling as he was flung against the bar’s outer wall. The siding groaned under the weight, paint curling off in flakes, the wood cracking like dry ribs.

Y/N couldn’t move. Her breath locked behind her ribs, her feet rooted to the spot like a girl caught in a memory she’d spent years trying to forget. The noise. The suddenness. Her father’s silhouette in a bedroom doorway. The crack of hand to flesh. The aftershock. It all came back in a rush. And still, she didn’t look away.

The man screamed. Loud, ragged, desperate. “Enough! Jesus, stop—I’ll leave her alone, I swear—just stop!”

But Hunter didn’t stop. Couldn’t. He was somewhere else now, somewhere deep and dark where language didn’t reach. His fists moved like they had their own hunger. He hit and hit and hit again. Blood spattered the wall. The stranger’s face blurred beneath the onslaught, caving inward with each strike. There was no pleasure in it—just release. Years of humiliation, of anger, of barely-holding-it-together crashing out in brutal waves. Hunter grunted with every punch, teeth bared, breath ragged. His rage was not loud—it was focused. Controlled in the most terrifying way.

The man tried to fight back. Briefly. He clawed at Hunter’s face, caught skin, left red marks. Went for the throat, the eyes—wild, scrambling. But Hunter caught his wrist, twisted hard, and something inside it gave. The noise was wet and wrong. The man went limp, whimpering, shoulders slumping as the last of his strength leaked out through blood and fear.

Then the door of the bar slammed open.

It was a stampede after that—men spilling out, shoulders wide, faces already twisted with what-the-fuck and oh-hell-no. They saw the scene—Hunter with his fists still cocked, the other man a bloody sack of twitching limbs—and they didn’t ask questions. They just moved. Fast.

One hit Hunter from behind, drove him down to the gravel. Another looped an arm around his neck, hauled him back, while a third dove for the limp man, fingers scrambling for a pulse.

“Jesus, Jesse, is he alive?” one of them shouted, panic slashing through the heat of the moment.

“Barely,” came the answer. “He’s breathin’. Just.”

Another man slammed his knee into Hunter’s side. Hard. “You fucking psycho.”

Hunter didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak. His face was pressed to the dirt, blood in his teeth, breath coming in low, animal bursts. His eyes were wide, black with fury, and he stared at them like he was still mid-fight. Like he hadn’t finished yet.

“You need putting down,” the man on top of him snarled. “Like a fuckin’ dog.”

Another kick, sharp and mean. Hunter groaned, but didn’t plead. Didn’t ask them to stop. He just kept staring up, chest heaving.

Then a new man crouched beside him. Different tone. Not angry. Not wild. Cold. Measured.

“You’re lucky,” he said, glancing toward the half-conscious heap that used to be a man. “Buzz’s lucky too. Could’ve been worse.” He looked Hunter square in the face. “But this? This is done. You’re done. We see you here again, even just drivin’ by—we won’t talk next time.”

Hunter exhaled slow. Gritted. “I hear you.”

“I didn’t ask if you heard. I told you to say it.”

“I hear you,” Hunter said again, voice like gravel in water.

The man spit in his face. Wiped his hands on his jeans like the sight of him had soiled the air.

Then he turned to Y/N, eyes hard, lips curling in something that wasn’t a smile. “Keep your bitch leashed.”

The bar door creaked shut behind them like the closing of a coffin, and the sounds of dragging feet and muttered curses faded until only silence remained—thick, oppressive, hanging in the air like humidity before a storm. The stars above were gone, swallowed whole by a low ceiling of bruised clouds, and with them went the heat. In its place came a strange chill, the kind that didn't touch your skin so much as slide beneath it, making bones ache and nerves twitch. Y/N didn’t move. Couldn’t. One arm was wrapped tight around her ribs as if to hold herself together, the other still rubbing absently at the wrist where the drunk had grabbed her, trying to erase the feel of his fingers, the claim in them.

Hunter staggered up slow, like something broken rising from its own wreckage, not a man so much as a ghost of one, held together by fury and stubbornness. His breath was ragged, heavy, loud in the quiet. Y/N rushed to him without thinking, her heart a drum in her chest, her hands trembling with adrenaline and leftover fear. Sweat clung cold to her back where it had been pinned against the bar’s siding, and when she touched his face, she could feel how torn and swollen it already was. His skin was split open above the brow, his jaw darkening to purple, his lip fat and weeping blood.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, cradling his face like something delicate, something irreplaceable. She wasn’t even sure who the words were for—him, herself, the night.

They crossed the road like ghosts in exile, drifting fast and low toward the motel. He leaned on her more than he’d admit, one arm slung across her shoulders like a dying man’s last tether. Inside, under the hum of flickering bathroom light, Hunter looked less like the man who had almost killed someone in a bar fight and more like a boy who had been kicked too many times by life, a boy who kept standing just to prove he still could. She stripped off his shirt with the quiet care of someone handling a relic, the fabric clinging to dried blood and sweat. The mirror caught his reflection—bruised, wild-eyed, hollow—and he watched her through it, through the haze of pain, as she wet a towel and dabbed gently at his torn face.

“Did I scare you?” His voice was thick, slurred around swelling.

She didn’t flinch, just pushed his hair back to better see the gash above his brow. “A little,” she said, her tone soft but firm. The bleeding had slowed, but it hadn’t stopped.

“He deserved it,” he mumbled.

She didn’t argue, because maybe he had. But something in the way Hunter's rage had exploded—so fast, so total—had left her wondering if it would ever come for her, too. Not because she doubted his care, but because some storms don’t know how to stop. She pressed the bandage down gently, then cupped his jaw and met his gaze in the glass.

“Calm down now,” she murmured. “It’s over.”

His breath hitched. “You ain’t gonna leave me, are you?”

It came out in a whisper so vulnerable it felt like a crack running down the spine of the night. She looked into his eyes and didn’t see a monster. She saw a boy, wounded and wild, a boy the world had swallowed whole and spit back half-made, still carrying the scars of everything that had tried to own him.

“No,” she said. “I’m never leaving you, Hunter.”

She helped him to the bed, wrapped his ribs with gauze that trembled in her shaking hands. She was still barely more than a child herself, but there was no one else to do this—no nurse, no mother, no savior. Just her, and the man who had become her gravity. She wrapped him in care like it was armor, and when it was over, when the blood was cleaned and the worst of it patched, he collapsed into sleep like something finally allowed to rest. His breathing evened out, his body slack, the rage drained out of him like water from a cracked glass.

She sat at the edge of the bed, knees drawn to her chest, watching his chest rise and fall. The silence pressed in from all sides, but there was peace in it. A strange, fleeting kind of peace—the kind you learned not to trust. The kind that always comes before the next rupture. When you loved a man like Hunter Soto, you learned to savor these quiet moments like breath held too long underwater.

The next town looked like it had been exhaled by the earth itself—a cluster of crumbling buildings squatting on the edge of Texas, sagging beneath a sky the color of old pewter. The sun bled out behind them as they arrived, casting long shadows across cracked pavement and rusted fences. The motel they landed in leaned against time like an old man leaning on a cane. The paint had long since peeled away, curtains hung limp like tongues, and even the stray cats that roamed nearby kept their distance, wary as if the place remembered things it shouldn’t.

Their room was a grave. The kind of space that felt like it had seen too much, soaked it into the carpet, and never told a soul. It smelled of mildew and something else—something bitter and unfinished. Hunter had been quiet the whole drive, and Y/N had let the silence fill her up like water, too tired to fight the quiet.

Later, under the buzz of a dying fluorescent light and between sheets that felt like paper, she lay still, listening. From the next room came voices—sharp, familiar, the language of falling apart. A man’s voice, low and broken. “I was gonna marry you, Tabitha!”

Then a woman’s reply, high and trembling, heavy with the kind of panic that’s half hope and half knowing better. “I swear, John, we can still make it work!”

“You expect me to marry a whore?”

The words cracked the silence like a whip. Y/N winced. She didn’t need to see them to know what came next. She knew the script too well. She pictured the woman shrinking, folding in on herself, maybe curled on a bathroom floor, hands in her hair, hoping not to be next.

Hunter stepped out of the bathroom then, steam curling from his hair, a towel low on his hips. His eyes looked tired in that deep way, the way that goes past sleep, and when they met hers—cigarette glowing between her fingers, shoulders bare and bathed in the dim glow of moonlight—his mouth twitched into a half-grin.

“You alright?” he asked, voice rasped soft.

She didn’t answer right away. The voices next door had dropped into something worse—sobs, and then the heavy, unmistakable sound of a fist hitting drywall. She stiffened. The cigarette burned close to her fingers. Hunter sat beside her on the edge of the bed, the mattress sagging under his weight.

“Did I scare you yesterday?” he asked again, his voice stripped of everything but worry.

“Let’s just forget about it,” she said, and her voice held steady, though the floor under her didn’t feel so solid.

He rubbed his swollen knuckles, gaze low. “I only did it ‘cause I didn’t want him to hurt you.”

“I know.”

The wind moved like a warning, hard and sudden, catching the crooked motel sign and wrenching it into motion, its rusted metal hinges shrieking like something alive. It clanged against its own rust and decay, a sound too loud for a place so tired. From the room beside theirs came a final cry—sharp, brittle, human. The kind of sound you don’t forget. A door slammed hard enough to rattle the wall they were pressed against, and then the world exhaled into silence again. Not peace—never that—but the silence that creeps in after a reckoning, thick and total, like a sheet pulled over a body. The kind of hush that settles only when the hurt’s already done and the air itself recoils.

Hunter leaned forward and pressed his forehead against hers, skin warm despite the chill that had crept in from the outside world. There was blood on his breath—faint but unmistakable, metallic and stubborn, like iron at the back of a throat or pennies between teeth. He smelled like cheap shampoo and old sweat and the kind of violence that doesn’t fully wash off. His chest rose and fell beneath her hands, too fast, too shallow, a rhythm that spoke of effort more than ease.

“I need you tonight,” he whispered, and there was no hunger in it, no lust. Just something raw, like an old prayer spoken under breath. A need not of body, but of soul. A plea to be seen and held and not abandoned.

She nodded, the motion small, not because she was unsure, but because words had long ago stopped doing the job. Words were for people with plans and peace and time. She had none of those left. Only motion. Only breath.

Later, when everything had gone still again, when the air settled like ash and Hunter's breathing had slowed, she lay curled against him, her face hidden in the warm crook of his shoulder, her fingers ghosting along the edges of the bandages wrapped tight around his ribs. The cotton was stiff, the adhesive already peeling at the corners, but she traced them like they were holy. His eyes were shut, but she could feel him watching from behind the lids, his breath catching slightly beneath her hand.

“Does it still hurt?” she asked, the words no louder than a thought.

“No,” he said, too fast, too smooth.

She didn’t challenge the lie. She understood it, the way someone understands fire without needing to touch it again. Some men needed to keep the pain inside, needed to hold it like a secret weapon, or a talisman. Taking it from them would be an act of war.

“You could’ve died yesterday,” she murmured, her voice thin with the echo of memory. “I thought they were gonna kill you.”

He opened his eyes slowly, stared at the water-stained ceiling as if the rot and mildew might offer him an answer. “Still here, ain’t I?” he said, the words half a smirk, half a shrug. Like someone pointing at the wreckage of a car and saying, I walked away.

“For how much longer?”

She hadn’t meant to ask it aloud. It slipped free before she could catch it, a truth torn from somewhere deep. And with it came the tears—slow and unexpected, not loud or wrenching, just a quiet leaking, like a wound reopened without warning. He didn’t flinch. Just raised a hand, thumb brushing her cheek in slow circles, touching her like someone trying to map sorrow by feel.

She remembered the night before, how broken he’d looked after the fight, blood on his teeth, fear in his voice, his hands shaking as he asked her not to leave. For all his fury and bone-deep violence, he’d been afraid. Not of death, not of pain. But of being left. Of waking up and finding her gone. It was the first time she'd seen the boy he used to be, the boy the world had failed to protect.

“I never thought I’d live past twenty-five,” he said after a while, his voice low, the sound of gravel underfoot. “Figure if I’m still kickin’, I must be doin’ something right.”

She pressed closer, her arms wrapped around him like armor, her tears falling warm against his chest. There was no fixing either of them, no salvation waiting at the end of some map. But in that moment, they held each other like it might be enough.

“Girl,” he muttered, the word rough and fond all at once, “what’re you cryin’ for?”

“I’m just… happy, I guess,” she whispered, a lie that almost tasted sweet.

He didn’t push. Didn’t call her on it. Just pulled her closer, wrapped around her like a second skin. For a moment, there was sanctuary. Not peace, not safety, but that rare middle ground where breath came easy and the dark didn’t seem quite so sharp.

Then he spoke, his voice quieter than before, the words falling heavy.

“In the morning, you’ll wake up alone. There’ll be a hundred dollars on the nightstand. That’s your share from SouthTrust. It’s yours, clean. You can take it and run, or you can meet me in the parking lot. We’ll head west—Texas, maybe farther. Wherever the road takes us next. I won’t blame you if you go.”

She didn’t speak right away. Her breath caught in her chest, held still by something larger than fear. Her heart thudded, steady and traitorous, louder than it ought to be. She turned her face into his chest, listened to the rhythm of him—his heartbeat like a fist knocking at a door, asking to be let in.

Through the silence and the salt, she said only: “Okay.”

And that was it. No promises. No plans. Just the press of her body against his, the sound of a motel room breathing around them, and the night stretching out ahead like a road with no signs.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

When morning arrived, it did not blaze like some new beginning. It seeped—thin and gray—through the blinds, tracing silver ribbons across the threadbare motel quilt and illuminating the void he left behind. The sheets still bore the faint imprint of his form, a ghostly hollowness in the mattress where warmth had once lived. But he was gone. The cruel, living heat of him—his breath, his voice, his weight—had vanished like smoke from a forgotten fire.

Y/N sat up slowly, her body stiff with sleep and sorrow. She was barefoot, her legs trembling beneath her, her mind cloudy with half-formed thoughts and the hangover of dreams. She reached for the nightstand and saw the money first—five crumpled bills, fanned like dead leaves across the wood. A hundred dollars, exactly. His parting gift, or perhaps his apology.

She slid the bills into her purse without ceremony, lit a Camel with shaking hands, and drifted into the bathroom to dress in silence. The mirror offered her no answers—only the face of a girl who had dared to love a hurricane and expected to be left whole in the aftermath.

She told herself she would go back to Montgomery.

It was a decision not made with clarity but out of necessity—a whispered prayer to something more practical than hope. She would find work again, perhaps at a roadside diner not unlike the one in Abbeville. There, she would carry trays and wipe counters and smile politely while men twice her age called her “darlin’.” Maybe, if the universe was feeling kind, she’d meet someone—some soft-spoken man with cornflower eyes who resembled Sam Wallace in the right light. Someone who would love her without fire, only warmth. A quiet man who came home every night and kissed her forehead like a benediction.

No more motel rooms. No more midnight screams from behind thin walls. No more men with devilish grins and fists wrapped in gauze.

That was the vow.

She had barely made it to the sidewalk before her steps began to falter. The world stretched out before her like a barren road in the dead of summer—hot, dry, and endless. The thought of walking for days, thumbing for rides on lonely highways, sent a hollow wind through her chest.

And then came the ache, slow and creeping. A phantom pain, not in her limbs, but in her heart. She longed for the feel of leather beneath her fingers, the hum of a motorcycle beneath her thighs, the press of her cheek against Hunter’s spine, his heartbeat steady and wild beneath the ink of his skin. She thought of him—still bandaged, still bruised, still so impossibly young—and wondered, with a shiver, who would look after him now if she did not.

She turned toward the backlot with the hesitancy of one returning to a grave.

Perhaps he had already gone. Perhaps this was all a test, and she had failed it.

The doubts came fast and cruel. Maybe he had never loved her. Maybe she had been little more than a momentary comfort, a soft body to keep the cold away. Maybe, like all the men before him, he had looked at her and seen something disposable.

But when she rounded the corner, he was there.

Leaning against his Harley like a portrait torn from a dream—his boots planted firm, the engine already purring low beneath him. Sunglasses veiled his eyes, and her cigarette hung from his mouth like a smirk. One arm rested across his chest, the other casually at his hip, as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

And he was waiting—for her. Just as he said he would.

A sob caught in her throat, and she ran to him, nearly crumbling into his chest.

“Girl,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around her, pressing his lips to her temple. “You scared me. Thought you wasn’t gonna show.”

She buried her face in his jacket. It smelled of leather and smoke and something older—like burned sugar and forgotten warmth. “You knew I’d come back,” she whispered. “I ain’t got nothing without you, Hunter.”

They didn’t make it far. The hundred dollars they had scraped from the shattered mouth of the ATM took them deep into Texas, but paper only stretches so far before it dissolves to dust. Money faded. The thrill waned. And by the time they reached a weary town with a name neither of them remembered, they had only fifty cents left between them.

That night, Hunter lay on the motel bed, scrolling listlessly through static-filled channels while the blue television glow flickered over his bandages like candlelight on marble. Y/N paced the room with nervous fingers, lighting cigarette after cigarette, trying to keep her hands from shaking.

She dropped beside him, laying her head against the warm slope of his neck.

“What are we gonna do?” she asked.

He didn’t answer right away. Only wrapped one arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.

“Don’t worry about it, baby,” he said softly. “I’ll figure something out.”

But she’d begun to notice things—how his smile lingered longer than it used to, how his voice cracked when he thought she wasn’t listening. He carried the weight of their days like a stone in his pocket. It wasn’t just love that wore him thin—it was survival.

“I shouldn’t always be asking you that,” she muttered. “Shouldn’t always be lookin’ to you to fix everything.”

“You never asked me to,” he said. “But I’ll do it all the same.”

She watched the blue shimmer of the screen, the sound of the world outside muffled by plaster and insulation. Her heart whispered things she didn’t want to hear.

“You think we’ll ever live like real people?” she asked, half-dreaming. “Like those families with gardens and coffee mugs and screen doors that don’t creak when you open them?”

“Y/N…”

“We’d get a little house near an elementary school. I’d work in the mornings. You’d be back by five. And my mama’d visit and say, ‘You went and found yourself a good one.’” She let out a soft, hollow laugh, more breath than joy. “Can you imagine it? You—a good one.”

He turned to her. “You know I ain’t that kind of man.”

“I know.”

“And you coulda left, but you didn’t.”

“I know.”

“So now we’re stuck. Just you and me.”

“I know,” she repeated, and her voice cracked on the edge of the word.

“I can’t make your mama proud,” he said, “but I ain’t ever gonna let you starve.”

The television clicked to commercial break. The silence that followed wasn’t silent—it was full of all the things that had not been said. It pressed in on her, cold and hollow, a wave of truth cresting high.

He was still here. Still holding her. But the future felt no closer than it had yesterday, and she could feel the ground beneath them beginning to slip.

She turned toward him, her voice no more than a breath.

“I know.”

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The morning brought no peace.

Hunter stirred before the sun had yet risen, as if hounded by invisible dogs in the shadows of his dreams. The rusted bedframe creaked beneath him, a weary groan that roused Y/N from a thin and dreamless sleep. Her lashes fluttered as her mind clawed its way back to wakefulness, but even before her eyes opened, she could feel it—the tension, coiled like a spring, thick in the air.

He paced the room like a beast too long caged, pausing only to sit and bury his face in his hands before rising again with that same wild energy, as if the floor beneath his feet were smoldering.

“Hunter,” she whispered, her voice still marred by sleep. “What’s wrong?”

He did not answer her. Not with words.

There was a fire in him that morning—hot, directionless, half-born of fear and half of fury. She saw it the instant their eyes met: the way his gaze flicked across her figure, her sleep-warm skin exposed by the shifting of her nightgown, one shoulder bare, hair tangled, lips parted. Something primal stirred in him. She’d seen it before, in other men, but with Hunter it was never simple lust. It was desperation—an unspoken plea to find solace in her, to devour her before the world devoured him.

Without warning, he pulled her up from the bed and pressed her hard against the wall, the windowsill bruising her spine. She gasped, startled not by fear but by the sheer velocity of it, the way he seemed to need her so urgently it frightened even him. He kissed her like a drowning man, teeth and breath, no tenderness, no prelude. Just fever.

He gripped her face as though afraid she might vanish in the fog of morning. His breath was ragged, his hands trembling as they moved with frenzied purpose. Y/N, dizzy from the suddenness of it, clung to his shoulders and let herself be taken—not in submission, but in understanding. This was his cry for help, this was the only language he seemed capable of speaking when the fear came.

And she understood fear.

There was nothing sweet about it—nothing gentle. It was raw and restless, a physical translation of the storm gathering behind his eyes. His touch was too rough, his mouth too urgent, but beneath it all, she could feel the quake in his limbs, the shaking that betrayed him. She held fast to him, letting her forehead rest against his, eyes closed to the mottled ceiling above, and simply existed there, with him, in that searing, broken moment.

Afterward, he stumbled back, his shirt twisted, his breath still caught in his throat. She nearly collapsed, her legs weak beneath her, her palms catching against the peeling wallpaper.

Hunter sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the floor, his cheeks flushed not with desire but with shame.

“Went rough on you, did I?” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck like a boy caught in mischief. “I’m sorry.”

She touched her shoulder absently where the windowframe had bitten into her. It would bruise. “Is this how you plan to make us money?” she asked quietly, not unkindly. The corners of her mouth twitched with bitter irony.

“Nah,” he said, his voice low. “I already got an idea.”

She waited, but no more came.

Hunter sat like a statue built of nerves—his hands on his knees, his leg bouncing like a drumbeat. His eyes never met hers. They stared instead into the floorboards, searching for a map that did not exist.

“But it’s risky,” he said at last. “Real risky.”

“What is it?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

He shook his head. “Don’t matter. You’ll find out.”

And that was all he gave her.

Y/N said nothing. What could she say? He had that look again, the one she dreaded—the one her father wore the day he stopped speaking to them entirely, the one Sam had when he packed his bags without saying goodbye. It was a look that meant the decision had already been made.

She felt the weight of it before it fell. The change in the atmosphere. The quiet breath before a door slams. She had always been good at sensing endings—like a barometer for sorrow.

There was a hush in her, a pulling back of something deep inside. She didn’t ask questions. Not anymore. Not after Sam. She’d learned the hard way that pressing too hard only made men disappear faster.

So she watched from the sidelines, arms around herself, while Hunter paced and planned and broke apart at the seams. The man who once laughed like the world couldn’t touch him was unraveling thread by thread, and she was powerless to stop it.

In the pale light of morning, with the scent of motel soap still clinging to his skin and the shadows from the night still thick in the hollows beneath his eyes, Hunter Soto looked like a man already halfway gone.

And Y/N—God help her—loved him even more for it.

The ride into town unspooled like a slow, muted dirge. The sun hung low and sallow in the sky, too weak to brighten the streets they passed, too tired to bless the world with light. Y/N held fast to Hunter’s back, her arms clinging to him with a quiet desperation. The wind tangled through her hair, but even the sensation of it could not stir the heaviness rooted in her chest. It was not panic—not yet—but something quieter, more insidious. A dull ache, a premonition she could not name. It pulsed in her bones like a song she once knew but had long since forgotten. And it made her ill.

She had never liked the silence that fell before calamity—the way the air thickened, as if time itself were drawing breath.

They came to a stop behind a First United, the tires crunching softly over sun-blanched gravel. Hunter killed the engine. The stillness that followed was deafening. Y/N dismounted slowly, her legs tingling with nerves. She stared at the blank brick wall of the bank, half-expecting it to speak, to warn her away.

Instead, only Hunter’s voice broke the quiet.

“We gotta be quick,” he muttered. He stared into the pavement like it might answer some riddle he’d been trying to solve for years. His palms were raw from gripping the handlebars too hard, as though he’d tried to wring something out of the ride—courage, maybe, or clarity.

“Sure, we will,” she said, attempting reassurance, but her voice was hollow. Even she didn’t believe it.

Hunter nodded, mostly to himself, and turned to the duffel bag strapped to the side of the bike. She watched with unease, half-expecting to see the crowbar again—the old tool, the crude ritual, something predictable. But when he pulled out two bandanas, her breath hitched. One black as a thunderhead. The other red, the color of dried blood.

He handed them to her without a word.

She tied her hair up with trembling hands, fingers fumbling like a child’s. He worked the fabric over her face, knotting it with quick, practiced ease, and it tickled the curve of her neck as he tightened it. Then he pulled his own up, covering his mouth and nose until only his eyes remained—and they betrayed him.

It was terror. Clean, undiluted, and bright as fire.

She should have run then. She should have turned, should have torn the bandana from her face and thrown herself down the empty street. But she stood there, paralyzed, as if the dread had rooted her to the spot.

And then he drew the gun.

A small thing, black and silent in the early light. But there was something about it—something in the way he held it, passed it to her, that made it feel like the weight of all the world had been forged into that single piece of steel. It was warm, absurdly so, as though someone had held it close in the dark for a long time. Like a secret.

“What’s this for?” she asked. Her voice came soft and stifled through the cloth.

He wrapped her fingers around the grip, firm and final. “Just in case.”

Her heart slammed against her ribs. “Hunter,” she said again, her voice rising in pitch. “What do you mean? Why do we need these?”

“It’s not loaded,” he lied, and the lie was clumsy, fragile as porcelain. “Just need to scare them a little.”

She swallowed. “Then why do I need one too?”

He hesitated. For the first time, he looked at her—not as his partner, not as his passenger, but as someone he might lose.

“Precaution,” he said. “That’s all. Just… in case anything goes wrong.”

She shook her head. “This is stupid,” she whispered. “They’ll throw us in jail. Or kill us.” Her voice broke. “They’ll kill you.”

His rage flared for a moment, sudden and brief. He slammed his hand down against the bike’s frame, wincing from the impact. Y/N flinched. He didn’t look at her when he spoke.

“Christ. Just—calm down, alright?”

She bit her tongue. She said nothing. Somewhere in her mind, she thanked him for not hitting her. For putting the blow into metal instead of flesh. Funny, how low the bar had fallen.

Then he crouched in front of her, his face damp with sweat. “I’ll be right here,” he said, and it wasn’t a promise. It was a plea. “Me and a thousand-something dollars. Doesn’t that sound good?”

She nodded, her throat burning.

He pulled her into his arms. Crushed her against him like he meant to keep her there forever. And for a moment, she let herself believe him.

Then he was gone.

The door swung open and swallowed him whole.

She sat astride the idle machine, its chrome frame radiating heat beneath her thighs, though the morning air clung damp and chill to her skin. In her lap rested the pistol, a thing of unforgiving metal, cold and inert, yet unbearably heavy—as though some unseen force had poured sorrow into its hollow frame. Her palms, slick with sweat, slid endlessly over its surface, trying and failing to wipe clean the dread that clung to her bones. The hammering of her pulse filled her ears like the drone of distant thunder, and each beat echoed not only within her chest but through her very marrow.

Her thoughts, untethered, wandered backward to the soft decay of Abbeville—the cracked church pews that once smelled faintly of dust and lemon oil, her mother sleeping with the television humming low like the whispering voice of God. She saw Rhonda Portnoy again, seated across from her in a fading kitchen, the girl's eyes glazed with the knowledge that her brother would never return. Y/N now understood that look. That sacred, silent ache—grief before confirmation, mourning before the body is laid out cold. It was the sort of sorrow that takes root before the loss even arrives, and blossoms only when it does.

Y/N recognized it now blooming within her like a fungus. This wasn’t about money. It hadn’t been for a very long time.

It was about being the one he came home to. About being needed. About being the hand someone held before stepping into the fire.

And now here she was, holding on still—white-knuckled around a weapon she’d never meant to wield, sitting sentinel beside a bank she’d never meant to rob, waiting like so many women had before her—for the one she loved to come back through the door and not be changed.

But he did leave her. He always had to. He stashed the pistol in his back pocket like it was nothing more than a trinket, squared his shoulders with a fool’s resolve, and disappeared into the sterile light of the bank. She thought of home again. Not the motels or the highways, but the true home, the mythic one, where aprons still hung from hooks and coffee cooled on a sunlit porch. She thought of laundry flapping in the breeze and her mother’s voice asking what time she’d be home. She thought of Rhonda again, and the day Mason Portnoy Jr. had slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and declared he’d enlisted. Y/N had envied that kind of bravery once. Now she knew it was not bravery, but a certain kind of madness—a madness born in men who think they cannot be touched by death, and in women who let them go anyway.

The silence in the minutes that followed rang louder than any siren could. She thought she might have heard a gasp from within the bank—but perhaps it was only her own breath catching in her throat. Her fingers passed the pistol from one hand to the other, feeling for its weight, trying to become familiar with it. It was smaller than she’d imagined, yet it seemed impossibly heavy. Not with lead, but with consequence.

She stared at it like it might speak.

Could she use it, if it came to that? Could she really raise it in the name of survival? Could she pull the trigger and watch the world change forever?

She wanted to scream his name, to cast it into the air like a curse. Damn you, Hunter Soto. Damn you for putting this in my hands. Damn you for making me the one who waits. If he’d truly loved her, would he have done this? Would he have marched into ruin with her tethered behind like a mule with blinkers?

Then the door opened. And he returned.

The sight of him—tall and blood-rushed, the duffel bag swollen with stolen money—was so at odds with her panic that it stunned her silent. He looked like victory. She wanted to hit him. She wanted to fall to her knees and thank him. Instead, she clutched the throttle and said, “C’mon, Hunter, we gotta go.” Her voice trembled.

He didn’t listen.

“I’ll count it later,” she urged, watching him leaf through bundles like a child unwrapping Christmas gifts. He wasn’t afraid anymore. The rush had burned it out of him.

“She stiffed me,” he hissed, face hardening. “I asked for ten thousand. There’s only nine.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter!” she cried. “We have enough! We need to go, now—before––”

But it was already too late. He zipped the duffel with a finality that made her sick.

“I ain’t gonna be stiffed,” he said. He pulled the bandana back over his face, his jaw a line of pure spite. “Not by some fat-lipped bitch in a First United.”

“No,” she whispered, and this time she clutched his sleeve like it might save them both. “Don’t do this, baby, please. Please, let’s just go.”

He shook her off. The sirens began as he turned—loud and inevitable, like the tolling of some terrible bell. The world turned red and blue in pulses. Her breath stuck in her throat like sap.

They hadn’t been quick enough.

Hunter turned to stone. She watched him raise his hands slowly, stiffly, as if lifting them might break him. She followed suit, limbs numb, her body moving only from the sheer momentum of fear.

Two squad cars parked like wolves circling prey. The cops emerged, guns drawn. And everything within her slowed. She barely heard them shout. Her pulse swelled and surged through her ears like the crash of a distant sea.

She watched the officer approach him, the man’s steps weighted not with caution, but triumph—a predator nearing a wounded thing it believed had already yielded. With one swift motion, the cop reached for the bandana and tore it from Hunter’s face. His lips curled into a sneer. “Thought you was gonna get off easy, didn’t you?”

Y/N saw Hunter’s chest rise, his breath coming not easy but sharp and ragged, as though the very act of living had become too much for his body to bear. And yet—she knew what he would do before he did it. The resolve had already gathered in his bones, coiling through his limbs like smoke.

Then came the flash.

The black silhouette of the pistol, like the outstretched wing of some ill-omened bird, burst from Hunter’s hand—quick as breath, dreadful as prophecy. A thunderclap cracked the silence, tearing the stillness in half.

A man collapsed. And the world followed suit.

Screams rose like birds startled from a field. Somewhere, a child cried out, high and shrill and animal. A woman flung herself behind the door of her vehicle, her cries warping with the Doppler of panic. But Y/N remained unmoved, cold as grave marble. She sat on the Harley, her hands still affixed to the throttle, her spine rigid with shock. She did not blink. Did not breathe. Her gaze was fastened to Hunter as he turned toward her, his mouth parted in a grin stretched too wide, too wild. The blood across his cheek looked like paint applied in war.

He said something. She could not hear it. Maybe it was we’ll make it, baby, or maybe something more dreadful still. She could not tell. Then came the second shot.

The silence afterward was not empty. It was immense. Sacred. The kind of silence that echoes within the hollows of tombs and ancient cathedrals—places made for mourning.

Something hot splashed across her skin. It coated her cheek, her neck, and curled into the edge of her lips. She could taste it—salt and iron and something else that had no name, something that reached deep into the pit of her stomach and twisted. She did not cry out. She did not even flinch. Her body remained fixed, not from strength, but from paralysis. The tears arrived without her knowing, as if her soul had begun to bleed in place of her body.

She did not see him fall. She only saw the place where he no longer stood.

And the day—this terrible, ruinous day—took on a strange, faraway quality, as though her memory had filmed it through a pane of glass and tucked it into the back of her father’s old VHS box. Those tapes, she remembered, stacked high in the attic, each marked by a strip of tape and some scratch of black Sharpie: Wedding Day, 1969. Y/N’s First Birthday, 1971. Rainy Tuesday, 1979. She imagined a new one now, slick and unworn, its plastic shell not yet dulled by dust. The Death of Hunter Soto, 1989.

She was on the bike before she realized it. Her fingers gripped the throttle with blind instinct. The engine groaned beneath her like a wounded animal and she fled, tires spinning across asphalt slick with blood. Her hands burned from where the bullet had flown so near—ghost pain, perhaps. She’d only ever fired a gun once before. That had been years ago, in a summer field with Sam Wallace, his hands clamped gently over hers, guiding her. Don’t be scared, he’d said. Just a little practice. But this hadn’t been practice. This had been real.

The officer had not seen her—he’d been fixed on Hunter’s body. He hadn’t noticed her reach for the weapon in the duffel, hadn’t seen her trembling fingers pull back the hammer. She was invisible again, just as she’d been to her mother, to the townspeople of Abbeville, to the Lord Himself.

It was a good thing, she thought now, that he hadn’t looked her in the eyes. If he had, she would never have fired.

The silence after her shot had been worse than the sound. It was full, vibrating. She remembered something her father once told her on the front porch during a summer thick with heat and memory. That morning in church, he had preached about Cain. She was six years old, her tiny hands clasped in her lap as her daddy’s voice filled the chapel, and the image had haunted her since—the blood pouring from Abel’s throat like wine, Cain’s hands red and unrepentant.

Later, on the porch, rocking slowly with her knees tucked beneath her, she’d asked, “Daddy, would you ever kill someone?”

Vern had studied her, surprised by the question. Then, evenly, he’d said, “If I had to.”

“Why would you have to?”

“If someone tried to hurt you or your mama,” he replied softly, “I think I’d have to do it.”

She’d been troubled then. Still was now. “But then you’d be like Cain,” she’d said. “You’d be bad.”

He’d pulled her closer. “No, honey. Cain was bad because he killed from jealousy. There’s a difference. Sometimes, a man does violence not for himself, but to shield what he loves.” Then, with finality, he’d said, “You’ll understand when you’re older. And if any man ever means to harm you, you shoot first. Then run. Don’t look back.”

She had shot. And now, she ran.

She peeled off the highway and followed the signs south. Somewhere along the old road, the trees gave way to scrubland, and beyond that, to the river. She didn’t know what river it was. Didn’t care. All she knew was that it whispered to her, like it wanted to wash her clean.

She parked the bike in the grass and left it behind—left it like a corpse at a funeral pyre. She would not return. Already, sirens screamed far in the distance, and the Harley, with its wounded growl and shining chrome, would betray her path too easily.

She stripped by the riverbank. Her dress was crusted with blood, stiff and brown and clinging to her like a second skin. She knelt in the icy water and scrubbed at the fabric until her hands burned and the fibers frayed and split. Still, the stain refused to fade. It was small enough to lie about—some stranger might mistake it for coffee—but she knew better. She could smell him on the fabric still. The coppery memory of him. She scrubbed and scrubbed until she tore a hole through the cloth.

When she had done all she could, she left the dress to dry on a nearby branch, and waded into the river. Naked, shivering, the cold nipped her ankles and scraped her soles raw against the rocky bed. She collapsed to her knees and submerged herself to the neck. Her teeth clattered. Her limbs felt too far from her, like they belonged to another woman entirely. She scrubbed the blood from her skin, her neck, her shoulders, her thighs. Still it lingered, invisible but not forgotten.

When she closed her eyes, his face was there. Not the boyish smile she’d once loved, but the face from the final moment—twisted, wild, exalted with madness. She splashed cold water against her cheeks to banish the vision. Her sobs came silently, folded into the sound of the river.

She stayed there until she could no longer feel her legs. Until she was sure she could not cry anymore.

The current moved past her, uncaring. The world did not stop for grief. The river flowed on, endless and ancient. She, too, would have to move on. But for now, she knelt in the current like a relic, a weeping thing among the reeds, waiting to be cleansed.

The bench was unforgiving. The wood beneath her spine groaned beneath even her frail weight, its paint chipped and splintered, its slats warped from long years of sun and storm. The cold crept up from the iron beneath, into her bones. Yet she did not move. She merely sat, silent as stone beneath the trembling hush of the trees, the amber streetlight flickering above her like a failing star. The pistol lay heavy in the folds of her coat beside her—a weight more profound than its steel form suggested.

And now, with the hush of the park pressing all around her and the night air whispering between the dead leaves, she understood why that weapon had felt so familiar in her hands. It had not been the chill of the barrel or the grease-slick finish of the trigger that stirred something old and dark within her. It was the weight of death. It was the presence that came with it.

She had known that presence before. Not in name, not in story—but intimately, as a child knows the feel of her mother’s heartbeat in the quiet moments before sleep. She met it first on the day the house burned, when she was six years old and had pressed her eye against the keyhole and watched, unblinking, as her father was devoured by fire.

Even now, the memory came sharp as broken glass—bright and searing. She could see the smoke curling beneath the door, feel the hot breath of the flames through the iron hinges, and hear the keening sound that came from inside: part animal, part prayer. The sound of Vern Y/L/N dying. She’d sat there on the floor in her nightdress, knees spread, watching in silence. Not screaming. Not pounding on the door. Just... watching. Death had placed its cold hand on her shoulder that night and whispered, Do nothing.

And she had obeyed.

Sometimes, in moments like this—when the night stretched too long and her body too empty—she would recall her mother’s scream. How it ripped through the hallways like a storm when she found her child crouched at the threshold of the blaze, still watching. Y/N, oh my God, Y/N, let’s get outta here! her mother had wailed, scooping her up as though saving her from drowning. But it was too late. Y/N had already looked death in the eye. Already made her silent pact with it.

Her mama hadn’t seen Death there in the hallway, draped in smoke and licking the air like some black-winged thing from Revelation. But Y/N had. And in that instant, something inside her changed—subtly at first, like a tide pulling back from shore. Later, that tide would rise again. It would flood everything.

People would say the quiet that followed was grief. What else could explain it? A girl who once filled rooms with laughter and song now refused to speak. A child who once plucked wildflowers for her neighbors now smoked stolen cigarettes behind the schoolhouse and came to class with whiskey on her breath. But they were wrong.

Y/N had not grieved her father. If anything, she had felt—God help her—relief. Relief that the booming voice and the trembling ground of her father’s rage was gone. Relief that no more doors would slam or belts come loose from drawers. And for that relief, she punished herself for years. She buried it beneath shame, beneath silence, beneath a thousand small destructions of herself. Because if she had opened the door—just opened it—maybe he would have lived. Skin like melted wax, bones like blackened branches, but alive.

But she hadn’t. And now, she was the one left to carry his ghost.

If anyone hurts you, shoot ‘em , he had once said, bouncing her on his knee beneath the sun. His voice had been warm then, affable. She had giggled at the idea, not understanding. He didn’t mean it, not really. But now, she wondered. Maybe he had. Maybe he meant himself most of all.

And wasn’t that what she'd done?

Her fingers flexed, cramped from the cold. She rose, stretching her legs slowly, deliberately, like one moving through the motions of an old dream. Her limbs ached from lying curled in on herself, like a child or a wounded animal. She rolled her neck, trying to dislodge the visions that haunted her—the way the flames had eaten through the old wallpaper, the way the blood had seeped between the concrete seams outside that bank.

No, she thought. No more tonight. She could not think of Hunter. Could not see his face again, not right now. Not his wide, uncomprehending eyes. Not the way he smiled at her one final time, as if the world had not already begun its slow crumble beneath his feet.

She could not sleep. Sleep would be worse than waking, worse than this wandering half-conscious fugue that carried her from street to street and left her sitting on benches like a ghost that no one remembered to fear. Sleep would take her back. Back to the scent of charred wood, to the crack of gunfire, to her knees wet in a river as she scrubbed blood from the folds of her only dress.

No. There would be no sleep tonight.

She started walking. The park was empty save for a few rusted swings rocking in the breeze. The moon, full and pale, seemed to follow her with the slow gaze of an indifferent god. Her shadow fell long before her, stretching down the gravel path like an omen.

She was no longer sure if she was running from something or toward it.

But she walked on. Because to stop would be to remember. And remembering—truly remembering—might destroy what was left of her.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

Sunday mornings always came to Y/N with a hollowness in her gut, a gnawing emptiness that had no beginning and no apparent end. When her father had lived, Sundays were a ritual of suffocation—the starchy lace dress, the pressed gloves, the hymns sung in dull, drawn-out strains while sweat pooled behind her knees. Three hours beneath the yoke of God and her father’s thumb. After Vern Y/L/N perished in flame and silence, the day took on another sort of solemnity—no longer oppressive, but vacant, like a house with the furniture stripped bare.

That sacred hollowness persisted, despite all efforts to drown it. It was a feeling like dust in her mouth, the sensation of something that had once been whole and now was not. After the preacher in their town died—some fever or old curse taking him in his sleep—Y/N, in a fit of strange devotion, took it upon herself to deliver the sermons in his place. Her own voice ringing out over the pulpit, sharp-edged and unyielding. It was not so different from her father’s, they said. Perhaps that was why it tore through her like a knife each time she opened her mouth to speak.

Now, in a town whose name she had not asked and would never remember, she wandered aimlessly through sun-baked streets, her dress still damp from the river where she had tried—and failed—to wash the sin from her skin. Her legs carried her, as if on instinct, toward the steeple that rose modestly against the horizon. A church. Of course. Some rusted cross glinted above its eaves like an eye watching her from Heaven or Hell—she no longer knew the difference.

The parking lot was full when she arrived. That, at least, was comforting. In the pews, among strangers, she could be no one. Anonymous. Faceless. Unworthy of notice. She missed that: the ease of being one of many.

When she stepped into the chapel, the air shifted.

All heads turned, each pair of eyes landing upon her like the final weight of some unseen jury. There was no malice in their gazes, only the kind of bland, idle curiosity that greets any stranger in a small Southern town. Still, it struck her like a blow. Her cheeks flushed. Her limbs stiffened. She swallowed her nausea and made her way to the back pew, where the shadows were thickest and the scent of cedar strongest. The building was old, and its beams, swollen with heat, seemed to weep beneath the weight of the years. The preacher’s voice echoed thinly through the chamber.

“––and the Lord has made gluttony a sin, so we avoid the drink,” he croaked, his glasses sliding down his long, perspiring nose. “He has warned us of lust, and so we wait ‘til the night of consummation before bedding our wives. He has said, ‘love thy neighbor,’ and yet still we murder, still we steal.”

Y/N rubbed at the brownish mark near her hip, the one she’d scrubbed raw in the river just hours earlier. Her skin beneath it still felt singed. If her father had been preaching—Vern Y/L/N, who thundered from the pulpit like a prophet of old—he would have halted his sermon at the sight of her. Gone silent, arms folded, glaring. He’d have demanded silence, and he would have gotten it. Not like this poor man, whose sermon faltered like a match in a windstorm.

“Just yesterday,” the preacher continued, lowering his voice as though to share a secret, “there was a robbery in Redwater. A man entered a bank with a handgun and left with nearly ten thousand dollars. And when the police––” he paused to pantomime the pistol, absurd and almost childish in his performance, “came to arrest him, he shot both men dead.”

There was a gasp from the woman beside Y/N, a sound like the clutch of pearls. Y/N did not flinch. Her hands stayed knotted in her lap, her back rigid. Inside, her blood ran cold as winter’s brine.

“But,” the preacher added, “do not fear, my friends. This man—this sinner—was killed in the act. God did not allow him to walk free. No, He smote him where he stood. For the Lord is just, and justice is His alone. When this man stands before God, there will be no mercy. Only judgment. Tenfold judgment, for every drop of blood he spilled.”

The service ended not long after. A few final hymns were sung, hollow and warbling. As the parishioners stood and gathered their Bibles, the woman next to her turned with wide, affected eyes.

“Can you believe it?” she whispered. “Two men dead. I swear, the world’s gone mad.”

Y/N gave a stiff smile. Her lips felt waxen, pulled too tightly across her face.

“It sure has,” she murmured.

“Are you new here, honey?” The woman was smiling, all friendliness and pearl earrings. “It’s a small town. I thought I knew just about everybody.”

“I’m just passing through.”

“Well, I hope I’ll be seein’ you around. What’s your name, honey?”

Y/N lied with the ease of someone who had grown too used to running. “Rhonda Portnoy.”

The smile dropped the moment she stepped back into the heat of the morning. The sky was white with clouds, the streets empty. The world had returned to its dull turning. No sirens. No blood. No Jungkook. Nothing but dust and heat and silence.

She gave the church one last glance—its cracked bell, its chipped stone steps—and knew, with an aching certainty, that it would be the last church she’d ever enter. God, if He had ever watched her, had stopped doing so long ago. Perhaps He had looked away that day her father first beckoned her into his room and closed the door behind him. Perhaps He had turned His back when her mother wept silently in the next room, hands clasped in prayer, pretending not to hear.

That little girl in the lace dress was gone now. Her hymns silenced. Her hope extinguished.

Y/N lit a cigarette with shaking fingers and turned away from the steeple, letting her feet lead her wherever they would. She didn’t care where.

Elsewhere, long ago, in a town called Abbeville, a girl named Shonda had been born into the world without fanfare or fuss. She came from a long line of small, tired women—Southern women, the sort raised on sermons and starch, who bore their burdens with clenched teeth and linen aprons. Her life was marked out for her in quiet, unremarkable strokes: Sunday school, modesty, obedience. She was the kind of girl who never left home because no one ever asked her to.

And then one day, a stranger’s car broke down outside the corner store, and everything changed.

His name was Vernon, and he arrived with smoke on his breath and boots thick with road dust. Shonda passed him on her way to the Harrisons’, swinging a basket of ginger cookies, and he stopped in his tracks. There was nothing especially remarkable about her—thin, curved, dressed in hand-me-downs—but Vern decided, in that strange way men do, that he’d stay.

He courted her in the old-fashioned way. Brought her daffodils in a jar. Watched her from the porch. Smoked with her daddy and won his favor. And when the hunger in him grew too loud—when he could no longer stand the quiet ache to see what lay beneath those prim church dresses—he married her.

It was in the dead weight of December that she was born—a pale and squalling thing pulled from her mother’s body in the half-light of morning, slick with birth and howling as though she already knew what sorrow awaited her. Her mother, Shonda, hunched and hollow-eyed, wept silently over a chipped porcelain basin as the baby crowned. Her father, Vern, leaned at the warped window frame with a cigarette between his lips, the matchstick’s flare reflecting dimly in his eyes. Outside, frost bit the windowpanes, and the bare, black trees bowed beneath the burden of the wind. No one wrote her birth down. There was no cake, no letters penned in joy, no carved nameplate above the cradle. But the world shifted on its axis that day—an imperceptible shudder. Something old died, and something new and uncertain began.

And now, almost two decades on, that child—a girl no longer, but some wild, in-between creature of dust and grief and smoldering memory—walks the shoulders of highways and the crooked-spined roads that slither between the hills. Her name is Y/N, though she does not speak it unless forced. She carries all she owns in a fraying canvas bag: a pistol with five rounds remaining, and a fistful of crumpled bills that smell faintly of gunpowder and sweat. Her dress, once white, is stained the color of tobacco and sun-dried blood. The stains are ghost-pale now, worn by weather and weeping and river-water. But she feels them still. They cling to her like sins unconfessed.

She walks beneath a sky bleached bone-white, the wind cutting her throat raw. She walks as if the road might one day lead her home, though she has long since forgotten where that was. Every town is beginning to look the same—burnt signs and shuttered stores, dogs with ribs showing, men with eyes like broken glass. Nothing new under the sun, her mama used to say. She didn’t know how right she was.

When the red Ford Bronco slows beside her, gravel spitting under its tires, she doesn’t startle. She turns her head with the slow, resigned grace of someone who’s seen every bad thing twice and is ready for the third.

The window rolls down with a mechanical whine. A woman with bleached curls and crow’s feet leans out with a smile too large for her face. Her elbow rests on the window’s edge; her fingers are tipped in chipped blue polish. The man behind the wheel squints at Y/N through his aviators, suspicion or interest—or some rough blend of both—settling behind his stare.

“Where you headed?” the woman calls out.

Y/N shrugs. “Wherever you’re going.”

“Hop on in,” she says, her voice gentle and twanged by heat and years. “Watch the door though. Lock’s rusty.”

Y/N pulls the door open with both hands, listening to the metal groan like a dying thing. She climbs into the back seat and sets her bag between her knees, careful not to let it jostle. The pistol inside shifts slightly against the canvas, its weight a constant companion. The money is folded in the side pocket. She hasn’t counted it in days. She doesn’t care anymore how much it is. There is no amount that can buy what she’s lost.

The scent of the car hits her: cigarettes and gasoline and sun-baked leather. She sinks back into the worn upholstery and closes her eyes for a moment, just long enough to imagine herself somewhere else. Somewhere softer. Somewhere without sirens or blood. Somewhere under a tree with Sam Wallace, his brown eyes so sad they could have been blue, his lip busted.

The man clears his throat and peers at her in the rearview mirror. His voice is dry and skeptical. “Bad break-up, huh? Looks like you’ve been on the run a while.”

She doesn’t answer at first. Her eyes remain closed. Her head leans gently against the smudged window glass, and the blur of trees passing by outside flickers over her face like shadows cast by a fire.

“Uh-huh,” she says at last. It is not a lie, but it is not the whole truth either. Not the kind of break-up they’d understand. Not the kind with screaming matches and slammed doors and shared custody of houseplants. No, she broke from something far older, far crueler. She broke from death itself, and it still followed at her heels, a silent dog.

Outside, the sky begins to darken—slowly, like ink dripping into milk. The Bronco roars along the highway, and Y/N sinks deeper into the seat, her hand still clutching the frayed strap of the bag at her feet.

Somewhere up ahead, another town waits. Another nameless gas station. Another church steeple. Another motel with flickering neon signs. She’ll sleep on a hard mattress beneath a ceiling stained with water rings, and in the hush before dawn she’ll wonder if this is the place she’ll finally stop running. But not yet.

Not tonight.

Tonight, she watches the road, and the road watches her right back.

Chapter Text

Horizon City was somehow even worse than El Paso. The sky overhead was flat and merciless, a single sheet of blue that offered no shade. It hung like a lid over a pot, holding the heat in until the air itself felt heavy. There was no breeze, no relief, just that dry, oppressive stillness that made the world feel abandoned. The pavement shimmered in the distance. The buildings sagged under the weight of it all, paint faded to bone and window glass pulsing hot to the touch.

Down the center of it came the Pussy Wagon, loud and too bright, a smear of yellow on the sunburned road. It didn’t fit here—not in a town like this, not among the rusted trucks and busted air conditioners. Heads turned. Men paused mid-conversation. A woman froze at the pump, squinting after it like it might be part of a dream she didn’t remember having. Nobody spoke. Just watched. Then they went back to what they were doing. Nobody asked questions in a town like Horizon. Not unless they wanted the kind of answers that made sleep hard to come by.

She didn’t care who stared.

Her bare feet were braced against the warped rubber of the floorboard, soles blackened from gas station dirt and whatever the hell else lived in truck stop bathrooms. Every inch of her hurt—the way you hurt after being still too long, like your joints forgot they belonged to you. Her spine creaked when she moved. Her shoulders tugged against muscles that had atrophied in silence. But it was a clean pain. A lived-in pain. The kind that came with being awake.

She turned off the main road and coasted into the parking lot of a squat strip mall that looked like it had been dying for years and was just too stubborn to finish the job. Half the shops were empty, windows dusted and papered over with For Lease signs that had curled at the corners. The rest were hanging on out of spite. One of them was TexStyle Western Wear, its sign crooked and sun-faded, half its letters flickering with the effort of staying lit. She parked the truck, killed the engine, and listened to it tick and groan in the silence, like it resented her for waking it up.

The pavement was hot enough to blister. She stepped down from the truck and felt it instantly, a slap of heat against her feet that nearly made her knees buckle. She stood there for a second, trying to get her bearings, then limped toward the storefront. Her legs didn’t like it. Neither did her hips. But they worked. She didn’t look back.

Inside, the temperature dropped hard and fast. The AC was working overtime, blasting cold air that smelled like chemicals and old linoleum. It made her skin prickle. The lighting was the kind you only find in stores like that—too bright and too dim at once, flickering in some far-off corner like the ceiling was trying to give up. Country music played low from a speaker behind the register, something twangy and slow and stitched together with heartbreak. It was familiar. Everything about the place was.

She moved slowly between the racks, her hospital scrubs rustling with each step. They clung to her in awkward places, stained and too big, reminders of somewhere she didn’t want to think about. No one looked at her twice. That was the beauty of places like this. You could walk in dripping blood or ghosts or both, and as long as you didn’t start yelling or shoplifting, you were just another person trying to get through the damn day.

She ran her hand along the denim, fingers grazing stiff seams and worn hems. It was grounding. She found a pair of jeans that looked close enough to her size—high waist, a little stretch, tough in the way real jeans are supposed to be. A black tank top came next, ribbed and simple, soft enough to be kind to her skin. She added a denim jacket, lined with thick shearling she didn’t need, but it gave her arms something to hide behind. Some of her scars she didn’t want to be seen. Others shouldn’t be.

The boots were tucked under a clearance rack. Red leather, scuffed but not horribly so, white stars stitched up the sides were more cream now with wear. She sat down and pulled them on, one at a time. They were snug. Her toes pushed against the leather. Her fingers trembled as she laced them, but she kept going. She had to stop twice just to breathe through the sting in her thighs. The pain was sharp, but it didn’t stop her. When she stood, they felt just fine.

At the register, she dropped a handful of bills from Buck’s wallet. They were damp, folded tight. The clerk—mid-forties, long braid, bored expression didn’t even pay attention to her. Just rang her up and bagged her old clothes like trash.

Outside, the sun was still merciless. She walked back to the truck with her chin up, her boots striking the pavement like punctuation. Her body still ached, her shoulders still burned, but she didn’t limp.

She opened the door, and the heat inside hit her square in the chest. It was thick, metallic, sharp with the smell of fuel and vinyl and something older. The interior hadn’t changed. Cracked dashboard. Dust on the glass. A rearview mirror that hung crooked, framing a face she refused to look at. Her reflection in the windshield was warped, broken into pieces by spiderweb cracks, and she let it blur.

She dropped into the driver’s seat and laid her hands on the steering wheel, fingers spread, palms sticky from the heat. She didn’t move right away. The truck had cooled a little with the AC blast from the store, but the sun was climbing fast, and it wouldn’t stay that way for long. The air inside was already thickening again, sweat curling under her new clothes. Still, she just sat there, the heavy silence folding in around her. She had a list now—mental, incomplete, but it was something—and she knew she needed one more stop before calling it a night in whatever no-name motel this blistered corner of Texas had to offer.

She turned the key. The engine gave a guttural cough, then came to life with that low, pissed-off rumble she was starting to associate with something close to comfort. She threw it into reverse and yanked the wheel, tires squealing a protest as she peeled out of the lot, gravel kicking up behind her like spit from a fight. Horizon City didn’t change much in the half-mile it took to find the next store—just more sun, more heat, more buildings that looked ready to collapse under their own boredom.

The place she landed on was barely a department store—concrete block, sun-bleached signage screaming about discounts and deals that sounded desperate. “EVERYDAY LOW PRICES,” “BUY ONE GET ONE,” “CLEARANCE EVENT.” Most of the parking lot was empty. Something inside was cooking—fried chicken, maybe. It smelled greasy and old and almost edible.

She parked all the way at the edge of the lot, as far from the entrance as she could justify. Her legs still felt wrong, weak in ways she hadn’t forgiven, but she needed to walk. Make them work. If she let them off the hook, they’d quit on her again. She shut off the engine and sat there a beat longer, chest rising slow, the sweat already returning beneath her collar, soaking through the denim of her jacket. Then she opened the door and stepped out into the light.

Inside, the cold was immediate and mean. It hit her full-on, like a slap meant to humiliate. Her breath caught in her throat and she squinted hard under the fluorescents. Everything in here was too bright and smelled like bleach, popcorn, and melted candy. It had the sick-sweet scent of nostalgia gone sour. The place buzzed with cheap noise—kids screaming, parents bickering, some teenager throwing a tantrum in the toy aisle—but she barely clocked any of it. She kept her eyes ahead and moved.

She didn’t look like she belonged. Her new clothes were decent enough, but the boots were already scuffed, her hair was wild, her skin marked. People noticed. They didn’t say anything, but they noticed. She could feel it, the weight of eyes brushing over her in half-second flicks. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care.

She made it to the back aisles and grabbed a red plastic basket, the handle squeaking loud enough to snap a few heads in her direction. She ignored them. The camping section was sparse—off-season—but she found what she needed: a folding shovel, handle like a crowbar; a short-handled pickaxe, fiberglass grip slick under her fingers; a flashlight that looked like it could double as a club; waterproof matches in a garish orange case. She added a map of Texas—creased and dog-eared, someone else’s fingerprints still on it. She’d be the last to touch it.

On her way to the front she passed the clearance bins—cheap Father’s Day junk, novelty socks, foam can holders, mugs declaring things no real dad ever needed to hear. She didn’t stop. Just moved on.

The stationery aisle was garish—everything neon or glitter-coated or branded with quotes about dreams and girl power. She picked a plain black notebook and a pack of felt pens.

She dropped her first basket and grabbed a second, the metal frame cool and already rusting at the welds. She started filling it fast. Apricot shampoo and matching conditioner. A plain white bar of soap, no scent. Pink razors—cheap, dull, but good enough. A loofah, didn’t care what color. Deodorant. Face wash. A bottle of lotion. All of it went in without pause. She didn’t want to smell like blood or sweat or medicine anymore. She wanted the hospital off of her—scraped clean, top to bottom. She wanted to reclaim her skin.

Across the aisle, bath salts lined the shelves like candy in a glass jar. Bubble baths in bright, desperate packaging. A sale sign promised something stupid. She stepped closer without really thinking, drawn by a scent memory she didn’t want but couldn’t resist.

An older woman was there already, her hair white and coiled in a perfect bun. She moved with slow, elegant purpose, uncapping jars and sniffing them one by one, always gently, always with care. Y/N didn’t look at her. Just reached for a jar. She opened it. The smell hit instantly.

Her stomach turned. Her lungs locked up. The scent dragged her straight back—blinding lights, antiseptic, soft footsteps echoing on tile. IVs. Beeping monitors. A cold hand brushing her hair while someone whispered that it was all going to be okay. It wasn’t. She snapped the lid shut and shoved it back on the shelf like it had burned her.

She grabbed the next jar at random. Didn’t read the label. Just breathed it in. Tropical. Something citrusy. Fake. But it cut the memory, and that was all that mattered. She dropped it into the basket without another thought.

The bubble bath she grabbed next was leaking a little, label half-peeled and cap cracked. It said vanilla. She didn’t care. It wasn’t lavender.

At checkout, she dumped both baskets onto the conveyor without ceremony. Her thoughts wouldn’t stop spinning—Taehyung’s face in the rearview mirror, the clean white sheets of the hospital bed, the scent of Sam Wallace in the dead of summer, the heavy silence of her mother’s kitchen. And beneath it all, always, that deeper note: her father. The one memory she could never quite wash out.

The cashier looked barely legal. Hoodie, chipped nail polish, one earbud still in. She didn’t say a word. Just started scanning.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Each item crinkled into a plastic bag. The scent of lavender still clung to Y/N’s hands. She could feel it even now—traced into her cuticles, her shirt collar, her breath.

She heard his voice, clear as a whisper in the dark.

“Our Father, who art in heaven…”

“Your total is $32.71.”

The words yanked her out of herself. She blinked. Dug into her pocket, counted out the money. The cashier gave her change and slid the receipt across the counter like it was nothing.

“Have a good one,” the girl mumbled without looking up.

Y/N’s mouth twitched—just barely. She studied the girl for a second, saw the soft shadow of apathy in her eyes.

“You too,” she said.

Her voice was dry, low, like it had to travel a long way to get to her lips. She gathered the bags—two in one hand, the third hooked over her wrist—and walked toward the exit. The automatic doors parted with a soft hiss, like the store was exhaling her out into the world.

The Pussy Wagon sat alone at the far edge of the parking lot, its candy-colored paint job practically humming under the weight of the sun. The red flames curling down the sides shimmered in the heat, distorted just enough to look like they were moving—breathing. It didn’t look fast. It didn’t look tough. It looked like something someone built on a dare and then regretted. She didn’t care. She just kept walking toward it, slow and steady, letting her boots fall heavy against the asphalt. The bags in her hands swayed gently with each step, bumping her knees like pendulums. Her spine throbbed, and her legs burned from too much effort, too fast—but she didn’t let it show. The sun beat down like it was trying to erase her, and still, she walked through it.

The heat inside the truck hit her the second she opened the door—thick, stale, suffocating. It smelled like rubber and sun-cooked vinyl and the leftover stink of someone else's sweat. She didn’t wince. Didn’t curse. She just rolled the window down with a crank that stuck halfway through, tossed one bag onto the passenger seat, and climbed in. The seat stuck to the back of her thighs as she settled in. She turned the key, and the engine came to life with a sound like it was clearing its throat after a long nap—grinding, growling, reluctant. But it caught. It always caught.

She pulled out slow. The tires groaned against the blacktop, finding traction like they had to talk themselves into it. The main strip of Horizon City blurred past in sun-scorched layers. Fast food chains with faded signs, payday loan offices in once-white buildings, gas stations with busted pumps and sun-faded chip displays behind smudged windows. Liquor stores with names like “EZ Mart” and “Last Stop.” Nothing green. Just dust and concrete and the occasional sun-warped palm trying to remember what thriving looked like.

She didn’t look twice. She didn’t need to. All of it was familiar, a copy of a copy of a copy. She’d seen this exact town a dozen times. Lived in three of them. Died in one.

When the buildings started to thin out, she veered off the main drag and pulled into a narrow lot full of potholes and crabgrass. At the far end stood a squat two-story motel that looked like it had been forgotten halfway through its own construction. The stucco walls were faded and cracking, the paint curling like dead skin. Rust streaked down from the corners of every window. A crooked neon sign buzzed weakly above the office door. “The Texican.” The “i” blinked like it was struggling to stay alive.

She parked in the shade beneath the second floor walkway, right beneath Room 212. The blinds in the window were shut, but one slat was bent, sticking out like a broken tooth. She stared at it for a beat before she moved. Then she grabbed her bags, shifted her weight, and got out.

The lobby was dim and smelled like heat and mildew. The air inside didn’t move right—thick and wrong, like it had been sealed in with the cigarette smoke from a thousand years ago. A ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, ticking once every time one of the blades passed the same rusted edge. The desk at the back of the room looked like it had been dragged in from a garage sale and never cleaned. Behind it, a man sat slouched low in a squeaky chair, eyes on his phone or maybe the TV mounted in the corner. His tank top was stained and limp around the collar. A serpent tattoo wrapped halfway down his arm before vanishing under the fabric. He didn’t look up. Not right away.

When he finally did, his gaze climbed her like a ladder—boots, thighs, waist, and then paused just long enough to make her jaw tighten. She didn’t flinch. Just reached into her jacket, pulled out a small roll of bills, and dropped it on the counter without a word.

He dragged it toward himself with two fingers, yellowed nails scratching against the laminate.

“Night or week?” he asked, voice flat, like it came from the bottom of a long, dry well.

“Night.”

He gave a grunt that might’ve meant anything, slid a key card across the counter, and dropped his eyes back to whatever screen he’d been lost in before she arrived. No greeting. No smile. Perfect.

She took the key and left without looking back.

The stairwell groaned as she climbed. The rail was cool and rough beneath her hand, bits of old paint peeling away with every grip. Her legs protested with each step, every joint stiff, tendons still waking up from their long silence. She moved carefully. Her balance was better now, but not perfect. The old building leaned a little, and the stairs felt uneven beneath her weight.

When she reached the second floor, Room 212 was waiting. The numbers on the door hung crooked, one screw half out. The wood around the lock was chipped, the paint smudged where keys had missed the slot a hundred times before hers. She slid the card through. It beeped, a faint electronic chirp that sounded unsure of itself, and then the lock clicked open with a sound like a bone popping out of socket. She stood there a second longer, staring at the handle, feeling the weight of the heat on her shoulders, the sweat sliding down the center of her back. Then she opened the door and stepped inside.

The smell hit her before she even crossed the threshold—old cigarettes soaked deep into the drywall, the carpets, the curtains. Not the fresh kind, but the kind that had settled in over decades and turned everything yellow. Beneath it, something sour and sharp: mildew, cleaning products that tried and failed to mask what was already permanent. There was no real freshness here. Just the illusion of effort. The air felt heavy, still, like it hadn’t moved properly in years.

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her with a dull click. The deadbolt slid into place with a tired snap, and the chain dragged across its track with a soft, metallic scrape. She grabbed a chair from the corner—a stubby, mismatched thing with upholstery that had once been green—and jammed it under the doorknob. Not that it would stop anyone if they really wanted in, but it was something. A gesture. A line drawn.

The room itself looked like it had been cobbled together from forgotten parts of other motels. The curtains sagged from their hooks, corners sun-bleached and uneven. The light slipping in around the edges painted the bed in thick orange streaks—late sunlight cutting the space in half. The carpet was patchy near the door, matted flat with grime. Nothing matched. The nightstand was too low, the lamp on top of it towering and cheap, casting a strange shadow across the wall. The desk bore the weight of time—rings from cups, knife marks, cigarette burns that had never been sanded out. The bedspread was loud and deliberately ugly, swirled paisleys in reds and greens that screamed don’t touch me. It looked like it was made to distract from everything else.

She stood in the center of the room for a moment, her bags dropped by the edge of the bed. Just breathing. Letting the quiet settle. The hum of the wall unit clicked on, blasting air that smelled faintly of dust and freon. It wasn’t much, but it was something. For the first time all day, she didn’t feel watched.

She made her way into the bathroom, flipping the light on with a snap. The bulb above the mirror flickered twice before holding. The mirror itself was cloudy, corners warped like time had eaten away at the silver backing. It didn’t reflect clearly—her face came back to her in dull patches, her features slightly off. It was like looking at a version of herself she didn’t recognize, or didn’t want to.

She turned on the faucet and waited while the pipes groaned to life. The water sputtered, came out red-tinged for a few seconds before clearing. It ran hot almost immediately, fogging up the mirror within seconds. The steam climbed the walls, filled the small space with warmth that was almost too much, but not enough to push her out.

She opened the jar of bath salts and dropped two generous scoops into the rising water. The scent filled the room like something borrowed from a better life. It was soft, warm, and wrong. She poured in the bubble bath, slow and steady, watching it twist through the surface like melted gold before dissolving. The bar of soap, plain and white, stayed on the edge of the tub, untouched.

Steam rolled around her as she stripped off her clothes. Each piece pulled free like peeling off a second skin. Her shirt stuck to her back. Her jeans clung around her thighs. Her underwear was damp with sweat and something else—fatigue, maybe, or just the weight of being upright too long.

She stood naked in the fog, body half-obscured in the mirror. Her skin caught the light in strange places. The curve of her shoulder, the bend of her waist, the shadows under her ribs. Her body had changed in ways she couldn’t ignore. Bruises dotted her sides, dull yellows fading into green. Her stomach was flat, but in a brittle, worn-down way. Her thighs had thinned. Her hips jutted like she’d been carved out. The scar along her lower abdomen was still pink and raised.

She didn’t stare. She’d already memorized it, even if she wished she hadn’t.

One hand on the tiled wall, she stepped into the tub. The water bit her ankles first, then her calves, the heat so sharp it forced a gasp out of her throat. But she didn’t pull back. She just kept going, slow and deliberate, lowering herself in until she was curled in the bottom, knees tucked in tight, arms looped around her shins. The water came up to her collarbones. The steam wrapped around her like a blanket pulled too tight.

She let herself breathe.

The tropical scent lingered, gentle and persistent. The bubbles clung to the top of the water, delicate, catching the light. Her skin burned at first, then settled. Her muscles started to loosen, one at a time. Her jaw, her neck, her spine. For a moment, it almost felt like safety. Like somewhere in this room, she could let go.

The sob came from deep—so deep it felt like it didn’t even pass through her throat. It erupted out of her like a cough, violent and full. She clenched her eyes shut, pressed her forehead to her knees, and tried to stop it, but it was too late. The second sob followed. Then a third. Her breath hitched. Her fingers curled into her skin. She didn’t wail—there was no air for that—but she wept. Full-bodied, bone-deep crying. Her ribs ached. Her throat burned.

She cried for the baby she never held. The one they told her was gone before she even got the chance to hear her cry. She cried for the man who was supposed to stay, whose blood had stained her hands, her wedding dress, the floor beneath the altar. She cried for the hospital bed, for the endless ticking of the machines, for the way the light never dimmed, even at night. She cried for every woman she saw with her hand on a belly that still held something. For every photo she never took. Every name she never whispered.

She cried for herself. For the years behind locked doors. For the way she forgot how her voice sounded. For how no one came. For how no one noticed she was gone.

Eventually, her body ran out of the strength to cry. The sobs faded into shudders, and then into silence. Her chest rose and fell in slow, uneven waves. Her arms loosened. The water had cooled, lukewarm now, but she didn’t move.

She just stayed there, in the tub, with the lavender and the bubbles and the bruises and the scar.

The only sound was the drip of water from the faucet and the soft crackle of the fan in the ceiling above her. The room had gone quiet again. And in that quiet, for just a second, it felt like maybe nothing could touch her.

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, just for a minute, letting the quiet wrap itself around her. Outside, the motel’s rickety air conditioner hummed in uneven bursts, rattling every few seconds like it had something to prove. A breeze nudged the curtain, making it tap gently against the sill in a rhythm that felt almost deliberate. From behind her, the faucet in the cracked sink let out a slow, steady drip—each drop hitting porcelain like a tiny metronome.

She reached for the soap.

It was motel standard: plain, pale, wrapped in stiff waxed paper that crinkled in her hands like old leaves. No brand. No scent. Nothing to identify it except the word “soap” in faded block letters. She peeled it open and rubbed it between her hands until it foamed. The lather was thick and smooth, gathering fast with the heat of the water. She didn’t rush. This wasn’t about getting clean in the usual sense. It was about working something out of her, layer by layer.

She started with her arms, sliding her hands slowly from shoulder to wrist. Then her chest. Her neck. Her shoulders again, giving extra attention to where the tension clung like a second skin. Her jaw, gentle there. Her stomach, careful around the scar—her palm moving slower over that spot, almost like an apology. Then her legs, her feet, her hands again. She worked between her fingers, under her nails, behind her ears. Nothing frantic. Just deliberate, slow passes like she was scraping memory off her bones.

The water started to turn—cloudy first, then murky. She didn’t notice at first, but the change crept in. Soap film swirled on the surface, tinged with the colors of wear and time. Faint pink streaks floated near her thighs, so light she almost missed them. Tiny cuts maybe, reopened by the heat. Or maybe just old wounds that hadn’t figured out how to close.

She picked up the apricot shampoo and popped the cap. The scent burst open—sweet, bright, almost cheerful. It didn’t belong here, but she let it in. She poured a palmful into her hand and massaged it into her scalp, working it through once, then again. On the third wash, she slowed. Her fingers moved in lazy, circular patterns, nails gently dragging over skin not to clean, but to feel. It was instinctual, and oddly grounding. For a second, she wasn’t thinking about hospitals or sirens or what came next. Just the weight of her own hand. The warmth of her own body. The presence of herself.

Her hair floated in dark strands around her, clinging to her shoulders, her arms, the rim of the tub. The water rippled with every shift, small waves that lapped softly at her collarbones. She moved slowly, barely disturbing it.

By the time she rinsed, the bathwater had turned thick with the remnants of everything she’d carried in with her. The oils, the shampoo, the dirt, the blood, the foam. Tiny bits drifted through the water—hairs, flecks of skin, things she didn’t try to name. A film coated the surface, breaking in quiet swirls each time she exhaled.

She sat still in the middle of it all. Arms wrapped tight around her knees, chin pressed to them. The steam had started to fade now. The mirror was still fogged over, but the air had cooled just enough to raise goosebumps on her arms. Her breath moved in shallow rhythms. Her spine ached. Her knees burned. But she didn’t move. It was the stillness she needed—the kind that emptied you without fanfare.

Her fingers found the drain. She pulled it without thinking.

The sound came slowly, a gentle slurp at first, then a stronger pull. The water swirled around her like it was trying to say goodbye. It lapped at her thighs, traced around her arms, slipped past her ribs, and disappeared in spirals. The surface broke into whorls as the drain took everything she didn’t want anymore—soap, oil, old blood, pieces of skin that didn’t feel like hers. It went without complaint.

She waited for the very last inch of water to go, that hesitant puddle that seemed reluctant to follow the rest. It circled once, twice, then vanished with a hollow gurgle. The kind of sound that left behind a silence you couldn’t fill.

She pressed her palms to the rim of the tub. It was cold now, slick beneath her hands, but she welcomed the discomfort. She took a breath, deep and sharp, and let it anchor her. Then she started to rise.

Her legs trembled on the way up. Her arms shook with the effort. Her joints argued with every inch she gained. Her muscles felt like strangers—tight in all the wrong places, uncertain in the right ones. But she kept moving, slow and stubborn, until she was standing again.

Water dripped from her body in slow trails, pattering against porcelain with quiet persistence. It traced down her spine, slid off her elbows, fell from her fingertips. Each drop left a mark. A reminder. The steam had mostly cleared now, retreating up toward the vent or curling under the door. What was left clung to the mirror in faint streaks.

She reached for the towel.

It was coarse and stiff, edges frayed, and it smelled faintly of bleach and old detergent. She dried herself in blunt, unceremonious swipes. No tenderness. No self-care ritual. Just a practical act: removing water from skin. Left side. Right. Shoulders. Legs. Arms. The towel scraped over raw spots where she’d scrubbed too hard, igniting new sting, but she didn’t wince.

The bathroom was behind her now. She stepped out barefoot onto the motel carpet. It scratched at her heels like someone else’s bad memory. The air outside the bathroom felt thin, crisp—like the room had changed while she was gone.

Her clothes were waiting, just where she left them. Folded. Neat.

She stepped into the jeans one leg at a time, the denim dragging over fresh skin. She winced once, briefly, when it caught on a healing scrape. But she yanked them up anyway. Cinched the belt tight. The pressure was grounding. The tank top came next, pulled down over her ribs, catching where she was still damp. Then the jacket—heavy, familiar, too warm for now but necessary. Not comfort. Protection.

She didn’t look at herself in the mirror again.

She sat on the edge of the bed, both feet planted wide for balance, and pulled on her boots one at a time. Her hands shook a little—not from nerves, not quite, but from something deeper. Exhaustion threaded through her muscles, the kind that didn’t just sit in the body but burrowed down into the bones. The right boot went on without a fight. A solid thump. The left needed coaxing. She flexed her ankle, wiggled her toes, yanked the heel until it finally slid into place with a reluctant shudder. She stood.

The floor felt steadier beneath her than it had last night. That was something.

She crossed the room and stopped at the sink, the mirror still wearing a thin sheen of fog from the bath. She dragged her palm across it in a single slow stroke, smearing away the condensation. The reflection that appeared was fractured. The glass had hairline cracks running across it, and time had left behind a faint yellow tinge along the edges. The image staring back at her was broken up—disjointed, imperfect—but still, unmistakably her.

She looked older than she remembered. Hollowed out. Cheeks drawn, bones sharper. Her skin was tight across her face, pale at the temples, thinner at the collarbones. Deep shadows clung under her eyes like thumbprints left too long. Her lips were pale, dry, and pulled into a line that didn’t quite frown, but didn’t try to smile either. Her jaw was clenched like it had been holding something back for years.

The scar across her forehead caught the light. Not a neat line—no surgeon’s tidy signature—but a jagged bloom of pale tissue that arced across her right temple. The kind of mark that didn’t just heal but settled in. The skin shimmered faintly in the mirror’s low light, stretched smooth over the metal plate beneath. It hadn’t disfigured her. Not completely. But it had changed her face. Given it a story, whether she liked it or not.

She didn’t shy away from it. Didn’t flinch or shift her eyes. She stared at herself until the weight of it pressed into her chest, until she felt that familiar tightening at the base of her throat. The beginning of something she wasn’t going to let rise.

The rage was there. Always. Slow, smoldering, nestled deep in her spine. It never flared fast—it built, quiet and constant. She could feel it stirring now, coiling just beneath her ribs, spreading heat through her lungs. She didn’t want to look at the scar on her stomach. She knew what she’d see there. She didn’t need the reminder.

Her daughter. Gone.

Her breath hitched once in her chest. She stepped back.

The bathroom still held the last of the steam, curling in the corners, moving with the air like it had nowhere else to go. When she opened the door, it drifted out behind her, evaporating into the dry stillness of the room. It wasn’t quite dawn, but the light was beginning to shift. That hour when the darkness starts to bleed out at the edges, but nothing has truly woken up yet. Everything felt suspended—quiet, waiting.

She walked to the nightstand. The notebook was there, just where she left it. The black cover smooth, untouched. Waiting. She picked it up with both hands, careful, like it might change weight if she wasn’t gentle. It felt heavier than it should. Not because of the pages, but because of what they were meant to hold.

She pulled the pen from her bag. Simple, black, no logo. The kind you buy in packs of ten and forget to refill until they all run dry. She uncapped it slowly, the click soft, almost polite in the quiet.

The first page stared back at her.

Death List Five

1. Yoongi Min – Cottonmouth

2. Jimin Park - Copperhead

3. Namjoon Kim - Sidewinder

4. Brandi Phoenix - California Mountain Snake

5. Taehyung

She capped the pen and slid both notebook and pen into her bag.

Then she picked up Buck’s sunglasses. They were still where she tossed them the night before, scratched, bent, ridiculous. She put them on. They tilted crooked, just like always. She adjusted them with two fingers, nudged the nose bridge, gave up. They never fit right, but they did the job.

The room was still dim. Her boots thudded across the floor, soft but certain, the kind of sound that felt like a promise. She paused at the door. The chair was still wedged beneath the knob, a makeshift lock, cockeyed and stubborn. She knelt, slow and stiff, grabbed the frame with both hands, and dragged it aside. It scraped across the linoleum, loud in the silence, a final punctuation mark.

The chain came next. One flick of her thumb. The deadbolt—three quick turns. Her fingers knew the rhythm. She didn’t have to think.

She opened the door.

It groaned—low, grudging, like the hinges resented the work. The air outside was already thick with heat, that dry kind that presses down and promises it’ll only get worse. Asphalt fumes floated up from the lot. Dust clung to everything. The scent of sun-baked concrete, a faint trace of oil and something metallic, filled her nose.

The sky was starting to turn. Not quite gold yet, not fully pink, just that soft, strange in-between light that only lasted a few minutes. The world was waiting. The motel sat silent in it—caught between the end of one night and the start of another day. Not awake. Not asleep. Just... paused.

The neon sign buzzed weakly above the office. Somewhere, a cicada started up. One short bark from a dog. Then silence again.

She stepped outside. The door clicked shut behind her. She didn’t look back.

The Pussy Wagon sat where she’d left it, crouched at the edge of the lot like it was sulking. Yellow paint lit up in the early light, too vivid for the hour—like someone had taken a highlighter to the morning and hadn’t known when to stop. The red flames down the side shimmered in the heat haze, twitching as if they had breath in them. The whole truck looked like a threat dressed as a joke. Or maybe the other way around.

She opened the door and climbed in without thinking about it. The vinyl seat was warm against her thighs, not quite hot yet, just the kind of heat that reminded you it would be soon. The cab smelled like lavender and motor oil—clean, almost antiseptic, but still mechanical. It smelled like something that had been rebuilt more than once. Like it had history.

She sat still for a moment, palms resting flat on her legs, fingers twitching slightly. The hum of the motel’s air conditioning unit still echoed faintly in the distance, low and droning. Inside the truck, everything was quiet but coiled—like a breath held too long.

Then she reached for the key.

The engine turned once, then again. Caught on the second. Growled alive like it had something to prove. The whole cab rattled around her, and the wheel gave a little shake in her grip, a reminder of its presence. The noise vibrated up her arms, into her chest, settling somewhere behind her ribs.

This wasn’t just a truck. This was motion. And motion was everything.

She threw it into drive. The tires spit gravel in complaint as she eased it forward, steering with slow confidence. The motel shrank behind her—just another place she’d slept, another room she wouldn’t remember if not for the scar it poked at. Room 212 disappeared in the rearview, drawn back into the mess of dust and cheap neon and sagging blinds.

But the name burned hotter now. Still written in ink. Still waiting.

She didn’t look back.

The highway opened up in front of her like it always did—wide, cracked, a dark ribbon stretching out through West Texas. Brush lined the shoulders, thorny and brittle, dotted with rust-colored rocks and skeletal trees. Mesquite twisted like broken arms. The sky was an empty sprawl of pale blue, washed out, with a sun that hadn’t even gotten mean yet.

By the time she hit the real desert, night had come back. Not gently. Not slowly. It didn’t settle—it dropped. The kind of dark that felt full. No moon. No stars. Just black, thick and pressing, wrapped around everything like a closed fist.

The truck didn’t fit out there. And it knew it.

It moved through the dark like a thing that didn’t belong. Too loud. Too bright. High beams pierced the night in two tight columns, carving white tunnels through miles of nothing. The engine hummed deep, like a warning too tired to raise its voice. The whole frame rattled with every dip in the road, but the steering stayed true. Her hands didn’t leave the wheel. Ten and two. Steady. Pale knuckles, loose wrists, focus pulled forward and nowhere else.

The road shimmered, though the heat had long gone. Just phantom mirages now—ghosts of sunlight, flickering at the edges of her vision. She didn’t chase them. Didn’t need to.

Outside, the wind scratched the truck’s flanks, a sound like fingernails on denim. The desert whispered in that dry, rattling way it had—half wind, half insects, a little bit of memory. Something moved out there, fast and low, skimming across the gravel just beyond her lights. She didn’t bother checking. She slowed instead.

The road thinned to a single lane, rough asphalt barely clinging to its shape. She eased off the gas. Let the truck crawl. Then brought it to a full stop.

Headlights swept across the brush and rocks ahead. Nothing moved, but the shadows felt deep—long enough to hide something. Or someone.

She killed the engine.

And the silence came fast. Loud, in its own way. Absolute. The kind of silence that didn’t just fall over a place—it had always been there. She just hadn’t noticed until the noise stopped.

She moved slowly. Reached for the flashlight on the passenger seat and opened the door.

The air outside was sharp now. Cold in a way that wasn’t about temperature, but exposure. She pulled the jacket closer without thinking. Gravel shifted under her boots as she stepped out. The truck ticked softly behind her, the engine settling back into rest.

She clicked the flashlight on. A clean, narrow beam cut ahead, slicing through the dark like a scalpel. Everything outside that pale cone of light remained untouched, waiting in shadow. It wasn’t threatening. It was just patient.

She didn’t hesitate. Walked forward, step by step. Her body moved like it knew the rhythm already. It did. Her legs remembered this place better than her mind wanted to.

Then there it was.

A rock. Just a rock, if you didn’t know better. Pale limestone, half-sunk into the dirt like it had been dropped there decades ago. Weathered. Ordinary. Something that blended in with everything else out here. Something anyone else would miss.

But not her.

She crouched, knees bending with a soft crack, the flashlight jammed awkwardly between her shoulder and chin. The light washed over the rock’s edge, casting long shadows that made it look twice its size. She dug her fingers in at the base, where the dirt rose around it like it had been trying to bury the thing whole.

She pulled.

It fought her. Felt heavier than it used to. Time had packed the soil tighter, maybe, or maybe her arms just weren’t what they were. She adjusted her grip, planted one boot hard, and pulled again. It shifted, scraped, rolled with a gritty sound.

Underneath, the mark was still there.

An X, burned into the stone. Deep and sharp. Not worn down, not faded, not erased. As black as the day she’d made it. The edge of it shimmered faintly under the flashlight. She stared at it, the breath in her chest caught somewhere between release and recoil.

That mark had been a promise.

If it was gone, she’d walk away. That had been the deal. No names. No vengeance. Just... let it go. Pretend the past didn’t still live in her blood.

But it wasn’t gone.

The desert hadn’t taken it. The wind hadn’t touched it. The universe hadn’t blinked.

So she stood.

The cold had settled deeper now, pulled in around her collar, tugged at her sleeves. The shadows felt closer, like they’d taken a few steps forward while her back was turned. She didn’t care. She walked back to the truck.

The tools were right where they always were—shovel, pickaxe, flashlight—nestled in the bed of the truck like they hadn’t moved in years. She didn’t pause to second-guess or plan; her hand just reached back and found the shovel by feel, like muscle memory had already made the decision for her.

She circled around to the driver’s side, leaned in through the open door, and thumbed the stereo. The silence shattered in an instant. Barracuda hit like a slap to the face. The opening riff exploded through the speakers, loud and jagged, too much for the cab to hold. The whole truck seemed to twitch under the force of it, tires vibrating against the dirt, frame rattling like it wanted to jump the road and take off on its own. Guitars snarled and kicked. Drums pounded like war. The sound didn’t ask permission. It just filled the air and dared anything to try and stop it.

She turned without waiting and started back toward the rock.

The music followed—slightly warped by distance and terrain but still sharp enough to cut. It rolled out into the empty desert like thunder without lightning, hitting scrub brush and dust like it was looking for a fight. Her boots matched the rhythm without meaning to, each step crunching over gravel and brittle leaves.

One. Two. Three.

She counted quietly, almost a whisper, more breath than voice.

Four. Five. Six.

The flashlight swung at her side, casting a slow arc of white light across the dirt and rock. It caught on shadows, bent across dips in the land, slid over broken branches and tufts of dry grass. It felt like walking into a story that hadn’t been told yet.

Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

Her legs moved without complaint now, the cold licking at her calves, the air dry and biting down her throat. But the rhythm was working, the movement keeping her balanced.

She reached the rock and stopped. The cold hit harder here—different. It rose up from the ground itself, not the wind, like the earth was holding on to something too long and it had started to rot.

The shovel’s handle was damp. Not from sweat. From something older, deeper. Her gloves creaked around the wood as she gripped tighter.

She lifted the shovel and drove it down.

The first hit rang dull and solid. The earth didn’t welcome her. It shoved back—compact, sun-hardened, baked into something closer to stone. It jarred her shoulder, bit into her arms. She didn’t stop.

Another swing. Harder this time.

Then another.

Each strike loosened something. The ground resisted, but she knew how to keep pushing. Dig. Lift. Pivot. Again. Her breath thickened, came shorter. She could feel sweat sliding between her shoulder blades, catching at the base of her spine. The muscles in her back were beginning to hum with fatigue. Her legs burned. Her hands ached inside the gloves. Still, she didn’t let up. The repetition helped. It emptied her out, cleared space in her chest. Every slam of the shovel into dirt knocked something loose from her—something angry, something tired.

Behind her, Barracuda still roared. The guitars scratched at the dark like claws. The beat thudded through the ground beneath her boots.

And she kept going.

She dug like she was trying to carve a hole to the center of herself. Or maybe just far enough to leave something behind.

Then— clink .

The sound stopped her cold. It wasn’t just a different noise. It had a feeling to it, a vibration that ran straight up the shovel handle and into her spine. She froze, one boot planted on the edge of the hole, dirt caving in around her laces. Her breath caught. Her heartbeat didn’t.

She dropped to her knees without thinking, jeans dragging across sharp rocks and dust. Her gloves were thick with grime now, fingertips clotted with dirt and something darker. She didn’t care. She set the flashlight beside her. The beam wobbled for a second, then settled—just enough to catch the shape beneath the soil.

She reached back for the pickaxe. Her grip closed around the handle like it had never left her hand. She didn’t pause. Just brought it down.

Once. Twice. A third time.

Each hit sent dry earth flying, chunks breaking apart and scattering like bone. The pickaxe punched through layers the shovel hadn’t reached, splitting the dirt with sharp, brutal rhythm. Her arms screamed, her lungs worked double-time, her knees dug into gravel.

She saw it just beneath the surface—edges poking through the dirt, wrapped in black plastic torn in places, clinging like skin left too long in the sun. The shape was familiar. Boxy. Olive green peeking through the rips. She knew what it was before her hands touched it.

The pickaxe dropped from her grip without a thought. She crouched, fingers clawing into the soil, curling around the sides of the box. It didn’t want to move. The ground held tight, suctioned around it like it wasn’t ready to let go. Her gloves slipped, caught, ripped at the plastic. Dirt stuck to her palms. Something else—wet, maybe blood, maybe just water gone sour—dragged under her nails. She shifted her weight, planted one foot hard, and gave it everything.

The box came free with a groan from the earth, a final, reluctant jolt that knocked her back on her heels. She landed hard, heart hammering, lungs pulling in dry, gritty air. Her gloves were filthy. Her chest rose and fell like she’d been running. But the box was out.

It was a footlocker.

Army-issue. Metal. Olive drab dulled with time. Corners dented, the surface scratched and scuffed, the paint chipped in long thin lines. The hinges had rust but held. The latches were tight. It looked exactly like it should—forgotten, but intact.

She ran a hand across the top, brushing away the worst of the dirt. Her fingers found the latches without hesitation and popped them open in one clean, practiced motion. No pause. No breath held. Just a sound—metal protesting metal—and the lid lifted with a slow creak. Dust puffed out in a fine cloud, catching in the beam of the flashlight like ash drifting on still air.

She rested the flashlight on the edge, tilting it so the beam fell inside the box. Then she reached in.

The first thing she pulled out was a sleeping bag—cheap, navy blue, synthetic. It had the stiffness of something left untouched for too long. It unrolled with a crinkle, the zipper clinking its way down like a chain being unfastened. She spread it flat next to the hole, smoothing it with both hands.

The flashlight perched on the edge of the footlocker, casting a hard line of light across its insides. Dust drifted in the beam, rising in lazy spirals, like the past exhaling slowly. She reached back in.

There were magazines, tucked tight in rows. Some rubber-banded, others wrapped in black electrical tape now fraying at the edges. She picked one up, ran her thumb over the top round—brass and clean, no tarnish, no grime. It gleamed like it had just been packed yesterday. Like it had waited, untouched, for her return.

The first gun she pulled was compact and polished, silver with a kind of elegance that didn’t belong out here. It looked delicate, but wasn’t. She knew better. A close-range weapon. Not for show. For finishing things before they had time to start. She held it for a moment, testing the weight, the way it still sat perfectly in her hand. Then she placed it beside the holsters with practiced ease.

Then came a snub-nose .38. No frills. Just a solid, unforgiving weapon. The kind that didn’t try to impress, just did the job. She opened the cylinder, checked the chambers, spun it once. It clicked like a clock. Still precise. Still ready. She paired it with its ankle holster, felt the gritty Velcro catch and hold.

She pulled a Mossberg out in pieces—the barrel first, then the stock, then the slide. Matte steel, no decoration. She brushed each part clean with the inside of her sleeve, wiping away whatever dust had settled. The assembly was second nature. She didn’t think, didn’t even blink. Just moved. One part into the next, until the last click snapped it into place. It sat across her lap heavy and sure, and she didn’t need to test it to know it still worked.

Something smaller touched her fingertips next. Cold. Smooth.

She lifted the silver boomerang with both hands. The edges were sharp enough to cut without effort. It caught the beam from the flashlight and scattered it like glass. She turned it in her grip, feeling the weight shift along the arc. This was older than everything else in the box. Older than her rage. Older than her scars. A reminder from another version of her. She slid it into the leather holster that had once lived under her jacket. It still fit. Her hand lingered there a second longer than necessary.

At the very bottom, half-hidden beneath the foam, was a black attache. She pulled it free, laid it flat, and opened both latches. It clicked open with the kind of sound that never lost its edge.

Inside, nested in carved foam, was a sniper rifle broken into clean parts. Barrel. Bolt. Scope. Mount. She picked each piece up in turn. No dust. No corrosion. Not even a scratch out of place. She held the scope up toward the sky. Caught a flicker of starlight through the glass—sharp, pinprick-clear.

She was about to close the case when something caught her eye.

Flat. Tucked just beneath the foam. Her breath paused.

An envelope.

Manila. Worn at the corners, soft like something held too many times. She slid her gloves off—her hands were dirty, nails packed with soil—and lifted it out like it might crumble. She didn’t clean her fingers. Just opened it.

Inside was a single folded piece of paper.

She knew before she unfolded it what it would be. Still, she was careful. Slid her thumb under the folds slowly, one at a time.

A sonogram.

Black and white. Blurry in places, but unmistakable. A curled shape, the size of a thumb. Spine. Head. The faintest stretch of limbs. Not a question. Not potential.

Her child.

She stayed still. Music throbbed low in the background, but she barely heard it. The wind around her had stopped, or maybe she just stopped noticing. The desert pulled back like it was giving her space. And she sat in the dirt—knees bent, sleeves caked in grime—and held that small, grainy piece of her that never had a chance to become.

She didn’t cry. No break. No shift. But something changed in her face. Something in her jaw let go.

She folded the paper slowly, carefully, like folding skin. Slid it back into the envelope and pressed the flap down. No tape. No seal. Just enough to keep it shut.

Then she reached into the footlocker one last time.

There was still something left.

A Ziploc bag. Cloudy plastic, wrinkled, corners browned from heat and time. She pulled it free, unsealed it with two fingers. Inside was an old Texas state ID.

Candy Ralston.

The photo was her, sort of. Younger. Her face rounder, skin smoother. No scars. Her hair was pulled back too tight, her eyes not quite settled. Not yet guarded, but already watching. Her mouth flat. No smile. Just a thin line that said she didn’t trust what was coming.

Beside the ID was an old paper bank book—creased at the spine, corners worn down to soft fuzz. The kind of thing you didn’t see anymore unless someone had kept it on purpose. Every entry was written by hand, neat and measured, like someone had been planning something and needed a paper trail no machine could erase. Each withdrawal was small, spaced out perfectly, like the person behind it had patience to spare and secrets to protect. Nothing loud. Nothing that would draw attention. A slow, careful breadcrumb trail leading straight to now.

She flipped to the final page, thumb brushing the paper like it might still be warm from the last time she touched it. The last entry wasn’t a number—it was a moment. A final choice in a long line of them. And right beneath the lining of the footlocker, exactly where she remembered, was the key.

It was small. Plain. A little tarnished. She turned it in her fingers and felt the weight—not heavy, not really, but it still seemed to tug on her like gravity had changed just for it. It dangled from a chipped novelty keychain, the kind you find hanging on dusty racks near gas station registers. The letters were almost gone, rubbed smooth by time and fingers, but she didn’t need to read them. She knew what it said.

Deadly Vipers.

She didn’t waste time staring at it. Didn’t whisper anything dramatic or linger for effect. That wasn’t her way. She just knelt down again and started putting the gear back where it belonged. Piece by piece, careful and deliberate. No panic. No wasted motion. She packed the weapons like someone repacking a life they knew how to live. The foam gave beneath her fingers as she pressed the sniper parts into place. The pistols slid into their custom slots. The boomerang clicked into its curved space like it had never been gone. Everything else went in with the same methodical rhythm. Smooth. Certain. No room for doubt.

When the footlocker was full again, she zipped the sleeping bag shut. The zipper teeth caught once near the top, but she didn’t stop. Just nudged it past the snag and kept going. It closed with a final click that sounded too loud in the quiet, like a door closing behind her. She lifted the bundle onto her shoulder—too heavy for comfort, but her body shifted to carry it like it had done this a hundred times.

She stood, turned, and headed back toward the truck without a glance behind her. The hole stayed open in the dirt, a dark gash in the ground, like the earth had been holding its breath all this time and finally exhaled. There was no marker. No cross. No gravestone. Just a patch of desert that had kept a secret until it didn’t need to anymore. She left it that way.

The wind picked up slightly, but the desert around her didn’t change. The oil derrick in the distance kept moving like it always had—slow, mechanical, indifferent. The truck was still humming low with music when she climbed back in. Something with fast guitars and the kind of percussion that made your ribs feel bruised just from listening. She didn’t turn it down. She didn’t look at the radio. She just turned the key.

The engine snarled back to life. The steering wheel jumped under her hands like it was impatient. Like it had been waiting for her to remember what she came for.

She shifted into drive.

The wheels rolled over the gravel and back onto the road without hesitation. No goodbye. No second look. Just the crunch of tires over dust and the faint rise of dirt in her wake. The hole behind her stayed behind. Nothing filled it in. Nothing needed to.

The miles started slipping under the tires, one after the other, steady and unbroken. The sun climbed higher, casting hard light on the highway, and the horizon flattened out into a long, shimmering stretch of nothing. She let it pass beneath her like a current she didn’t have to fight.

By the time she pulled into the parking lot of the Commonwealth Bank of Texas, the sun had reached its highest point and the heat shimmered up from the concrete like a warning. The building looked like it had been forgotten mid-construction and then forced into service anyway. Beige brick. Dull metal trim. A faded red "OPEN" sign blinking against the glass like it couldn’t decide if it meant it.

The place sat between a shuttered taqueria and a payday loan office that still had Christmas tinsel hanging in the window. Dust gathered in the cracks of the sidewalk. The kind of strip mall people didn’t look at twice. Perfect.

She cut the engine and got out. Her boots hit the pavement with the same slow certainty they’d had in the dirt. The sleeping bag was gone—tucked away with the rest of it. What stood here now wasn’t the woman from the hole. This was Candy Ralston.

Not the fresh-faced version who smiled too easily and had the accent dialed up just enough to charm. That Candy was dead. This one was leaner, paler, her mouth a flat line and her eyes too tired to pretend otherwise. This Candy wasn’t here to make friends.

She crossed the parking lot with a slow, deliberate gait. One hand on a bag. The other resting close to her side, near the coat’s opening. The fabric moved when she walked, brushing her thighs, catching the breeze. She moved like a woman who knew who she was, what she was carrying, and what it would take to use it.

The bank doors were glass, but they didn’t invite. The tint was too dark. The reflection warped. Inside, fluorescent lights hummed and flickered faintly, casting a pale, gray light across everything. The blinds were half-twisted, yellow at the edges. The kind of place that never got better, just didn’t get worse fast enough for anyone to shut it down.

She pushed the door open.

The buzzer chirped as she entered, loud enough to break the hush. The air conditioning was aggressive—artificial cold with a bite, meant to keep people alert, uncomfortable. It smelled like citrus cleaner and hot electronics. Beneath that, maybe just a hint of fear.

The lighting didn’t forgive. It stripped everything down to sharp angles and bad skin. Her coat stayed on.

She moved forward with the kind of presence that didn't need to ask for space. Cameras tracked her—small black domes in each corner, humming faintly if you listened close. She didn’t look up. Just kept her pace steady. Let them watch. Let them guess.

Behind the counter sat a woman who looked like she’d been there since the bank opened—helmeted hair sprayed into submission, lipstick a bright, almost defiant pink that didn’t quite suit her skin tone. Her name tag read MARJORIE , all caps, clipped to a polyester blouse the color of powdered strawberries. She looked up when the door chimed and gave the kind of smile people keep in reserve for trouble. Too practiced, too quick, the kind that came from instinct, not welcome.

Y/N didn’t return it.

“Hi there,” Marjorie said, her voice soaked in the slow sweetness of a Texas drawl, one that sounded like it had been taught in finishing school and worn thin by years of repetition. “How can I help you today, ma’am?”

Y/N stepped forward, just close enough to make it feel personal, but not close enough to make it weird. Her voice came out low, a little frayed, like she’d worn it out talking to ghosts. “I need access to my safety deposit box.”

Even to her own ears, she sounded small. Not scared. Just tired in a way that felt deep in the bones. Her arms still ached from the dig, her back tight across the spine, her muscles running on fumes. It helped. The exhaustion made her seem soft at the edges, easier to dismiss.

She reached into her coat and pulled out the key. It was plain, silver dulled to a matte finish, worn down at the edges. Nothing remarkable. Except it was. The way she turned it in her fingers, how it caught the light for a second—made it something more than metal. This key had opened more than steel boxes. It had cracked things open that were meant to stay shut.

She placed it on the counter like it might still be hot. “My name’s Candy Ralston.”

Marjorie blinked. Just once. But it was enough. A pause in the rhythm. Her eyes dropped to the key, then back up. Something shifted in her face—some small recalculation, like a mental search engine had just returned an unexpected result. Not panic. Not even suspicion. Just awareness. A name that didn’t match a story. Or a story that was missing too many pages.

Y/N noticed. She always noticed. The flicker in the eyes, the slight tension in the mouth, the way Marjorie’s hands hovered over the keyboard for half a second too long. Like they were waiting for instructions the rest of her wasn’t ready to give.

Y/N followed with the ID. Slid it across the glass, calm, steady. The photo was old but recent enough. Her face in it was rounder, eyes a little less guarded, a smile that barely made it to her mouth. Now her cheeks were hollowed out, skin drawn tighter, her gaze hard-edged. But the eyes—those stayed the same.

Marjorie studied the ID, compared it to the woman standing in front of her. Her smile didn’t return. Something behind it had turned mechanical.

“I’ll be right back, honey,” she said, and the warmth in her voice had vanished. She took the ID and the key, turned, and disappeared behind a gray metal door that hissed shut behind her like a vault sealing off bad memories.

Y/N didn’t move.

She scanned the lobby instead. Vault tucked in the corner, keypad locked. Two cameras, standard dome type, mounted high—cheap, analog, probably on a timed loop. Footage saved to tapes or some outdated drive, nothing that uploaded to a cloud. She made a note of that. Good, not great. Sprinklers overhead, fire alarms every fifteen feet. No posted security. No visible guards. Just quiet.

It wasn’t much. But maybe enough to stay ahead if Taehyung had caught her scent.

Marjorie came back slower than she’d gone. The door opened with the same soft hiss. No smile now. Just neutral posture, the kind you wore when you didn’t want to pick sides. She held the door open without a word.

“Right this way.”

Y/N didn’t thank her. Didn’t speak. She just moved, coat brushing against the counter’s edge, boots making a soft sound against carpet that had been chosen specifically to muffle footsteps. The hallway they entered was narrow, lined with anonymous doors that had no signs or names, only keypads in place of knobs. It smelled like cold paper and old wiring.

At the end of the corridor was a room built for forgetting. The temperature dipped the second they stepped in—not from AC, but something deeper, like the place had been sealed off from the rest of the world for too long. Fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, casting a flat, pale glow that made every surface look harsher than it was. Shadows clung to the corners, thick and reluctant.

The walls were covered in rows of steel safety deposit boxes, each one identical, stacked high like a wall of filing cabinets in a mausoleum. A square table sat in the middle—wood, worn smooth in some places, scratched in others. It didn’t look like anyone had ever sat comfortably at it.

Marjorie moved without speaking, walking straight to a lower drawer in the wall. Her fingers didn’t fumble. She pulled a steel box free and laid it on the table with a dull thunk. Then another. The sound was soft but final, like a decision being made in secret.

She didn’t look at Y/N. Didn’t ask any questions. Her whole body said the same thing: I don’t want to know.

Y/N didn’t open the box.

Not here. Not with the lights buzzing and the cameras humming faintly above, and Marjorie pretending not to see but seeing everything anyway. This wasn’t the place for what came next. Not yet.

She stood slowly, letting her knees stretch, spine groan just a little as it straightened. She didn’t make a sound. Just rose, steady and full of weight.

Marjorie still stood by the door, hands folded tight, knuckles pale. Her voice came out quiet, not reverent, not polite—something more cautious than that.

“Thanks for coming.”

Her eyes flicked to the bag over Y/N’s shoulder. Not curious. Just wary. There was no warmth in her voice. No welcome. Just the brittle sound of someone realizing too late that they should’ve asked fewer questions—or maybe more.

Y/N didn’t try to soothe it.

“Thanks for your help,” she said. Flat. Even. Just enough to be finished.

She turned and walked out.

Marjorie followed at a distance, like she didn’t want to be caught sharing space with whatever Y/N carried. Back through the hallway, down the long strip of carpet meant to erase sound and footprints. When they reached the counter again, Marjorie slid behind it without a word and sat very still, watching through the glass as Y/N moved toward the door and pushed it open.

The heat outside hit like a slow slap—drier than before, tinted orange by a sun that was just starting to fall. Shadows had grown long across the parking lot, stretching past broken curbs and faded paint lines. The sky had gone bruised at the edges. The truck waited exactly where it had been, dust settled thick across the windshield, the yellow paint looking tired in the last of the light.

She tossed the bag into the flatbed, climbed into the driver’s seat, and closed the door. The cab held the day’s warmth like a breath that hadn’t been let go. The engine took a second to respond. Then it grumbled to life with a thick, uneven roar that rattled the steering column.

She pulled out of the lot without a glance at the building behind her.

No one followed.

The bank disappeared in the rearview, swallowed up by the flat lines of small-town architecture and the slow drag of coming night. Another door shut. Another name scratched off.

The road opened in front of her again, stretching west through brush and rock and the half-sleep of places too small to fight back. Her fingers rested easy on the wheel. Not loose. Not tense. Just ready. Her other hand twitched once against her thigh, like it was remembering something—some old rhythm, some old grip.

The sky behind her wasn’t just sunset—it was collapse. Like something had given way at the edge of the world and let everything pour out. Red bled into deep violet, orange streaked like torn silk across the horizon. It was a hell of a sight, bold and feral, almost too much to look at. But she didn’t turn to see it. Endings didn’t impress her anymore.

Mile marker 233 blurred past. Just beyond it, the motel came into view—low-slung and sagging between a boarded-up diner and a pawn shop with a broken front window and an “OPEN” sign that hadn’t glowed since Clinton was in office. The SUNRISE MOT_L sign blinked in sickly neon, the “E” long gone, leaving the name limping toward meaning. Plastic palm trees lined the driveway, sun-bleached and cracked, their fronds drooping like they’d finally accepted their own artificiality.

She pulled in slow. The truck hissed as it settled, the engine ticking like it had opinions about being parked. Heat shimmered off the hood. Her boots hit the asphalt with the solid, unhurried thud of someone who’d done this before, too many times. Another town. Another key. Another night spent listening to the sound of her own breath, wondering if it was really her breathing anymore.

The lobby stank of cheap cleaner trying and failing to smother the smell of time. Old carpet, burned coffee, that bitter scent of fake lemon polish used to wipe down furniture no one liked. The man behind the counter didn’t even try to act surprised. Red eyes, week-old stubble, a sweat-stained shirt that had lost its battle with the afternoon heat. He looked up at her the way a man looks at a thunderstorm from a screened-in porch—resigned, a little impressed, but not about to step into it.

She laid a wad of bills on the counter without counting. No eye contact. No name. Just the universal transaction of people who don’t care to speak. He slid a room key across the scratched laminate surface—a red plastic tag dangling from it, the number 11 in peeling gold paint. The plastic stuck a little against her fingers, soft and tacky with the kind of grime you couldn’t wash out anymore.

“Back row,” he muttered, already turning away.

Room 11 waited at the end of the building, farthest from the office, tucked into the shadows like a bruise no one talked about. The key stuck in the lock. She had to lean into it, shoulder tight against the door, until it gave with a tired click, as if the room had been holding its breath.

Inside, the air was still and heavy, like it hadn’t moved in weeks. Not hot. Not cold. Just stale. Saturated with the kind of invisible weight that clung to your clothes, your skin. The scent of old smoke and mildewed carpet crept up from the floor. She stepped in, shut the door behind her, and slid the bolt home. Chain. Deadbolt. Then she pulled the chair from under the desk—its seat torn, metal legs uneven—and wedged it beneath the knob. Not because it would stop anyone. But because it felt like control.

The bag hit the bed with a dense thud. She didn’t open it yet.

The blinds were plastic, warped and brittle, their edges curled from sun exposure. She lowered them slat by slat, letting them fall into place with sharp, deliberate clicks. Outside, the parking lot sat under a flickering streetlamp, the kind that hummed a little too loud and didn’t quite know whether to stay on. A few cars scattered across the lot. No movement. Just heat rising off the pavement and bugs swirling beneath the light.

She flipped the bathroom switch. The light buzzed to life—sickly yellow and half-dimmed, casting a long crooked shadow behind her. The tile was cracked in spiderweb patterns, the sink ringed with rust. The mirror was clouded at the edges, water-stained, warped. The door stayed half open. Not to see anything. Just because she never shut a door without a reason anymore.

She stood there for a long second. Eyes steady. Shoulders loose. Breathing easy. The room around her was peeling at the seams. The wallpaper lifted in the corners. The ceiling wore a dark water stain like a permanent bruise. The air conditioning unit coughed once, then died again, rattling into silence.

She moved back to the bed.

The zipper on the bag rasped open. Inside, bundles of cash sat in neat stacks, their rubber bands brittle with time. She picked one up. The bills smelled like sweat, vault dust, and long drives with the windows cracked. This was quiet money. The kind that didn’t raise flags or ask for witnesses.

Beneath it were weapons. Two pistols—one compact and clean, the other more worn. The compact one she hadn’t held since El Paso, since Lisa Wong had walked out of that motel bathroom holding a pregnancy test and not saying a word. She left three days later. Faked her own death the day after that.

She slid the pistols aside and found the SOG knife. Still perfectly balanced. Still hers. A straight razor was tucked beneath it, sleek and simple. Not for show. For skin. She hesitated, then slid it into a side pouch. Always better to have the option.

A hard-sided rifle case came next. She moved it into the light, flicked open the latches with practiced fingers. The rifle inside was exactly as she remembered—long barrel, matte black, functional. Nothing ornate. She stared at it for a beat. Not nostalgia. Just memory. She wouldn’t be bringing it to Korea. Too loud. Too big. Too final. She locked the case and set it aside.

At the very bottom of the bag was a manila folder, thick and soft at the corners. Inside were passports. Fourteen of them. Each one a different version of her—Candy Ralston. Minsook Cho. Emma Blevins. Others she barely remembered using but couldn’t forget if she tried. Different hair. Different smiles. But always the same eyes. Always hers.

A map slipped out from between the pages. Folded and re-folded. Korea. Red ink traced across it—circles around cities, lines between provinces, a route that looked like a heartbeat. It was her handwriting, though she couldn’t remember the moment she’d drawn it. Didn’t matter. Her hand had known where she was going.

Further down: photographs. Old ones. Blurry prints from a school yearbook she’d ordered under another name. She flipped through them fast. A beach. An arm around Sam Wallace. Her own smile caught in freeze-frame, half-formed. She didn’t stop long.

She felt the sonograms before she saw them. The paper was different. Softer. She passed them without unfolding. She didn’t need to look. The shape lived in her spine now, in the spaces between her ribs.

She sat on the edge of the bed, folder in her lap, the bag still half-open next to her. One lamp lit the room now, weak and yellow. The rest of it stayed in shadow. She didn’t turn on the TV. Didn’t check her phone. Just sat there with her hands still and her breath steady.

The room didn’t welcome her. But it didn’t push her out either. It was just a room. Another box to sleep inside, another four walls to keep the world away for one more night.

Outside, a car rolled by slow, tires crunching over loose gravel like it was trying not to be noticed. Somewhere down the row, a door slammed shut. A quick burst of laughter cracked through the air, sharp and careless, followed by the low thump of bass bleeding through a window left open too wide. The music had that swollen swagger to it—just noise and bravado and no real weight behind it. People out there were moving through their lives like spotlights on swivel heads, bright and blind and loud.

She stayed still a while longer. Just breathing. Letting the sounds pass like weather. When it felt right, she leaned forward again and unzipped the smaller pocket near the bottom of the bag. Her fingers found the edge of something cool—metal, compact, rectangular. A refrigeration case. She slid it out, set it on the bed, and retrieved the key laced behind her boot. The lock clicked once, soft and clean, before the lid opened.

Inside were two gold syringes resting in a bed of tight black foam, gleaming slightly under the bedside lamp. Between them, a vial. Thick liquid, pale amber, the kind that didn’t catch light so much as hold it. It moved slow in the glass, syrupy, heavy—like honey aged too long. Taehyung had called it The Undisputed Truth, said it was the kind of thing that burned the lies right out of a person. She hadn’t believed him. Still didn’t. But she’d taken it anyway. Now it was here, real and waiting. Maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t. But soon she’d have to find out.

She closed the case again and turned the key with care. Slipped it back behind her laces like it had never left. The case settled back into the bag with a dull thud, tucked beneath layers of gear. Her hand brushed something soft in the side pocket—a flattened pack of Camels, paper crumpled and worn at the edges, like it had been living there a long time. She pulled it out and stared at it. Couldn’t remember putting it in. Couldn’t remember the last time she wanted to. Not since Pai Mei. Not since the split lip and two days of lungs that felt scraped raw from the inside. That had been the line. She’d meant to quit.

But tonight didn’t care what she meant.

She tapped the pack twice against her knee, fished out one cigarette with her teeth. The lighter was tucked into the same pocket—cheap, blue, half-empty. It sputtered once, twice, then caught. The flame kissed the end of the cigarette and flared, bright and too close, before dimming down to a steady glow. She drew in the first breath deep, let it curl through her lungs and settle like something old and familiar slipping back into her.

She exhaled slow, watching the smoke rise toward the ceiling in soft spirals. It mixed with the stale motel air like it had always belonged there, like maybe she had too. She took another drag, longer this time. Let it anchor her. The tremble in her hands eased. The knot in her chest loosened. The tight pressure behind her eyes softened just enough to blink without feeling it.

She had what she needed. Enough money to vanish. Enough weapons to make sure no one stopped her. Enough names and paper trails to build another self, somewhere else. She’d started with less, built worlds from crumbs before. But there was something different under it all now. Not just the itch of old revenge, not just the echo of pain. Something deeper. Hunger. The kind that didn’t come from being hurt—it came from surviving. From still being alive after everything and wanting something back.

She reached into the side pocket again and pulled out the folded map. Laid it flat across the bed, smoothing it out with both hands. The paper had gone soft from use, the edges curling, the creases tired. The ink was smudged in places, but the line was still clear—drawn in red, a thread from here to Korea, curling across borders and through customs and lies. Cities circled. Names underlined. Her finger followed it, tracing the route slow, stopping just shy of Busan. There, a small circle, marked twice. Her nail tapped it. Once. Then again. Then she folded the map back up, methodically, pressing each edge down like sealing a thought.

She stood. The cigarette had burned low, ash curling long and delicate at the end. The room felt tighter now. Not smaller, just more present, like it had drawn in around her. The A/C wheezed once and then gave up for good, coughing a final rattle before falling quiet. She didn’t even glance toward it.

She walked to the window and slipped two fingers between the slats. Pulled them apart just enough to look out. The parking lot sat in that sodium orange glow, edges blurred, nothing moving but the bugs swarming the flickering lamp. Her truck was still in the corner, hood shadowed, paint dulled to a hum of yellow. It looked like it was waiting. It knew this wasn’t the end. Just another launch point. Another checkpoint on the way back to a version of herself that had been buried.

She smoked the cigarette down to the filter. Stubbed it out in the glass ashtray near the lamp, the glass already webbed with cracks and speckled with the leftovers of a dozen forgotten nights. She turned from the window and stretched, slow and silent, until her spine gave a small pop. Rolled her shoulders once. Tension. Proof that the engine was still running. That she hadn’t rusted over yet.

There was still work ahead. Still miles. Still names that needed remembering. Or forgetting.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The sky was still the color of a healing bruise when she stepped out of Room 11. That thin, breath-held hour before sunrise stretched across the motel, quiet and suspended, like the world wasn’t sure whether to wake up or go back to sleep. The air hung low and heavy, not cold anymore but still clinging to the memory of it, brushing at her ankles as she walked. Her boots met the gravel with a soft, steady crunch, her stride slow but sure. The door clicked shut behind her with the soft finality of a decision already made. She didn’t look back. She never did.

Whatever lingered inside that room—the musty reek of mildew, the peeling wallpaper, the silence pressed into the floor like dust—could stay there. The ghosts were welcome to it.

The lot was empty now, stripped of last night’s noise and movement. No music, no laughter, no arguing strangers trying to forget whatever they’d dragged in with them. Just the hum of a flickering security light and the shadows it cast—long and tired and mostly ignored. Her truck waited where she’d left it, the same as it always did. Black, battered, dust-laced. It didn’t look fast or dangerous, just patient. Like it had seen everything and didn’t need to brag about any of it.

She opened the door. The hinges gave a soft groan. The duffel landed in the passenger seat with a solid weight, heavier now—heavier in more ways than one. Not just steel and currency, but decisions. Commitments. Endings. She sat behind the wheel and rested her hand on the key, but didn’t turn it right away. Instead, she looked through the windshield, past the sagging plastic palms and sun-warped signage, out toward the open road.

Somewhere along the way, something had shifted. She didn’t know the exact moment, but it was there—in her blood, in her spine. The running was over. Whatever came next wouldn’t be a retreat. She wasn’t trying to disappear anymore. She was going back.

She turned the key.

The truck woke up with a low growl, not eager, but ready. The kind of engine that didn’t expect praise, just purpose. She eased out of the lot without checking the mirror, letting the motel recede into the rearview like everything else she’d buried. It would stay there, just another mile behind her.

The road to the airport unfolded like it always did in these parts—quiet highways full of tired signage and forgotten ambition. Diners with names like “Lisa’s Last Stop” and “Grill & Chill 24/7,” their neon flickering like it was fighting sleep. Empty parking lots. Billboards that promised injury settlements, eternal salvation, and the best damn pecan pie on Highway 9. Churches with broken steeples. Loan offices with barred windows. The skeleton of American promise, sun-bleached and hollowed out.

She didn’t turn on the radio. Didn’t crack the window. Her coffee sat untouched in the console, more for the heat in her hand than anything else. She drove with both hands on the wheel, letting her thoughts drift slow and aimless, looping back through the same questions and never settling on answers.

The sun rose behind her, crawling up the horizon like something tired of hiding. It lit the road in pale gold and chased her shadow out ahead of her, long and crooked. The towns she passed blurred together—same gas stations, same parking lots, same dust settling on sun-baked signs. Nothing reached her. Nothing asked to.

By the time she pulled into the airport lot, the sky had turned that washed-out shade of blue that promised heat and little else. She parked in long-term, rows from anyone else. Killed the engine under a flickering lamppost that gave one last buzz before giving out. She sat a moment, hands still on the wheel, feeling the last bit of quiet settle around her. Then she slung the duffel over her shoulder and got out.

It hit her hip like a reminder. Cash. Steel. Papers. Lives. She didn’t walk fast, but she didn’t stall either. Just moved forward like time didn’t own her anymore.

The terminal ahead was all glass and stale light, catching the morning sky in fractured reflections. She stepped through the automatic doors and into the kind of cold that didn’t come from weather but from design—manufactured, artificial, meant to keep people sharp and orderly. It smelled like lemons, plastic, and every departure that had come before her.

She paused just inside. Not hesitation. Just calibration. Listening. Feeling the hum of the place. Gate calls. Wheels dragging. Overhead pages layered with chatter. The low murmur of a world built for leaving. For going but not staying.

She moved through it like someone who didn’t need instructions.

The check-in counter was manned by a thin kid barely old enough to rent a car. His name tag said TYLER. His lanyard was a mess of meme pins and frayed cords. The kind of kid who clocked in with earbuds still in and forgot to take them out. He didn’t notice her at first—not until she was standing right in front of him.

The duffel hit the floor beside her with a small, final sound. Her voice stayed low.

“One-way ticket to Gwangju. First available.”

Tyler blinked, fingers stuttering a second before tapping at the keyboard. Gwangju wasn’t common. It made him look up again, a little more carefully this time. She said nothing else. Just waited.

She slid the passport across the counter. Emma Ji-woo. The photo was polished, airbrushed just enough to pass scrutiny. But the eyes were hers—still, unblinking. Focused. Tyler studied the picture, then studied her. He didn’t ask questions. Maybe didn’t know how. Or maybe something in her expression told him not to.

She paid in cash. Clean bills. Neat stack. Pulled from the vault without hesitation, counted out like it was nothing. Like it hadn’t come with a history. The paper smelled faintly of oil and time, like everything important always did. Tyler took the money, his fingers slowing just a bit as he handled it, as if part of him was trying to memorize what wrong felt like.

He printed her ticket, hands fidgety now, and slid it across the counter like he was giving her something that might explode.

“Gate thirty-four,” he said. “You’ll connect through Incheon.”

She took the boarding pass without a word. She didn’t say thank you. She turned and walked toward security, and left Tyler staring after her.

She didn’t ask about upgrades or snacks. Didn’t care what came in the seatback pocket or what counted as a meal at thirty-seven thousand feet. No interest in a foil-wrapped cookie, or a lukewarm bottle of water labeled “premium.” She wasn’t here for comfort. She was here to move forward. To put sky between her and the things behind her. She wanted distance. Altitude. The kind of cold, wordless detachment that only the stratosphere could offer.

The security line wound like a slow fuse—plastic bins clattering, belts slipping through metal loops, the voices of TSA agents clipped and bored. She stepped through it like she’d done it a hundred times. Because she had. Her coat was dark wool, the sort you could wear to a funeral or a boardroom without drawing questions. The stitching was heavier than it looked—reinforced. Useful. Her boots cleared the scanners. The blade inside was legal by a fraction of an inch, and packed with the precision of someone who’d measured the limits. Her bag was clean where it counted. Nothing that would raise alarms. Just the weight of something lived-in and quiet.

They scanned her passport and boarding pass without a second glance. The photo matched. Emma Ji-woo. Hair slightly darker in the picture, lips touched with a professional half-smile. Believable. The machines beeped politely. No flags. No questions. Just a nod and a wave.

She didn’t breathe easier. She didn’t need to.

At the gate, the crowd had already started to gather—people sprawled in chairs, their energy muted by early hours and too many miles. Some stared at their phones. Some picked at overpriced muffins. One kid cried softly into a sweatshirt, and nobody looked up. It was the kind of communal fatigue that airports did best: a shared sense of waiting without purpose.

She took her place in line, middle of the pack. Not the first. Never the last. Just another body headed somewhere else.

When they called Group Two, she moved.

Her seat was by the window. It always was. The duffel slid under the seat in front of her with practiced ease, fitting like it had done this before. She let her fingers rest on it briefly, grounding herself in the weight of what it held—names, tools, contingencies. The pieces of a life carefully folded down to fit inside a single bag.

She leaned into the wall of the plane, cool against her shoulder, and looked out. Morning had arrived without conviction. The sky was a washed-out gray, the kind of color that came before heat, before light. Airport machinery drifted past—fuel trucks, baggage carts, people in reflective vests who looked like they hadn’t slept. The wing of the plane cut across her view, still and patient, waiting to rise. Sunlight slid over it in dull streaks, catching on the rivets and edges, turning everything gold and indifferent.

The overhead speaker crackled something about boarding zones and safety demonstrations, but none of it landed. Not for her. The sound washed past her ears without shape, the way wind moves through trees—present, but meaningless. Someone two rows up laughed too loudly. A baby fussed. Coffee burned its way through the air vents, mixing with the stale plastic scent of recycled cabin air.

She didn’t move. Didn’t fidget. Her hands were folded in her lap, posture calm, almost meditative. But inside, the tight coil sat waiting. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t nerves. Just pressure. A quiet readiness built from too many miles and not enough peace.

The engines rumbled to life beneath her feet. The metal shell around her vibrated in response, like the plane was stretching its limbs after too long on the ground. It rolled slowly toward the runway, wheels clunking over seams in the concrete. She didn’t grip the armrest. Didn’t reach for anything. Just watched.

Takeoff wasn’t elegant. It was mechanical force dressed up in aerodynamics. The thrust came all at once—raw, loud, unapologetic. The kind of motion that didn’t ask permission. Her body pressed back into the seat, gravity pulling at her chest as the ground fell away. For one long breath, the Earth clung to her like it didn’t want to let go. And then it did.

The airport dropped out of view—buildings and roads folding in on themselves, reduced to the flat language of maps and memory. Gas stations, parking lots, little rectangles of human effort. All of it faded under a rising haze, distant and forgettable.

Her breath touched the glass for a moment. A soft cloud, gone just as quickly. The sky beyond was endless and blue in that high, cold way. Not warm. Not kind. But honest. It didn’t care who she was. It didn’t care where she was going. It just was. Vast. Empty. Ready.

She stared out into it, not searching, not thinking. Just remembering how it felt to be small again. Small enough to disappear, but sharp enough not to.

Her hand moved without looking, brushing the inside pocket of her coat. Cotton. Folded. A handkerchief she didn’t remember packing. She pulled it out, fingers slow and careful. The cloth was clean. White. Pressed. The kind of thing you carried when you didn’t know if you’d cry, or bleed, or both.

From the same pocket came the needle. Fine steel. Polished. Paired with a single loop of red thread, already knotted. She didn’t check it. She didn’t need to.

She began to sew.

Her hands worked in small, deliberate motions, the thread pulling through the fabric with barely a sound. She didn’t glance down. Her fingers remembered the rhythm. The name formed, one letter at a time. T. A. E. H. Y. U. N. G. Each stroke was precise. Each pull tight. No wasted movement.

She didn’t say his name. Didn’t even let her lips shape it. But it was there. In the cloth. In the blood-colored thread. In the silence between stitches.

When the name was finished, she tied it off with a flick of her wrist. Trimmed the excess. Folded the cloth again. Pressed it back into her pocket. Over her heart.

The plane had leveled out. Cruising now. The clouds below looked like ash. The ocean below that—cold, dark, silent. Somewhere beyond it, past all this emptiness, was Korea. And the man from Gwangju.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The plane hit the runway. A hard, ugly jolt that snapped her spine straight and rattled the tray table in front of her. The tires screamed against the tarmac, metal grinding in protest as the cabin vibrated with the kind of impact that made people forget how to breathe. Drinks sloshed. Seatbacks creaked. Somewhere up front, someone muttered a sharp curse under their breath. The overhead lights flickered once—barely a stutter—but she saw it. She always did.

Out the window, the city didn’t look like it was sleeping. It looked like it had never gone to bed in the first place. Darkness hung heavy, not clean or quiet, but thick—like smoke, like old breath trapped in a closed room. The kind of dark that didn’t just hide things, it held them. The runway lights sliced through it in stark, clinical lines. Past them, the faint blur of Gwangju shimmered in neon and haze—blues and reds pulsing like slow heartbeats, mirrored in wet pavement that hadn’t dried and maybe never would. The glass reflected back just enough of her face to remind her she was still here.

As she stepped into the gangway, the air shifted. Dense. Damp. Immediate. It clung to her skin like something familiar, something half-forgotten but buried deep enough in the bones to recognize on contact. A mix of exhaust, concrete, late summer heat, and something sweeter—grilled food maybe, or just memory dressed up like scent. It hit her lungs like a slow exhale. She didn’t rush. Just walked forward, each step steady, her bag slung across her shoulder in that way that made it clear she didn’t need help and wouldn’t ask for it. Her coat hung open now, too warm for the humidity but still part of the armor. She moved like someone who belonged in the space between strangers. Not local, not lost—just passing through with purpose.

And yet, something shifted the second she stepped off the plane and into Korean soil. Nothing anyone could see, but she felt it—a small click, like a lock catching in place. A posture change that didn’t show in her spine but settled deeper, in muscle memory and instinct. The mask slid on without effort. Not Emma Ji-woo anymore, not exactly. Not Candy, not the others. Just the version of herself this place required. Whatever her name was, she carried it like a blade in her boot—quiet, hidden, ready.

Inside, the airport moved like it had been designed for silence. No chaos. No rush. Just clean lines and softened footsteps echoing off polished tile. People didn’t shout. They didn’t loiter. They moved with the kind of practiced grace that didn’t need announcements. The lights overhead were low and cool, and even the seating looked like it had been designed to be ignored.

Customs passed without friction. The officer barely glanced up, flicked through her documents like he was reading grocery lists. Her forged passport—Emma Ji-woo, South Korean citizen returning from years abroad—was fresh, well-aged in the right places. The photo had the right kind of editing: smooth enough to pass facial scan, textured enough to seem human. She handed it over with both hands, bowed just enough to make it believable, smiled with restraint. Polite. Non-threatening.

“감사합니다,” she said, her voice low and shaped just right.

The stamp fell with a dull, final thud. No questions. No extra eyes. Just a nod, a motion, and then the gates opened.

Outside, the night waited.

The city air hit harder—warmer, wetter. The kind of humidity that didn’t just touch you, it soaked in. Rain had fallen not long before; she could feel it in the way the concrete gave off heat like breath. The streetlights bounced off slick asphalt, halos forming in puddles that mirrored blinking shop signs and broken reflections of moving traffic. Scooters buzzed past, weaving between slow cars. The buzz of neon hummed in the wires overhead like a living thing. There wasn’t much noise, but everything felt alive. Breathing.

She walked toward the taxi stand without checking her phone, without checking directions. She already knew where she was going. Her bag pulled at her shoulder—not in protest, just in reminder. Inside, names and pasts and the pieces of herself that weren’t for daylight. But she didn’t adjust it. Didn’t even shift her stance.

The cab she picked wasn’t the newest. The bumper was scuffed, one headlight had the faint film of age, and the license plate was slightly crooked. But it was real. Lived-in. The driver leaned against the hood, half-lit by the overhead bulb, cigarette cupped loosely in two fingers. Middle-aged, maybe older. His shirt wrinkled, his gaze unreadable.

She smiled before she spoke. Soft, disarming, the kind of smile that made people assume you didn’t bite.

“안녕하세요,” she said. “Seongmin Heritage Hotel, please. Near Sajik Park? The one with the koi in the lobby?”

The man blinked at her. A flicker of recognition—more for her fluency than her face. But he nodded like it didn’t matter.

“Know it,” he said, voice rasped from smoke or years or both. “That’s a nice place.”

She slid into the back seat, her bag tucked in beside her, one hand resting on its handle.

As they pulled into the street, he glanced at her in the mirror. “Vacation?”

She let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh. “Sort of,” she said, breezy, warm enough to sell. “I’m meeting someone.”

That made him smile, just a little. “Boyfriend?”

She tilted her head, just enough to suggest a blush. “Not exactly. I’ve known him for a long time.”

“And you’ve never met?” he said, eyes narrowing with casual disbelief. “Do you trust him?”

She leaned forward a little, voice softer, like she was sharing something real. “I guess I’m old-fashioned. I still believe in people.”

The driver chuckled, tapping ash out the window. “Well. Hope he’s worth the wait.”

She smiled again, turning her eyes back to the window. “Me too.”

Outside, the city slid past in glints and shadows. Signs blinked red and blue against walls slick with water. A lone man smoked beneath a streetlight. A group of teenagers laughed near a convenience store, their voices echoing sharp and bright. And above it all, Gwangju pulsed. Alive. Waiting.

Her body language was relaxed, open, even friendly—but not too friendly. Her smile landed right where it needed to: warm enough to seem genuine, distant enough to keep the woman behind the desk from asking questions she didn’t want to answer. And yet, beneath it all—behind her eyes—there was something else. Something sharp. Alert. A presence just beneath the surface, watching everything, holding still like a wire pulled tight.

The cab ride had taken about twenty minutes, maybe less. She couldn’t really tell. In that strange pocket of time—after midnight but before dawn—everything stretched or collapsed depending on how close you were watching. Cities didn’t sleep in those hours; they just drifted, like the tide. The cab driver barely spoke, his cigarette glowing faint in the corner of her vision, the smoke trailing out the half-open window into the warm, wet air. He drove like a man who’d forgotten how to be surprised by anything. She appreciated that. It made things easier.

Out the window, Gwangju blurred past in bands of neon and shadow, light warped by the sheen of recent rain. The storefronts were lit like stages no one was acting on anymore—7-Elevens glowing sterile and perfect, their shelves full of snacks and instant noodles and bottled tea that no one needed but still bought. People moved through them slowly, hunched and quiet, looking like they were halfway between sleep and survival. The rest of the city felt paused—noodle shops with stools turned upside-down, karaoke bars locked behind metal grates, all of it blinking half-heartedly like no one had told the power to shut off yet. One sign above a barbecue place kept flickering between “삼겹살 24시” and total darkness, as if it couldn’t decide whether to keep going or give up.

They passed a hanbok rental place with mannequins frozen in the windows, draped in silk and thread, caught mid-movement in some forgotten celebration. The lights inside were faint, almost apologetic. The kind of glow you could miss if you weren’t looking directly at it. And everything outside—every puddle, every wall, every parked car—reflected that layered light. Hangul shimmered across wet streets like it was painted there in real time. Chicken. Tarot. Facials. Cheap drinks. Lost hopes. It was all advertised the same way: with bold fonts and desperate color.

She leaned her head against the cool glass of the cab window and let the city slide past her. She wasn’t sightseeing. She wasn’t curious. She was memorizing. Every corner. Every alley. Every building with a fire escape or a side entrance or a window that stayed cracked. Not just as someone taking in a new place. But as someone planning how to move through it. Where to hide. Where to hunt. Where to vanish.

She wasn’t here for a reunion. That was the lie she wore like cologne—pleasant, easy, expected. She was here to dig. To drag someone’s name back out of the dirt and make it mean something again. If this city had tried to forget him, she’d remind it. She’d burn the name into glass and pavement if she had to. She hadn’t come this far to let memory do the burying.

When the cab finally slowed in front of the Seongmin Heritage Hotel, she already knew the building before it came into full view. She’d studied it—grainy photos, tourist reviews, street-view walkthroughs. But even with all that preparation, it was still something to see in person. Polished, curated, old-world elegance repackaged as modern luxury. White stone columns stood like they were holding up more than a roof—like they were trying to convince the street this place mattered. Carved details along the trim caught the warm spill of interior lighting. The brass door handles gleamed like they’d never been touched by real weather. Above the entry, a stained-glass panel glowed amber and deep red, a honeyed light pouring over the curb like something sacred had just cracked open.

And just inside, behind a clean pane of tall glass, the koi pond gleamed. Black water, smooth and quiet, broken only by the slow turning of gold and orange fins. The fish moved in lazy arcs, each shift like a breath drawn too deep to be seen. Like they didn’t care who watched.

The driver parked and turned to look at her. His voice was low, soft, like he knew not to break whatever moment she was in.

“This it?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”

He watched her for a second too long—not in a threatening way, just thoughtful. Like he’d seen this before. Not her, maybe. But people like her. People with a story that couldn’t be told in the back of a cab. People walking toward something only they understood.

“Well,” he said after a pause, “good luck with your meeting.”

She smiled faintly, just enough to be polite. “I think it’ll be one to remember.”

She handed him a bill folded clean once. Double what the meter read. He glanced at it, then back at her, and nodded without another word.

She stepped out of the cab. The air hit her like it meant to. Heavy. Humid. Full of noise that hadn’t been made yet.

She shouldered her bag without shifting her weight. Moved toward the hotel doors like she was stepping into something familiar. And as the cab pulled away, the night closed back in behind her like it hadn’t noticed she’d arrived at all.

Inside, the hotel smelled like money pretending to be modest. Like expensive wood polish layered over old stone and cold air recycled too many times. The lighting was just dim enough to flatter the furniture but still show off the marble floors—clean, symmetrical, sharp where it counted. Every tile lined up like it had been laid by someone who understood symmetry wasn’t just about beauty. It was about control.

To her left, the koi pond curved around the front desk like a moat. Its surface was glassy and still, the fish drifting in slow spirals. They looked unreal in the low light—too bright, too calm, like someone had animated them just for her arrival. A tiny pump kept the water moving just enough to keep it from falling asleep, but the sound was so soft it might’ve been imagined. It wasn’t tranquil. It was measured. Controlled. Like everything else in this place.

She walked toward the desk like she’d done it a dozen times in other cities under other names. Calm, confident, casually forgettable. The kind of guest who knew how to tip well and never asked for room upgrades.

The woman behind the desk looked young but practiced. Hair styled into a sharp, no-nonsense bob. Uniform crisp. Movements efficient. Her name tag said Juha, though Y/N didn’t really need to read it. She’d already pegged her—precise, polite, not interested in small talk. Just enough kindness to pass for warmth. The kind of employee who wouldn’t remember a single detail about you by the end of her shift, and wouldn’t question why she didn’t.

Y/N offered her a smile. The good one. Just the right amount of curve. Something safe. Something easy to forget.

Y/N switched to Korean mid-step, her tone effortless, almost casual. “예약했어요. 캔디 랄스턴으로요.” Her accent was textbook Seoul.

The woman behind the desk didn’t blink. “환영합니다, 랄스턴 씨. 3박이시죠?”

Y/N nodded, and with a soft switch in rhythm, she slipped back into English. Her voice lifted just slightly, pleasant and open, with that eager brightness tourists wore like perfume. “First time in Korea. I’m really excited.”

The receptionist smiled as if on cue. Not warm, exactly—rehearsed. But pleasant. She slid a room key forward, tucked inside a white sleeve embossed with the hotel’s gold crest. “Room 714. Elevator’s just to your right.”

Y/N offered a small bow, murmured her thanks again, and turned away. Her boots made no squeal against the floor—just that quiet, deliberate click that echoed soft and sharp like footsteps in a gallery. The kind of sound that didn’t try to be heard but couldn’t help leaving an impression.

The elevator was already waiting, doors wide open like it knew she was coming. She stepped inside and caught her reflection in the mirrored walls—three angles, three versions of herself looking back. Her posture was perfect. Relaxed, composed. Her clothes—neutral tones, well-fitted—spoke of efficiency, not attention. Her makeup subtle, just enough color to say effort had been made, not enough to say she cared about being seen.

She looked like someone organized. Someone harmless.

But the reflection in the center mirror told the truth. It was in the way her eyes held steady, unflinching, like they didn’t expect kindness. Not anymore. Like they’d already learned what questions were traps, which silences meant danger, and how to vanish while still in plain sight. There was a stillness in her face, but not the kind that came from calm. This was stillness earned. The kind built from rehearsals. From closing hotel doors behind you and counting exits before you even set your bag down.

The elevator rose, slow and steady. She shifted her canvas bag higher on her shoulder. Not because it hurt—she didn’t let things hurt—but because it grounded her. Inside was everything that counted: names, paper trails, backup plans. There was no wasted weight.

When the elevator doors slid open on the seventh floor, she was already halfway into the hallway.

It was quiet. Carpeted in something dull that might once have been green. The kind of floor that muted footsteps into suggestions. The wallpaper, floral and faded, curled at the corners where humidity had worked its way in over the years. The light overhead buzzed, faint and constant, like the building was humming to itself out of habit. A soft, tired sound.

Room 714 was near the end, just past a bend in the hallway where the emergency map was pinned slightly crooked on the wall. She paused in front of the door. Keycard in hand.

And then she just stood there.

Not long. Just long enough to listen.

Not for sound. For pressure. For presence. You didn’t survive by hearing footsteps—you survived by feeling when a room wasn’t empty. The temperature. The stillness. The quality of silence. She tilted her head slightly. Felt the way the air held its breath.

Nothing.

She slid the keycard through the reader. The lock beeped. That soft, mechanical click—small, almost polite. She pushed the door open with her shoulder and stepped inside without looking behind her. The door sealed shut behind her with the kind of sound that didn’t echo. It just ended.

She locked it—deadbolt first, then the chain—her hands moving in a rhythm they’d known for years. One smooth motion, no hesitation. She wasn’t checking. She was securing. There was a difference.

The canvas bag landed on the bed with a deep, even thud. Not loud. Just final. Like it had arrived with intent. She didn’t stop to look around. Didn’t bother checking the view. The room wasn’t the point.

She walked to the desk in the corner and turned on the lamp. Warm light spilled across the pale wood, catching on the edges of the hotel stationery and the small, useless pen that had been placed there with the usual pretend care. The kind of detail that suggested someone had thought about your comfort, even if they hadn’t.

She sat down. The chair creaked faintly but held. Her body didn’t sag. She didn’t relax. She just settled into it.

She pulled the pad of paper toward her and picked up the pen. It was smooth, plastic, light—nothing special. It didn’t matter. She clicked it once and started writing in small, deliberate strokes.

Things to Do Tomorrow:

—Buy a light pink blouse. Something that moves. Something soft.

—Buy makeup

—Rehearse the story. Again.

—Smile until it hurts.

Her pen hovered above the last line for a beat. Then she added one more, slower this time.

—Be perfect.

She circled it. Once. Then again. Firm. Not as a reminder. As a rule.

She put the pen down beside the pad and exhaled. Not dramatically. Not with relief. Just enough to release the breath she’d been holding since the door clicked shut.

She stood.

The bathroom was exactly what she expected—white tile, cool light, no character. Clean without warmth. The mirror above the sink was wide and too tall, forcing her to step closer if she wanted to see all of herself at once. She didn’t bother.

The light buzzed overhead, sterile and flat. The kind of glow that made everything look a little too real.

She touched her fingertips to the edge of the counter. Steady.

She wasn’t tired. Not yet. What she was came after tired. And it had no name.

She reached out and turned the faucet, letting the water run. Cold at first—bright, clean, loud as it hit the porcelain—but beneath the noise, she listened. Not to the water itself, but to the way it moved through the pipes. The way it echoed off tile. The way it filled the silence with something that wasn’t her. It sounded pure, but she knew better. It had traveled through metal older than the building, scraped past rust and time, ghosts caught in the bends. Still, it came out confident. Unbothered. Like it hadn’t carried anything with it.

She didn’t hurry. Her fingers moved slowly to the hem of her shirt, tugged it over her head, and let it fall to the floor. Then the rest—belt, pants, underthings—peeled away without effort. She’d done this ritual a thousand times before. And yet tonight, her hands felt different. Not clumsy. Not unsure. Just heavy. Like they remembered more than she wanted them to. Her clothes ended up in a soft heap at her feet. By then, the mirror had already fogged over.

She stood still for a moment. Not posed, not inspecting. Just… there. Her arms hung loose at her sides, her toes sinking slightly into the tile. The steam softened everything—her outline, her skin, even the air. The reflection staring back at her was dulled at the edges, her features blurred by heat and breath. She could still see her shape. Her shoulders narrow but set, arms lined with the first signs of strength again. Her ribs still showed when she inhaled too deeply, but her thighs had started to look solid again. Her body was still catching up to the rest of her. Still figuring out how to be whole after Two Pines tried to carve her hollow. But she was getting there. Slowly. She could see it.

She tilted her head and scanned herself like she was reading a story she knew by heart. The scars stood out like chapters. The crescent just below her ribs where a blade had barely missed something vital. A paler burn at her hip, nearly invisible now, but still a map of pain. The line along her collarbone—clean, deliberate. Surgical. The scar on her forehead had been there the longest. She didn’t even notice it anymore.

She nodded once, almost imperceptibly. A quiet agreement between her and the woman behind the fog.

Then she stepped into the shower.

The water hit her like a warning. Scalding. Immediate. It slammed into her shoulders and rolled down her back, ruthless in its heat. But she didn’t flinch. She leaned into it. Let it rake across her spine, sting her arms, burn her thighs. The pain was real. Tangible. Honest in a way few things were. It didn’t lie, didn’t soften, didn’t ask questions. It just landed, over and over again, washing everything else into silence.

She closed her eyes, tilted her head forward, and let her forehead rest against the cool tile wall. It grounded her. Solid. Cold. Unmoving. She breathed. Not deeply. Just enough. Enough to be here.

Then it came.

Not a memory. Not an image she could blink away. It was sharper than that. It crashed through her like glass—fast, clean, final. No prelude. No grace.

A sonogram.

Not imagined. Not abstract. Burned into her mind with brutal clarity. Grainy black-and-white. A crescent of light, unmistakable. And there in the center—her. The child. Seven months. Spine curled tight. Fists pulled in. Fragile, yes, but undeniably alive. A daughter.

Not a possibility. A fact.

The photo was still folded in the lining of her coat. Tucked behind Kevlar, buried between seams, carried across borders and terminals and checkpoints. It was creased so deeply now it had forgotten how to lie flat. She’d kept it close because she couldn’t not. Because some part of her still believed the paper would remember the shape even if she forgot the name.

She used to whisper to her belly in motel rooms that reeked of other people’s stories. Whisper names in the dark—some strong, some gentle, some stolen from myths, some from books she hadn’t finished. She spoke them aloud like spells. Names in Korean. In English. Names that meant light. Names that meant defiance.

Now? Now she couldn’t remember a single goddamn one.

Not one.

The realization hit without warning. Her knees gave out, buckled like they’d been kicked. She dropped, too fast to catch herself, hands sliding helplessly down the wall. Her skin hit the shower floor hard, the ceramic slick and unforgiving. Her breath didn’t come. Her chest just... stalled.

The water kept pounding down, relentless and hot, hammering her back, her scalp, her shoulders. 

She folded in tight—arms clamped around her stomach, head bent, forehead pressed hard to her knees. The heat had scalded her skin pink, but it was nothing compared to what was burning underneath. Her whole body trembled, not from cold but from something older, deeper, more bone-deep than fear. Her jaw locked so tight her teeth throbbed. Fingernails dug into her upper arms, leaving pale marks that flushed angry and red as the shower thundered down over her back. Her shoulders jolted with every breath. Her chest couldn’t seem to find a rhythm. Her mouth opened once, like maybe a sound would come out. It didn’t. Just steam and a shattered breath that barely made it past her lips.

She cried, but not the way people cry in movies. No cinematic sobs. No beautiful devastation. This was messier. Raw. She cried like it surprised her—like her body had remembered something her mind wasn’t ready to revisit. It wasn’t gentle, or cathartic. It was violent. Uncontrolled. The kind of grief that had waited in the walls of her bones, that had made a home beneath her ribs, that had lived inside her blood quietly for years and now refused to be quiet anymore.

It wasn’t just about the child, though it started there. She cried for the girl she never got to meet. For the weight of her. The impossible, invisible pull of a presence that had once lived beneath her skin and kicked in the dark and responded to her voice like it meant something. She cried for the names whispered into motel ceilings. For every plan made in secret. For the way she used to sleep with one hand on her belly and the other over the gun under her pillow, believing—naively, stupidly—that she could keep both safe.

She cried for herself too. Not the woman she was now, but the one she used to be—the one who thought she could walk two roads at once. Who thought she could live between love and violence and come out clean. That she could be sharp and soft. That she could kill for a living and still build a life worth protecting.

She’d buried that woman. Or thought she had. But grief has a way of preserving what pain can’t quite dissolve. The version of herself she thought was long gone hadn’t decayed. It had hardened. It had turned into something fossilized under all the anger and training and years. Not gone. Just waiting.

And under the grief, something else had been building. Coiled low in her belly. Climbing her spine. Tightening around her throat.

The fury.

It hit hot and sudden. Like a flare lit inside her chest. Fast. Blinding. Unforgiving. Her muscles locked. Her fists curled tight. Her breath caught in the cage of her ribs. She wanted to wreck something. Rip the cabinet off the wall. Shatter the mirror with her elbow. Drag her knuckles down the glass until they split. She wanted to leave blood on porcelain. On tile. On her own hands.

She wanted to find him—Taehyung Kim—and make him understand what he’d done. Not by telling him. By making him feel it. Every inch of it. Every second. She wanted to look him in the eyes as it hit him. As the weight of what he stole crushed him under its full, ugly truth.

Her knuckles went white. Her muscles trembled with the force of restraint. But she didn’t scream. Not because she couldn’t. Because she wouldn’t. That kind of rage needed to be saved. Stored. Honed.

It would have its moment. Just not here.

The shower kept running, loud and steady, until she moved. Just a breath. Just a twitch of her fingers. Then she reached up and turned the water off.

Silence crashed down like a wave. Thick. Dense. The kind that fills every crack in a room. The kind that listens back. Steam drifted in long, slow ribbons, curling around her shoulders like it wasn’t ready to leave either.

She blinked, once. Her breathing evened out. Slower. Cooler. Her chest still ached, but the fire was banked now, drawn in close and dangerous. Not gone. Just shaped.

She stood.

Water clung to her skin. Her hair dripped in long strands down her back. Her face was flushed, eyes glassy but sharp now—clear in a way that felt surgical. She moved with precision, drying off in steady, methodical swipes, every motion practiced and spare. The towel trembled in her hands, but she kept her grip. Dressed quickly. Quietly. No wasted motion. Just armor going back on.

The grief didn’t vanish. She packed it back down. Tucked it into the parts of herself she didn’t let anyone see. But the rage—she left that right where it was. Let it sit beneath her skin. Close to the surface.

Because Taehyung Kim didn’t know what he’d taken from her.

But he would.

She wasn’t coming for answers.

She was coming for the truth.

And he would give it to her.

Because there would be no one left to stop her.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The city didn’t perform. Gwangju just was. It didn’t blaze with ambition like Seoul or stretch itself into glitz the way Busan tried to. It moved slow, breathed heavier. Honest, unbothered, like an old man in his undershirt posted up on a plastic chair, feet bare, sweating into the sidewalk, waving off mosquitoes with a rolled-up newspaper. There was a stillness here that didn’t feel staged—it felt earned. Like time didn’t hurry. Like it hadn’t for a while. Even the heat didn’t rush. It pressed down in thick, lazy folds, dragging everything—footsteps, voices, the color out of the buildings—into something close to sleep.

The streets moved in rhythm with it: fans turning slowly in dim back rooms, the hum of overhead wires swaying with the weight of too many summers, the drag of slippers across concrete. Shops leaned on each other like they were tired of standing alone. Paint peeled in curls off old storefronts. Rust bloomed at the hinges of delivery carts and folding chairs. Hand-painted signs creaked as they shifted in the breeze, their edges warped like paper left out in the rain.

It was the kind of afternoon where nothing tried too hard. The air was a patchwork of smells: hot oil, boiled radish, exhaust, old metal, the damp tang of stone that’s never had a chance to dry. Vendors fanned themselves with bent menus, arguing halfheartedly with ajummas who bargained with the precision of habit. A mop of scooters rolled through puddles left by melted ice or a spilled soup bowl, weaving through crates and feet like they knew every shortcut before it was built. The city didn’t sleep. But it didn’t really wake up, either. It just existed. Like a held breath.

And tucked into all of it, halfway hidden between a shuttered bookstore and a florist with wilting carnations, was the door. If you could call it that. More a suggestion than an entrance. A curtain—once blue, now more of a stained gray—hung from a crooked rod that looked like it had been hammered into place out of stubbornness rather than skill. It shifted when the wind pushed at it, not with drama but with the quiet of something breathing. The name painted across the fabric had long since faded: 김밥바. The brushstrokes barely held together, like the person who wrote them hoped the world would forget.

She didn’t go straight in.

Y/N stood across from it, phone in hand, thumb flicking absently at nothing. Her eyes weren’t on the screen. They were on the building. On the way the curtain moved. The way the shadows behind it didn’t feel empty. A pigeon flapped once, but didn’t fly. A scooter buzzed past, and an ajumma barked something sharp about cabbage. The usual sounds. The usual rhythm.

Still, she waited a beat longer. Watched how the light caught the doorway. Noticed how the air felt different here. Denser.

Then she stepped forward and slipped behind the curtain like she belonged.

And everything changed.

The moment it fell behind her, the city vanished. The noise didn’t fade—it ceased. Like someone hit pause on the outside world. Inside was quiet in a way only old places know how to be. Not just soundless. Still. The kind of stillness that settles in stone. The kind that remembers things. The air was cooler, not because of any fan or vent, but because it had never left. It clung to the walls, the wood, the floor. Everything felt touched by time.

The scent hit next. Not artificial or sanitized. Just real. A mix of rice, vinegar, seaweed, and broth so old it had soaked into the wood grain. Salt, smoke, a whisper of garlic. It was the kind of smell you carried home with you, in your clothes, your hair, your bones.

Her eyes adjusted fast.

The space was barely larger than a closet. Three stools lined a counter—one crooked, one stained, one seemingly untouched. The varnish had long worn off the wood, dulled by elbows and sweat and stories told over soup. A ceiling fan turned overhead, slow and uneven, ticking with every revolution like it was remembering something too late. A single fly moved in lazy circles beneath it.

Nobody else was here.

No music. No kitchen noise. Just a single plate on the counter—empty but for one streak of red sauce, chopsticks placed beside it with care. Not abandoned. Just waiting.

She walked in like she’d been here before. Like this was a memory, not a discovery. Her posture was casual. Her camera hung from her neck like a travel blog prop. The type of woman who’d find “hidden gems” and write about the soul of a place like she’d invented the concept. But none of that touched her eyes. They were focused. Clear. Watching.

And then he appeared—quietly, without fuss, like he’d always been there and the world had only just remembered to look. The steam rolled out behind him, curling around his shoulders like it had followed him from some low, back kitchen heat that never fully cooled. He was tall, not imposing, but solid in the way that came from doing hard things for a long time. His build was lean, a little bowed at the shoulders, like time and gravity had done their work. His skin had the baked-in tone of someone who’d spent years near open flame, his forearms marked by thin pale scars that spoke of burns, not battles. The white chef’s jacket he wore was buttoned but stained—splatters of dark brown that might’ve been soy sauce or something else. It was hard to tell, and maybe it wasn’t supposed to be clear.

His face didn’t offer much. It wasn’t unreadable in the cold, calculated way of spies or killers—it just didn’t feel the need to explain itself. High cheekbones softened the shape of his long face, and his eyes, dark and narrow, carried the quiet stillness of someone who watched more than he spoke. His hair was thick, slightly tousled, mostly black but peppered with gray at the temples. He was handsome, but the kind of handsome that didn’t advertise. He managed to exist right in the middle ground—someone you’d forget until you saw them again and couldn’t stop wondering why.

Y/N kept her expression neutral as he stepped fully into view. Her body didn’t flinch. Her gaze didn’t drift. She looked at him plainly, openly, like she had no reason not to. But this was him. The man she’d crossed an ocean for. The one who had answers locked behind his teeth.

He saw her, and the smile came fast. Too fast. It stretched across his face like a reflex he hadn’t bothered updating in years—broad, eager, practiced. It was the kind of smile that had been used too many times on too many strangers. The kind that worked better when you didn’t look too closely. He wore it like a uniform: the smile of a man who knew how to sell comfort, how to charm tourists just enough to make them stay, just long enough to make them leave before asking the wrong question. There was no real warmth in it. But it was a good act.

“English?” he asked, cautious but cheerful, testing each syllable like he was stepping over a puddle he didn’t trust.

She gave a half-shrug, tipping her head slightly as her mouth pulled into something lopsided and pleasant. “Almost,” she said. “American.”

Something about that word flipped a switch in him. He lit up like he’d been waiting for it. “Ah! America! Yes, welcome, welcome!” He nodded several times, as if the excitement might wear off if he didn’t hammer it in. “My English—very good. Yes.”

“Perfect,” she said, breezy and bright, like a woman with nowhere to be and all the time in the world. She stepped farther inside, her fingers ghosting along the edge of the counter. She didn’t look at it, not really, but the gesture made it seem like she was appreciating the wood, soaking up the charm. It wasn’t for him—it was for the story.

The chef smiled wide when she stepped in, his English laced with effort but cheerful all the same. “Welcome, American,” he said with a chuckle. “I hope you like my shop.”

She dipped her head, just enough to be polite. “안녕하세요,” she said, soft and even, her pronunciation clean, too natural to be brand-new.

That got a reaction. He lit up like someone had pulled a coin from behind his ear. “오오오! 안녕하세요!” He leaned forward with the delight of a man genuinely impressed. “Very good, very good! You speak Korean?”

She let out a modest laugh, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear like the compliment embarrassed her a little. “Not really,” she said. “Just a few words I picked up yesterday.”

Her eyes moved over the room, taking in the shelves, the old wood, the dust that softened the corners of things. “Is it okay if I sit here?”

“Sit, sit!” he said, already wiping down the bar with a damp cloth in wide, sweeping strokes like he was preparing an altar. “Of course. You sit. What words you learn? Oh—wait one second.”

He turned toward the curtain behind him, barked something in Korean without missing a beat. The words tumbled fast and irritated.

“We have a customer, bring out some tea, quickly!”

A voice called back, lazy and muffled. “I’m watching my soap operas.”

The chef rolled his eyes, snapping, “Lazy bastard! Screw your soap opera! Hurry up!”

“The tea’s hot. Why don’t you serve it yourself for once?”

“Shut up! Get your ass out here!”

Then he turned back to her, placing both palms on the bar like nothing had happened, though a thin line of annoyance still showed around his eyes. His smile remained pleasant. “So,” he said, “what else do you know in Korean?”

She tapped her chin lightly, brow furrowed like she was digging through a mental list. “감사합니다,” she said after a second, letting the word unfold carefully but not too perfectly. Like she was still getting comfortable with it.

He nodded with approval, the kind of praise people give freely but mean all the same. “Very good,” he said. “You say it nicely.”

She leaned forward just a touch, elbows resting gently on the bar, camera bumping softly against the edge. “알겠어요?” she tried, the hesitation built in just enough to seem earnest.

He brightened. “You know that one! ‘I understand.’ Good, very good. You learn fast.”

She smiled back. “Only what people say to me first.”

Then she tilted her head and added another. “안녕히 가세요?”

His expression flickered—just for a split second. The kind of shift most people wouldn’t catch. He recovered quickly, correcting her with a wave of his hand. “No, no, no. Say again.”

She blinked once, feigning the kind of sheepish confusion that made it look like maybe she had messed it up after all. She tried again, a little slower this time. “안녕히 가세요?”

He clapped his hands once, sharp and loud in the stillness of the shop. His smile stretched wide, but the lines around it didn’t move. “You speak Korean,” he said, voice lighter than it had been—but also a little tighter.

She laughed softly, tilting her head again. It was the kind of laugh you’d hear from someone caught in a harmless exaggeration. “Now you’re just flattering me.”

But he didn’t laugh with her. “No,” he said simply. “Serious. Your pronunciation... very good. You say 안녕히 가세요 like we say 안녕히 가세요.”

The air between them settled. Not tense, but heavier. The kind of pause that had weight in it, even if you didn’t know why.

His voice came again, this time quieter, slower. “You can learn Korean very easy.”

She let her gaze drop for half a second—just enough to give it texture—then lifted it again with a careful smile. “No kidding,” she said, her voice just a little softer now. “But thank you. 진짜... 감사합니다.”

He didn’t respond right away. Just breathed in through his nose, steady and thoughtful. Then he adjusted his stance, the shift so subtle most people wouldn’t notice. But she did. She saw the way his shoulders reset, the tiny movements that told her he wasn’t just running a shop—he was watching something unfold.

He turned without another word and picked up a rice paddle. His voice floated back over his shoulder, even and calm. “Let me make something for you.”

She nodded, her smile still in place, but the tone that followed wasn’t quite the same. “Anything’s fine.”

The chef stayed where he was, hands now methodically working at the counter. A bowl of rice, steam still clinging faintly to the grains. A bamboo mat laid flat. A half-sliced cucumber. The blade beside it already glinting in the overhead light.

“You like kimbap?” he asked, like it was just polite conversation.

“I love it,” she said, light and breezy.

She let the sentence hang just long enough to sound casual, like maybe this was a regular kind of moment, in a regular kind of place. But it wasn’t.

The knife moved with soft, measured sounds. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

Carrot. Radish. Cucumber.

Every slice was uniform. Clean. The rhythm was precise, practiced. Not just skilled. Disciplined. 

She didn’t take her eyes off him, not directly, but not obviously either. Her posture stayed relaxed, her hands resting on the bar. The camera around her neck swayed gently with the air from the ceiling fan, tapping now and then against the wood like a slow heartbeat.

She didn’t look dangerous.

But then, neither did he.

The overhead light gave a quiet hum, casting the shop in a worn, yellow wash that made everything look faintly out of date. The fan creaked once with each turn, ticking off invisible seconds. Outside, the alley was still. A cat passed, paused in the doorway, then disappeared again.

The chef didn’t look up from his cutting board. His voice came steady, like they were just passing time.

“You should learn Korean.”

She smiled, light but not airy. “You think so?”

He nodded slightly, slicing through radish with clean precision. “Yes.”

“I’ve heard it’s impossible.”

He nodded. “Yes. Very hard. But you,” he said, quieter now, “you have Korean tongue.”

He returned to his work, pulling a smaller knife from a drawer. It was heavier, curved differently. He laid slices of tuna onto a black ceramic plate. Next to them, he added a pinch of pickled ginger and a small, hand-shaped mound of wasabi.

He slid the dish toward her with quiet pride.

She looked down at it, then back up. “How’d you know tuna’s my favorite?”

He shrugged one shoulder, almost coy. “What?”

“Tuna,” she said again, watching him. “It’s my favorite.”

He smiled with the same practiced calm. “Ah. Thank you very much.”

Then he turned his head toward the beaded curtain and shouted, voice sharp.

“야! 차 어디 갔어? 빨리 좀 해!”

Behind the curtain came a reply—loud, annoyed.

“지금 드라마 보고 있잖아!”

“드라마는 개뿔이지! 손님 왔잖아, 이 자식아. 빨리 갖고 와!”

“차 뜨거워! 너도 좀 움직여 봐!”

The chef muttered something under his breath, wiped his hands, and moved toward the curtain. The beads clinked as he grabbed the other man by the wrist mid-gesture, twisted it lightly, and leaned in close.

“네가 장군이면 나는 황제다. 그러니까 조용히 차나 갖고 와.”

Then, with a mocking grin and just enough weight to sting, he said in English: “ Do you understand ?”

The assistant pulled free, scowling, and glanced at Y/N. “대머리 아니거든,” he muttered. Then, in stiff English: “I shave. Do you understand me?”

The chef didn’t even look. He picked up a small knife and threw it underhanded toward the wall. It landed with a soft thud, blade buried in the wood just left of the curtain.

The assistant disappeared without another word.

Y/N didn’t follow his movement. Her fingers just found a napkin and began folding it, slow and absent, like she was trying to pass the time. But her attention stayed open, alert—every creak from the fridge, every shift of weight behind the curtain. She tracked it all without looking.

The chef glanced her way and let out a low sigh. “Sorry,” he murmured.

She smiled, shook her head gently, still all ease and pleasant charm. “No worries at all.”

The chef had gone back to wiping a plate that didn’t need it, slow circles that looked more like habit than cleaning. He hummed something under his breath—no real melody, just sound for the sake of it. Every so often, his eyes drifted up. Not to her. To the curtain. He was waiting, too.

Y/N leaned her chin into her palm and let out a quiet sigh—the kind that sounded like she had nowhere else to be, like this was just another slow stop on a longer, looser itinerary. But beneath the quiet facade, her pulse had cooled into something steadier. Sharper. She was counting. Not seconds. Not movements. Just weight.

The beads stirred again.

The second man reappeared, bottle in one hand, glass in the other. The soju was cold, condensation sliding down the green glass in thick streaks. His fingers were wide, stained around the cuticles, the nails chipped like they’d been trimmed with teeth or a dull blade. Hands that had done hard things.

He reached the counter and set the bottle and glass down. He turned to walk away. The chef didn’t let it slide. 

His voice cracked through the air, hard and sudden. “야, 예의 좀 갖춰!”

The man didn’t stop completely—just slowed. His shoulders shifted. A sigh leaked out, long and annoyed.

“뭐? 술 갖다 줬잖아.”

“손님 앞에서는 제대로 해. 외국인이라도.”

A scoff. Barely loud enough to register. “외국인이라 모를 텐데 왜 신경 써?”

The chef’s reply came low, firm. “그러니까 더 조심해야지. 한국 사람처럼 보여도 다 듣고 있을 수도 있어.”

There was a pause—just a few seconds, but heavy. The kind of quiet that wasn’t about silence. It was about choice.

The man muttered something under his breath—just noise really, but shaped by resentment. Then he twisted the cap off the bottle with a rough snap and poured. The soju splashed high in the glass, almost spilling. He shoved it toward her with one hand, the edge of the glass tapping wood just shy of rude.

Then he turned and disappeared again. The beads clattered harder this time. The chef let out a breath.

“죄송합니다,” he said, bowing his head slightly. “그 사람은... 사람 대하는 법을 몰라요.”

Y/N didn’t flinch. Her smile stayed where it had been the whole time—pleasant, unbothered. “Sorry?”

The chef’s tone softened, switching to English like it was muscle memory. “Ah—no, just... he doesn’t know how to talk,” he added, with a thin smile that almost reached his eyes.

She nodded, light, polite. Lifted the shot glass with a small, quiet toast. “Thank you,” she said, and took a sip.

The soju hit cool. Sweet up front, then a clean, sharp finish that sat in the back of her throat and lingered. It didn’t burn. It reminded.

She set the glass down. Picked up her chopsticks. The motion was fluid, casual, not stiff with performance—but practiced. The way a habit becomes part of muscle memory.

She lifted a piece of tuna from the plate, a clean slice that caught the light like silk. Deep ruby red, almost translucent, grain running fine through its surface. She placed it on her tongue and held it there, waiting. It melted. Soft and rich, just a trace of brine and something faintly metallic—like memory. She chewed once. Twice. Let it dissolve.

Her eyes drifted shut, just for a second. Not for effect. Just to feel it.

She set the chopsticks down, careful not to clatter them, then picked up the soju again and finished the glass in a single, smooth pull. The second hit went down easier. The warmth spread slow through her chest, settling in a place that had once held nerves.

Across the counter, the chef watched. He hadn’t changed his expression, but something in the way he stood had eased. Not relaxed—just... respected. Noticing a quiet fluency. No words. Just recognition.

“First time in Korea?” he asked. His hands returned to the cutting board, fingers resting near the knife, though he didn’t pick it up yet.

Y/N nodded, finishing another bite. “Mmhmm.”

“What!” he said, voice rising with disbelief that didn’t quite ring false.

She swallowed, wiped the corner of her mouth lightly. “Yes. This is my first time.”

He tilted his head, eyes narrowing, just a little. “What brings you to Gwangju?”

Outside, the alley shifted. A gust caught some stray bit of paper and skidded it along the brick like a coin on pavement. Somewhere nearby, a bird let out a single cry—sharp, fast, gone in a blink. The curtain behind her swayed faintly with a whisper-soft clatter, like wind chimes that never quite got the breeze they needed to sing. Y/N adjusted her chopsticks, repositioned them between her fingers, then gently set them down without ever lifting a bite. Her tone was light when she finally spoke—almost conversational. “I came to see a man.”

The sentence didn’t echo, but it changed something in the room. A beat passed. Not long. But the chef’s hand froze mid-motion, his knife held just above the salmon, blade tilted slightly, as if it too had paused to listen. “Ah,” he said after a moment, stretching the word just enough to carry weight. “A friend in Gwangju?” He didn’t look up.

“Not quite,” she replied.

“Not a friend?”

“No.” She waited until his eyes found hers before continuing. “We’ve never met.”

The blade finally touched the board. A soft sound. Then he laid the knife aside—not quickly, but with care, like he’d decided whatever came next didn’t need a blade in hand. He kept his gaze on the cutting board for a moment longer than necessary, then finally looked up. The expression on his face didn’t shift much, but something behind his eyes sharpened—not fear. Not even suspicion. Just awareness.

“And,” he said, more quietly now, “may I ask who he is?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Jung Hoseok.”

The name didn’t explode. It didn’t need to. It landed in the room like a rock dropped into still water—no splash, just the heavy assurance that things were moving beneath the surface now. Her voice hadn’t changed. She wasn’t dramatic. She didn’t lean in. But the name was enough.

The chef went still. Not tense, just... anchored. Like something in him had snapped into place. His right hand rested on the edge of a towel. His left hovered briefly over the blade again—reflex more than anything. The tip of his finger brushed the metal and slipped. A sudden streak of red rose across his knuckle. He looked down at it, just for a moment, and lifted the hand to his mouth. Sucked the blood away like it was routine. No flinch. No sound. Just control, reset.

Behind her, the beads rattled once more—sharper this time. The bald man stepped through again, his face a clenched fist. He didn’t speak. Just let his eyes sweep the room, pausing on her, not with suspicion, but calculation. Like something in the air had told him to pay attention.

He crossed to the counter, picked up the bottle, and poured her another shot. This time, the movement was smooth. No clatter. No shove. Just a quiet, focused pour. He didn’t speak. Didn’t meet her eyes. He finished the pour, left the glass full, and walked out. The beads clacked shut behind him—not loud, not subtle. Just punctuation.

The chef exhaled slowly through his nose. No drama. Just release. Then he took a towel and began wiping his hands—carefully, methodically. His eyes stayed on her.

She lifted the new glass in a small, silent toast, even though the man who’d poured it was already gone. The glass was cold enough that it clung to her fingers.

When the chef spoke again, the language changed. No more English. No more pretense.

His voice lowered, smooth and even, each word placed with precision. “정호석에게 무슨 용건이 있습니까?”

Y/N didn’t blink.

She answered in Korean, her voice quiet, level. No showmanship. Just the kind of careful weight that traveled farther than volume ever could. “강철이 필요해요.”

His eyes narrowed. Not in suspicion. In thought. Like he was studying her words, not for truth, but for intention. He didn’t answer right away. Let the silence linger.

“왜 강철이 필요하죠?” he asked.

She looked at the glass beside her plate, a droplet tracing its way down the side. Then she met his eyes again. “쥐를 죽이려면요.”

There was another pause—longer, but not uncomfortable. Then the chef let out a short laugh. Not cruel. Not mocking. Just low and dry, like someone who’d lived long enough to understand how serious things always start in calm voices.

“Must be a big rat,” he said in English this time, voice touched with something close to amusement. “If you need Jung Hoseok steel for it.”

She smiled, but only with one side of her mouth. The other half stayed still.

“Huge,” she said.

They didn’t move. Didn’t raise their voices. The air between them didn’t buzz with tension—but it held. Quiet. Pulled tight like thread stretched between fingers. It didn’t warn. It just waited.

The chef gave a small nod. Y/N didn’t speak, didn’t finish the food. She left the second shot untouched. The fish remained as he’d plated it, artful, unspoiled. The only sign she’d been there was the soft, fading ring left behind by her first glass, already drying into the grain of the wood.

She rose without a sound and followed him through the beaded curtain, not once looking back.

The hallway beyond was narrow, long, the kind of space that time forgets. The wallpaper—beige or yellow once, now sun-bleached into something closer to nicotine-stained parchment—peeled at the edges in slow curls. The floorboards creaked just enough to remind you that no one had fixed them in a long while, and maybe no one ever would. The air smelled lived-in, dense with cooking oil and old plaster, like generations of heat had steeped into the walls. A single bulb swung gently from the ceiling, flickering once before settling into a thin, steady glow.

Hoseok walked ahead, silent, his gait quiet but confident. He didn’t rush, didn’t hesitate. His steps were even, deliberate, the kind of pace that didn’t waste energy or ask permission. When he reached the end of the corridor, he glanced up and found the pull cord—barely visible in the dim light, hanging like a spider’s thread. He tugged it once.

A low groan came from above, followed by a creaking shift. A square panel in the ceiling cracked open with a dusty exhale, and a folded ladder unfolded downward with slow, mechanical clicks, the rungs snapping into place like joints stretching after too long at rest.

He climbed first. She followed.

Her boots hit the rungs with soft thuds, the sound swallowed by the close space around her. One hand on each side rail, steady, smooth. No wasted movement. She didn’t glance up, didn’t glance down. Just climbed. The air thickened as she ascended, growing warmer, more still. There was a shift in temperature—and in smell. Wood. Oil. Steel.

As she rose through the opening, the attic revealed itself like a photograph developing in slow motion.

It wasn’t big, but it felt larger than it should’ve. The low ceiling curved inward slightly, giving the space a strange hush, like it was used to quiet. The warmth was immediate—not stifling, but deep, the kind of heat that came from bodies and time and electricity burning low and constant. The scent was unmistakable to anyone who knew what it meant: cedar, carbon, and choji oil. That distinct blend of camellia and clove, familiar only to those who’ve ever cared for a blade.

The light from the window was weak, filtered through grime that hadn't been wiped away in years. But what little came through cast long golden lines across the floor, picking out the pattern in the grain and throwing deep shadows that stretched and curled. The floor was clean. Worn, but swept. Not a speck of dust in sight. No clutter, no trash. This wasn’t storage. It was maintenance.

On the far wall stood the racks.

Not shelves. Not hooks. Racks—each one handmade, shaped with intention, joined by hand rather than hardware. Pale wood, aged and patient. No decoration. No flair. Just quiet craftsmanship. They held swords. Not just katanas. Blades.

Dozens of them, each one unique. Their sheaths glinted in the dim light—black lacquer with soft reflections, deep red urushi, mottled green like old bark. One was wrapped in white rayskin bound with gold. Each sageo tie—gray, plum, navy—was knotted tight and deliberate, tension held with purpose. The tsuka, wrapped in silk, were symmetrical to the point of obsession. Every fold precise. Every diamond perfect. Each kashira had its own story: copper dragons, koi fish, sakura petals, brass ships riding a storm. And the tsuba—miniature sculptures of iron and bronze, some simple, some elaborate, none ornamental for the sake of it. These weren’t pieces for display. They were weapons made to be used. Cared for, kept sharp, kept ready.

Y/N stepped forward, her movements quiet, measured. She didn’t touch anything. Didn’t need to. The room held its own gravity. The kind of silence that didn’t beg for reverence, but commanded it through sheer presence. Every detail—the blades, the wood, the air itself—spoke for her to listen.

Behind her, Hoseok didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to either. His stillness wasn’t tense or withdrawn—it was aware. Watching, but not pressing.

She turned slightly, just enough to glance over her shoulder. Her voice, when it came, was soft. Her Korean clear and careful. “May I?”

A beat passed, subtle but intentional. Then, his reply—not in Korean this time, but in English. And for some reason, that made it gentler. “Yes, you may. Second from the top. Sixth row. Left side.”

She nodded once and turned back to the racks. Her steps didn’t creak the floorboards. She moved with the kind of calm that came from purpose, not performance. Her eyes scanned, counted, found it—sixth row, left side, second down.

She stopped in front of it, let her gaze rest on the sheath before reaching for it. Black lacquer, smooth and deep enough to absorb the light. It reflected just the faintest outline of her face—blurred, formless. The finish was perfect, but not decorative. Not flashy. Maintained, not polished. Like someone had wiped it down once a week for decades, always with the same cloth.

The sageo cord was tied in a neat, practical knot. Not ornamental. Not lazy. Tight, squared. The kind of tie someone would redo until they got it right. The tsuba was brass, aged and worn, its surface darkened by time and touch. Etched pine branches crawled along its edges—simple, understated, and detailed enough to tell you it wasn’t mass-produced. It had been chosen.

Her fingers wrapped around the tsuka. The silk binding was tight, smooth, crisscrossed with perfect symmetry. Black cord over white rayskin. Traditional. Familiar. The handle sat against her palm like a known shape, like something she'd used before, even if she hadn’t.

And something inside her—something she hadn’t even noticed was noisy—went quiet.

She drew the blade without hesitation, not for show, just to see. It came free with a sound so subtle it was almost imagined. Like breath drawn through cloth. The kind of sound that disappears if you’re not paying attention. But she always paid attention.

Light caught the blade and changed it. What had been metal turned fluid—reflections danced along the edge, fractured and reformed as she moved. The hamon curled like a pale ripple, shifting with every minor tilt of her hands. The kissaki was long, graceful. Measured for reach, not for display. The sword wasn’t just well-made. It had purpose in its design. Intention.

She held it in both hands now. The balance fell into place like it knew where to go. No resistance. No demand. Just a quiet agreement between steel and muscle, weight and memory.

Behind her, Hoseok finally stirred. The smallest motion—fabric shifting, a heel settling more fully into the floor. When she turned slightly, she saw him near the window, one hand deep in his pocket. The other rolled something between his fingers.

A baseball. Worn, the leather dulled to a soft gray, the seams darkened, fraying. It looked like it had been tossed from hand to hand for years. He turned it over in his palm absently, like it was more habit than thought.

“Funny,” he said, voice quiet enough that the words didn’t quite disturb the stillness. “You like swords…”

He tossed the ball into the air, caught it once without looking.

“…I like baseball.”

Then, without warning, he threw it.

There was no flourish. No wind-up. Just a sudden motion—fast, clean, direct. The ball cut through the air on a line straight toward her. No room to think. No time for a plan.

Her arms moved before her mind did. The sword rose in a single arc, smooth and efficient. No tension in the shoulders, no wasted energy in the swing. The blade moved as though she were answering something, not striking.

The ball split cleanly.

There was no dramatic crack. No cinematic echo. Just a soft, muted thud—leather parting under steel, a sound more felt than heard. One half of the ball skidded off and rolled beneath the nearest rack. The other bounced off her boot and stopped.

She didn’t breathe out. Not yet. Her grip had already eased. The sword angled down, relaxed at her side, tip toward the floor. Balanced again, as if nothing had happened.

Hoseok stepped forward, steady as ever, though something behind his expression had shifted—barely, but enough for her to notice. A flicker in his eyes, like a thought he hadn’t yet decided whether to keep or release. He lifted a hand toward her, slow and sure. Not a demand. Not a gesture of control. It was open, deliberate. A quiet invitation to return something that wasn’t quite hers yet.

She reversed the blade, offering the hilt without hesitation. No dramatic pause, no hesitation—just weight moving from her hands to his. The handoff was clean, unspoken, the kind of exchange that didn’t need ceremony to be understood.

He sheathed the sword with practiced ease, and the sound—soft, precise, the smooth slide of steel into lacquered wood—didn’t echo. It landed. Not loud, not theatrical. Just final. Like a breath held, then released.

“I wanted to show you these,” he said in Korean, the playful edge from earlier gone. His voice had changed—calmer, older somehow. He held the sheathed blade in both hands, fingers gliding over the lacquer not to clean it, but to remember it. “But someone like you… someone like you already understands.”

He placed it gently back in its rack, hands steady, motions exact. Each movement held weight, the kind of intention that couldn’t be faked. “I no longer make instruments of death,” he said, softer now, almost to himself. “I keep them for their beauty. For what they once meant. Because I love them.”

There was a quiet pride in his words, not boastful, just true. He bowed his head slightly. “I’m proud of what I made. Proud of how well I made them. But I am retired.”

She stepped closer, silent. No threat in her approach, only certainty. Her presence filled the space without trying to. Her voice came softly, but with clarity.

“Then give me one.”

The words landed like a pin in still fabric. He turned to face her, jaw tightening.

“They’re not for sale.”

“I didn’t say sell me one.”

They locked eyes. Her stare didn’t waver. Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to.

“I said give me one.”

A pause opened between them—not long, but heavy. The kind that held all the weight of what hadn’t been said yet. When he spoke again, it was clipped. Cold.

“And why should I help you?”

She didn’t blink. “Because the vermin I’m after,” she said, the words clean and hard, “was your student.”

That stopped him. Not with a flinch, not with alarm. Just a subtle shift—shoulders lowering by a fraction, breath held at the top of his chest. His silence was sudden and full.

She stepped in again. “And considering the student…” she let the rest hang, then added, “you have certain obligations .”

He turned and walked toward the narrow attic window, its frame sun-bleached and warped slightly with age. With the back of his hand, he wiped away a patch of fog, clearing a view just big enough to see the city stretching out below them—rooftops, wires, and the slow dimming of the day. The glass was damp, the edges still filmed in condensation.

With one finger, he reached up and began to write.

TAEHYUNG.

The name curved faintly in the glass, drawn in a line of skin oil and breath. Outside, the wind kicked up, brushing against the building with a hollow tap. The beams creaked. The attic seemed to lean into the moment. The name.

She didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just nodded once. That was enough.

Hoseok turned, walked to the trapdoor, and reached for the old latch. It gave with a dry metallic groan. The ladder creaked as it unfolded, the sound echoing faintly in the rafters.

He gestured to the corner. A futon, rolled neatly. A folded blanket beside it. A small jug of water, a wooden comb laid with care. Nothing lavish. Nothing new. Just clean. Lived-in.

“You can sleep here,” he said in Korean. “I’ll make space downstairs. Might take a day or two to find proper furniture.”

He descended the ladder with the same quiet weight he carried everywhere. But just before the hatch closed, his voice floated back up—lower, firmer.

“It’ll take a month to make the blade.”

A pause. The creak of one last step below.

“I suggest you spend it practicing.”

Then the hatch closed with a solid, wooden thunk. Not sharp. Not aggressive. Just complete.

She stood still, alone in the attic, the air settling around her like dust that had waited too long to fall. The quiet wasn’t just quiet anymore—it was thick, almost physical. A silence that had weight, like the room itself was holding its breath after what had been said, what had been written.

The last of the afternoon light had slipped away without notice, and in its place came the muted amber of early evening. Outside, the city blurred—rooftops softened, edges dulled, the sky folding into dusk with no sharp lines left. Gwangju looked like it was remembering something it didn’t want to say out loud.

She walked toward the window, slow and steady, her boots tapping gently against the floor. The name was still there, hovering in the circle of cleared glass, faint but legible. TAEHYUNG. The letters had already started to run a little, the edges softened by moisture and time.

From her coat, she pulled a cloth. It was plain, the kind of fabric that had seen years of use—creased, worn, stripped of anything personal. Just something that did its job. She raised it and began to wipe. One pass. Then another. Then again. Not hard, not angry. Just firm. Methodical. With each motion, the letters blurred a little more, until they were nothing but streaks. And then nothing at all. Just fog again.

She held her hand to the glass for a second longer, palm pressed flat. The warmth from her skin left a faint outline before the cold reclaimed it. It faded just like the name had—quick, quiet, complete.

She folded the cloth with care and tucked it back into her coat, her fingers working with practiced ease. No lingering. No pause for meaning.

Then she turned from the window.

Outside, the city kept fading. Behind her, the attic returned to stillness. The name was gone. And with it, whatever place he might’ve held in her. Taehyung Kim had already taken too much. There was no room left in her for the ghost of him—not anymore.

He would fall. And when he did, she would finally be free.

Chapter Text

The attic was dim, the air thick with sandalwood. It clung to the rafters, soaked into the beams, and seeped from the floorboards like time itself had steeped in it. The walls exhaled the scent in slow, heavy breaths.

Candlelight sputtered low, throwing jagged shadows across old wood. Steel glinted in the flicker. Hoseok Jung’s sword collection lined the wall like a silent jury. Every blade had a name. Every saya was polished like a relic. Y/N had studied them all during her month in Gwangju. She’d held them, trained with them, bled on their edges. By the time the incense stopped catching in her throat, she knew each one like her own hands.

Hoseok stood at the altar, his black silk robe whisper-quiet as he moved. The candlelight reached for him, but the silk swallowed it whole. A serpent devouring its own tail was stitched across his chest in blood-red thread. Once, his face had been soft, someone who believed peace was a choice. Time, sorrow, and war had carved that man away. What was left was sharp. Dangerous. His eyes, obsidian, reflected nothing. His lips were drawn tight. Whatever softness Y/N had once known was gone. He had grown out his goatee during the month they trained.

Moon-Byul stood beside him, unmoving. His robe mirrored Hoseok’s, minus the serpent. Instead, gold-threaded cranes rose up from the hem. His head was freshly shaved, his expression unreadable. Moon always hovered between brilliance and boredom, amused, never impressed. Once, he called Y/N a lion after she bested him in a spar. She never forgot it. They were close in age, and he treated her as an equal. Hoseok, though, was a kindred spirit. After two weeks of wooden swords, Y/N knew his every move. When sticks stopped being fun, they switched to steel. They both got cut, nothing deep. They spent more time praising each other than nursing bruises.

Hoseok was still a master, but past his prime. Had they met when he was her age, she wouldn’t have stood a chance. She knew that. She just happened to meet him late enough to survive.

On the altar lay a single sword.

The lacquered sheath looked wet, like still water under moonlight. Brass fittings in the momoji style curled into maple leaves at each end. One leaf caught the light like it had something to say. A gold band ringed the fuchi.

The tsuba was a custom prayer wheel, Jung Style the smiths called it, flanked by Kozuka-ana and Kogai-ana holes. The seppa were plain brass. The menuki, blackened kongosho, three-pronged spears invoking Fudo Myo, the wrathful protector.

The sageo was mustard, tied in precise knots. No shitodome. Pure function. The saya was purpose shaped into beauty. Solid fittings. A gold ring off-center. Twin gold stripes traced its spine and edge. The ito was leather-wrapped, white ray skin beneath.

Y/N had seen many blades. Trained with legends. But this one didn’t gleam. It warned. It pulsed. It whispered. It was the most beautiful. And the most dangerous.

Silence held.

Then Hoseok spoke.

“I’m done doing what I swore to God nearly ten years ago I would never do again,” he said. “I’ve created... something that kills people.”

He looked at the blade. A breath passed.

“And in that purpose, I was a success.”

He stepped forward and knelt. The floor creaked beneath him. He turned slightly toward the girl in the shadows. Her hair hung loose, her eyes wide. A fading bruise marked her wrist. The candlelight caught the frayed hem of her pants. She stood like she was bracing for something.

“I did this,” Hoseok said, quieter, “because philosophically, I’m sympathetic to your aim.”

His palm rested on the sheath.

“This is my finest sword. If on your journey you should encounter God…” He gripped the hilt. “God will be cut.”

He rose. The light caught his jaw, casting deep shadows.

When he looked at her again, something in his gaze had shifted, just slightly. The way Pai Mei had looked at her before she left China. She thought of her old master, wondered if he was still alive, still alone. She never thought to visit. Pai Mei didn’t like guests. He would mock her if she showed up without reason. But he had cared for her. More than he cared for Taehyung. And that had meant something. Pai Mei saw Taehyung as a son.

She blinked, realized she had drifted. Hoseok was still staring.

“Revenge,” he said, “is never a straight line.”

The incense pressed in. The air thickened. The attic closed around them.

“It’s a forest,” he said. “And like a forest, it’s easy to lose your way. To get lost. To forget where you came in.”

He stepped forward again, robe trailing like dusk.

“To serve as a compass,” he said, “a combat philosophy must be adopted.”

Moon-Byul moved without sound, placing a scroll in Hoseok’s hands. The parchment looked brittle. The ink was claws on rice paper. The Doctrine. The old Yagu code. Hoseok’s legacy.

He looked at Y/N.

“Repeat after me.”

His voice turned sharp. He began in Japanese.

Hoseok was born in Gwangju but raised mostly in Okinawa, under his grandfather’s roof. His family had fled to Japan before the war, hiding in a village so small it escaped notice even during the bombings. His grandfather made katanas, not hwandos. Y/N doubted they kept the name “Jung” there.

Hoseok’s childhood was carved between languages, between cultures. Between silences.

He held the scroll.

“When engaged in combat, the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior’s only concern…”

Y/N echoed him in Japanese, low and steady.

“This is the first and cardinal rule of combat…”

No pause.

“Suppress all human emotion and compassion…”

Her jaw clenched.

“Kill whoever stands in thy way,” Hoseok said, “even if that be Lord God or Buddha himself…”

She didn’t hesitate. Hoseok’s voice was smooth, almost soothing. Hers was rougher, clipped. Her Korean was better.

“This truth lies at the heart of the art of combat,” Hoseok whispered. “Once it is mastered… thou shall fear no one. Though the devil himself may bar thy way…”

Y/N didn’t blink.

Hoseok bowed. She bowed back, then stepped forward. Her fingers closed around the hilt, steady, callused. The blade slid free with a soft hiss, catching candlelight as it rose. It was flawless.

Two gold carvings marked it: the unfinished Hattori mon, raw and exposed, and a Shi-sha before a war spear, garnet eyes gleaming. Hoseok’s lion. His mark. All his swords bore it. Now it belonged to her.

The hamon shimmered. Notare cresting into chaos halfway up the blade. Chu-kissaki tip. Toriizori curve. Every line exact, every surface mirrored. She saw the whole room behind her in its polish.

Hoseok spoke in English.

“Be careful, Y/N.”

She looked at him. Really looked. Weeks of sweat and silence had taught her more than any master before. He hadn’t comforted her. He had prepared her. Soup left wordlessly. Mid-spar corrections, sharp and precise. Quiet care. The kind that mattered.

Moon-Byul had honed her into something hard and clean. She would miss them both. And the restaurant downstairs, sticky tables, chipped cups, perfect kimbap.

“Can I come back?” she asked. “If I need help?”

Hoseok smiled. Small. Honest. It softened him.

“You are always welcome here, Black Mamba.”

She bowed. Deep. He matched it.

Then straightened, voice lighter.

“Now,” he said, “you need to rest. You have vermin waiting.”

She turned toward the stairs, sword in hand. Neither man followed.

Her room was barely a closet. Low ceiling. Thin walls. But it was hers. Quiet.

She closed the door. The soft click of the lock steadied her. The air felt heavier now. Tomorrow pressed close.

At the desk, Hoseok had left paper and charcoals. A small gesture. She had mentioned once that she used to draw.

The page waited, too white, too still. She pulled one sheet loose, placed it flat.

Her hand moved before her mind caught up. Lines. Shapes. Motion without thought.

Then a name surfaced. Unwelcome. Unavoidable.

Yoongi Min.

Just thinking it made her chest tighten. She hadn’t said it out loud in years, afraid it might summon him. But her hand didn’t stop.

His face came first. Sharp cheekbones, guarded eyes, the mouth set hard, almost smiling. The cold was there. But so was the warmth. The version of him that existed only for her. She hated that she remembered.

“Bittersweet” was too neat a word. Nothing about him had ever been clean.

Yoongi wasn’t Taehyung. No one was. Taehyung had been wildfire, beautiful and ruinous. She had run toward that fire.

But Yoongi... he was the silence in a world that never stopped screaming. Tea at 3 a.m. No questions. No fixing. Just space. He didn’t tame her. He made room.

And for a while, that had been enough.

Her strokes slowed. Smaller now. More careful. Her wrist trembled once. Her eyes stung.

He hadn’t always been cruel. Not with her. There had been jokes. Seoul nights. The way he used to hold her like the world had ended. Even his rivalry with Brandi had dulled eventually. And she remembered how he used to look at her, like she was something holy. Like he wasn’t sure he deserved her. Maybe once, she believed it.

Then came Two Pines. Yoongi chose empire. Chose power over her without blinking. And whatever they had died in that moment. Now he wore the crown like it belonged to him. Never apologized. Never looked back.

She gripped the charcoal too hard. It snapped. She didn’t flinch. Just picked up the broken half and kept drawing.

Two Pines had been a dream: peace under trees, shared breath, a place to exhale. It became a slaughterhouse. He didn’t save her. Didn’t try. He watched. She never forgave him. She never would.

Yoongi Min would pay. That was carved into her bones now. Love didn’t excuse it. Didn’t clean it. Didn’t quiet the screams. She saw them in her sleep, felt them in her chest every time she closed her eyes.

This desk was her altar now. A page, a truth. Vengeance wasn’t theory. It was instinct. Ritual. Religion.

I loved him. And I’ll still kill him.

Once, that thought might’ve broken her. Now it fit. Now it kept her warm.

Sometimes she pictured it: the moment he saw her again. Not the executioner. Not the girl who once touched him like a prayer. Just two broken things who loved each other before they learned how to ruin everything.

Her eyes dropped to the sketch. His face stared back. Not a portrait. A reckoning. He didn’t look like the tyrant the world feared or the boy she trusted. He looked like what lived in between. A ghost of someone who never got to choose who he became.

A tear slid down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it. Didn’t need to. Her hand moved harder now, charcoal grinding into the paper, deepening the shadows beneath his eyes, carving out the line of his jaw, the shape of that mouth.

That mouth. It had saved her once. Destroyed her, too. She knew it better than her own reflection.

She was almost done.

When she drew the last line, something settled. The version of him on the page was final. Whatever was left of him in the world, she’d bury it herself.

Vengeance doesn’t wait. Not even for love.

She paused. The charcoal trembled in her grip. The lamp buzzed louder, throwing jagged shadows across the wall. Dust floated like time had paused, just to watch.

Then it came. A voice from somewhere deep. Old. At that moment, you think: it’s proof like no other. That not only does God exist, but you’re doing His will.

It hit like a splinter beneath the skin. She remembered hearing it once. Young. Believing. Blade in one hand, faith in the other. Back when certainty felt like armor. When killing felt like purpose.

A sound escaped her. Something like a laugh, scraped raw. That belief was dead now. Buried under ash, silk, and silence at Two Pines.

There was no holy mission. No divine justice. Just blood and what followed.
She wasn’t a prophet. Wasn’t anyone’s daughter anymore. That girl, the one who prayed, was long gone. What remained was colder. Sharper.

Her fingers moved again. One last stroke across the collarbone, clean and exact. Not decoration. Not feeling. It was dissection. Finding what hadn’t rotted in the corpse of something long dead.

When I knew the least about my enemies, she thought, the first name I wrote was the easiest.
And Yoongi Min had never tried to hide. Not from her. Not from anyone. No aliases. No masks. No intermediaries. He stood in the center of his own legend, calm as a man pouring tea. Never flinched. Never blinked.

They called him Busan’s velvet devil. A gentleman butcher. A king in wolf’s clothing. No one whispered his name, they said it with care. Like it might unlock something dangerous.

He didn’t build his empire in shadow. He built it loud. Deliberate. Brick by bloody brick. Face bare. Eyes forward. His business was fear, and he ran it like art.

And once, she had loved that face. Not like Taehyung. That had been fire. Destruction you welcomed. Yoongi was different. Solid. Still.

He sat with her on the bad nights. No questions. No comfort. Just presence. He let her have silence without trying to fill it. And when she needed him, really needed, he was there.
Now she needed him gone.

The memories cut sharp. Her hand hesitated, then pressed on. She darkened the hollow of his throat. Sketched the collar of his coat, always black, always tailored.
Gloves. Always gloves. A man who knew what he was. Never pretended otherwise.

Her thoughts circled back to where it began. Taehyung. He didn’t enter a room, he arrived. Moved like smoke. Looked like he knew secrets you hadn’t earned. Every move deliberate. Every silence calculated. He didn’t fight for the top, he acted like he already lived there. And the world didn’t argue. She’d loved that about him. God help her, she had.

Yoongi was twenty-nine when Taehyung handed him the kingdom. It wasn’t loyalty. It was strategy. A chess move disguised as trust. And Yoongi wore the crown like it had always been his.

She didn’t trust the memory, too warped, too worn. But it came back anyway. Again and again.
Now, staring at the page, something in her chest went still. His eyes. That same emptiness. That certainty. Like he already knew how your story ended, and wasn’t impressed.

Once, those eyes had looked at her differently. Maybe not with love. But with recognition. Like he saw her. Now he wouldn’t blink. And neither would she.

Her hand slowed, weight behind each stroke. She shaped his mouth, the same one that once told her she was more than fire. The one that kissed her like she was something worth saving.

But that version of them was gone. Whatever she’d been to him, whatever he’d been to her, it didn’t matter anymore.

Hoseok had told her how the war ended. Not quietly. Not with peace. It ended the way power always does when it refuses to share: loud, brutal, almost holy in scale.

He said Yoongi had stood on the edge of the last battlefield, black hanbok catching the light like oil, moving like smoke. The final rival, once feared, bled out at his feet.

Yoongi didn’t gloat. Didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. He looked down. Stepped over the body. Kept walking. Like death was just another item crossed off the list. That was what made him terrifying. Not the violence. The indifference.

After that, Busan didn’t resist. It bowed. Now the only trace of that man lived in graphite and shadow on the page in front of her.

Her hand moved in steady strokes, building his face in layers. Every line felt less like art and more like exhumation. She wasn’t drawing. She was digging. Through wreckage. Through memory. Through what was left.

Yoongi’s features came together piece by piece. The sharp jaw. The cold slope of his eyes. The soft curve of his mouth, more memory than muscle now. Not quite a king. Not the boy she’d known. Something in between. A ghost on paper.

Then her hand slipped. The charcoal snapped, rolled across the desk, stopped against the edge of a dried tea stain. She didn’t reach for it. Just stared.

The face on the page looked back, unfinished. Not a monster. Not a myth. A man.

And still, the image stayed. Burned into memory like a scar: Yoongi, that night. Black hanbok, sleeves wet with blood, standing over the last man who dared to defy him. The body twitched once, reflex or defiance, but it didn’t matter. It was over.

Yoongi didn’t pause.
He turned to the others. His face unreadable. Cold.
If there was emotion, it was certainty.

And that was the thing that made him impossible to outrun. He didn’t need to conquer you. He made you realize you’d already lost.

Smoke from gunfire still hung in the air. Cries just beginning to fade. And there he stood beneath a shattered skylight, cherry blossoms drifting through broken glass. Still. Too still.

He looked like something pulled out of a dream and dressed in blood.

And when the final scream died, Busan bowed.

Hoseok had told her about that night like a prayer he wasn’t sure he should say.
“It was one of those nights,” he’d murmured, voice low. “You could feel it. In the air. Like the city already knew. Like it could taste the blood before it hit the ground.”

And after came the gathering at The Red Lantern Club. Not really a club. More like a mirage stitched together underground. Velvet curtains. Perfume and secrets. Jazz leaking through the walls. Lighting low and sharp. Voices too soft. Cigar smoke hanging like a lie.

Somewhere behind a locked door, a woman was always crying. No one ever asked why.

The deeper you went, the worse it got. The air thickened. The light reddened. By the time you hit the center, it didn’t feel like nightlife. It felt like hell with waitstaff and designer liquor.

That night, the city’s old guard had gathered. Six kkangpae bosses, men who’d ruled for decades. Draped in silk and legacy. Their suits cost more than most lives. Their rings were old as dynasties.

Behind them stood their muscle. Armed, still, waiting.

And in the center of it all stood Yoongi.

He wore a black suit that seemed to drain the light around it. Everything about him was honed to a point: jaw, eyes, presence. Hair slicked back. Not a strand out of place.

The chandelier above caught his face in shards. He didn’t look human. He looked like death taught how to wear a suit.

He didn’t speak. Just watched.

His gaze moved slow, surgical. A scalpel drawn across the room. Every glance measured posture, weakness, fear.

And the fear was heavy. Thick enough to taste.

These were men who weren’t used to being afraid. But they were smart enough to feel it.

They could kill him. They had the numbers, the firepower. But it would cost more than any of them were willing to pay.

One by one, they raised their glasses. Not respect. Ritual. Whiskey. Toasts. Smiles stretched too thin.

Everyone was pretending. No one was celebrating.

Except one.

Boss Yoon. All silk and silence. Hands folded over his stomach like he was holding something ugly inside. He didn’t toast. Didn’t smile. Just stared. He hated Yoongi.

Half-Japanese. Half-Korean. Raised on Camp Humphreys. Too foreign for tradition. Too clean for blood.

To men like Yoon, Yoongi didn’t belong. He hadn’t earned it. Hadn’t clawed his way up through mud and knives like they had.

In another time, another world, Yoongi wouldn’t have even been let in the building. But this wasn’t another time. This was Yoongi’s time.

Yoongi hadn’t inherited power. He hadn’t waited for it. He’d taken it, piece by piece. Clean. Quiet. He didn’t follow bloodlines. He erased them. Rewrote the hierarchy. Dug his throne out of the dead.

And Boss Yoon couldn’t stand it.

His son, Chan, sat beside him, tight-lipped, tense. When he moved, it was like something uncoiling. His hand came up slow, then slammed down, palm first, into his plate. The porcelain cracked hard, shards scattering across the table like shrapnel.

Silence hit the room like a slap. Every glass stopped midair. Every throat held breath. Even the jazz behind the walls seemed to pause, like the music knew when to be afraid.

Yoongi didn’t move.

Yoon stood. Slowly. Like the motion hurt. His shoulders were tight, jaw clenched, rage leaking through every breath. His guards shifted. Hands hovered over blades. The room felt suddenly very small.

A younger boss, maybe still naive enough to think this could be salvaged, broke the silence. “What’s the meaning of this?” he asked, voice pinched and too high. “What’s this outburst supposed to mean?”

Yoon didn’t answer right away. When he finally did, his voice sounded like old rust: thin, bitter, sharp enough to cut. “What am I supposed to celebrate?” he said, spitting each word. “The death of this council? The stain on our fathers’ work?”

The murmurs started small, like the first crackle of a fire. A glance here, a whisper there. Fast words. Faster doubt. The kind of unease that spreads before anyone admits it. The air thickened until it clung to the walls like smoke.

Then Yoongi spoke. “Gentlemen.”

One word. Calm. Even. Icy. It dropped into the room like ash from a fire that had already burned everything worth saving. He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to.

“Boss Yoon has something he’d like to share,” he said, tone flat, bored even. Like he was reciting bullet points at a board meeting. “So let’s hear it. What rot do you smell, Yoon-sshi?”

Yoon didn’t hesitate. Maybe he thought it was mercy. Maybe he thought it was his moment. Or maybe he just couldn’t stop himself. He pushed his chair back like a man stepping onto a stage. His knuckles were white against the table’s edge. His hands trembled, barely. But not from fear. It was deeper. Older. Resentment carved into bone.

“My father,” Yoon began, voice cracking under the weight of something too big for the room. “Yours. All of them. They built this council on blood. On discipline. On legacy. This table,” he gestured broadly, cuffs of his silk shaking, “was carved from code. From purity.”

A sharp crack rang out across the room. Boss Bae had slammed his glass down hard enough to chip the base. His eyes were wide with fury. “Outrageous,” he snapped. “You insult this council.” He grabbed his napkin and tossed it across the table like it meant something. “Bastard.”

Yoon caught it, didn’t look, flung it back. “Fuck face.”

“Enough,” Yoongi said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. His eyes didn’t leave Yoon. “Speak.”

Yoon did. He stood straighter, like bracing for a storm, and let it out in one breath.

“I speak of the perversion we’ve allowed into this council. The disgrace that sits at its head. A place I’ve loved more than my own children. Desecrated. By crowning a half-breed Korean Jap-American bitch as its leader.”

It happened before the air had time to shift.

One moment Yoongi was seated. The next, he was standing on the table, sword already drawn. The blade cleared its sheath with a whisper. His coat moved like smoke. Spilled bourbon soaked into the soles of his shoes as he crouched, stepped forward, and swung.

One cut.

Yoon’s head came off like the sword had been waiting for it. It spun once in the air, a blur of silk and skin, then dropped with a sound too soft for what had just happened. Blood followed, bright and fast, arcing across the table. It soaked silver, silk, polished leather. Splattered napkins. Stained velvet. Pooled beneath the feet of men who had ruled Busan’s underworld longer than Yoongi had been alive. Yoon’s body folded in on itself like a puppet cut clean.

The room froze.

Yoongi stood at the center, framed in crystal and blood. His face was flecked red. Still. Unmoved. He rose from his crouch without urgency, eyes flat.

No one spoke. The six remaining bosses kept their eyes on the body or the floor. None dared look at him.

At the edge of the mess, Yoon’s two guards still held their swords. The moment had already passed. One trembled. The other stood stiff, waiting for a bullet that hadn’t come.

Yoongi turned to them. His face didn’t show anger. Or satisfaction. Just that cold certainty, the look of a man who didn’t guess. Who didn’t need to.

He didn’t make a threat. He didn’t have to.

“Fight me,” he said. “Or work for me.”

The two men looked at each other. Loyalty passed between them, brief, reflexive. But it didn’t hold. Not in this blood. Not in this room. They dropped their swords.

“On the floor,” Yoongi said.

The blades hit tile, sharp in the quiet.

“Get behind me.”

They moved, slow, hands open.

“On your knees.”

They knelt.

“Foreheads down.”

They lowered.

“Keep your mouths shut.”

Yoongi turned back toward the table.

No one had moved. Their hands stayed on armrests that no longer felt like theirs. Suits once tailored to power now looked too tight, like their authority no longer fit. These were men who had run cities, ordered executions between drinks, built empires in back rooms. Now they sat like children caught lying, avoiding Yoongi’s eyes, saying nothing.

Even the oldest among them, men who had once terrified nations, kept their heads down. They all understood what had changed. No one here was stupid enough to think they could challenge him. They had all seen what he’d done to reach this seat. No one was angry about his rise.

Boss Bae just hated Boss Yoon for ruining the mood.

Across the room, just beyond the chandelier’s reach, Lynn Easton watched. One leg crossed, cigarette between two fingers, unlit and forgotten. Her eyes never left Yoongi. There was something in her gaze that looked like admiration, but it wasn’t.

It was worship. Not the kind given to saints.

The kind reserved for gods who kill.

No fear in her. No hesitation. She knew what he was. Saw it in him like a reflection. She didn’t flinch. She smiled. Slow. Precise.

Yoongi spoke again. His voice was smooth, low. Velvet over steel. Polished. Corporate. Lethal.

“I’m going to say this in English,” he said to the table, “so you understand exactly how serious I am.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Every word landed with the weight of steel.

“As your leader,” he said, tone flat, “I encourage you from time to time, and always in a respectful manner, to question my logic.”

Lynn translated quietly from her chair, thoroughly amused by his outburst.

“If you’re unconvinced that a particular plan of action I’ve decided is the wisest, tell me so,” Yoongi said. “But allow me to convince you and I promise you right here and now, no subject will ever be taboo.”

He paused.

“Except, of course, the subject that was just under discussion.”

He turned, slow, toward a soldier behind him. A big man, pale and sweating through his collar, standing like he wasn’t sure if movement would get him killed.

“Hand me the head.”

The soldier hesitated, then stepped across the blood-slick floor. He knelt, gripped Yoon’s hair through his gloves, and lifted what was left. Blood still dripped from the neck. The mouth hung slack. The eyes stared, wide and glassy. Whatever they had seen last had stayed with them.

Yoongi took it without ceremony. Like passing a file across a desk.

He held it up slightly. Let the face do the talking.

That expression was still there, that last moment of realization, right before death, when the brain knows it’s over but the body hasn’t caught up. Recognition. Regret.

Then Yoongi’s voice changed.

It dropped lower. Rougher. No polish now. No formality. This wasn’t the voice of a man at the head of a boardroom. This was the voice from before. From the alleys. From a life of being told he didn’t belong. A voice that didn’t learn to fight. It had to.

“The price you pay,” he said, every word slow and exact, “for bringing up either my Japanese or American heritage as a negative…”

He raised the head just a little higher.

“…is I collect your fuckin’ head.”

One of the dons swallowed, loud in the quiet. Another froze completely, like even the sound of a breath might draw attention. Under the table, someone moved to cross themselves, then stopped, maybe remembering no god watched over this place.

“Just like this fucker here,” Yoongi added, swinging the head in a small arc. A red line traced the table around him.

He turned in a slow circle, letting them see it.

“And if any of you sons of bitches got anything else to say…”

His voice lifted slightly, barely, but the force cracked through the room like a bullet.

“Now’s the fuckin’ time.”

He looked at each of them, one by one. Daring them. Giving them the chance. No one spoke. No one moved.

“I didn’t think so.”

He dropped the head.

It hit the table hard. A wet, blunt slap. Blood sprayed outward, over linen, over crystal, over the sleeve of the man closest to the corpse. The head rolled once, then again, and fell off the far edge. It landed with a soft thud and disappeared under the tablecloth.

Yoongi turned his back to them.

“Meeting’s adjourned,” he said.

He walked away. Two men who had once sworn to kill him followed without a word. Behind them, the room stayed still. The scent of blood lingered, thick and permanent. The council, once a cabal of giants, sat quiet, stripped down to what they really were.

Men. Just men. And they all stared at the spot where the king used to stand.

Y/N sat curled in the corner of her room. The cheap wooden chair pressed hard into her back, too stiff to be comfortable, but familiar enough not to notice. The smell fan she had screwed into the wall filled the silence with a steady hum.

Memory didn’t work like a book. You couldn’t flip to a clean page and read it straight. It was smoke. Slippery. Every time she tried to hold it still, it shifted. Time didn’t erase anything. It just dulled the edges. The things that used to cut now brushed against her like worn silk. The pain was still there. It just moved to the background, like old music from another room.

Yoongi Min lived there now. She didn’t cry for him anymore. The rage that used to keep her up at night, sweating and twisting in the sheets, was gone. So was the hate. That would have been easier.

Now, she just carried him.

Every night, before sleep dragged her under, she read the list. Names, dates, memories etched in ink, sealed in scars. Yoongi’s name had never moved. Always circled. Always there. Preserved in blood and intent.

Once, the irony amused her. That you could still want vengeance against someone you didn’t hate anymore. Now it just made her tired.

He hadn’t always been part of her story. Once, he was just a name. A man with quiet eyes who appeared one sunburned afternoon in Jalisco, uninvited but perfectly expected. She still remembered the smell of scorched dust, the scream of cicadas in the heat. She had been sitting on the veranda, a bitter drink in her hand, ice melting faster than her patience. The estate’s white walls radiated heat like an oven. She thought she would pass out before anything important happened.

Then he walked in.

Too still. Too composed. The kind of man who looked wrong in heat and noise because he didn’t sweat. Didn’t flinch. And that made him dangerous. Danger didn’t announce itself. It stood still in chaos and watched.

Her first thought was that he was too pretty to be a killer. Not soft, just out of place. The kind of face meant for cathedrals or concert halls, not backrooms and wars. It caught her off guard. She had felt that once before, the year she met Jimin. But Jimin weaponized his beauty. He distracted. Disarmed. Smiled before he cut.

Yoongi didn’t smile.

He was cold. Still. A presence that quieted rooms. The kind of man you didn’t approach. You waited to be seen.

She hadn’t trusted him. But she hadn’t objected either. When Taehyung asked if she approved, she hadn’t looked away. Just gave a brief nod and said, “What’s his name?”

Taehyung had already chosen.

“Cottonmouth,” he said, smiling like it amused him.

Yoongi didn’t stay long. Maybe forty-eight hours. Just long enough to shake the right hands and unlock the right doors. By Monday, he was gone, headed back to Korea with a folder of papers and a one-way ticket in his coat.

At the time, it didn’t seem important. It was 1992. She was still green. Still trying to figure out what kind of weapon she would become.

Back then, her hands hadn’t learned how to break things. Her heart still ached when it rained. She still prayed, sometimes. She hadn’t met Pai Mei yet. That part of her story hadn’t started.

But Taehyung, as always, had seen it coming. He knew she wasn’t ready. Or maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to be the one to turn the key. When it came time to learn the blade, he stepped back. Said it was too personal.

So he made the call. Yoongi picked up. Said yes.

Three days later, she arrived. The cold hit her the second she stepped off the plane. Busan didn’t feel like a city. The skyline was gray, resigned. The Min estate sat on the edge of that resignation, stone and silence, walls older than any name she knew. It didn’t feel like a home.

Yoongi was waiting in the great hall. Standing there, tall, composed, dressed in slate silk that shimmered like oil under low light. He didn’t move. Just watched her walk in with a stare that could empty a room.

So she bowed.

Not out of respect. Not even formality. Instinct. Survival. She knew men like him. You bowed first, or you didn’t get the chance.

She dropped to her knees. Lowered her head. Waited.

He didn’t speak.

The silence stretched, long enough for doubt to slip in and settle. But she held position.

Then, finally, he spoke. Quiet. Exact. His Korean was flawless. Formal. The kind you heard in courtrooms and memorial rites. Not Taehyung’s fast, back-alley Seoul dialect. This was old money. Inherited. Precise.

“Tell me,” he said, “why are you here?”

It wasn’t curiosity. It was a test. A mirror.

She raised her head. Met his eyes.

“Taehyung told me he already spoke with you,” she said, matching his dialect. The formality was stiff in her mouth, shaped by study, not instinct.

Something flickered in his eyes. Maybe approval. Maybe not.

“Our mutual acquaintance said he would send the foreigner I met in Mexico,” he said, kneeling so smoothly it made no sound. “But that’s not what I asked.”

Now they were eye-level. But she still felt beneath him. Not from height. From stillness.

Yoongi didn’t dominate a room. He erased it. Took the air out. Turned it into something cold and hollow. His stillness wasn’t passive. It pressed in, dense and quiet, until you felt it in your lungs. A slow pressure, like being buried.

Then he moved.

No warning. No wind-up. Just motion.

His hand reached out, fingers catching her chin. Not rough. Not kind. Just efficient. The touch felt clinical. His skin wasn’t cold, but it felt like it should have been.

“Why are you here?” he asked again. “If it’s training you want, Taehyung could’ve done it himself. But he didn’t. Why?” His voice didn’t rise. It sank, low, smooth, cold. “Is it because you think I’m closer to the roots of the blade? That your little infatuation with him would cloud the lessons?”

Then he leaned in. Barely. Just enough to close the distance. She caught the faint scent on his skin, wood smoke, paper, ink. His eyes narrowed.

“Or…” The edge in his voice sharpened. “Or is it because Taehyung found a new pet, and you couldn’t stand to watch him play with her?”

It hit like a punch. Not forceful. Precise. A clean shot to the soft place she never acknowledged. It found it anyway.

She didn’t flinch.

Her breath caught, just for a second, but she forced the air out slow. Steadied her gaze.

“Taehyung’s too busy to train a beginner,” she said, voice level. Even. Neutral. “And I wanted to get to know you. We’re closer in age than I am with the others. I thought we could become friends.”

A lie. But polished. Just enough truth to sound casual. Just enough simplicity to sell.

She let the silence stretch. Let it settle between them like pressure.

Something flickered in his face. Not a smile. Not quite mockery. Something colder. He brushed his thumb across her cheek. It could’ve passed as a gesture of comfort.

It wasn’t.

Without breaking eye contact, he switched languages. His English was flawless. Not practiced. Natural. Private-school crisp, but stripped of warmth.

“Well,” he murmured, “we’ll see what you are soon enough, won’t we?”

Then he stood. One clean motion. Effortless. Like movement didn’t cost him anything. He turned and walked away without a glance, already finished with her.

“Lynn will show you to your room.”

The door closed behind him. Quiet. Clean. Final.

She sat for a second in the echo of it. Her face still cold from his fingers.

Then she stood. Picked up the hotel phone. Dialed.

Taehyung answered on the second ring. Warm. Familiar. Almost amused.

“You good?” he asked before she said a word.

She opened her mouth but didn’t get the chance.

The door burst open.

No knock. No warning.

Lynn Easton stepped in like she owned the place. Black silk. Sharp tailoring. Heels like weapons. Her hair pulled back, expression blank. Her presence wasn’t. It filled the room.

Y/N’s instincts lit up.

She didn’t think. Just moved.

The gun was in her hand before Lynn crossed halfway in. Smooth draw. Safety off. Barrel aimed steady between the eyes.

The phone clattered to the floor. Taehyung’s voice buzzed faintly, tinny and distant.

Lynn didn’t blink.

She glanced at the phone. Then at Y/N. Something flickered, disgust. Then it vanished, replaced by something colder.

“I’m here to tell you,” she said, voice flat, dry, “training starts in ten. Main courtyard. Don’t let your little phone call make you late.”

Then she turned and walked out. Like the gun hadn’t mattered. Like the whole thing bored her.

Y/N lowered the weapon. Picked up the phone.

Taehyung was still there.

“You good?” he asked again, voice calm.

“Yeah,” she said. Too quick.

“I have to go. Yoongi’s waiting.”

A pause.

Then, gently: “Show him why I picked you. Don’t hope. Prove it.”

“I will.”

“Goodbye, Alabama.”

“Bye, Tae.”

She hung up. Stood still for a second. Smiled, just barely.

Three minutes later, she was already in the courtyard. She’d memorized the layout her first night. Not for aesthetics. She didn’t care about ancient stone, delicate bonsai, or cherry blossoms floating like confetti. That wasn’t her lens.

She mapped sightlines. Marked exits. Noted cover. Measured steps. Calculated what she could cross, where she could hide, how fast she could move.

Survival started with the map.

The courtyard was bare. Raked gravel. Slate tiles worn smooth by weather and time. Wind chimes overhead, their tones sharp and strange. A single cherry tree leaned in from the far corner, petals drifting down like soft debris.

Yoongi stood beneath it.

Back to her.

Still.

The sun cast his shadow long across the stone, a cut of darkness the light couldn’t touch. His robe was black, edged in silver thread. The fabric moved with the wind. He didn’t.

She crossed the courtyard without sound. Her boots were ghosts on the stone. No training mats. No racks of blades. Just Yoongi, and the wooden sword in his hand, held like he’d never put it down.

He didn’t turn.

“Show me how you hold this,” he said. No greeting. No warmth. Just a command dropped mid-movement, like she was late.

She took the sword in both hands. Grip clean. Textbook. Balanced.

Too clean.

It looked right but felt wrong. Like a pose held too long in front of a mirror.

She tried to channel Taehyung, the way his stance breathed, the way the blade looked grown from his hand. But she wasn’t him. And Yoongi wasn’t here for poetry.

He didn’t sigh. Didn’t speak. Just shifted his jaw, barely.

“No.”

He stepped forward. She didn’t see it happen. One second, still. The next, closer. The sword left her hands without resistance. He didn’t yank it. Didn’t ask. He just took it, like gravity claiming a dropped stone.

Then his hands were on her. Not rough. Not gentle. Just efficient. Fingers folding hers back around the hilt, sliding a thumb, adjusting the angle. One sharp push realigned her elbow. A tap moved her hips. Behind her, he pivoted her knee, nudged a foot half an inch forward. No words. No explanation. Just movement. Precise. Automatic. He worked like someone who had done this a thousand times and expected no questions.

It wasn’t teaching. It was sculpting.

She didn’t resist. It wasn’t instruction. It was command.

Yoongi’s style had no drama. No shouting. No speeches. No honor-bound riddles. Just correction and silence. He didn’t care when her arms began to shake or when her back pulled tight. His hands just kept moving, carving posture into muscle whether it wanted to hold or not.

By the time he stepped back, her entire body burned. Thighs tight. Shoulders screaming. Spine locked. Sweat clung to her jawline, her breathing short and shallow. Her hands cramped around the hilt.

He looked her over once. Then gave a single nod.
“Hold that position for one hour,” he said. Flat. Final. “When it’s over, I’ll show you the next.”

She blinked. “An hour?”

The disbelief escaped before she could kill it. Regret followed instantly. Not just because she had questioned him. Because it sounded weak.

Yoongi didn’t answer.

He turned and walked to the bench beneath the cherry tree’s shade. A tea set sat waiting. Steam already curling from the spout. He poured a cup with the same precision he used on her stance. Not rushed. Not careless. Ritual.

He sipped. Closed his eyes.
“Don’t speak,” he said. “Your muscles must stay still.”

She stared at his back, jaw tight. Part of her wanted to drop the sword. Just to see what he would do. To make him react.

She didn’t. Because this was still the test.

“There are children who start this training at four,” he said. “Most still fail.”

Another sip.

“You’ve spent two years playing with guns and knives and think that makes you ready.” A pause. “It doesn’t.”

The words didn’t sting. They landed. Quiet. Dry. Accurate. Like facts she had avoided saying out loud.

“Maybe your mind can learn. Maybe. But your body will. One way or another.”

He didn’t look at her when he added, “I’ll hope you leave this place a credit to my mother’s nation. Try not to disappoint, will you?”

It didn’t sound like hope. It sounded like a door closing.

A week and a half later, Yoongi decided to take the crew out. No reason. No plan. No destination. Just motion.

His people didn’t need details. Only direction. And they moved like gears. Quiet. Timed. Unquestioning.

Lynn delivered the message.

Y/N sat cross-legged on her floor, wrapping gauze around bruises that bloomed black beneath her ribs. Each pass dragged against raw skin. Her breath hitched when the edge of the bandage caught bone. She pressed her palm to her side and waited for the pain to settle. It didn’t. It just burrowed deeper. She gritted her teeth and kept going.

She was halfway through when the door opened.

Lynn stepped in like she owned the space. Black silk, tailored sharp. Not a wrinkle out of place. Posture perfect. Chin up. Shoulders square. Eyes level.

Y/N was on her feet before she realized it.

The pain screamed through her ribs, but her body moved on instinct. Her spine locked, and her hand shot out. The gun was in her grip a second later, trained on Lynn’s forehead without hesitation. The silence that followed wasn’t stillness. It was loaded. Bright and taut. Like air stretched too thin.

The only sound was the faint scrape of her phone sliding off the futon and hitting the floor. Taehyung’s voice, mid-sentence, flickered into static.

Lynn didn’t blink. She didn’t move. Her eyes ticked from the gun to the phone, then back to Y/N. Her expression didn’t shift, not really, but something passed through it. Faint. Fleeting. Contempt. The kind too old to be loud. She exhaled once through her nose, slow and quiet, then spoke.

“You’re allowed to come tonight,” she said, voice flat, the kind of flat that could cut glass. “We leave in five.”

She didn’t wait for an answer. Just turned and walked out, the tail of her silk shirt whispering across the doorway as she disappeared down the hall.

Y/N stood there, chest heaving. Her ribs throbbed. Her fingers loosened around the grip of the gun, but she didn’t lower it for a few more seconds. Long enough to make sure Lynn wasn’t coming back.

Then she bent to grab the phone, her hand trembling slightly as she brought it back to her ear.

“You good?” Taehyung’s voice was still there. Low. Calm. Annoyingly perceptive.

She exhaled, steadying herself. “Yeah,” she said. Too fast.

“I have to go. Yoongi’s waiting.”

A pause.

Then: “Show him why I picked you. Don’t hope. Prove it.”

“I will.”

“Goodbye, Alabama.”

“Bye, Taehyung.”

She ended the call and sat there for one beat longer than she needed to, staring at the wall. Then she stood, wincing, and pulled her boots on over aching legs. She didn’t change clothes. No time. The sweat-soaked tank top clung to her skin. Her jeans were still dirty from morning drills. She swiped a sleeve across her mouth to smear whatever lip gloss was left and ran a hand through her hair, tugging it back with a band that had seen better days.

She didn’t care about looking good. She cared about moving fast.

By the time she stepped into the front hall, she had already pushed the pain back down where it belonged. The light in the entryway was warm and gold, soft against the polished wood floors and cool stone walls. Yoongi stood near the door, speaking in clipped Korean to a man she didn’t recognize. He was tall and heavy-set, the kind of man whose hands looked like they knew how to break a jaw without wrinkling his cuffs. Yoongi’s voice was brisk and efficient. His eyes kept flicking toward the hallway.

When he saw her, they stopped. Just for a second. Long enough to notice, not long enough to mean anything. But it wasn’t nothing.

She fell into step behind the others, slipping into formation as if she had always been there. Not too close. Not too far. She knew the rhythm now. She knew the space she was allowed to occupy. Not inside. Not excluded. She was tolerated. Observed. Weighed.

A wiry man with too many rings and a mouth that seemed to smile more during fights than at parties offered her a drink. Something clear in a crystal vial. She shook her head. Not because she trusted him. She didn’t. But she needed every ounce of strength for whatever came next. Her body still buzzed from the morning’s drills. Her legs felt like overused rope. Her back ached. Her palms were raw.

Yoongi had worked her until she collapsed. Then he told her to start over. He hadn’t praised her. He hadn’t spoken at all when it ended. But he hadn’t walked away disappointed either. That counted.

In the narrow space between rejection and recognition, she could feel the pull. Not affection. Not ambition. Something simpler and hungrier. She wanted to be seen. Not as Taehyung’s pick. Not as the outsider with borrowed language and too much to prove. She wanted to be seen as a threat. Something that could not be ignored.

The car ride to the club was silent. Not awkward, but disciplined. Every man sat straight, knees aligned, backs stiff. No one spoke unless necessary. When they did, it was quick, quiet Korean. Clean and controlled. Not meant for her.

Up front, Yoongi sat next to Lynn. He never looked back. The passing streetlights carved his face into pieces, slicing him into segments of brightness and shadow, something not quite whole. When he spoke, the car quieted even more.

Y/N did not catch the words. She didn’t need to. The tone was enough. Low. Sharp. Exact. Lynn nodded once, her arms folded tight across her chest as if she were holding something in. Her reply was short and clipped, but her body shifted. Just a little. Like something inside her had been punched.

Y/N did not know what Yoongi had said. But she felt it in her teeth. He didn’t waste words. When he spoke, something somewhere bled.

The car stopped. She reached for the door, expecting one of the others to go first. Protocol. Order.

But the door opened from the outside.

Yoongi. Still seated, half turned, holding the door open for her. Just once. Just for her. It wasn’t gallantry. It wasn’t habit. It was a move.

Their eyes met. Half a second, maybe less, but it stretched longer than it should have. A flicker of understanding passed between them. Not fondness. Not even acknowledgment. Recognition. The game had begun.

The club was buried beneath an old hotel near the edge of the harbor. It sat tucked under stone and shadow like something too dangerous to live upstairs. There were no signs. No neon. Only a pair of matte black steel doors and a man standing in front of them who looked like he had retired from killing people professionally but still did it on weekends for fun. He didn’t speak. He didn’t check IDs or nod in recognition. He simply stepped aside when Yoongi approached, as if the man had already been through him once.

Inside, the air changed immediately. You felt it before you saw it. The atmosphere had weight. A low hum beneath the skin. Everything was red. Not just in color but in mood. The lighting bled against velvet walls and lacquered surfaces, casting shadows that clung to corners like secrets. Smoke curled from cigars too expensive to ask about, winding into the haze like something alive. The music was live jazz, but not the kind played in hotel lobbies. It had teeth. Brass and muscle. A saxophone wailed from the stage like it had history, like it had seen too much and was tired of staying quiet.

No one here danced. No one shouted over the music or begged for bottle service. This was not that kind of place. You didn’t come here to forget yourself. You came because you already knew exactly who you were and wanted others to know it too.

Every person in the room mattered. Nobody wore name tags. Their reputations arrived ahead of them, carried in rumors and police reports. Laughter was low and precise, like a shared joke you only understood if you had killed the same man. Weapons glinted beneath suits. Flashes of matte black steel and the occasional polished wood handle. Not a threat. A formality.

It wasn’t safe. But it was sacred.

Y/N didn’t need instructions. One glance from one of Yoongi’s men sent her toward the far end of the long table. No words. Just movement. The seat was obvious. Furthest from Yoongi, furthest from Lynn, tucked into the farthest edge of the heat. A place for the tolerated, not the trusted. She sat without protest. She didn’t take it personally. She poured herself a small cup of sake, careful not to let her fingers shake. Her body still ached from training. Shoulders like stone. Wrists sore. Back tight. But she held the cup steady.

The first sip burned. Sharp and clean. It didn’t dull the pain, but it gave her something else to focus on.

From her seat, she could see the whole room. What she saw caught her off guard. Yoongi was laughing.

Not a polite smirk. Not the curated charm he used with government contacts or lieutenants looking for approval. This was real. Mouth open, eyes creased at the corners, head tilted just enough to show his guard had dropped. Briefly, but fully. He leaned toward Lynn, said something low that made her roll her eyes and smirk. Something warm, almost playful. Not the usual predator’s smirk she wore like lipstick. This was different. Lighter. Familiar.

Yoongi tapped the table with two fingers, keeping time with the band. Occasionally, he snapped a word toward the musicians. They responded instantly, adjusting their tempo as if they were tuned to his mood.

She did not recognize this version of him.

This wasn’t the man who had held her elbow too long in the courtyard. Who had made her hold a stance until her thighs screamed and her arms went numb. Who corrected her without speaking, using only pressure and presence. That Yoongi was exacting. Brutal in his quiet.

This one was fluid. Charming. Dangerous in an entirely different way. This was the king.

She lifted her cup again. Just to do something with her hands.

That was when he looked up. Right at her. He did not blink. He did not smile. He only looked. For a moment, the noise in the room faded. Not because it stopped, but because she no longer heard it. Her heart struck once, hard enough to echo in her ears. She stayed still. Silent. She did not need to speak. The air had shifted. She felt it.

Then Yoongi stood. He smoothed his jacket, straightened his cuffs with a flick of his wrists, and walked. Not toward the band. Not toward the bathroom or the bar. He walked toward her.

Y/N did not move. Her cup hovered in mid-air. Everyone noticed, even if they pretended not to. Eyes flicked toward him, then slid away. It was like watching the sun move across the sky. You did not stare, but you felt it.

He reached her side of the table and sat across from her as if the seat had always been his. He did not ask. He did not wait. He claimed it.

The look he gave her was not kind and not cruel. It was measured.

“You like soju?” he asked. His voice was soft, almost casual, as if he were asking about the weather.

He reached across the table for the bottle in her hand and took it as if she had offered it. She had not, but that did not matter.

“I have had it with Taehyung before,” she said. Her voice stayed calm and steady. That was the important part.

Yoongi rolled the bottle between his fingers. The label caught the light and shimmered, a red gleam against his skin.

His mouth curved slightly. Not quite a smile. Something quieter.

“And am I right to believe,” he said in a tone that was light but edged just enough to sting, “that you have been enjoying this one all by yourself?”

She did not answer. Her pulse spoke for her.

“I see Eun-Jae has his own.” He nodded toward a man two seats down. “And Chi-Hun too.” He glanced again.

His voice did not rise. It did not need to. Every word cut deeper. The power was not in volume. It was in the edge.

“That makes this bottle yours.”

Eun-Jae and Chi-Hun moved together in perfect choreography. Each lifted his own bottle. Each poured for the men nearby. They did not look at her. They did not comment. The gesture was enough.

Her breath caught. Not for long and not dramatic, just enough to tighten her throat. Her body knew before her mind did. She had not meant to claim anything. She had not even realized she had. But she had. And now it was out in the open, sitting between them like a challenge carved into stone.

Yoongi did not believe in accidents. He did not believe in second chances either. Not here. Not with her.

The expression he had worn—cool, unreadable, almost amused—vanished from his face in an instant. The bottle tilted slowly in his hand. The last of the sake spilled across the table in a thin stream that soaked into the lacquered surface. It pooled quietly, unmistakably. A slow insult. A liquid reprimand. It did not splash. It bled.

“I will not allow a student still in training to get drunk,” he said. His voice was flat, stripped of warmth. Not angry. Worse than angry. Final. “Not when I have been generous enough to permit her a night of entertainment.”

Something inside her snapped. A coil wound too tight since the day she arrived. Since the first blow she had not been allowed to flinch from. Ten days of drills. Ten days of silence. Ten days of pain stitched into her skin and rules never explained but always punished. Ten days of never knowing if she was doing well because he only told her when she failed. Ten days of swallowing every ache, every humiliation, with no relief and no reward.

Her palms slammed against the table before she even realized she was moving. The sound cracked across the room like a gunshot. She rose halfway from her seat, the motion sharp and defiant. Her voice tore out, scraped raw from restraint.

“Then maybe you should have said that before we left the compound!” she snapped. “How the hell was I supposed to know when everyone else is drinking like it is a wedding?”

The room changed instantly. Breath seemed to vanish from it. Air turned still. Every conversation froze. Heads turned slowly, carefully. Chairs shifted. Hands slid toward weapons, not drawing yet, only resting, waiting. The silence was not empty. It was anticipation. Everyone in that room knew this kind of silence. Everyone had lived long enough to recognize the moment before something breaks.

Yoongi did not blink. He did not move.

He raised one hand.

And everything stopped.

His voice carried no volume, but it had gravity.

“Are you telling me,” he said slowly, “that I was wrong to assume Taehyung would only send someone intelligent enough to know training does not end when the sun goes down?”

Then he stood. No flourish. No threat. Only inevitability. Like the tide rolling in. Like gravity itself shifting around him.

“I do not excuse disrespect under the guise of ignorance,” he said. His words cut cleaner than a blade. “You may not yet understand what it means to belong to something greater than yourself, but you will learn what it means to respect the table you sit at.”

His eyes flicked to Eun-Jae. Then to Chi-Hun. Neither man moved. Neither breathed.

“For the rest of the night,” Yoongi said, turning back to her, his tone sharp and exact, “you will refill their glasses. To repay the insult of serving only yourself.”

He did not wait for a response. He did not look at her again.

“You.”

A waitress near the bar jumped as if struck. Her tray clattered in her hands.

“Bring her tea. Nothing else. And clean this mess.”

The girl moved immediately. No protest. No hesitation.

Yoongi walked away. Not storming. Not hurried. Simply finished. His point made. Nothing left to say.

The air shifted again in his absence. The room exhaled at last. Conversation resumed—too loud, too quick, forced. Nervous noise from people desperate to believe nothing serious had happened.

Y/N did not move. She could not. Her hands shook. Her skin burned, not only with humiliation but with something colder. Rage. Resentment. Shame. Worst of all, the hollow realization that the worst part was not what he had done to her.

It was that she had let it happen.

When Yoongi sat back beside Lynn, it was not him who looked at her.

It was Lynn.

Her smile was small. Precise. Cruel in a way that did not need teeth to draw blood.

They never spoke of it again. They didn’t need to.

Yoongi was not the kind of man who repeated himself, and Y/N was not the kind of woman who asked for wounds to be reopened. Training didn’t work that way. The lesson had been public, sharp, final. The silence that followed was the test. The message was clear.

After that, everything got colder. Sharper. Quieter.

The weeks bled together in a rhythm of pain and repetition. Every morning before the sun rose, Y/N stepped barefoot into the stone courtyard, bokken in hand, breath visible in the cold air. Her muscles ached before she began. Her fingers were raw and calloused. Her shoulders locked tight. Her back burned from the inside out.

Yoongi always appeared without sound. Gray silk draped his frame, hair tied neatly, a porcelain cup of tea in hand. He never greeted her. Never asked if she was ready. He gave one demonstration: a stance, a pivot, a strike. Then he left her to chase it. No instructions. No corrections. No praise.

Only silence.

And eyes. Always watching. From the edges. From shadows. From the corner of her vision where he lingered just long enough for her to feel it. Not seen, but tracked.

He never corrected her with words. He broke her rhythm instead. A faint frown. A raised brow. A soft clack of his own blade knocking hers out of line. Every mistake meant starting over, no matter how far she was into the sequence. No matter how tired. No matter how raw her hands had become.

He didn’t teach. He shaped. He disrupted. And he made it work.

It was a hot afternoon when she cracked. Spring clung to the air like a fever. Blossoms sagged on tired branches. Sweat slid in rivulets down her back. She was on the hundredth repetition of a basic kata, clean and practiced, almost meditative, when his voice sliced from behind her.

“You’ve gotten sloppy since returning from lunch.”

She froze for one second. It was all he needed.

Her hand tightened on the hilt. She didn’t turn. Didn’t answer. But her grip faltered. Her breath grew uneven. The stance that had been perfect a moment ago unraveled in an instant.

Of course he had been watching. Of course he never really left.

“I ran into Lynn at lunch,” Y/N said, her voice taut, held together by will alone. She didn’t explain further. She didn’t mention the way Lynn’s words had cut—soft but cruel, designed to slice without volume.

Her grip tightened until the wood groaned. Splinters bit into her skin. She didn’t loosen her hold.

Yoongi said nothing. He didn’t ask. He simply set down his tea and crossed the courtyard with that same quiet precision, deliberate and certain, without wasted motion. He moved like breath against glass. Soundless. Unshakable.

When he reached her, he took the bokken from her hands. Not with force. Not with kindness. Just decisively, as if the matter were already settled. As if her permission had never been required.

His fingers brushed hers, light and impersonal. Not comforting. Not cruel. Simply measuring damage. He turned her hand over, inspected the raw patches, the forming blister, the embedded sliver of wood at her thumb. He handled her like a craftsman checking his tools. Detached. Efficient.

“She’s jealous, I’m afraid.”

The words came casually, as if he were commenting on the weather. No bite. No warmth. Just fact.

Y/N blinked. “Jealous? Of what, my bruises?”

A flicker passed through his eyes. Amusement perhaps. Perhaps something sharper. His mouth twitched, not quite a smile.

“You haven’t figured it out yet? I thought you were supposed to be clever.”

He didn’t wait for her reply. Instead, he used a nail to lift the splinter from her skin—quick, practiced. Then he took her other hand. His thumbs pressed into old bruises along her palm and forearm, testing how far the tissue had hardened. Every movement was precise. Every touch necessary.

“She was Taehyung’s favorite before you,” he said evenly. “The only reason I ever worked with him was because she asked me to. She called it loyalty. I called it convenience. But I said yes.”

He paused just long enough for the weight to settle. Not dramatic. Just deliberate.

“Then he got bored. She returned here. And he sent you.”

Y/N didn’t flinch, but the words hit low and deep. She had no reply. She didn’t know what she was meant to feel. It wasn’t a compliment. It wasn’t a warning. It was both. It was neither.

He looked up and met her eyes.

“And now you’ve taken my attention too.”

There was no inflection in his tone. No tilt of the head. No softening smile. Only the weight of the words left hanging between them. Then he released her hands.

“You are beginning to have the hands of a samurai,” he said. “You may take the night off.”

And then, like always, he turned. Three steps away. No glance back.

But he stopped.

“Tomorrow,” he said, his back still to her, “I will join your practice.”

It should have felt like something. A victory. Recognition. A sign that she had finally crossed some invisible line. Instead it sank into her gut like stone: cold, heavy, permanent.

The next morning, the courtyard looked unchanged. Gravel neatly raked. Air still. Gray light blooming faint against the sky. But this time Yoongi was already there.

He stood beneath the cherry tree, bokken in hand, its wood darkened by years of use. He didn’t smile. He didn’t greet her.

“I will strike,” he said. “You will counter. You have until I reach you to remember the correct movement. If you fail...”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

She set her stance. He moved.

No signal. No count. Only sudden motion. The first strike came fast and low, angled at her shoulder. She tried to shift, but too late.

The blow landed with a crack and dropped her to one knee. Pain flared down her ribs, bright and sharp. Her vision burst white at the edges. She didn’t cry out.

“Begin again,” he said.

So she did.

Over. And over. And over.

There were no drills, no warming up, no soft correction. Only his blade cutting through air, his feet silent on stone, and the sick thud of her body reacting too slow. Her shoulders screamed. Her calves cramped. Her palms ached from the grip. Her mind blurred between one motion and the next.

Yoongi gave her nothing. No feedback, no approval, not even disappointment. Only relentless pressure. He moved like a metronome with teeth, steady and ruthless. If she was off by an inch, he found it. If her balance faltered, he exploited it. Every failure reset the clock.

This was not training. It was exposure therapy. And it worked. Not in a single revelation or dramatic breakthrough, but in layers, in silence. Her body began to anticipate. Her feet stopped dragging. Her shoulder no longer ducked instinctively. The bruises still formed, but less often. Her hands stayed firm, her wrists stopped trembling, and she moved on reflex instead of thought.

Yoongi never slowed, yet cracks began to appear—not in him, but in the routine. A breath that came half a second late, a shift in weight before the strike, tiny tells that most would overlook. She did not. She kept them tucked away like cards she was not ready to play.

The change came late in the session. The heat pressed down, blossoms overhead curling in the sun. Her shirt clung to her spine and her lungs burned. She was deep into another repetition, automatic and unconscious, when Yoongi broke pattern. A sharp flick, a feint they had not practiced in more than a week. Her mind did not register it. Her body did. She pivoted and blocked, clean.

Yoongi stopped. He did not speak, did not nod, but something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile, not exactly, but close. It vanished almost immediately, sealed away behind the mask he always wore. Yet it had been there, and that—coming from Yoongi—was everything.

Something shifted between them, not in any dramatic glance or heavy moment, but in a quiet recalibration that needed no name to be real. She began watching him differently, not only reacting to his strikes but studying the seconds before. The tension in his shoulders. The draw of his breath. The way he set his weight before moving. She was reading him now, not following but predicting, feeling the current instead of bracing against it.

Without thinking, she tested him. It was not planned. Her body moved before her brain caught up, a twitch in the shoulder and a shift in her stance. She stepped in fast, blade sweeping low. It was not perfect, maybe not even wise, but it was honest. He caught it effortlessly, calm, as though he had been waiting for her to try.

That hint of a smile returned, small but unmistakable. Not approval, something more dangerous—recognition. She swung again, this time at a different angle, sharper, more deliberate. His block came quicker, and with it a subtle change in his stance, a pivot that revealed not a mistake but an invitation.

Try again.

And she did. For the next half hour they moved together, not quite sparring and not quite dancing. She pushed, he absorbed. Every inch of progress, every shard of discipline, every stubborn breath left in her body went into those exchanges. He gave her only what she earned, no more and no less. There were no corrections, no lectures, no fire. Only motion. The air between them tightened, charged with effort and silent calculation. For the first time, it did not feel like survival. It felt like progress.

But it could not last.

Yoongi shifted suddenly, swift and deceptively casual, and used a move she herself had tried earlier. A flick, a false step, something familiar that her body was not ready to counter in reverse. Her mind lagged behind, and the strike landed hard. The wooden blade slammed into her ribs with merciless precision, seizing her entire body. Her breath vanished. She fell, coughing, knees hitting gravel as heat exploded white-hot through her side. The courtyard spun.

Yoongi stood above her in silence, the bokken loose in his hand as if he had barely touched her. His breathing remained steady. His shoulders did not move. He looked almost bored.

“Very good,” he said, his voice dry as stone. “Although you would be dead if my sword had an edge. Try to remember faster tomorrow.”

No gloating. No malice. Just fact.

She forced herself upright, ribs protesting with each breath. Her vision swam, but she did not drop the sword. Her grip held—tight, shaky, but there. She had learned at least this much: pain no longer had the right to take things from her.

“Tomorrow?” she rasped.

Yoongi did not blink. “It is not even noon.”

She stared, sweat cooling against her skin, body throbbing in every place that mattered. He turned without waiting, walking with the same casual control, the blade swinging loosely at his side. One hand lifted behind him in a lazy gesture.

Follow.

So she did.

They were not heading to her room. She realized it the moment they took the east corridor. The pattern was wrong. The walls shifted to older stone, the silence heavier. She knew the layout. Taehyung had made her memorize every hall of the estate, every corner, every dead end, just in case. She had never come this far before, but she knew exactly where they were going.

Yoongi’s wing. Private. Off-limits. No one lingered there unless summoned.

At the end of the hall, he slid open a door and a wave of heat spilled out, thick with cedar and citrus and something older, like sun-warmed earth or smoke from the right kind of fire. The bath sprawled across stone as though it had grown from the earth itself. Sunken deep, carved clean, it sent steam curling into the air in long, slow threads. No marble. No gold. Only simplicity that dared anyone to call it lacking.

Yoongi stepped aside, leaving just enough room for her to pass.

“Your body is bruised. Your muscles are tight,” he said in the same even tone he used when calling a strike. “This will help.”

Not quite an offer, though it sounded like one. It carried weight, an order softened at the edges.

She looked at him. “Are you joining me?”

One brow lifted with faint amusement. “You are not interesting enough yet.”

He walked past her then, swallowed by the steam as if it belonged to him. The door slid shut behind him with a sound too soft to echo.

She stood there for a second and let the warmth reach her skin. The scent of yuzu and cedar clung to her clothes. The stone under her feet radiated quiet heat. For the first time in weeks, no one was watching.

She set the sword down.

The steam curled around her arms, climbed her spine, and softened the places that ached the most. Her ribs hummed where the strike had landed. Her shoulder blades loosened. Something deep inside her, the part that had gone tight and silent, let go. Not all at once, but a little.

Then the door slid open again.

Yoongi stepped into the steam without a word. Bare-chested, robe hanging loose at his hips, sash in one hand. His presence did not change with the space. He moved the same way he always did, with that silent, deliberate ease that made you forget you were watching something dangerous. Nothing in his posture acknowledged that she was there, standing in the doorway to his private sanctuary. It was as if her presence had already been accounted for, expected, filed neatly under inevitable.

“This is my bath,” he said, calm and even, like he was offering her a history lesson. “I thought you might appreciate something more civilized than the training hall showers.”

He folded the robe with practiced care, every motion tidy and purposeful. Not fussy, only controlled. Every crease smoothed, every corner aligned. He set it aside, then turned to the cold-water spout set into the stone wall, twisted the valve, and let the water slam against his skin.

No flinch. No breath hitch. Just the rhythmic sound of cold water hitting muscle and stone, echoing through the steam-heavy air.

She did not step forward yet. She only stood there, body worn down to the bone, every joint and bruise aching in protest. Her eyes stayed on him, though. The shape of his back. The way water sheeted off him, like even the elements could not quite stick. The stillness he carried, too perfect to be natural, too practiced to be peaceful. It should have unnerved her. Instead, it pulled at something deeper, something she did not want to name.

“Why?” she asked, keeping her voice low and steady. “Why bring me here?”

He looked over his shoulder. No smirk. No raised brow. Just a calm, clear look, as if he already knew what she was really asking.

“Consider it a reward,” he said. “You have not complained. Not once. Even when your body failed you. Or”—a faint pause sharpened the air between them—“maybe I just wanted a closer look at the strange girl who stayed, when I expected her to be gone before the week ended.”

She let out a short breath, half-scoff, half-laugh. Then peeled off her shirt. Slowly. Not to perform, only because it hurt. The fabric clung to her, damp with sweat and blood. She stripped it away piece by piece, revealing skin blotched purple and yellow, deep reds where the bruises still bloomed fresh. She did not hide them. Each one had cost her something.

“I do not think you know Taehyung very well,” she muttered, dropping the shirt onto the wooden bench behind her. “He does not exactly allow failure. I could not—”

“You could have,” Yoongi cut in. He was still not looking away. “Do not insult me by pretending you stayed because of him. That is not the woman who has been bleeding in my courtyard every morning. The last one he sent left before sundown.”

And just like that, he stepped into the bath.

No noise. No fanfare. Only water parting around him like it knew better than to resist.

“You are here because you chose to be,” he said. “Because whatever waits for you in Mexico scares you less than I do. And that is what makes you dangerous.”

The water hissed against his skin, steam rising around him. He closed his eyes and sank down to his collarbones, not to relax but to reset. Like a weapon cooling after too much use.

She followed. Slow. The heat hit her like a wall, hot enough to bite and chase breath from her lungs, but she kept going, deeper into the water until it wrapped around her aching limbs. It felt more like a purge than a relief. The bath did not comfort. It stripped.

Yoongi watched her.

Not hungrily. Not even curiously. Just like a man who knew how to read pain and wanted to see how she carried it. She felt him clock her every wince, every breath, every way she tried not to fold.

“I will admit,” he said quietly, “I did not think you would still be here the next morning. Or the one after. I kept waiting for a note. Or an empty room.”

She let her arms rest along the stone ledge, eyes half-shut, the heat working into her bones. And then, unexpectedly: “I never even thought about leaving.”

The words surprised her more than they surprised him. She had not realized it until she said it. She had given herself no options, no way out. Just one road forward, no matter the bruises it collected.

“It was not fear,” she added after a pause. “Not of Taehyung. Not of you. It was just…” Her voice cracked slightly, not with emotion but with exhaustion. “I could not fail. I could not be ordinary.”

Yoongi did not nod. He did not soften. But something passed through his gaze, quick and subtle. A quiet shift behind the eyes. Recognition. Like two hunters finally realizing they were not hunting each other. They were the same species.

He said nothing for a long moment. Then:

“A shame,” he murmured, “that you may someday be my equal.”

The words landed like a quiet blow. Not praise. Not warning. Just a truth, delivered with all the weight of something final.

She did not speak. She only let it settle in the place she kept the things that mattered most: the bruises, the insults, the small, hard reasons she got back up every morning.

By the time she had found the shape of a response, he was already moving again.

He stepped through the water, steam curling around his body, and stopped just beside her. Not close enough to touch, not yet, but close enough that she could feel him.

His hand came to rest on her shoulder. Measured. Still.

“Turn around,” he said.

She did, but not without asking, sharp and flat, “Why?”

His grip did not tighten. His voice did not shift.

“Your body flinches when you move, when you are touched. You are locking up from pain. Let me help.”

No invitation. No implication. Just fact.

So she turned, braced her forearms on the stone edge, and exposed her back to him. It should have felt like surrender. It did not. It felt like a quiet kind of trust.

His hands started at her shoulders. Not soft. Not hard. Just practiced. He found the bruises first, the places where muscle had tightened around injury, and adjusted his touch accordingly. His thumbs moved with clinical precision, pressing into old tension and coaxing it loose.

He did not speak. Neither did she.

Steam thickened around them, clinging to skin, softening the sharp edges of pain. Her body stopped resisting. The ache remained, but the weight of it changed. It no longer felt like failure. Only effort.

And Yoongi’s hands stayed steady, never drifting, never teasing. Just working. Like she was a map he already knew by heart. Like she was not broken. Only rebuilding.

For the first time in a long time, she let herself feel that. Not comfort, but something close.

His fingers brushed the curve of her breast.

Her entire body locked. Not from fear, not entirely, but from something else. Something older, older than instinct. Her spine jerked upright, colliding softly with his chest behind her. The bath seemed smaller. The air heavier. Steam closed in like a held breath.

She did not move again. Neither did he.

They only held there, suspended, as if the moment might break if either of them did more than breathe.

“What are you doing?” Her voice was low. Measured. Strained but steady.

He exhaled through his nose, slow and quiet, deliberate.

“I think you already know.”

No heat. No teasing. No playacting. Only honesty, dropped between them like a stone in still water.

“If you want me to stop,” he said, even softer now, “say it. I will not touch anything not freely given.”

Her breath faltered. Not at his words, but at the certainty in them. So calm. So absolute. The steam swirled between them, thick and clinging. She felt it against her face, in her lungs, wrapping around her hesitation like rope. Her voice cracked without meaning to.

“Taehyung…”

His name came out as a whisper, but Yoongi’s response didn’t miss a beat.

“Taehyung,” he said flatly, not as a question but as an answer, “would have had someone else in his bed before your plane even landed.”

Not cruel. Not bitter. Just fact.

And the worst part was that she knew he was right.

She didn’t speak again. She couldn’t. The words weren’t there. Only the heat, the ache, the tension that had never fully left her since day one. All that training, all that silence, all that held-in rage coiled too tight for too long.

Yoongi leaned in. Not close enough to crowd her, but enough that she could feel his breath at the base of her neck. Not a move, a signal. A question.

“Don’t pretend you haven’t been watching me,” he murmured. “Don’t pretend Lynn didn’t have reason to be angry. I told you she was jealous. What did you think she was jealous of?”

His hand slid across her stomach. Slow. Measured. Not pressing. Not assuming. Just there. Still waiting. Still giving her the choice.

“Say the word,” he said again, low and level. “And I’ll stop.”

She should have said it. She should have shut it down. Draw the line. Protect herself. Retreat behind the layers she had built to survive this world.

But she didn’t.

Her eyes closed. Not out of surrender, but something deeper. Something sharper. Not submission. Control.

A sound left her, quiet and raw, like breath torn from somewhere near her ribs, as his fingers moved lower between her thighs.

It wasn’t about lust. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even comfort. It was defiance. Against the pain. Against the bruises. Against every silent rule she had bent to. This was her crossing a line no one else would define for her.

She didn’t melt into his touch. She stepped into it. Not for him. For herself.

For the first time in too long, the choice was hers. And she took it.

Later, years later, she would remember the bath. The heat. The weight of his hand. The sound of his breath against her ear. Not with regret. Never with regret.

She remembered because it mattered. And in her world, memory did not fade. It sharpened. It cut cleaner the further away it got.

That night, when the list was finally made, when the names were written in ink instead of blood, she started at the beginning. Not with Taehyung. With Yoongi. That was why he had to be first. Not because he was the worst, but because he was the closest.

The charcoal slipped from her fingers, leaving a faint black streak on the desk. She didn’t pick it up. She just stared at the sketch.

Yoongi’s face stared back. Too precise. The downturn of his mouth. The stillness behind his eyes. That composure she knew better than anyone.

She hated how well she remembered. Because remembering meant the wound was still open. And an open wound was still a weapon.

Back then, she had held it for his approval. Now, she held it for blood.

She stood slowly, vertebrae popping like worn links in a rusted chain. Her spine stretched, uncoiling with the reluctant grace of something long kept in a cage. Her body did not feel like hers anymore. It did not even feel human. It felt sculpted, chiseled by pain, and honed by something colder than purpose. Something sharper than memory.

A knock shattered the stillness. She flinched instinctively, muscles wired tight from too many surprises that came with blood on the other side.

“Y/N, can I come in?”

Hoseok. His voice, always a balm, softened her edges just enough to remind her she had not been born with claws. Around him, she could almost remember being someone else. Someone less dangerous, more whole. She exhaled, slow and careful.

“Yes.”

The door creaked, ancient wood straining against metal hinges. He didn’t step inside. There wasn’t enough room for two people to stand without touching, and they had never been the kind to brush shoulders casually. She moved to the bed. He took her seat without hesitation. His eyes flicked to the drawing on the table, unimpressed.

“You’ve been thinking,” he said, tone dry.

Y/N let out a low, humorless chuckle. “I’m always thinking, ahjussi.”

Hoseok’s face contorted into that familiar grimace. She had always liked getting under his skin.

“I told you not to call me that.”

“No,” she replied, tilting her head, “you asked me not to.”

That made him laugh, the real kind. The kind that cracked open the air and let warmth bleed through. Rare and reckless. She joined him, not meaning to, but needing to.

Then the moment snapped shut like a trap.

“You hide behind words, Mamba,” he said, gaze locking onto hers with that old soldier’s weight. “But we both know you don’t say much of anything at all.”

The laughter died like a match in water. Hoseok never wasted time on half-truths.

“You’ve been in here two hours,” he added, “and all you’ve got is a rat’s face.”

She had no defense. He wasn’t wrong.

“Min Yoongi,” he said, voice low and flint-hard, “is your enemy now. Don’t forget that.”

She nodded once. A stiff, mechanical gesture. She knew it. She knew it in her bones. But knowing and acting were oceans apart. Yoongi had been her friend. He had also tried to kill her. The betrayal lived under her skin like a buried shard of glass. It didn’t make sense. Maybe it never would. But sense was not a prerequisite for vengeance.

He helped murder her daughter. He beat her while she was still carrying that fragile, innocent life. He killed Tommy. He opened the chapel door. He didn’t stop Taehyung when the gun was raised. He didn’t flinch when her world was reduced to ash. He chose his place at the table over her life. Over all their lives.

And she would be the one to remove him from it.

Because whatever they had once been, Yoongi had made sure they could never be that again.

“Are you listening?”

She blinked, dragged out of the spiral. Hoseok watched her through the hazy yellow light, and in that dull glow he looked younger. Sadder. Like something in him was wearing thin.

“No,” she said, honest and small. “Not as well as I should be.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No,” she whispered. “I just… can’t understand how any of this happened.”

The silence that followed made the room feel smaller.

“I want to tell you a story,” Hoseok said quietly. His voice slipped into Korean like a man retreating into the safety of his own skin. English was too sharp for grief. Too foreign to carry what lived in his chest. “Not because I think it will help. But because maybe you’ll do better than I did.”

He turned the chair around and straddled it, arms resting across the back. His robe fell open at the knee, revealing loose black cotton pants worn thin by years of habit. He looked almost relaxed, but his eyes betrayed him—stormy, hollowed out by memory.

“I met Taehyung when he was twenty-four. I was almost thirty. I had been making swords since I was a boy. My grandfather raised me with a hammer in one hand and a whetstone in the other. That was all I had. That was all I knew. That was how Kim Taehyung found me.”

His voice carried the rhythm of something rehearsed too often in silence. Not regret anymore, just the ghost of it, dulled with age.

“He was magnetic,” Hoseok went on. “Fast. Wild. Smarter than he let on. We started sparring in the alleys of Okinawa. Half-serious at first, then real. He was the only man I could never beat easily, and when I did, it was never by much. We bled together more than once. I trusted him with everything.”

He leaned forward, fingers drumming against the desk.

“Korea was behind me. My father. His belt. The silence after my mother died. I left it all to rot. But Sookie came with me. She was seventeen. Still called me oppa like she was five. Still believed the world was fair if you worked hard enough. My baby sister.”

His voice caught on that word, and he cleared his throat.

“She was stubborn. Mom named her after some American girl she saw on TV once. Sookie. Sounded dumb to me then. Still does. But it stuck. Everything stuck to her—smiles, people, hope. When she met Taehyung, I knew she was in love with him before he even looked her way.”

The bulb overhead flickered, but Hoseok’s face didn’t change.

“I told him to leave her alone. He promised. For a while, he kept it. But she wore him down, and he let himself be worn. A year later, he asked for my blessing. I gave it. I told myself he would never hurt her. He was loyal. I thought maybe he’d be family.”

Y/N’s voice came out soft as breath. “What changed?”

“She almost died,” Hoseok said flatly. “Ambush outside the noodle shop. Someone we knew. Someone Taehyung had history with. She was so scared after that. Told me she wanted out. Out of Japan. Out of him. I thought that would be it. She left with me. We went home to Gwangju. Bought a little house. She opened this kimbap shop. I fixed the walls and built shelves. She would hum while she cooked.”

His eyes drifted, unfocused. “That was the last time life felt small enough to hold.”

He touched his lower lip, as if searching for the taste of that last good meal with her, and maybe he couldn’t find it.

“Moon-Byul came into our lives by accident. Street kid with quick hands. One day he stopped a couple of punks from robbing the shop. I watched from the attic window. He had no blade, just a broken mop handle, and I thought—this kid might actually be something. I took him in. Trained him. We forged swords together. The attic became sacred.”

Y/N stayed motionless, her breath shallow.

“Then Taehyung came back. And Sookie let him in without hesitation. Just smiled and said he missed her. As if it were that simple. As if he hadn’t dragged violence to her door the first time. I saw it then. The rot. The way he turned everything around him to ash.”

His voice hardened.

“Two weeks later the Italians came looking for him. He had crossed someone. Money, territory, who knows. Instead of warning me, instead of protecting her, he took her to bed. He let her wake up to gunfire.”

The silence was suffocating.

“They stormed the house just after sunrise. Moon and I held the attic with whatever we had. Sookie tried to run. They gunned her down in the kitchen. Shot six times. She died on the tile, blood in her teeth. I slipped in it trying to reach her.”

Y/N’s hand trembled.

“And Taehyung? He killed everyone. Efficient. Beautiful, even. Like a painting. Then he looked at me, calm as ever, and said, ‘At least she went quick, Hobi-ah.’”

Hoseok stared at the floor. “That was when I knew. He wasn’t human anymore. And maybe neither was I.”

The breath he drew rattled like something breaking.

“I let him kill with my steel. I made those blades. I admired him. Protected him. And I never cared what it cost until it was my doorstep he brought death to. Until it was my sister.”

Y/N’s eyes glistened, but she didn’t look away.

“I challenged him that night. We fought in the dark, just like the old days. I won. First clean strike to the thigh. Second to the ribs. He bled all over my floor. And when I stood over him, blade at his throat, I couldn’t finish it. I let him crawl away. I watched him limp down my hallway. I have never seen him since.”

The silence that followed was a grave too big for words.

“And that,” Hoseok said, raw now, “is why I don’t make swords anymore. That’s why I don’t call him brother. And that’s why I’m telling you this. Not for pity, but so you understand what it costs when you wait too long to cut the monster’s head off.”

He looked at her then, truly looked. Not at the girl who had first stumbled through his door bloodied and silent, but at the woman who had survived everything after. The woman with a sword across her thighs and fire behind her teeth.

“Don’t wait like I did,” he said.

The air cracked with it. She shut her mouth on whatever retort crawled up her throat, teeth grinding until her jaw ached. He didn’t let her look away.

“If I had killed him in Okinawa like I wanted to,” Hoseok said, each word deliberate, “Sookie would still be alive. And you would not be this shadow of yourself, so full of rage and resentment. You would be in Alabama. Probably drunk in some dive bar, bragging about the time you stabbed a man with a pool stick in El Paso for grabbing you. You would have gone home. You never would have crossed paths with a man in a black button-down who thought ordering you a margarita was enough to own you. You would have had a life, Y/N. One worth fighting for. One worth keeping.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his shoulders sagging under the weight of the words he had carried too long. His voice was hoarse, not from shouting but from truth. Sharp and raw as steel dragged across bone.

“But instead,” he said slowly, “you’re here. Sitting in the wreckage of a life you never asked for. Caught in the wake of a man who turned your death into currency. Who stood there, watching, while four animals stomped your pregnant belly. A man who hates you, and can’t help but feel contempt towards you.”

His voice cracked at the edge, but he did not break. He would not, not in front of her. Not when she was holding it all in just like he used to.

She didn’t respond. She didn’t have to. Her silence was thick with memory and rage.

“They all deserve to die,” Hoseok said, quieter now, but no less cutting. “Yoongi. Taehyung. The whole pack of them. Maybe even us. We are not innocent, Mamba. We stopped being that a long time ago. We are sharpened edges and bad decisions. We are the end result of what happens when you trade mercy for survival. You and me? We are the kind of people others have to survive.”

He glanced up at her. His eyes were softer now. Something fatherly. Something fraternal. Something fierce.

“You remind me of Sookie. Not because you are gentle. You are not. But because you feel everything too deeply. You wear your wounds on the inside, and you carry them like armor. That is what will kill you, if you are not careful.”

A beat passed. Then another.

“If you want to live,” he said, “you need to stop pretending you are prey. You made your choice already. Stop circling it. Stand in it.”

Y/N didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. She moved like something uncoiling. The sword on her lap shifted as she leaned forward, the metal catching the light as if it recognized her now. As if it knew where it was going.

Hoseok saw it. And he stopped her, gently.

“I have something for you,” he said.

He rose and left without another word, his steps quiet but sure. She sat in the hush he left behind, breath slow, mind loud. The sketch of Yoongi stared up at her again—unfinished, but not incomplete. His face was already a tombstone.

When Hoseok returned, he was holding something wrapped in dark crimson cloth. It looked ceremonial. Heavy. He placed it on the desk, then unwrapped it as though unveiling a relic.

It was a sword. Not one for battle. Not meant for war.

It was beautiful. Clean. Silent.

She didn’t touch it.

“What is this?” she asked.

“My final blade,” he said. “The last one I ever forged, except for yours. I made it for Sookie. She never got the chance to hold it.”

Her chest tightened. Her hands clenched in her lap.

It was unlike the weapons she was used to. No bloodthirst in its shape. No vanity in its lines. It was simple. Pure. A shikomizue, disguised in feminine wood, sakura etched into the handle with the gentleness of a promise.

“Why give this to me?” she asked, voice barely a whisper.

Hoseok’s expression softened in a way that nearly broke her.

“Because it was made for someone I loved,” he said, “and now it belongs to someone who knows what it means not to use it.”

She picked it up slowly, reverently. It did not hum like her own sword. It did not beg for violence. It sat in her hands like something sacred.

“I won’t use it,” she said. “Not ever.”

“I know,” he replied. “That’s why I am giving it to you.”

She set it aside, her eyes burning.

“Thank you, Hoseok.”

He nodded once, then looked at her with that same worn, protective weight.

“You will be outnumbered.”

“I know.”

“You will probably die.”

“I know.”

He studied her face. Saw the steel. The sorrow. The storm.

“You will need to move like a shadow,” he said. “Yoongi’s men will feel you coming. If they do—”

“If they get wind I am coming,” she said, “that compound will be crawling with bodies before I even cross the street.”

“And do you want to take on all eighty-eight of the Crazy 88 alone?”

“No,” she said. “That would be less than ideal.”

Hoseok let out a short breath that landed somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. Something almost human passed through his expression. Soft. Worn. Vulnerable in a way she had not seen in years.

“I’m going to miss you.”

She looked toward the door. Her shadow stretched long across the floor, sword glinting at her side. Her stomach clenched. She hadn’t eaten. Couldn’t. Hoseok had tried earlier, but nerves had shredded her appetite.

“I’ll come back,” she said.

“I hope so.”

She turned to go. The moment tasted final.

“Y/N.”

She stopped.

“If you find him, and you hesitate, don’t wait for a second chance.”

She looked back at him, steady.

“There won’t be one.”

No words. She walked out, sword in hand, steps steady. She made it to the kitchen before he caught up to her, his hand landing gentle on her shoulder.

“Put the sword away,” he murmured. “I’ll bring you some soup. You can eat in your room tonight.”

She turned her head slightly. “Will you eat with me?”

He nodded. “If you’d like me to.”

“I would.”

He didn’t speak again, just disappeared around the corner. And for a moment the house was quiet, and warm, and almost kind.

Chapter Text

Of all the nights Y/N had spent beneath someone else’s roof, this one was the quietest. The bed sagged in the middle, worn down by years and bodies, its sheets stiff and colorless, clinging to her damp skin with a musty intimacy. The air carried dust, faded cleaning supplies, and the sour ghost of other people’s breath. It should have sent her back to the shower. Instead, it wrapped around her like a half-forgotten song that lodged itself deep in her chest.

She lay in the dark, hair still wet, a threadbare towel pulled across her chest. The ceiling above was cracked, sagging as though it might speak if given the chance. The silence wasn’t peace. It was aftermath. Her legs throbbed, ribs ached, skin raw from scrubbing too hard, but the quiet told her body it was safe to stop, even if it didn’t believe it yet.

The trouble had started like it always did, without warning. She’d gone into a liquor store for something cheap, something warm to burn her throat. A man with a switchblade complicated things, barking at the old man behind the counter. She hadn’t waited. One pull of the trigger, a bullet through his skull. Blood sprayed the clerk’s hands; his scream followed her out the door. She was gone before thanks could touch the air, on the stolen bike, into the night. Maybe someone had seen her. Maybe they’d remember later: a girl, sickly-looking. She ran. She vanished.

And here she was, vanished again, beneath stale sheets in Room 616 of a crumbling Busan motel, the weight of a foreign sky pressing down. She couldn’t decide what was more reckless: pulling the trigger, escaping, or realizing afterward how little she cared. Regret might come tomorrow. Tonight, exhaustion had the last word.

Sleep crept in like fog, soft and slow, until her eyes closed without her noticing. She dreamed she was running barefoot through woods so dark they felt like the ocean floor, breath ragged in her ears, something massive tearing the trees behind her. The sky split open, bleeding red rain.

Then the dream shifted. She was small again, seven, maybe eight. Summer thick with honeysuckle and heat. She sat barefoot on the porch steps while her mama combed her hair with a worn wooden brush. The bristles caught but never hurt. Her mother’s voice was warm against her ear: “It’s okay, honey. Everything’s okay. Someday you’ll make it out of here. And when you do, I want you to run. Don’t you dare stop.”

It didn’t feel like a dream. Too rooted, though the edges blurred. She couldn’t recall the exact warmth of the sun, or the porch boards under her legs. Her mama’s face was hazy, more impression than detail. But she remembered the rhythm of her voice clearer than the color of her eyes.

In those memories, the sun always shone. Light streamed through cheap curtains onto her hand-me-down dress. It lit the stubborn little garden her mama kept alive, the rows of ants she studied in the dirt, the socks always patched at the toes. Mama’s fingers worked quick by lamplight, darning holes, stitching torn knees, steadying a world that always seemed to fray.

Her hair was always long. Mama wouldn’t let her cut it, said short hair wasn’t proper. So it hung in uneven braids, tied with dandelions or tugged into crowns, while Y/N wandered barefoot, chalking symbols on the sidewalk, pretending she could summon kindness.

But somewhere, the thread had frayed. The warmth of those summers always ended with him.

Her father. Vernon Y/L/N. A man of God. His presence filled a room before he spoke, his silence louder than anger. Love without softness, without light.

One night stayed sharp: her eighth birthday. Someone had given her a glittery plastic hula hoop, cheap magic that caught the dying sun. She played barefoot in the grass, hips swinging, counting breaths. Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one.

The hoop fell. She stamped her foot, ready to spit out a playground curse. That’s when she saw him. Her father, at the edge of the yard, cigarette glowing. Watching.

“Daddy!” she called, grinning, gap-toothed. “I almost made it to a minute!”

His voice came back dry, worn but not unkind. “Really, hon? Try again. Maybe you’ll get it this time.”

She beamed, tried again. But she couldn’t stop looking at him. And he wasn’t smiling. His eyes tracked her, not her face, but the rhythm of her hips, the arc of her body. Something wrong curled sharp in her gut. She let the hoop fall.

“That was barely thirty seconds,” he said, almost amused.

“I’m tired now,” she whispered. But it wasn’t tiredness. It was colder than that, something that sat under her skin like frostbite. She carried the hoop to the garage, hid it behind a stack of newspapers, and never touched it again.

After that, the memories lost their edges. Not in a sudden sweep, but slowly, until the colors dulled and the warmth thinned. Her mother’s love didn’t vanish. It faded, like fabric left too long in the sun. Cereal tasted less sweet. Goodnight kisses grew quicker, then stopped. The brush stayed in the drawer. Mornings filled with silence instead of humming. Sometimes Y/N thought she had failed some invisible test, that love had always been conditional. Other times, she decided her mother was simply trying to survive.

Now none of it remained. Not her mother, not the house, not the girl spinning barefoot in the grass with a glittery hoop. What she had was a cracked motel ceiling, the red bleed of neon behind heavy curtains, and memory pressing down on her chest like stone. The silence wasn’t natural. It was the strange, padded kind only motels knew. Snow piled against the sealed windows, the frame groaning under the wind. The radiator ticked unevenly, like a faltering heart. Outside, no horns, no engines. Just quiet loud enough to sharpen every thought.

She pressed her face into the pillow, eyes shut against the ceiling and the curtains. There was nothing out there, but she buried herself anyway, as if she could muffle the silence. The fear wasn’t in the shadows anymore. It lived inside her. It had settled in. The sirens were in her blood.

She didn’t pray now. Prayer had always been performance, knees on thin carpet, hands locked tight, words spoken with more fear than faith. These days, if she folded her hands, it was habit, not hope.

Sleep came slowly, not as a fall but as a numbing that blurred exhaustion into surrender. And with it, the memories. They always came.

There had been a time before she could name the fear. Back when it was shapeless, more humidity than anything else, heavy, invisible, constant. She only knew that whenever her father entered a room, the air changed. Something inside her shrank back, small and silent, like a wick retreating from flame.

It didn’t begin with one moment but with countless small ones. A glance that lingered too long. A silence stretched until it strangled. She remembered lying on the floor one Sunday, coloring the edge of a crossword in crayon, when she looked up and found him watching from the recliner. Not blinking. Not smiling. Just watching. She smiled back, uncertain, tucking her hair behind her ear the way girls did in movies. The strand fell forward again. She left it there. Better that way. If he couldn’t see all of her, maybe she’d be safer.

There were good days once. He showed her how to throw a baseball. They watched cartoons. She sat beside him while he read scripture, his voice steady, heavy. But she stopped meeting his eyes. Something in them unbalanced her. She felt watched but never seen.

One night never blurred, no matter how much she wished it would. Her mother was out, maybe at church, maybe at the store. Her father called her into the bedroom, voice calm. Too calm. He sat on the edge of the bed. The door clicked shut. She noticed her socks didn’t match, one striped, one plain. Pajama shorts patterned with snowmen. His gaze tightened her chest. Her body screamed to run. Her feet stayed rooted. He was her daddy. That used to mean something.

She never told her mother what happened in that room. Not once. Not even later, when she understood. Some things were too heavy to carry out loud. Some were never believed, no matter how loud you spoke them. But something inside her shifted after that night. Shonda noticed.

Y/N grew quieter, paler. She stopped laughing. Stopped asking to go outside. She started sleeping in jeans. Her mother had to have known. Y/N flinched whenever her father entered a room. Bruises appeared. Night after night, she clutched her stomach and moaned of aches. She prayed louder, longer. Shonda saw. But she never asked. Maybe she already knew.

One night, years later, lingered like cold water. Y/N curled on the couch, arms wrapped tight around her knees. Her mother found her there and asked what was wrong.

“Stomach hurts,” Y/N whispered.

Her mother only smoothed a hand over her hair, kissed the crown of her head, told her to rest. From the kitchen came the shuffle of dishes, the radio’s hum. Life carried on. Nothing changed.

Later that week, Shonda spread a prayer mat on the living room floor. She guided Y/N through the words: “Forgive me, Lord. Lead me away from temptation.” Y/N repeated them, her voice shaking, each line emptier than the last. Her mother whispered the rest, hands trembling. And Y/N understood: the prayer wasn’t for her. Not for God either. It was ritual, an attempt to scrub away something that couldn’t be erased.

But no prayer could sanctify that house. Not with doors locked and curtains drawn. Not with the radio turned up to cover crying.

Now, years later, in a motel bed with silence pressing down like a body, Y/N saw her father’s shadow every time she closed her eyes. To the world, he was loved, admired, the preacher with the soft smile and steady voice. No one had questioned him.

But Y/N didn’t need proof. She carried it in her skin, in the way her body remembered. She turned into the pillow, exhaled a broken breath, fists clenching beneath the sheets. Still, she felt his touch.

Sleep circled but never came, a skittish animal pacing the edges. She stared at the ceiling, moonlight cutting faint stripes across the plaster like pale scars. The mattress was stiff in all the wrong places, molded by strangers before her. Her body ached, not just from bruises or exhaustion, but from the endless strain of staying awake in a world that had already taken too much.

She didn’t want to think about the sword in her bag, its weight cold and undeniable. She didn’t want to see his face either: the shock in his eyes, the disbelief that she had really pulled and challenged him. Once, a lifetime ago, she had kissed him. Back when things were simple, when his future was still unwritten. Now he was just another name. Another ghost in her pocket.

She rose slowly, carefully, her body moving as if it belonged to someone else. The motel tiles were cracked and icy against her bare feet. She dressed piece by piece—bra, shirt, jeans—like creeping past a sleeping dog.

The mirror stopped her. The girl staring back was her, but pared down to the frame. Hollow cheeks. Dull eyes. Hair damp against her neck. She looked worn past the edges.

She gathered what little she owned: a yellow tracksuit stiff with dried river water; a plastic brush missing half its bristles; a wad of damp, creased bills; and the hanzo sword Hoseok had given her, still sharp, still beautiful. She no longer feared it. Only grew tired of needing it.

Outside, the morning was too bright. Streets stretched pale and empty, buildings washed out, rust bleeding at the seams. Everything looked raw in the sunlight, unfinished. She walked fast, as though speed could keep the past from catching her.

When she was ten, she had whispered her secret to Sandy Klein on a hot playground afternoon: I don’t believe in God. Sandy’s eyes had gone wide, not afraid, just stunned. She asked if Y/N was joking. When Y/N shook her head, Sandy turned away. She didn’t speak to her again. Y/N spent the rest of recess alone on the edge of the blacktop, picking at the scab on her knee.

It wasn’t that she had stopped believing. Not exactly. She had just gone quiet on Him. She was angry, furious, though she couldn’t name it then. If God existed, He had to be cruel. And yet, she prayed sometimes. Lying in her childhood bed, whispering into sheets that smelled of mildew and baby powder. Not out of faith. Out of habit. Like brushing teeth. Like folding socks.

Now she sat in a highway diner, hands wrapped around a chipped mug of coffee the waitress kept filling. She had ordered blueberry pancakes with honey, the way her mother once made them on rare soft mornings. The waitress was tired but kind, her hair bleached and pulled back, crow’s feet carved deep from years of smiling. Y/N didn’t remember drinking. She just held the cup, watching lives unfold around her.

Couples splitting toast. Truckers with black coffee. Girls laughing too loud, blotting lipstick from napkins. Everyone fit. Everyone belonged. 

She didn’t. 

She left the warmth untouched. Outside, the sun still burned too bright, the sky still stretched wide and empty.

Years ago, on her father’s thirty-fifth birthday, the neighbors brought flowers wrapped in cellophane. Shonda took them politely. Vern called them useless frills and tossed them aside. But Shonda unwrapped them, set them in a chipped vase, and placed them on the table as if water might fix what was already broken.

After that, the house filled with trinkets. Doilies on chairs. Glass birds catching the light, fragile as breath. Surface comforts arranged to mask the silence. Y/N drifted through those rooms like a ghost learning how to haunt her own life.

Her mother had dreamed once of oceans and bright cities, lights that never went out. By the end, all she wanted was quiet. Not peace, just quiet. The kind that dulled edges, that kept her from hearing what rotted beneath the floorboards.

Y/N carried that same hush inside her now. Heavy as stone. Exhaustion in the marrow. The sun pressed hot against her skin, the blacktop radiated heat like a stove. She had no destination, only the act of moving. She had learned young that stopping always meant something caught up.

And yet, not everything had been bad. Once, her father took her fishing. She was eleven. It was hot and dull, cicadas screaming in the trees, algae thick on the water. They sat side by side, sipping soda. Nothing happened. That was the remarkable part: not joy, not love. Just stillness. A day where nothing cracked or struck. She turned it over in her mind for years like a puzzle piece from the wrong box. Out of place. Suspicious.

Later, when everything inside her burned down, she remembered standing on the porch, watching him walk inside. She hadn’t opened the door again. Not out of rage. Not out of vengeance. Just refusal. Her hand on the knob. The creak of the hinge. The click of the latch. That was it.

At the funeral, people whispered about grief and God, about how young girls sometimes went quiet when they were sad. Shonda stood like a statue beside her daughter, pale and unmoving. Y/N wore a stiff black dress that pinched her shoulders, her arms goose-prickled in the chapel air. She didn’t cry. Didn’t speak. She stared at the carpet until it was over.

Afterward, the house filled with flowers. White ones, mostly. They wilted quickly. Shonda never changed the water, only rearranged them, as if the gesture itself could carry her through.

A week later, Y/N sat across from her at the kitchen table. The air was heavy, the overhead fan thudding with every turn. Between them, a vase of flowers browned at the edges, their scent sour.

“I killed him,” Y/N said.

Her voice was calm. Not sharp, not cold, just steady, like confessing she’d forgotten homework.

Shonda didn’t look at her. She only blinked, slow and heavy. “Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not.” Y/N touched a lily petal, watched it crumble beneath her fingertip. “I mean it. I killed him.”

Her mother began to cry. Quietly. No noise, no drama. Tears slipped steady as a leaking faucet. “Well, good,” she whispered. “Are you happy now, Y/N? Are you happy?”

Y/N looked down at her hands. Thin fingers. Ragged nails. The same ones that had gripped the doorknob. The same ones that never turned it again.

“I don’t know,” she said.

And Shonda never asked again. Never brought it up. She only grew quieter after that, quieter than Y/N had ever known her to be. As if her voice itself had become dangerous. As if even the walls might hear if she let it out.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

Some places don’t simply host nights; they devour them whole, grinding them down to the marrow until nothing but the echo remains. The House of Blue Leaves was one of those rare places. By name it was a Korean bar, but that was only the skin of it, a shallow label for something deeper and stranger. Step through its doors at any hour—midnight, dawn, a trembling afternoon—and the same thing awaited: a pulse in the air, a beat coiled tight like a fuse waiting for fire. The walls themselves seemed to breathe, steeped in bass and synth, steeped in smoke, lacquer, and stories layered so thick you could feel them under your fingertips. Floors weren’t floors; they were stages, battlegrounds, confessionals, danced on, stomped on, bled on. Every inch of space was alive, claimed and reclaimed, steeped in joy and violence in equal measure.

At the front, the band unraveled a jazz-fusion number, spilling into every corner. The stage glowed indigo, musicians lit from below. Lyrics and notes drifted across the bar not as background noise but as living waves. Nothing in the House was background. Even conversation carried weight: patrons leaning into their glasses, shouting to be heard, their voices rising together into a canopy woven of neon, smoke, and lanterns that dangled like electric fruit from the rafters.

Outside, a koi pond shimmered beneath paper lanterns, a quiet deception of serenity. Scales flickered silver and gold in the trembling light, promising peace, a brief illusion for anyone pausing before the plunge. But the moment the doors opened, that fragile stillness fractured, and the House yanked you back inside, into its chaos.

The bar itself was excess made manifest. Chrome surfaces gleamed so bright they seemed wet with sweat. Behind glass, rows of bottles were displayed like relics, lit in violent jewel tones: emerald, ruby, sapphire. Liquid temptations masqueraded as sacraments. The waitresses—no, not waitresses, performers—slid between tables with silk whispering against their thighs, every motion honed to precision, every glance sharper than a blade hidden in ribbon. Their timing was too exact to be coincidence. Nothing here was accident. Even the shadows had choreography.

Beneath all that glitter, rhythm, and spectacle, the House was more than entertainment. It was the beating heart of Yoongi Min’s empire, a headquarters disguised as decadence. To outsiders, the scene might look like indulgence, like sin dressed in silk and neon. But the regulars knew. This wasn’t a bar. It was a stage where power rehearsed itself, night after night.

When Yoongi Min stepped into the establishment, the atmosphere shifted as though the very air had been stirred. A hush rippled through the crowd; laughter fractured, conversations stilled, chopsticks froze halfway to parted lips. It felt as if the temperature had fallen several degrees in an instant. Sixteen men in black followed after him, disciplined and silent, their formation flowing with the inevitability of a tide. At his side was a woman whose presence contrasted them all, striking in her pale skin and dark, depthless eyes. She never looked up, her attention locked on the glow of her phone.

Only the servers moved without hesitation. Their training showed in the precision of their steps, in their calm refusal to falter. This was not the first time they had faced a scene like this. The maître d’ bent so deeply in his bow that his frame seemed about to crack, then turned to guide the procession forward. Past the glowing stage where music dimmed, past the koi pond whose rippling surface whispered a hush of its own, deeper into the establishment they went. Diners found urgent interest in the grain of the wood before them, in their bowls of steaming rice, in anything that allowed them to avoid the sight of the man walking past.

The deeper corridors drained of color. Neon gave way to shadow, and sound softened as though filtered by unseen hands. At last they reached the private room: pale wood walls, cedar perfuming the air, no mirrors, no smoke. Simple, austere, adorned only by traditional Korean paintings. A low dining table waited at the center, ringed with plush cushions, an island apart from the revelry outside.

Yoongi seated himself at the head. In the hush, his scars caught the dim light, fine streaks of silver etched across his skin. He raised a single hand. No words. No need. Instantly, drinks appeared. To his left sat the Jeon brothers: Jung-il, immense and immovable, his silence carved deep; and Jungkook, all restless energy contained in a lean frame, his grin a blade sharp enough to draw blood. On Yoongi’s right lounged Lynn Easton, her laughter spilling soft and melodic, low enough to tease, directed at the young girl pouring her drink as though nervousness itself were some sweet little game.

The sliding doors whispered shut, but faint music still seeped through the wood, a muffled rhythm like a second heartbeat. Food followed: trays lacquered black and red, sashimi carved so cleanly it seemed sacrilege to disturb, soju bottles glowing faint green under the light. Nothing bore a price. Nothing was measured. This was not generosity. Here, money was beneath speech.

“형, 이거 봐,” Jungkook said suddenly, shoving a platter toward Yoongi, his smile stretched just a touch too wide. Beneath the grin, his pallor betrayed him, his body wired tight as if stretched to the edge of breaking. Still, he played the role. The others filled the silence with jokes and small jabs, warmth flowing outward like smoke from a fire: convincing, if you didn’t know who they were.

The waitresses bowed as though in worship, never lifting their gaze above the floor. Glasses refilled before they had the chance to empty. Cigarettes sparked to life, their smoke trailing upwards like fading ghosts. Toasts broke out uneven, voices rising in a chorus of Busan slang tangled against Seoul vowels, the air thickening as if the room itself had begun to drink with them.

Then the owner entered, his cheer too wide, his laugh too sharp at the edges. His sleeves were rolled back, revealing hands that betrayed him with their tremble. He poured drinks as though each one was a plea, piled compliments in heaps that tasted of desperation. Each time he set down a dish, he murmured, “서비스입니다, 서비스입니다,” a chant of offerings meant less as kindness than ransom.

Yoongi never looked at him. Kings do not lower their gaze to pawns. He leaned back, scarred knuckles resting lightly on the table, and lifted his glass. Instantly, all others followed, reflexive and inescapable. “건배!” The toast cracked through the air, thunder trapped within four walls. The room itself seemed to shudder with the sound.

What followed unfolded unhurried, weighted with the inevitability of control. Plans stretched across the table, voices low, gestures sharp. Someone suggested karaoke, and the tension fractured. Lynn threw back her head and laughed, promising she’d humiliate every single one of them. Jung-il’s mountain smile broke through, solid and rare. Jungkook smirked too, but his bravado dissolved into a cough that tore through him, raw and rattling. He brushed it off with a wave, “괜찮아, 괜찮아,” yet Yoongi’s eyes lingered on him a beat too long. Not in concern. In calculation.

For that moment, though, the night was theirs. Drinks poured like rivers. Voices tangled, rose, stumbled. Laughter climbed the walls until it cracked the ceiling. The private room spun itself into a world apart, a fortress sealed in smoke and cedar. Beyond, the band struck up something brighter, louder, pulsing through the walls.

Cigarette smoke curled higher, soju poured freer, but within the cocoon of cedar and low light, a new stillness stretched out. The Jeon brothers sparred quietly with their drinks, Jung-il solid and unmoving, Jungkook restless, caught between coughing fits and sharp bursts of laughter. The others filled the air with noise. Yet the room’s gravity had shifted toward one corner: where Lynn leaned closer to Yoongi, her shoulder brushing his, her perfume a faint thread of jasmine wound through smoke.

She switched languages as if it were a private door she alone could open.

“You’re bored,” she murmured in English, her voice a velvet ribbon only he was meant to hear.

Yoongi’s mouth curved at the edge, subtle, never more than the suggestion of a smile. “And you’re never satisfied,” he replied, his voice low, steady, the consonants clipped clean. He didn’t look at her when he said it, his gaze trained on the rim of his glass, the ice slowly surrendering to melt.

Her laugh came soft and melodic, the same one she’d used on the trembling waitress earlier, but sharper now, more intimate. “That’s why we make such a good pair,” she teased, letting her hand trail along the table until it brushed his knuckles. “You with your patience. Me with my hunger.”

Across the table, Jungkook caught the exchange, or at least the glance of it. His grin flickered, too quick, too thin, before he looked back down at his plate. He poured himself another shot, hands too tight around the bottle. Yoongi noticed. He always noticed.

Lynn followed his line of sight, then leaned closer still, lips grazing the shell of Yoongi’s ear. “He wants you too much,” she said, her words warm against his skin. “You spoil him, mon cher.”

Yoongi finally looked at her, the silvered scars along his cheek catching the lantern glow. His expression gave nothing away, but his hand, scarred and steady, reached across the table to Jungkook’s glass. He took it, drank from it, and set it back down in front of the boy without a word. Jungkook’s face lit, equal parts pride and relief, as if he’d been chosen.

Lynn’s smile thinned, possessive and sharp beneath the softness. She tilted her head, studying Yoongi with dark amusement. “You’re crueler than I am,” she whispered in English, though her fingers slid across his thigh under the table, a silent claim.

“Not cruel,” Yoongi corrected, eyes lingering on Jungkook, then shifting back to her. “Careful.”

Her laugh broke again, lower now, huskier, and she clinked her glass to his. “Call it what you like. He’s your toy, not mine. I only keep him pretty for you.”

Beyond the paper wall, Y/N stood with her spine aligned like a drawn blade, every vertebra locked into place. Her breathing was disciplined to the point of invisibility, measured down to molecules, each inhale precise, each exhale released without sound. One hand hovered just above her sword. It wasn’t choice. It was instinct. Readiness lived inside her muscles now, too deep to be summoned, too familiar to notice.

She didn’t need to see them to know them. The wall carried sound like a thin drumskin, and through it she traced them each by voice. Yoongi’s laugh, low, controlled, never wasted. The Jeon brothers bickering over ramen with the reckless comfort of men who kept knives close at hand, their argument carrying the rhythm of boys who had grown into predators but never stopped sounding like brothers. Lynn’s velvet cruelty hidden in charm, each word a performance draped in silk but cut from steel. And beneath it all, silence. The silence of Mr. Ricker.

He was not a man so much as a presence carved into the room’s foundations. American. Ex-SEAL. Ex-CIA. Ex-every other acronym you could think of. He did not speak. He barely breathed. He stood at the back of the private room as though the building had been constructed around him, immovable, inevitable. A piece of furniture, if furniture could kill. He did not sit because he was the chair, the final seat at the table, the last wall between Yoongi Min and annihilation.

Y/N’s thoughts were clean, pared down to the essentials. Panic was a luxury for people who still believed in escape. Her body had no such illusions. Breath belonged to someone else, an older self, a ghost of the woman who once thought love or motherhood could rinse her soul clean. That woman was long gone, stripped away until only steel remained. Tonight was not about survival. Tonight was reckoning.

The House of Blue Leaves, lacquered in rot and memory, had long since bent its will to Yoongi Min. He sat inside like a planet, pulling the room into orbit by gravity alone. Y/N pressed her palm flat against the rice-paper wall. It gave beneath her hand, fragile as a lie, its fibers trembling with each shift of air. The barrier was so thin it hardly deserved the name. One sharp breath might shiver it to pieces. One blade would erase it in an instant. Through the milky translucence she traced him in shadow, negative space rendering his shape: the line of his cheek, the broad set of his shoulders, the precise lift of his hand whenever amusement flickered across him.

She remembered that hand. The same hand once rough and warm against her jaw in a stolen second, tender where no one could see. The same hand that had crushed a man’s throat in Hongdae with the same steadiness, without hesitation, without regret. Brutality and tenderness fused into one body. The contradiction had undone her once. It still did.

Her pulse climbed, steady but high, a drumbeat she could not silence. And then Yoongi stopped laughing.

The pause was minute but undeniable, and the room bent around it. Conversation fractured mid-word. Jungkook froze with a syllable caught in his mouth, his lips parted but no sound escaping. Jung-il’s bulk stilled, bracing instinctively, his body tensing like earth before a quake. Lynn’s glass paused just shy of her lips, her brow lifting in warning, feline and precise. At the back, Mr. Ricker shifted. He did not move more than a fraction, only his head turning, focus narrowing like a lens locking on its target.

Yoongi moved like predators do: without haste, without waste, each gesture exact. His hand slipped into his coat, a motion light enough to pass as casual, easy enough to be mistaken for a lighter, a pen. It emerged holding something small. A dart. Black, slender, meant not to announce but to erase. He didn’t speak. He didn’t warn. He simply threw.

The dart cut through the air with a sound like silk torn underwater. It pierced the paper wall a hair’s breadth from Y/N’s cheek, close enough to shear a strand of her hair. She didn’t feel it until the loosened thread slid across her collarbone, feather-light. The dart buried itself in the beam behind her with a flat, final thud.

Inside, everything locked into stillness. The room froze in the same breath Yoongi commanded it. His face betrayed nothing: no irritation, no satisfaction, no signal at all. He was silence given form. The others waited, caught in the moment he chose to hold. Then, finally, he tilted his head toward the Jeon brothers. Two syllables fell from his lips. Calm. Precise. A command without ornament.

They rose as one. Chairs scraped back with the weight of drawn steel. Their steps carried deliberate gravity, long and heavy enough to promise violence before a hand was lifted. The paper door slid open with force, not slammed, not reckless, but with intent declared in the sound alone. Beyond stretched only emptiness. The House went on as though untouched: muffled laughter, clinking glasses, the rhythm of a normal night straining thin against the edge of rupture. Dust drifted in the lamplight like pale ghosts. No footsteps retreated. Nothing moved.

Jung-il reached the beam first. He plucked the dart free with fingers thick and certain, holding it up to the lantern’s glow. This was no miss. No warning. Whoever had thrown it had aimed to kill, and chosen not to. His eyes found Jungkook’s across the space. No fear passed between them. Only understanding. The message was clear, undeniable: I could have ended this. I didn’t.

The door closed again with a hard thud. The paper wall settled, its wound hidden. As though nothing had happened. As though nothing ever could.

Y/N had already moved before the paper stopped trembling. Her body uncoiled upward with a fluid certainty that came from a lifetime of drills and necessity. She scaled the wooden frame silently, fingers and toes gripping grooves worn into the beams, until her back pressed flat against the ceiling. The lacquered wood was cool against her spine, the air hot against her lungs. She held herself there, muscles burning steady but silent, breath controlled to the width of a pin.

Below, the Jeon brothers stepped out, eyes scanning the corridor like hounds pulling scent from the air. Jung-il’s gaze swept first, slow and patient, searching shadows with the weight of inevitability. Jungkook’s was quicker, sharper, darting from corner to corner, restless in its precision. They looked where anyone would hide: behind doors, beneath tables, into corners where dust dared to settle. But no one ever looked up.

From her perch, Y/N watched them with eyes that did not blink. Jungkook’s mouth tightened when his search turned up nothing, his frustration masked only by youth’s bravado. Jung-il lingered longer, his hand brushing the paper wall, his weight shifting as if listening for echoes. For a moment Y/N thought he might tilt his head back, that their eyes would lock. But he didn’t. He turned instead, holding the dart like an accusation, his steps heavy as he rejoined his brother.

The air held taut until they slid the paper door open again. Voices muffled, laughter strained, then the wood closed with finality. The sound rang through the corridor like a hammer on bone.

Y/N did not move. Not yet. Her back pressed harder to the beam, every muscle trembling with the discipline of stillness. She counted heartbeats, listened to the silence until it told her the truth: no footsteps remained, no breath but her own disturbed the corridor. Only then did she allow her lungs a fuller breath, slow and controlled, burning down her throat like fire caught in ice.

From her vantage, she could see them again through the lattice of the ceiling: Yoongi, unmoved at the head, his hand resting quiet on the table as if nothing had happened. Jungkook’s grin had returned, forced, his laugh running ragged around the edges. Lynn reclined like a queen amused by everyone else’s delusions, her glass raised in feigned ease. And at the back, Mr. Ricker still as a tombstone, his silence heavier than any sound.

Y/N’s pulse steadied. She was unseen. For now.

Y/N waited until the house breathed again. The beams creaked softly as heat from the lamps pressed against the wood, but the corridor outside remained empty. She lowered herself in silence, a slow unwind of muscle and balance, until her boots kissed the floor without a sound. For a moment she stood beneath the ceiling where she had been hidden, spine straight, breath low. The dart hole in the paper wall behind her felt like an eye, watching even as she turned away.

She moved down the hall with the gait of someone who belonged, steady, unhurried, her hands loose at her sides. Suspicion came from hesitation, from the wrong rhythm, and Y/N gave them nothing. She descended the stairs without a glance behind her, the murmurs of the House swelling louder with each step: the clink of glasses, the crash of laughter, the hum of instruments tuning at the stage. Life went on, oblivious, as if the upstairs room were not a gravity well swallowing every breath within it.

At the bar she found a space between strangers, sliding onto the stool with practiced ease. The lacquered surface reflected her for a heartbeat before a shadow crossed it: the bartender. He wore the calm mask of someone trained to serve without question, though his eyes flicked once, quick, curious, at the foreign cut of her coat, the way she carried herself.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

Y/N met his gaze without faltering. Her Korean slipped from her tongue flawless, smooth as poured glass, no trace of hesitation. “Surprise me,” she said.

The bartender blinked once, then inclined his head. No smile, no comment. Just a quiet acknowledgment that this woman did not stumble through his language, that she claimed her place at the bar as if she’d sat there a hundred times before. He turned to his bottles, hands moving with the confidence of ritual, pulling glass, pouring liquor, measuring ice.

Y/N let her gaze drift across the room while she waited, eyes catching on fragments the way a hunter marks a trail. The House of Blue Leaves pulsed in its own rhythm, a living organism made of light and smoke. Tourists crowded near the koi pond, dazzled by neon reflections dancing on water, their laughter too bright, too oblivious. Businessmen leaned into lacquered tables, trading jokes with mouths that never quite matched their eyes, chopsticks snapping through sashimi as though laughter could hide the stench of deals made in shadows. Waitresses moved between them, bowing so low it seemed their spines might splinter, hands quick and precise, their faces empty of hesitation.

Every corner of the place told its own story, yet the air carried a weight no story could explain. It wasn’t fear, not exactly. It was heavier, older. A pressure that clung to the lacquered beams and seeped through the tatami mats. A gravity drawn from above. Yoongi Min sat upstairs, and the House bent around him like orbit around a star, everything below tightening in invisible pull.

Her drink arrived without ceremony. The bartender slid it forward, a glass sweating against the lacquer. Y/N wrapped her fingers around it, cool condensation gathering beneath her touch, breaking into small streams that trailed down her knuckles. She lifted it slightly, offering a toast to no one: silent, private, nothing more than the faintest curl of a smile brushing her lips.

Then she looked at the drink itself, and almost laughed. Bright pink. Rimmed in sugar. Dragonfruit balanced on the edge with umbrellas sprouting from the glass. It was absurd and garish. A drink for tourists.

She raised it slowly, her hanbok catching the bar’s amber light. Silk rippled with her movement, fluid as disturbed water, elegance masking design. It was not costume but armor disguised as beauty, every seam taut with tension, every fold a defense prepared to snap. She brushed her lips across the rim, the sugar clinging like grit, tasting almost none of it. Her eyes never left the hallway.

The paper door was closed again. Silence reigned behind it, thick and telling. She had seen everything already: Jung-il’s mountain frame vanishing first, Jungkook lingering half a second longer, smirk cutting like a blade even as the door shut behind him. She didn’t need to hear what followed. Words were irrelevant in the House. The walls translated instead: servers moving quicker, footsteps sharper, patrons lowering eyes, voices thinning to whispers. The entire place bent toward reverence. Not fear, but something quieter. Deference. Submission to gravity.

Y/N tipped the glass, drained it to the dregs. Sweetness turned to ash on her tongue, a reminder that masks tasted the same no matter how brightly colored. She set the glass down carefully, deliberate, as if punctuating a final sentence. Then she rose. Her hanbok whispered with her movement, silk sighing against polished boards. She walked as if air parted for her, the way it always did when you understood the trick of vanishing in plain sight. Attention killed. Absence survived.

She crossed the dining room unnoticed, weaving through tables littered with bones gnawed to whiteness, glasses rimmed with crimson stains, ash ground into lacquer like fingerprints of intent. No one looked at her. No one dared. The House trained obedience into habit. Heads bent. Eyes dropped. Space opened without a sound.

The corridor waited at the far end, narrow and unmarked, the one path never written on blueprints. It was not the front hall where tourists filed in. Not the staff corridor where trays clattered. This was the artery that ran behind the veins, hidden yet essential, carved for people who understood how the House truly breathed. Y/N stepped into it without hesitation.

She knew it like skin. Past the kitchen, where steam hissed from iron pans like warnings whispered too late. Past the break room that had forgotten laughter decades ago, its walls yellowed with smoke, its tables scarred with secrets. The vents murmured above, the steady rasp of air cycling through lungs that never exhaled. A pan clattered, loud in the hush, a worker covering his own unease. Y/N’s footsteps brushed tile and vanished before they could echo.

At the end waited the back door. She pressed her hand against the frame and pushed. The hinges did not groan. They had been schooled into silence long ago. The door opened without resistance, and cold air spilled in, sharp against her skin, cutting away the warmth of lacquer and neon.

She stepped into the night.

The parking lot was nothing worth a second glance. Sodium lamps buzzed with insect-static overhead, their jaundiced glow bending parked cars and motorcycles into hunched silhouettes. Darkness collected thick in the gaps between them, swallowing details whole, the kind of shadows that refused to give anything back. Wind dragged scraps of trash across the cracked asphalt, each piece whispering like a half-escaped confession before tumbling into silence.

Her rental waited in the far corner. A gray sedan, unremarkable, chosen to vanish on sight. The kind of car no witness could describe even under oath, the kind that left no memory behind.

The trunk yielded to her key with a muted click. Its lid rose slow, like it had been waiting for this exact moment. Y/N slipped the hanbok from her shoulders, silk sliding in a whisper down her arms before pooling into her hands. She held it a beat longer than necessary, its weight cool, its presence heavy, before letting it fall limp between her fingers.

What remained was not disguise, not ceremony, but intent. The yellow tracksuit burned against the dark, its black stripes cutting straight down her frame like sharp exclamation marks. No camouflage, no pretense of blending in. It was a flare. A warning. A declaration without words: I am coming. I will not hide.

She folded the hanbok carefully, not out of reverence but out of acknowledgment. It had served its purpose, shielded her, let her pass unnoticed. That mask deserved a burial of sorts. She laid it into the trunk with the same precision someone might use to lower a body into the ground, each fold neat, each crease smoothed.

Then her hand closed on the sword.

The Jung blade slid into her palm with a weight heavier than steel. It was memory. It was inheritance. She could still feel the night she first tore it from her father’s failing grip, the hilt sticky with blood, his last breath rattling in her ears like a curse. She had cleaned it herself, bare hands in the sink, water rising red until her reflection drowned beneath the surface. Year after year she sharpened and preserved it, carrying it not as a tool but as ritual. It had become scar hammered into steel, a truth that could not be washed away. Tonight it pulsed faintly with her heartbeat, sheathed but awake, hungry as she was.

The trunk fell shut with a heavy thud, final as stone dropping on a grave. She turned back toward the restaurant. The night leaned closer around her, the shadows shifting, the silence pressing in, as though even the dark wanted to see what she would do.

She walked through the lot without breaking stride. Past a couple tangled against the side of a Civic, their drunken laughter too loud, too blind to notice her. Past a boy slouched on his scooter, powder smudged across his phone screen as his head lolled forward in a stupor. None of them looked up. None saw her. The blade rested quiet at her side, but the House of Blue Leaves already seemed to listen, its walls tilting toward her like it knew the cut was coming.

Inside, jazz spilled smooth and velvet from the stage, brass and piano weaving a pretense of ease. Beneath it, though, ran something else: sharper, thinner, a hum too low to be called music. It prickled at her skin like static just before a storm. Maybe it was only her bones vibrating with memory. Or maybe the building remembered, the walls themselves carrying the echo of what had been done here before.

She reached the bottom of the staircase. The second floor waited above: polished wood, rice-paper doors, serenity stretched taut like a mask hiding rot. The paper door at the landing slid open without resistance, yielding as if the house itself bowed in deference.

Two figures emerged.

Jungkook Jeon descended first, his body loose, movements draped in arrogance disguised as charm. Every step rehearsed, every tilt of his head calculated to look careless. Beside him, Lynn Easton flowed like silk in motion. Together they moved like predator and shadow, separate forms bound by the same cold orbit, older than convenience, sharper than desire.

Jungkook murmured something as they reached the midpoint, amusement curling his words. Lynn answered with laughter, rich, cutting, terrifying precisely because it wasn’t false. Murder clung to her the way perfume clings to skin, but still she laughed like someone who thought herself immortal.

At the foot of the stairs she leaned in, lips brushing against his. Jungkook’s response was mechanical, detached, as if his mouth belonged to habit and not hunger. Their lips touched, parted, ended. He turned without pause, sliding his hands into his blazer pockets, smirk restored, polished heir once more: pressed, armored, untouchable.

Y/N did not move. Not yet. She remained rooted where she stood, her gaze fixed on the space he had left behind, long after his silhouette dissolved into the dark beyond the exit. Her body was still, but inside her thoughts scraped hard and relentless, steel grinding against stone, sparks flaring and dying, waiting to catch.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The bathroom of the House of Blue Leaves was a shrine built to appearances. Every surface gleamed with obsessive polish, as though cleanliness could erase what had been done here. Music murmured from hidden speakers, a piano line soft enough to soothe, crafted to lull men and women who wanted to believe they had nothing to hide. But the air told the truth. Jasmine perfume clung thick, smothering bleach. Incense lingered, meant to cover what bleach could never erase: blood, vomit, endings. The ghosts pressed close, crowding porcelain and glass. This wasn’t sanctuary. It was stagecraft. A set where lipstick stains and bloodstains alike vanished on cue, leaving only the illusion of control.

Lynn’s heels cracked against the tile in deliberate rhythm. Each step struck like punctuation, her coat flaring behind her as though alive, silk and leather weaving threat into the pretense of fashion. She moved with the assurance of someone who knew the world bent for her. She never glanced at her reflection. She didn’t need to.

The counters gleamed beneath golden sconces, light slipping across her jewelry, her lacquered nails, the metallic glint of her watch. The jasmine was heavy here, smothering, fighting a rot it could never overcome. At the mirror Lynn became a portrait: wealth, malice, precision. Her phone glowed cold in her hand, casting a blue sheen across her features.

“Yes,” she said in clipped Korean, her voice sharp and precise, each syllable as polished as the marble beneath her. “He’s gone. Of course I kissed him. It keeps him soft. Predictable.”

Her mouth tilted upward, not into a smile but something harder. Contempt.

“He thinks he matters. Cute boy. Pretty face. Shame about everything else. You can pet something like that, but you don’t let it into your bed.”

Y/N was shadow, tucked into the edges of the room where no light touched. Concealed behind a broad potted plant, pressed into the slice of darkness cast by frosted glass, her body was still to the point of disappearance. Breath shallow. Muscles locked. The sword at her side thrummed faintly, alive in a way her pulse was not. She felt like lightning caged inside a storm, pressure building toward inevitable release.

This wasn’t eavesdropping. It was communion. The bathroom was no longer marble and porcelain: it had become altar. Lynn had stepped into ritual without knowing.

Y/N remembered that voice. Silken when it wanted to be, acid when it did not. She remembered that laugh, beautiful to strangers, cutting to those who knew better. The brown hair, the polished poise, the eyes that always hardened when Yoongi’s attention strayed elsewhere. He always looked elsewhere. Lynn, for all her wealth, for all her polish, had never been called Rabbit. And Y/N knew with the certainty of blood that Lynn would never call him Sugar. That name belonged to Y/N, and she knew time had not changed it.

Lynn’s tone cooled, dropping lower.

“Yoongi’s obsessed with the boy. So I let him. Jungkook bends easy. Wants to please women like me. Thinks he’s special.” She laughed then, the velvet stripped away, what remained rough and jagged. “Poor thing doesn’t see it. Yoongi won’t leave me. I made him legitimate.”

Something shifted inside Y/N. Not rage. Rage was fire that had burned itself out years ago. This was deeper: stone grinding against stone, tectonic pressure building, the weight of continents moving. Sacred. Final. The smallest twitch at her lip betrayed it—the body starting its countdown. Lynn was already marked.

The call ended with a click, cast aside like lint. Lynn slipped the phone back into her coat, thoughtless, and twisted the faucet. Water hissed into porcelain, steam rising in thin ghosts. An ordinary sound in an ordinary space. But the bathroom was no longer ordinary. It was a kill box. And Lynn stood blind in its center.

She leaned forward, hands beneath the stream, when behind her, death stirred.

Y/N moved. Her fist cut the air and struck.

The sound was brutal, louder than it should have been. Bone on bone, echo ricocheting across marble, glass, tile. Lynn’s head snapped sideways. Her shoulder collided with the mirror, her face following. Blood streaked across her lip and sprayed in sharp arcs over glass, slicing her reflection into jagged shards.

She gasped. Not in fear—fear was prey’s reaction. What broke from her was outrage, a snarl of disbelief that anyone had dared to strike her crown.

She spun, hair whipping, hand diving into her coat for steel, for something to reassert her rule. Too slow. Too slow because shock had rooted her feet. Too slow because her life had been buffered by fear and money. Too slow because Y/N lived in the razor-thin space between heartbeat and strike.

And Y/N was already there.

She stepped out of shadow like she had been forged from it, sudden, inevitable. Her body moved with precision bound to vengeance, a blade in human shape. The yellow tracksuit clung to her like a warning burned into flesh, its black stripes slicing down her frame like cauterized scars. She didn’t need to reach for her sword. Not yet. Violence radiated from her eyes, sharp enough to cut without steel.

She said nothing.

Lynn faltered. Her lips trembled, arrogance peeling away like wet paint in the rain. Her voice cracked, venom corroding into disbelief.

“You.”

Y/N didn’t blink.

The second punch came without thought, a cross thrown by muscle and memory, perfected across sleepless years of shadowboxing phantoms with Lynn’s face.

The sound tore the silence. A dull thud, bone against bone, reverberating in marble and glass. Lynn’s head whipped back, mirror cracking deeper, fracturing into a cruel mosaic. Blood smeared in streaks, painting her reflection crimson.

The piano track humming from the speakers seemed to falter, swallowed by the silence that followed.

Lynn staggered, unsteady, body slack. For years she had survived behind silk, behind money, behind the intimidation of a smile. Stripped of it, she looked fragile, raw, human.

Y/N did not pause. She closed the gap in two steps. Her knee drove into Lynn’s stomach, folding her body in half, ripping air from her lungs. Another punch shattered across her jaw, snapping her head sideways, teeth scattering like dice across tile. Lynn’s cry wasn’t pain. It was disbelief, a protest against the impossible.

She raised her arms at last, late, too late. Y/N seized one, twisted, and wrenched until the joint gave with a wet, sickening pop. Cartilage tore. Bone ground against bone. Lynn screamed high and shrill, a sound she had never imagined herself capable of making.

Blood smeared her now: nose split, lip torn, temple marked by glass. It streaked her blouse, ran in rivulets down her chest, painted the tile she had walked across in heels moments before. The pristine bathroom, scrubbed into obedience, was streaked with red.

And for the first time in years, Lynn Easton was no longer untouchable.

Y/N fisted a handful of Lynn’s hair and wrenched her upright. The sound was ugly—a low groan torn from Lynn’s throat as her body lurched into position. Her hands fluttered up in reflex, nails scratching weakly against Y/N’s arm, leaving shallow lines without strength. Her eyes, once sharpened with polish and calculation, were wide now, wet, spilling fear she had never allowed the world to see. The untouchable Lynn Easton—poise, wealth, intimidation—was stripped to nothing but blood, bone, and ruin.

“Get up,” Y/N hissed.

Lynn staggered on trembling legs. Y/N dragged her forward, heels shrieking across marble, the sound splitting the pristine room. Red smeared into white, long streaks marking their passage, a trail impossible to clean. Lynn’s body swayed like a puppet with cut strings, each step more collapse than movement.

The sword answered.

Y/N’s hand slid to the hilt and drew it clean, steel whispering against sheath until it sang in the open air. The Jung blade gleamed under the golden light, edge alive, sharp enough to split the moment itself. She pressed the tip to Lynn’s spine, firm and unyielding. Silk parted with a soft hiss, fabric giving way before steel, and beneath it, flesh flinched at the cold kiss of the edge.

“Walk,” Y/N ordered.

And Lynn obeyed.

The bathroom door swung outward with a muted creak. The world outside bled in: jazz curling smooth from the stage, the clinking of glasses, the murmur of conversation. Normal sounds. Ordinary sounds. But when the patrons saw—or rather, when they sensed—the change, everything fractured.

No one turned. No one spoke. Heads dipped at once, eyes pressed down to plates and glasses, forks frozen midair. The House knew better. The House always knew. Lynn Easton, immaculate queen of silk and cruelty, now staggered out bleeding with steel at her back. She was too dangerous to see.

So they looked away.

They passed down the corridor together, two women bound in silence. One broken. One absolute. Lynn stumbled with every step, leaving a breadcrumb trail of blood, thick drops pattering against polished wood, each one marking her fall. Y/N moved with her, steady and unrelenting, the sword an invisible tether holding Lynn upright.

The silence they left behind was heavier than screams. It was the silence of witnesses who understood instinctively what it meant to see history written not on paper, but in blood and steel. None would speak. None would dare.

So they walked.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

The night settled over Busan in a golden haze, the kind of heat that clung to the skin and refused to let go. It pressed into the streets, seeping through every open window and neon-lit alley, making the city feel both restless and alive. Streetlamps buzzed with dull persistence, their sodium glow bending cars and motorbikes into warped silhouettes, while neon signs flickered above, colors bleeding across slick pavement. The air itself was thick, a mingling of salt from the port, smoke from the endless grill houses, and the kind of promises that belonged only to summer nights. Promises of excess, of mistakes, of something unforgettable.

Inside the House of Blue Leaves, Yoongi Min’s private suite pulsed at the center of it all. It was more than a room. It was the heart of the building, beating steady with liquor and laughter, a place where men and women steeped in danger allowed themselves, for a few hours, to pretend they were ordinary. To forget briefly how sharp their lives really were.

It was late, that blurred threshold between night and morning, when hours lost their meaning and the world outside felt suspended. Real business had dissolved into half-slurred confessions and half-drunken jokes. No one wanted to leave, because leaving meant breaking the spell, stepping back into the reality that waited with knives beyond the door. The suite softened around them, no longer just a lacquered fortress of crime and consequence but, for this stolen span of time, something warmer. Rivals and allies leaned shoulder to shoulder. They shared cigarettes, poured drinks for each other, laughed in voices roughened by survival. There was intimacy in it, not trust, never trust, but closeness forged by the fact that all of them had endured too much together to lie.

Karaoke ruled the night. It did not just fill the suite, it consumed it, thick and unavoidable as incense in a shrine. The machine was ancient, its plastic yellowed, its screen flickering with graphics trapped in the nineties, its microphone bent from years of abuse. No one cared. The point wasn’t perfection. It was presence. Here, presence was everything. Release came when your throat burned, when your voice cracked, when you sang not to be good but to let something escape your chest. That was worship. That was ritual.

Hwan from the Crazy 88 went first. He hurled himself into a trot ballad like the song itself had betrayed him. His voice was raw, jagged, breaking in places it couldn’t hold, but he sang with eyes shut, veins straining, sweat streaking his face. It wasn’t skill. It was confession, each note an apology or a curse spat at the floorboards. By the end the room roared, not only with laughter but with delight. They clapped, they jeered, they loved him for it. Even Yoongi, who rarely offered more than the curl of his mouth, laughed until his shoulders shook.

Then came Jung-il, massive and drunk, dragging Hwan into a duet meant for lovers. He bellowed through it with the clumsy joy of a schoolboy, his voice cracking, his body swaying so hard the floor tilted beneath him. When they finished, he dropped the microphone onto the cushions with exaggerated grace and bowed as if he had just played Vienna. The laughter shook the walls.

Even Lynn laughed. And not her usual cultivated laugh, the silken sound she used to disguise cruelty. This was louder, freer. Her copper hair spilled forward as she threw her head back, her eyes crinkled with something perilously close to joy. She did not sing, not yet, but she poured drinks with precision, slid jokes into ears, kept the rhythm of the night alive. Always she hovered closest to Yoongi, refilling his glass before he reached for it, touching his sleeve in quiet deference. Her loyalty came wrapped in warmth.

Yoongi watched everything.

He didn’t posture. He never needed to. His composure was effortless, one arm stretched across the back of his chair, the other loose around a glass of plum wine. He was not a man who smiled often, but tonight he did. Small, fleeting curves of his mouth, each one enough to draw the room closer. He smiled at Jung-il’s theatrical bow, at Hwan stumbling through a dance step, at Lynn waving her phone and threatening blackmail with her recordings. The smile did not mean he forgot who he was. It meant everyone else remembered it for him, and none dared to strip it away.

Eventually they pushed him toward the microphone. He resisted just long enough to make them laugh, then gave in with a sigh heavy with pretense. The song he chose was old, a melody from another decade, saturated with longing. It carried nostalgia like perfume, memory in every note. His voice was not trained, not even strong, but it did not matter. It carried weight, more than performance ever could. It was a voice shaped by silence, edged with power that never needed to be raised. When Yoongi sang, the room stilled. Smoke hung frozen. Laughter stopped mid-breath. For a few minutes they listened to the sound of a man who rarely revealed himself, and when he did, it landed heavier than any blade.

By the time the last bottle of soju cracked open, the suite no longer looked like a fortress. It looked like a sprawl of humanity. Cushions scattered across the floor. Ties abandoned in corners. Heels toppled sideways. Smoke hung thick as fog. A dark spill of plum wine bled across the lacquered table, ignored by all. The night had reached its golden hour, that intoxicating time when even killers allowed themselves to feel human.

And then Ricker rose.

Silent. Scarred. Immovable. He held the microphone in hands that had ended men, his towering frame filling the room, his movements quiet and unassuming. When he sang, his voice came rough as gravel, deep and broken, carrying more ache than most men could endure. His English was clumsy, halting, the words of “Born to Run” heavy and imperfect, but truth does not need polish. It needs weight. And weight poured through his voice until the room ached with him.

For a moment, the impossible happened. The suite was not a sanctuary for criminals but a campfire, a family table, a place where the strongest man admitted he was human too.

They cheered. They clapped. Some wiped their eyes.

And Yoongi, watching from his throne of smoke and silk, smiled once more. Reclined. Content. A king who, for one night, allowed himself the luxury of pretending he was only a man.

And then it happened.

A voice. Female.

“민윤기! 우리 사이 아직 끝나지 않았다!”

The words cracked through the suite like a blade through lacquer.

Laughter did not fade. It died, strangled mid-breath, cut off before anyone could notice the sound leaving their mouths. Glasses froze halfway to lips. Cigarettes burned down between fingers, ash falling unnoticed. The room, alive a heartbeat ago, shrank into the silence of a tomb.

Every head turned toward Yoongi. Instinct, not choice. Wide eyes. Jaws tight. Lungs refusing air. Even the Jeon brothers, iron and silk carved into flesh, went still, their smirks gone, their bodies coiled in silence.

And Yoongi Min, King of Busan, architect of empire, master of quiet who had turned shadows into his throne, was no longer smiling.

He did not blink. Did not speak. His body held its usual shape, lazy, regal, untouchable, but something beneath it shifted. Subtle. Dangerous. The air tilted with it. His mouth edged downward, almost imperceptible. His eyes, though—that was the betrayal. They hollowed, shuttered, dark as windows slammed against a storm. Not fear. Not yet. Recognition. Reckoning. The shadow of something he had buried and sworn would never claw free.

For the first time, anyone watching him saw Yoongi falter.

He rose slowly, each inch deliberate, measured like ritual. The tatami groaned under his weight, wood too old to keep secrets. He did not shout. He did not spit orders. His hand moved once—a flick of the wrist, small, practiced, final—and the room obeyed like a single body bowing to its spine.

Doors slid open. Jung-il moved first, a wall of muscle in his master’s shadow. The Jeon brothers leaned forward, all silk and steel, their eyes like unsheathed blades. Lynn’s chair scraped against the floor. She did not rise. She could not.

The air thickened, fragile as glass stretched too thin. The silence wasn’t the calm before violence. It was violence itself, hovering, waiting for breath to finish before the blade fell.

Yoongi stepped into the hall, sheathed sword in hand. Not drawn, not displayed, but carried as if it were breath itself: casual, inevitable, absolute. His stride was unhurried, balanced, as though the building had been constructed to cradle his every step. He reached the balcony, framed in golden lamplight, one hand on the rail, his gaze sinking into the space below.

Chaos waited beneath him.

Patrons scattered like startled insects, chairs overturned, glasses shattering, liquid crawling across lacquer floors. Some clutched their phones, hands trembling, torn between the urge to capture history and the primal need to live through it. Yet it wasn’t full panic, not truly. It was something stranger, quieter, a ripple of awe and dread, a hush born not of thunder but of silence.

Yoongi followed the ripple with his eyes until he found the epicenter.

“…Y/N.”

It wasn’t spoken so much as breathed. A syllable. A curse. A prayer. It slid from his lips and fell heavy, the balcony catching it, carrying it, and dropping it into the stillness below like a stone into water.

A name he had buried beneath smoke and blood. A name meant to rot in the past, interred under hospital machines and promises broken. But there she was, living, burning, undeniable. Everything he remembered. Nothing he expected.

She stood at the center of the room, haloed in fractured neon and the low glow of paper lanterns. Stillness framed her, every inch of her carved in shadow and flame, like a saint painted in glass.

Behind her staggered Lynn Easton, clinging to life by bone and spite alone. She held herself upright with one trembling hand against a carved beam, the other limp and useless. Her blouse was soaked red, blooming with ruin. A lip split, nose crooked, eye swelling, cheekbones fractured under fists that had spoken older languages than cruelty. She stood not from strength but from the body’s stubborn refusal to quit breathing.

No one looked at Lynn.

It wasn’t her ruin that gripped the room. It was the woman who had dragged her here.

Her yellow tracksuit blazed in the muted dark, streaked with blood, dirt, and sweat. At her side hung a sword, bare and gleaming, its edge alive in lamplight, too sharp to name, too dangerous to ignore. Her hair was bound tight, her face carved into stillness. Not rage. Not emptiness. Something else. Something patient, merciless, inevitable.

Her eyes burned upward. Not at the crowd. Not at Lynn.

At him.

At Min Yoongi.

He stood as stone does: immovable, hands anchored where they had always belonged. One rested against the railing, the other on his sword’s sheath. He didn’t draw. He didn’t need to. But even stone, under enough pressure, cracks. His eyes narrowed. His breath hitched, small, nearly invisible. A tremor flickered across him so faint no one else could see it. But she saw it. She always had.

Somewhere behind her, Lynn whimpered. Thin. Wet. Prayer or plea, it didn’t matter. No one cared. The House didn’t hear her.

Because the House of Blue Leaves had gone impossibly still.

The karaoke machine sat frozen, a song abandoned mid-note, its tinny screen glowing nonsense. Waitresses stood locked in place, trays trembling in hands suddenly too heavy to hold. Patrons stared at tables or shoes, lungs caged, afraid even to exhale. Even the walls seemed to lean closer, waiting.

Because everyone understood: what came next would be written in blood. And once written, nothing could be undone.

And then memory seized her. Not as flickers. Not as fragments. But whole.

The sky in El Paso had been mercilessly blue, an endless Texas vault so wide it felt like it might never break. Beneath it stood a chapel, small, whitewashed, sun-bleached, its fragile walls holding the future she had convinced herself she wanted. Inside, Tommy stood at the altar, his grin boyish, too pure for the world he was stepping into. He spoke of second chances as if they were carved into stone, as if time could wash anything clean if you only gave it room.

But Tommy hadn’t known. Couldn’t have known. He didn’t know about the graves her hands had dug across continents, the ghosts stitched into her veins. He wanted only her: a wife, a wedding, a garden, a child. A life where old wounds might fade and love could anchor them to something ordinary. But love is brittle. Ghosts never sleep.

That was when Taehyung came. Sharp suit. Sharper eyes. His smile like a knife’s reflection. He had been her master, her lover, her god. And in that moment, at the back of the chapel, she prayed—just for an instant—that he would let her go. But then his head tilted. Just a fraction. The signal was given.

They came in black. Gloves. Guns. The Squad. Jimin. Elle. Budd. Yoongi.

Gunfire shattered the chapel like glass. A storm of lead tore through wood, cloth, vows not yet spoken. Tommy turned to her, confusion painted on his face, his mouth shaping her name. Then the bullets found him. The grin that promised second chances dissolved in red. He fell, torn apart, the floor swallowing the blood meant for their wedding aisle. Screams drowned the hymn. Guests dropped one after another, the air thick with powder and ruptured flesh.

And then they reached her.

They didn’t want her dead. Not then. They wanted her destroyed.

Jimin’s fist crushed her throat, the word bitch spat through clenched teeth. Elle broke her nose, laughed, called her whore as blood spattered the altar. Budd dragged her down the aisle by her hair, each curse heavier than fists.

And then Yoongi.

He had been the quiet one. Quiet like the last breath before a sniper’s shot. Every motion deliberate, stripped of malice because malice implied choice. When Yoongi struck, it was inevitability. His kick came sudden, perfect, surgical. Her jaw snapped sideways, her skull bursting with fire, her mouth flooding with blood. That kick burned itself into her memory more fiercely than the dress she never wore.

She had never seen who pulled the trigger that killed Tommy. She didn’t need to. She knew. Patience like that. Precision like that. Cruelty wrapped in stillness. Only Yoongi. Always Yoongi.

She carried that certainty through her coma. Through every hour since. His name carved into her bones. His shadow burned into her path.

And now—here.

Her grip tightened on Lynn’s trembling arms, steel pinning her like prey. Y/N stepped out from behind her, a curtain rising on the final act. Yellow tracksuit streaked with blood clung to her body. Her face unreadable. Her eyes steady, locked not on Lynn, not on the diners, but on him. Always him.

Lynn’s chest heaved, breath ragged, eyes darting upward. Begging him. A drowning woman reaching for a ship on the horizon.

Yoongi didn’t move. His stillness was answer enough. He knew what was coming.

When Y/N released Lynn, it was not for mercy.

Lynn staggered forward half a step. Then steel sang. The Jung Sword moved in a line so clean it barely seemed real. The cut was perfect. Lynn’s arm was gone.

The sound came after, wet and sickening, as flesh and sinew tore free. Blood erupted in a furious spray, streaking walls, spattering diners, painting wood and lacquer in red. The scream that followed was no word, no shape, only an animal howl—primal, broken, a body realizing too late it had been ruined beyond repair.

She collapsed, knees cracking against lacquered floor, folding forward as though trying to hold herself together. Blood poured fast, pooling, her blouse clinging, her skin painted in her own ruin.

Y/N did not flinch.

The spray across her cheek clung like paint, sharp and vivid.

The silence that followed was not silence at all. It was a vacuum, a void that drank the breath from every lung and left nothing behind. Even the koi beneath the glass floor froze, suspended in water as though they too felt the weight pressing down, the certainty that death was waiting for its name to be called.

The Crazy 88 moved as one. Blades flashed free with a hiss, steel gleaming like fangs under paper lanterns. Their masks betrayed nothing, white ovals staring blankly outward, each man a reflection of the other, interchangeable, faceless. Together they became a wall of sharpened intent, a barricade of steel standing between their master and the woman in yellow.

Behind Yoongi, his lieutenants stirred. Jung-il’s easy mask of youth and politeness vanished, leaving something older crouched in its place—feral, brutal, patient. His tie hung loose around his neck, his mouth a hard line, his frame tense like a predator ready to spring. Beside him, Mr. Ricker stepped forward, his bulk swallowing the lantern light, arms folding across his chest thick as stone slabs. He stood less like a man than like a monument, an executioner carved from memory and shadow.

And Yoongi himself remained still. His sword sheathed. His voice silent. Only his eyes moved, fixed on her as though time itself had collapsed. The years fell away: the betrayals, the oceans of blood, the graves dug and forgotten. What remained was raw and unescapable—the past, alive again, dragging the future behind it like a corpse tied to its ankles.

Y/N flicked the Jung Sword once. The blade cut the air with a sound like silk tearing under a storm, the motion sharp enough to catch the lantern glow. Blood arced from the steel, a red spray painting the air before vanishing into shadow. Then stillness again. Stillness so sharp it pressed against the lungs, heavy and electric, like the air before lightning splits the sky.

At its center stood Y/N. Her breathing was molten, deep, her chest rising like the stoked bellows of a forge. She looked less like a woman than a prophecy given shape, her gaze locked on Yoongi as though the world had narrowed to nothing but the line of his silhouette. He met her with silence. His posture echoed the chapel years ago: statuesque, sword in hand but undrawn, the calm presence at the edge of ruin.

The air inside the House of Blue Leaves soured into something sacred and foul, immutable. It was no longer a restaurant. It was a shrine to violence. Where jazz had once curled like smoke and laughter had shaken rafters, now only dread remained. Not ordinary fear, but mythic dread, the kind mortals feel when they realize they are watching gods bleed, and pray the earth will hold steady beneath their feet.

The staff stood petrified. Waitresses clutched trays with white knuckles, glassware rattling faintly against metal. A busboy barely twenty stared with tears streaking his face, twitching toward the exit but nailed in place by terror. Wealthy patrons, smug and unshakable minutes ago, now sat rigid, chopsticks frozen in their hands. They watched Lynn convulsing on the floor, drowning in her own blood, then lifted their eyes to the woman in yellow.

And then Yoongi spoke.

His voice was a scalpel—precise, measured, polite enough to cut deeper.

“Sorry, everyone,” he said in Korean, as if announcing only the end of a meal. “I’m afraid we’ll be closing early tonight.”

The illusion shattered.

Chairs scraped violently against the floor. Glassware toppled and burst into glittering shards. Tables went over in waves of panic, lacquer splitting beneath the weight of fleeing bodies. Patrons clawed at each other in desperation, silk sleeves tearing, shoes abandoned, jewelry forgotten, as though survival had no room for valuables. They weren’t running toward life. They were running away from the abyss yawning open inside the House of Blue Leaves. Their screams piled over one another, high and feral, until the restaurant doors slammed wide and swallowed them whole.

And then the world was empty again. Silence returned, heavy, unnatural, pressing against the ribs. The only sound was the steady drip of Lynn Easton’s blood spreading in widening pools across polished wood.

Yoongi didn’t move. Neither did Jung-il. Neither did Ricker. They loomed behind him like statues carved into the cathedral of violence, sanctified in shadow. Their stillness was its own weapon.

And below them, Y/N stood alone. Her yellow tracksuit clung to her body, painted now with another’s blood. Her sword hung at her side, still wet. She wasn’t trembling. She wasn’t gloating. She stood like inevitability given flesh, like the story itself had finally caught her, ready to be written in its ending.

Yoongi lifted his hand. Just a flick of fingers, casual as brushing dust from a sleeve. Yet in that motion carried the weight of command.

“Hwan.”

One word. Enough.

From the ranks of the Crazy 88, a man stepped forward. Wiry, scarred, his frame vibrating with nervous eagerness. His katana was already half-free, steel whispering as though hungry. He tilted his head as if smiling beneath the blank mask, the posture of a man who believed fate itself had chosen him for this kill.

Then he sprinted.

“BANZAAAAAI!”

The war cry ripped the air apart, jagged as shattered glass. His boots thundered across lacquered wood, blade raised high to carve her down before the world. It was theater. Fury. Arrogance distilled into motion.

But Y/N did not roar back. She wasted no breath on defiance. She turned slowly, deliberately, her sword rising in her grip with the patience of dawn cresting a horizon. Nothing frantic. Nothing uncertain. Just judgment.

Hwan’s scream peaked as his blade came down.

Steel shrieked.

Her strike landed first. A diagonal flash too quick for the eye to follow, a blur of silver and red. His katana snapped, the broken half skittering across the blood-slick floorboards. His body staggered, eyes wide with disbelief, his momentum collapsing beneath him. That single heartbeat of hesitation was fatal.

Y/N stepped forward. Her blade slid through his stomach with surgical certainty, the motion clean, unhesitating. Flesh parted wetly around the steel. His scream broke loose, but already it was fading, his voice drowning under the weight of blood leaving his body.

She lifted him. Steel carried him off the ground, his body writhing, suspended like a grotesque banner dripping red. Her arms shook not from strain but from the sheer force of his body fighting its own end. And she walked. Step by step, steady and measured, carrying him like an offering.

When she reached the koi pond, she twisted her wrist and let him slide free.

The body hit the water with a violent splash. Blood burst upward in an arc, droplets scattering across the glass floor and rolling in tiny rivers. Beneath, the koi scattered in frantic bursts of color, their world clouding as crimson unfurled through the water like ink bleeding into silk.

And still the House watched.

Y/N turned back, her blade hanging low, each drop of blood sliding from its tip with the weight of a funeral bell tolling the hour. The sound was not loud, but it was felt. Each impact on the ruined floorboards marked time, steady as a heartbeat in a corpse.

Her eyes rose and found Yoongi’s. The moment they locked, the world seemed to buckle in on itself. Time fractured, memory seeping through its seams like smoke rising through old wood left too long to rot.

She stepped forward. One pace. Slow. Deliberate. A step heavy enough to feel like a sentence being passed.

And then it came. A sound. Small. Almost nothing. Barely audible above the tension pressing the room flat. But her ears caught it the way a predator hears the snap of a twig miles away. It was not human. It was not natural.

Her body moved before thought could name it. Instinct carved into her bones snapped free. She folded into motion, the Jung sword spinning once in her grip, steel a perfect circle of shadow and light. Then she dropped low, one knee kissing the ground, and drove the blade downward with both hands.

The strike split the world.

The Jung sword cut through carpet and lacquered wood, carving deeper still until it struck something older. The house groaned as if in pain. A scream tore up through the foundation itself, shrill and pitiful, not meant for human ears. And then silence. The sound choked out, extinguished mid-wail.

The blade quivered where it stood upright in the boards, vibrating with a resonance that carried through the room like a bell struck at execution.

Then came the blood.

It welled up from the wound in the floor, seeping out in slow, deliberate rings, curling across the pale carpet. Not a spill, but a tide. A halo of red forcing itself into the present, steady and relentless, as though history itself refused to stay buried.

Y/N rose. She left the sword where it had landed, humming in the floor like a monument planted in consecrated ground. She did not need it in her hands. Her face remained calm, but her eyes burned with something vast, something beyond human.

Yoongi’s gaze flicked from her to the embedded blade and back again. And for the first time, his mask shifted. Not rage. Not fear. Something stranger. A twitch of the eyes, fleeting and unguarded—the look of a man who recognized a truth too late.

Her name hung in the air between them, unspoken yet alive, etched into ruin like scripture carved into stone.

Around them, the wreckage whispered its witness: tables split to kindling, lanterns spitting sparks, koi thrashing through water thick with blood. The House of Blue Leaves was no longer a restaurant. It had become a mausoleum, consecrated by ruin.

There was no spectacle in her rage. No posturing. No grandstanding. This was not theater. It was grief hardened into steel, heartbreak burned until it calcified into inevitability.

Yoongi bared his teeth. Not in scorn. Not in irony. In something older. Animal. A thing that had already crawled out of its coffin and remembered the taste of flesh. He raised his hand, fingers curled like they were already closing around her throat.

“Tear the bitch apart,” he said in Korean. The words dropped into the room like iron bars locking shut.

The Crazy 88 obeyed instantly. Six blades slid free with a hiss, the sound sharp as guillotines being primed in a public square. They moved with precision, circling her, less like men and more like a ritual in motion. The noose was drawn in steel, tightening around her.

Y/N didn’t move. She stood at the center, blood stiffening her yellow tracksuit, her breathing steady, her heartbeat slow and deliberate. A drumbeat in an execution yard.

Her hand dropped to the Jung sword still buried in the floor. The boards creaked in protest, as though the house itself wanted to hold the steel down, to keep it buried. She pulled anyway. The wood tore loose with a groan, carpet ripping as the blade slid free.

She raised it before her face, lantern light catching on the edge. Blood still clung to the steel, Hwan’s end smeared across its surface. In its reflection she saw her own eyes—flat, cold, merciless. And beneath them, something older churned. Something vast. Something endless.

Her weight shifted forward, her body sinking into readiness, balanced on the balls of her feet. The blade cut across her chest at a sharp angle, precise and controlled, yet alive with purpose. It was not a stance. It was a vow.

The polished steel fractured the room into shards of reflection: six masked faces caught in its surface. She saw everything. The nervous one to her left, his knuckles twitching on the grip. The heavy one behind her, already leaning into the swing he hadn’t taken. She did not have to look. The sword showed her all of it.

She did not blink. She did not breathe. The storm had already started.

They came first. That was their mistake.

Six blades folded inward at once, spiraling to overwhelm, a net of steel collapsing around her. The House of Blue Leaves shrank with the rush of them, the lanterns trembling in their wake. Air split open with the sound of swords driving down.

She moved.

Not like a soldier. Not like a killer trained in drills. Older than that. Elemental. Untamed. Fire. Wind. Inevitability. The Jung sword carved the air with such precision it erased sound, leaving only silence in its wake.

Three strokes.

Four men were already finished.

They collapsed mid-motion, their strings cut. One still locked halfway through his swing, mouth open around a cry that never left him. Another frozen in defense, his blade useless, too slow to matter. Blood marked her path, spraying the walls, spattering the lanterns until their glow burned red. Dots of it streaked her face like punctuation.

Their bodies dropped gracelessly, thudding to the boards in a heap of ruin. Abrupt. Irrevocable.

Two remained.

They faltered, hesitation rippling through them as the truth struck home. The smell of iron thickened, smothering. Pride or desperation shoved them forward.

The first came screaming, blade swinging too wide, too high, more panic than precision. Steel clashed, a burst of sparks as their swords met. Y/N turned with it, fluid as water spilling into new ground, and drove her blade into him with a clean, surgical thrust. His scream cut short in a wet choke. He folded, spilling to the floor.

The last one ran.

He made it three steps.

Y/N followed. Not fast, but certain. Like a stone rolling downhill, like gravity itself pulling all things down. Her blade swept in a wide arc behind her, a streak of steel and blood through air.

It caught him mid-stride.

The strike tore through his back, driving him forward into the grand window. Glass exploded outward in a roar, shards scattering into the night. His body followed, tumbling into the koi pond below.

Water erupted red. The koi scattered in frantic flashes, their bright scales vanishing into clouds of crimson ink spreading through the pond.

Then silence.

The stairs creaked, each groan of old wood marking the descent of something inevitable. Y/N’s head turned, her muscles braced before her mind even caught up.

Jung-il came down slowly, step by step, every movement heavy with the kind of confidence born not from arrogance but from certainty. Certainty that he had never lost. Certainty that he had never even imagined losing. He didn’t grin. He didn’t need to posture. His presence was enough. And in his hand, something uncoiled.

A meteor hammer.

The chain rattled loose, rust-bitten links grinding against one another as the iron ball swayed at its end. It looked like it belonged in a dungeon, tied to the corpse of a war criminal, not dangling from the hand of a boy whose open school blazer still suggested youth. But in his grip, it was alive. A weapon meant for ruin.

Y/N’s body tightened instantly, every muscle screaming its warning. Her hand shifted on the Jung sword, and her breath left her steady but low, smoke-charred.

“You’re Jung-il, right?”

He nodded once, the chain curling at his feet.

“Bingo,” he said, the foreign word bent through his accent, sharpened by his confidence. His eyes glimmered like glass cracked by heat. “And you… you’re the Black Mamba.”

His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Closer to hunger.

Y/N let out a long breath. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t fear. It was the sound of exhaustion, the sigh of someone who had fought too long, buried too many, survived far more than she should have. “I get it,” she said softly. “Loyalty. Duty. You’ve got a boss to protect. A name to die for. I can respect that.”

The silence between them went sharp, alive with charge. It was the moment before lightning struck, stretched thin.

“But I’m begging you,” she whispered, the Jung sword angled low, her knuckles pale against its grip. “Step aside.”

A beat.

Then Jung-il laughed. The sound was harsh, grating, like sand scraped across silk. He tilted his head as though testing her, unspooling more of the chain. His eyes gleamed with something manic.

“That was you begging? Come on. You can do better. Beg like you mean it.”

He stepped down the final stair and into the ruin, deliberate, every pace calculated. The chain began to whirl. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. The air bent around it as the speed built, faster, tighter, until the iron head blurred into menace. The room crouched beneath its weight.

And then he released.

The hammer screamed through the air. Y/N dropped low, body folding flat, the steel shrieking over her skull before it smashed into the wooden column at her back. The beam split apart with an explosion of splinters, the crack echoing through the room.

Jung-il grinned. And sent it again.

Lower this time. Smarter.

The chain snapped tight around her sword, clamping with a metallic bite. She braced, but he yanked hard, ripping the blade from her hands. The Jung sword spun once through the air, then landed in his grip. His grin widened, cruel, gloating.

But he didn’t get the chance to mock her.

Her hand was already moving.

The silver boomerang snapped free from her hip, slicing forward in a clean, merciless arc aimed at his chest. It spun fast, flashing in the lantern light, vengeance made airborne. But the chain lashed again, quicker, more certain, smacking it from the air with brutal ease. It clattered against the floor, dead.

The counterstrike followed instantly.

The iron head crashed into her chest with the force of a wrecking ball. The air ripped out of her lungs in a single violent rush. Her body slammed to the floor, ribs screaming fire, the ceiling above her spinning into a blur. She fought for breath but her lungs locked, refusing. The chain hissed again, the hammer returning for her skull.

She rolled just as it landed. The weapon obliterated the table beside her, wood bursting into shards that scattered across the tile like splintered bone.

Her body throbbed, every nerve alight with pain as she scrambled upright. Her hand caught a jagged table leg and tore it free in desperation, splinters embedding deep in her palms. She hardly noticed. She stood, chest heaving, ribs aching, her world narrowing to survival.

Across from her, Jung-il climbed onto one of the last intact tables. The wood groaned beneath him, lacquer cracking, but it gave him the height he wanted. A battlefield tilted in his favor. His chest rose and fell with manic control, blood streaking his uniform, his smile feral.

She followed, dragging herself up onto the slick surface opposite him. No words. Nothing left to say. The silence between them was the only language that mattered.

He swung the chain overhead, faster, harder, the whistle splitting the air like a siren. Then he brought it down. She blocked with the table leg. The impact jarred her arms to the shoulder, rattling through her bones. Again. Again. Each clash sent vibrations crashing through her body until rage and memory blurred into one.

Then he shifted. The chain dropped low, snapping around her ankle, the links biting into her skin like teeth. Before she could cut loose, he yanked.

Her body tore sideways.

The table shattered beneath her, lacquer bursting into shards. She fell with it, her weight slamming into the floor like the lid of a coffin breaking from inside. Her ribs screamed. Her vision flared white.

And still he didn’t stop.

Jung-il leapt down after her, steel in hand, his face twisted with pure violence. His uniform was torn, his white shirt soaked red, his schoolboy mask stripped away to reveal the feral thing beneath. His blade swung down fast, ugly, desperate.

Y/N caught it with the table leg. Steel crashed against wood, sparks and splinters flying. They were pressed close, breath against breath, his twisted snarl inches from her face. Too close for strategy. Too close for thought. Instinct lit her veins.

She bit.

Her teeth sank into the curve of his ear. Flesh tore with a wet snap. Blood flooded her tongue, bitter and metallic. His scream cracked the air, raw and jagged, a sound ripped out of him by disbelief as much as pain. He stumbled back, clutching the mangled ruin of his ear.

She didn’t wait.

She rose and brought the table leg down like an axe. It crashed into his skull with a blunt, sickening thud that reverberated in her arms. He reeled sideways. She swung again, burying it into the opposite temple. His legs folded. He dropped to the floor, twitching, blood pouring over his face, hands clawing at the flap of flesh still hanging at the side of his head.

But even broken, Jung-il was dangerous.

His legs snapped upward, both feet slamming into her gut with brutal force. Pain split her chest wide. She doubled over, knees slamming tile, vision flickering out.

And the chain was waiting.

It hissed across the floor like a serpent, coiling around her throat, snapping tight. Jung-il threw himself into the pull, his knee driving into her back as he wrenched hard. The steel links dug into her flesh, crushing her windpipe, drowning her world.

Her hands clawed at the chain, nails splitting, skin tearing, but the more she fought, the deeper it bit. Her vision narrowed, dark at the edges. Her body sagged. The dark pressed closer, suffocating, whispering her name.

But the woman in yellow was not finished.

Her fingers, slick with blood and trembling with exhaustion, found the table leg again. It was no longer just splintered wood. In her hands it had become something else, a weapon born from ruin, its jagged nails jutting out like teeth hungry for flesh. She swung blind, savage, in a brutal upward arc that tore the air apart.

The impact was obscene. A sound like fruit crushed under a violent squeeze, sick and wet. The nails punched straight through fabric and into meat, tearing into Jung-il’s thigh. His scream ripped through the House, higher this time, hysteria shredding what pride he had left.

She yanked the weapon free. Flesh tore loose in stringy strands that whipped across the air before snapping wet against the tile. Blood followed, a fresh tide that sprayed her face, streaking her skin in warm lines. Jung-il’s cry broke again, cracked into something animal, ugly, desperate.

The chain slackened.

Y/N gasped like someone clawing to the surface of drowning water, every breath jagged and raw, her throat a wound carved open and still fighting to survive. Her chest heaved. Her ribs screamed. Her vision shook, but she was breathing. Alive.

She didn’t think. She saw his shoes. White tennis shoes. Laughably clean. Ridiculous here, in this ruin of blood and splinters. She brought the leg down hard.

The nails punched through rubber, laces, then bone.

The sound was sharp, louder than it should have been, a crack that rang final across the wreckage. His scream shattered again, no longer human but broken into something keening, shrill, unrecognizable.

The chain slipped from his hands.

He fell backward, convulsing, clutching at his ruined leg, one hand pawing at the air like it could grab hold of something that wasn’t there. His face had gone pale, sweat pouring in sheets down his temples, mouth opening and closing in soundless agony. For the first time, Jung-il looked young. Not a weapon. Not a predator. A boy. A boy who had never believed pain could be real until it was tearing him apart.

Y/N collapsed onto her side, the chain still coiled at her throat, its links biting deep, refusing to let go even though its master had dropped it. Her fingers clawed at it, nails breaking, skin splitting as she fought the steel itself. Her breaths came jagged and bloody, each one a miracle dragged raw from lungs that had nearly stopped. She wrenched, link by link, rust screaming in protest, until finally the last coil slipped free.

Air rushed into her chest, raw and burning. She coughed, blood and spit painting the floor in ragged streaks. But she was alive.

For a moment she lay there, her vision flickering, her body stuttering under the weight of every scream pain had to offer. Then she pushed up. Shaking. Burning. Upright. Not triumphant. Just standing. Like something carved out of suffering and left behind by the fire.

Her boots slid in gore. Her ribs throbbed where his kicks had left their message. Her hands trembled from the strain, every tendon screaming. But her eyes burned.

The table leg slipped from her grip, nails still slick, still dripping. She didn’t look at it again. Instead, her fingers closed around the weapon that had nearly ended her: the meteor hammer.

The chain was heavy, sticky with blood and sweat. But when she lifted it, it fit her hand like it belonged there. She tested its weight, then swung.

Whoosh.

Again.

Whoosh.

Faster.

Whoosh.

Above her, Jung-il crawled. Broken. Bleeding. Barely human. He dragged himself up the staircase toward the mezzanine, his ruined leg leaving a wet red trail across the wood like a banner of failure. His arrogance had bled out of him. What clung to his body now was desperation. Animal panic. His shoes slipped on slick wood, his palms smacked uselessly against the steps, his body driven forward by instinct alone. He hadn’t accepted it yet, that he was already finished.

Y/N stood silent at the base of the stairs, her shadow stretching long over the wreckage. Lantern light painted her in halves, moonlight on one side, flame on the other, cut into a shape the night had decided to keep. She looked less like a woman and more like inevitability drawn in flesh.

The chain spun in her hands once, twice, faster, tighter, until the sound filled the silence like a storm given a voice. Then she let it go.

The iron ball screamed through the air and struck him at the base of the skull.

The sound was decisive. A dull, heavy crack that ended things before silence had the chance to settle. No scream followed. No curse. His body froze mid-crawl, fingers clawing helplessly at the stair. His head tilted too far to the side, his neck broken clean, his mouth opening in a shape that would never form words again. Whatever thought he might have had died in that instant.

Gravity did the rest.

His foot slipped. His arms buckled. His body tumbled backward in jerks and spasms, each stair marking his end with another brutal thud. His head lolled wrong. His joints flopped like cut strings. By the time he landed hard at her feet, face slack, eyes blind and empty, there was nothing left of him.

The chain slid from her hand, the iron ball thudding against the blood-slick tile like a gavel closing on a verdict already decided.

She lifted her gaze. Across the wreckage, two figures still stood. Mr. Ricker. Yoongi Min.

Snow drifted through shattered windows, spiraling down into the ruin. Lantern light caught them, fractured into silhouettes of judgment. They hadn’t moved. They hadn’t flinched. They stood motionless at the far edge of carnage, towers untouched while the empire beneath them collapsed.

Y/N stood in the wreckage, yellow tracksuit clinging to her like a second skin soaked in blood, her sword gone, her breath ragged. Lanterns flickered above, casting halos of dying light across corpses strewn like discarded pieces of a broken game. Snow spiraled downward, soft and cruel, settling into pools of red until it melted into pink water that smelled of copper and ghosts.

The House of Blue Leaves resembled a snow globe smashed open in the Devil’s hand. Beautiful. Cruel. Frozen in ruin.

Her head tilted back, strands of hair plastered to her cheeks with blood and sweat. She locked eyes with Yoongi Min, the man who had cracked her past open like a ribcage and stood now as a monument to his own undoing. His jaw was tight, his fists clenched, his face carved into fury barely held at bay.

Beside him, Ricker loomed. His cane crooked in one hand, his posture loose but precise.

Her voice cut through the silence, low and edged, steel sharpened by exhaustion.
“So, Sugar. Any more subordinates for me to kill?”

Ricker shifted. His cane tilted in his grip, and the lantern light caught on its length, casting a darker line across the floorboards. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His silence was its own answer.

Y/N stood alone in the wreckage, steady at the center. Bodies sprawled around her in arcs, their blood pooled and drying in red crescents that painted the lacquered floor. Her grip on the Jung blade did not tremble. Blood crusted down her forearm, dried in black stripes across her knuckles, but her hold remained iron.

Her gaze climbed. Yoongi had not moved. He stood with Ricker beside him, posture carved from stillness, as though his body were a throne carved long ago out of violence and patience. His face gave nothing. No awe. No fear. No anger. Only weight. The look of a haunted house recognizing the ghost that had come back to claim it.

Y/N lifted the sword. The motion was not flourish. Not defiance. It was ritual. A rite passed down by centuries of executioners, her arm carrying it with reverence. The arc was deliberate, absolute, the blade cutting a crescent through the air with perfect balance. Blood tore loose in a glittering spray that caught the lantern glow like jewels flung into the void. For a breathless second it hung there, suspended. A jeweled mist frozen above ruin. Then it fell.

The splatter landed sharp, punctuating the tension stretched so taut it had felt ready to snap for decades. The House of Blue Leaves seemed to shudder with it, wood groaning, lanterns trembling, as though even the building itself had been holding its breath and now exhaled.

And then came the sound. Not from her. Not from him. From outside.

Low at first, a vibration crawling in from the edge of the night. It climbed, rising into a roar. Mechanical. Hungry. Wolves with steel throats. Engines. Seventeen of them.

Their voices howled in unison, a harmony of combustion that rattled the shards of glass still clinging to broken frames. The vibration traveled into the beams, down the floorboards, into her bones. She felt it before she heard it fully. Her marrow recognized it. Old. Familiar. Inevitable.

The night wasn’t finished bleeding.

She turned. Slow. Deliberate. Her eyes narrowed to blades. Headlights split the dark. Halogen beams poured across the lot, their light harsh enough to feel prophetic. Shadows warped, stretched long and unnatural across the walls.

They came in formation.

Motorcycles screamed into the lot, chrome and menace wrapped in symmetry. They moved like soldiers, arrogance written into every precise line. Tires screeched across wet asphalt, kicking arcs of oil and frost. The riders fanned out, wrapping the building in a wide semicircle of engines. An iron noose tightening around the House of Blue Leaves.

Then silence again. Only the ticking of hot metal cooling.

One by one, they dismounted. At least thirty. Black suits, sharp and identical. Kato masks erased their faces until they weren’t men anymore, just shadows. Fragments of Yoongi Min’s will given shape. Thirty blades. Thirty lives bent to one empire.

The real army had arrived.

Y/N didn’t flinch. Her head turned back, smooth, controlled, until her eyes locked with Yoongi’s again. The moment clicked into place like a needle dropping into the groove of a record. A song too old, too familiar, playing itself again whether they wanted it to or not.

He hadn’t moved much. Just one step forward. Subtle. Enough to shift the world.

And then he smiled.

Not the mask he gave the world. Not the cold lord of shadows. Something older. Private. The smile she remembered from bed sheets and alleys, from blood and laughter tangled in the same breath. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t calculation. It was enjoyment. Entertainment.

“You didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you?” His voice came in English this time. The sound of it reached straight into her chest, the echo of another life. Once, she had loved that voice. Once, she had trembled for it.

Her head tilted, feline, sharp. The Jung blade rose with her breath, lantern light licking its edge, painting it red. Her lips curled. A smirk thin and cruel, carved out of steel.

“You know,” she said quietly, words slicing just the same, “for a second there? Yeah. I did.”

He stepped forward again. The calm cracked in increments, fracture lines spreading slow across his composure. Wind tugged through the shattered windows, pulling at his robes, carrying the smell of oil and snow. For a long moment he only stared at her, as if looking into the barrel of a gun he had fired years ago, and only now realizing it was turning back toward him.

Then his voice came. Soft. Almost tender. Dragged up from another life.

“Silly Rabbit…”

And she already knew the rest. The script was written into their bones. The answer rose to meet his words, not remembered but inevitable, the two voices—his and hers—overlapping like a memory too deep to ever kill.

“Trix are for kids.”

It wasn’t a joke anymore. Not a quip. Not even irony. Athens, a decade gone. A busted television in a motel. Cartoons flickering in Greek. Her ribs aching with laughter as he whispered, That’s me. That’s what I feel like with you. Hungry. Never fed. Her kiss had answered, slow, devouring. She’d answered back, breathless: Then why are you still chasing me?

Now there was only steel. Only blood. Only ghosts crowding between them like silent jurors at a trial neither of them was meant to walk away from.

Around them, thirty masked riders stood waiting, patient as executioners. The air itself felt braced, expectant, as though the night had bowed its head to watch violence bloom again.

Yoongi’s smile slipped. His gaze drifted past her shoulder, out toward the lot. The seventeen who had come in thunder peeled off their bikes in perfect rhythm, every step rehearsed. When the blades slid free, the air changed. Steel whispered from scabbards like a hymn written in violence, notes struck a thousand times before.

Even the walls seemed to remember it.

Y/N tightened her grip on the Jung sword until her knuckles whitened beneath streaks of blood. The steel hummed against her bones, faint at first, then stronger, resonant, alive. Not just a weapon. An inheritance. A tuning fork struck in the key of wrath, its vibration climbing through her wrist, flooding her chest, setting her pulse to its rhythm.

Inside her, the ghosts kept still. No screams. No frantic scratching at the corners of her mind. They waited. Patient. Wolf-quiet. Eyes glowing from the treeline, jaws slick and ready, their hunger disciplined. They knew the feast was coming.

She did not tremble. Her jaw held steady. Her mouth curved upward, not joy, not cruelty, but inevitability carved into flesh. Her gaze locked on Yoongi, a statue of shadows carved into the balcony, his devils coiled around him like gargoyles. She had not blinked since the last man’s body hit the floor.

Then the doors broke. Hinges screamed, wood splintered outward in violent bursts, smoke belching into the lantern light. Oil. Sawdust. Burnt metal. The smell of industry invaded the room like another predator.

Boots followed. Thirty pairs. Heavy, steady, synchronized. A heartbeat that belonged to something larger than men.

They emerged in black suits cut sharp as razors, the fabric gleaming like wet stone under lantern fire. Faces hidden behind masks edged in steel, mouths erased, eyes replaced with pits of glass. They weren’t soldiers. They were ritual, walking. Priests to a blood rite.

Their weapons were monstrous. Some carried twin katanas curved like fangs. Others bore cleavers meant for cattle, axes meant for forests, staffs that whirled so fast the air cracked at their edges. Steel shone hungry in every hand. Their entrance wasn’t a charge. It was ceremony. A procession toward sacrifice.

They spread wide, silent, forming a circle that closed like the tightening of a noose. The ruined restaurant reshaped itself in that instant. No longer a den. No longer a house. It was an arena. She stood at its axis, the still point, the storm’s eye.

Her chest rose once. Fell once. Then she lifted the sword.

Not flourish. Not bravado. Ritual. A relic risen. The blade caught the lantern glow, silver edge gleaming wet, her reflection staring back hollow-eyed, marked but unbroken.

The storm broke.

The first man lost his arm before he even understood he had attacked. A blur of steel, a crack of air, and his elbow vanished in a spray of blood. His scream rose too late, cut short by the second body collapsing beside him, his face cleaved open, mask split like bone.

She spun low, hips snapping, her blade rising through a throat mid-curse. A fountain of blood misted against her cheek, scattering light like jewels before falling with the body. She pivoted again, feet sliding across red-slick tile, balance locked, every step honed by survival.

Another came heavy, shouting. She ducked under his wild swing, rolled beneath, and rose with her blade carving him open from gut to sternum. His scream collapsed into a wet rattle as he folded, bones snapping beneath his own weight.

Behind her came steel. A flash. She caught it. The clash cracked against her arm, the vibration rattling her teeth. The masked man leaned close, grinning beneath his iron veil. She surged forward before he could finish. Her forehead cracked into his nose with a sound like stone breaking. His grip faltered. She kicked his knee sideways until it bent wrong. He screamed, and her blade silenced it before he finished.

The world blurred to black and white and blood. Not cartoon red, but black red. Thick, oil-dark, slick on the tiles, streaking the lanterns. Every stroke she made scrawled ruin across the walls, the alphabet of violence spelled in strokes too fast to count.

The waves kept coming, and she broke them. Steady as cliffs. Sharp as lightning. The sword was no longer held. It was her. Flesh and steel fused into one, instinct answering instinct. She did not strike. She allowed. She did not aim. She answered.

A flank attack, low and fast, aiming for her ribs. She didn’t retreat. She let him commit. At the last instant her hand flashed to her hip, nails breaking as she ripped the silver boomerang free. It left her fingers screaming, tearing air apart before it struck his temple with a sound like wet stone crushed underfoot. His skull split. His body seized and dropped, sword clattering across tile before stillness claimed him.

Still, they came.

She vaulted, quick and sharp, the floor recoiling beneath her. She rose and came down behind a larger man before his shadow turned. The Jung blade slid between ribs with quiet intimacy, like whispering murder into his spine. His legs buckled instantly. He toppled, clawing at nothing as blood steamed into the cold night air.

But another struck true. A shallow cut raked across her side, fire licking her ribs. Not deep, but enough. Breath caught in her chest, staggered, broke. Before she could brace, a boot slammed into her shin and the leg gave. She crashed down, ribs cracking loud against tile, sword spinning into the dark. For a heartbeat, she was bare. Exposed. The fight wrenched from her hands.

The shadow above her raised his blade. Two hands on the hilt. Point angled for her chest. Death inbound. Inevitable.

Her body moved without her mind.

Legs snapped upward, whipcord fast, coiling his throat. She twisted hard. His neck broke sideways with a crunch that silenced the room. Not clean. Not merciful. His body folded beneath her. She rode him down, weight planting her on his chest. Her hand found her boot, tore free the SOG knife. She drove it into his throat, twisting hard. The grunt that left her lips was not breath. It was growl. His last sound gurgled out wet, bubbling, then stopped.

Y/N rose, blood-soaked, breath ragged, eyes burning.

Bootsteps pounded closer.

Y/N ripped the boomerang free from the corpse’s ruined temple. It came loose with a sick wet pop, bits of flesh clinging to its edge. She didn’t aim. She didn’t have to. The throw was instinct, a whip of muscle honed by years of rage. The blade skimmed low across the slick floor, singing through the air before it found bone. A man’s ankle shattered. His foot snapped sideways with a crack that carried through the room, tendon and bone tearing loose. His scream ripped jagged against the walls as he collapsed, clawing uselessly at the ground, his mask tipped back in a soundless gape.

She was already moving.

Another attacker rushed in behind her, arms locking tight around her torso. A mistake. Y/N vaulted up his body, boots driving into his shoulders, thighs clamping around his neck. He staggered under her weight, arms thrashing, but she clamped tighter, her whole frame turning into the trap. The Jung sword flashed. One clean sweep down.

His wrists parted first. Hands fell, still gripping air, blood jetting upward in hot arcs. His scream split the room, ragged and shrill, but it lasted only a beat before she cut through his throat and finished him. He dropped beneath her like a puppet with its strings cut. She rode him down, landing atop his collapse, her blade still firm in her grip, its steel trembling but unbroken.

Her chest heaved. Breath tore jagged in and out. Every muscle screamed. Her ribs ached like splintered glass. Her skin stung, her blood mixing with theirs until she could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. But she didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Stopping was for people who thought survival was possible. She had gone beyond that.

The floor wasn’t floor anymore. It was a bog. Red, thick, bodies collapsed atop one another until they weren’t men but parts. Meat, fragments, discarded wreckage. A graveyard without graves.

And above it, still watching, was Yoongi.

He hadn’t moved. His balcony was untouched, flanked by his devils: Ricker, silent and immovable, and Lynn’s absence, still bleeding like an open wound. Yet something in him had shifted. His eyes no longer burned with cruelty. They weren’t wide with fear either. They carried recognition. A man staring down the living echo of his own sins, dragged back into flesh.

The woman he had tried to bury had risen. She was everything he had carved into her: every betrayal, every broken bone, every ounce of grief reforged into steel. And now she stood in front of him, blade in hand, his name etched into her rage.

Y/N rose from the ruin. Straight-backed. Her yellow tracksuit was painted in blood until it shone lacquered gold and red, a warrior’s gilded armor hammered from slaughter. Lantern light caught her in fragments, less a woman than a monument carved out of fury. She raised the Jung blade slowly, deliberately, as though the act itself were liturgy. The steel gleamed alive in the haze, silver and crimson, a relic consecrated by blood. Even the air seemed to pause, as though death itself had chosen to witness.

The koi pond below had drowned in blood. Its water had gone black-red, the carved dragons at its edge submerged, the polished wood erased beneath the tide. Fish thrashed in filth they couldn’t comprehend, scales flashing like broken mirrors before vanishing under the surface. The reflections once meant for serenity now showed only horror: faces twisted mid-scream, eyes bulging, blades caught frozen in descent. And in the heart of it all, like the pulse of some ancient wound, stood Y/N.

She didn’t walk. She stalked. Each step a drumbeat. The blade wasn’t carried. It carried her. Every strike came not from her arms but from blood itself, each arc a current pulled by gravity older than thought. Her frame, slick with gore, cut the air like lightning trapped under skin. Every exhale was a muffled war cry, clenched between teeth, a rhythm older than language. She didn’t need words. The blade spoke.

A body twitched beneath her boots. She leaned down, no hesitation, and finished it. One merciless cut, throat to ear. Clean, deliberate. Calligraphy written in blood. Red hissed upward, steaming in the cold air before gravity dragged it down into the bog. She wrenched the sword free, crouched, balanced, unshaken. She didn’t look down.

A roll forward carried her through gore and smoke. She rose into a vertical arc, steel screaming through the air, and split another man from groin to sternum. His scream was high, thin, inhuman, cut short as his body peeled apart under its own weight. She was already moving again.

From the smoke, one stepped out. Different.

He didn’t charge. Didn’t shout. He walked, calm and deliberate, like a man stepping into his own grave. His sword spun between his hands in lazy circles, every flick balanced, every shift controlled. He wasn’t tense, but his stillness was coiled, the readiness of someone who had killed often enough to know the rhythm. His mask erased his face, but his body spoke plain: I’ve killed better than you. He tilted his head, silent invitation.

Y/N’s growl rumbled low in her chest, animal, primal. She surged forward, predator loosed, blade raised, scream tearing loose from the pit of her lungs. It wasn’t language. It was inevitability. The chamber answered with steel.

Their swords collided. Sparks leapt. Metal shrieked. The impact reverberated through bone. They broke apart, clashed again, blades twisting, the rhythm furious and precise. It wasn’t combat. It was communion. A language spoken in cuts and blocks, in the ghosts of all they had buried before this moment. They circled. She ducked a hair’s breadth from death. He kicked. She rolled, rose, slashed for his spine. He spun, parried, steel screaming against steel. Each collision was its own hymn.

Then came his mistake.

One swing, too wide. His stance, too open. A single breath wasted.

Y/N’s blade fell in a diagonal arc, clean and merciless. The sound of it through bone was parchment tearing. His arm hit the ground, still clutched around his katana, fingers twitching like they hadn’t realized they had been severed. His scream tore raw from him, animal, ragged, stripped of all pride. He looked down at the stump, then up at her. Too late.

The Jung sword pierced his chest, splitting ribs, cracking sternum, spearing the thunder of his heart. He folded onto her blade, convulsing, pinned like a penitent kneeling before judgment. She held him there, crucified, until the twitching stopped and silence claimed him. Only then did she wrench the blade free. His body fell flat, final as stone.

Her eyes rose.

Half their number already lay ruined. The survivors still circled, blades trembling in hands they wished were steady. Fear leaked into the air like gas. They tightened their formation, not with confidence but with dread.

Y/N shifted back, dragging the corpse with her. The body was heavy, slack, its dying convulsions spent, but she pulled anyway, using his collapse as cover. For a single breath, she let his ruined weight serve as her shield. Heat from his spilling blood soaked her boots, layering over the stains already ground into them, an armor of filth and fury. When he became nothing more than dead mass, she released him. He hit the floor face-first, forgotten. She reset her stance, hips square, spine straight, the Jung sword alive in her hand, vibrating faintly as though it too hungered for more.

The next wave came screaming. Blades raised, voices rising in one throat, masks wailing their war cries. The sound should have shaken her. It didn’t.

She didn’t wait.

She dropped before their steel could reach her. Not crouching. Not kneeling. Flat. Her back slapped against the blood-slick floor. The impact splashed red outward in streaks. In the same breath she spun, body low, sword whipping in a perfect circle, a storm anchored to her fists. The Jung blade cut a cyclone. Steel met flesh. Ankles vanished in arcs of arterial spray. Shins split like dry timber. Knees cracked backward. Their screams came jagged, ripped raw from their throats, the sound of men being robbed of the one thing they thought untouchable: their own bodies. They toppled like statues kicked from their pedestals, graceless and broken, masks smashing into the floor with dull, sickening cracks.

Still spinning, Y/N planted her head against the floor, using her own body as the axis. She rose inverted, folding into an impossible lotus of violence, her sword blooming outward like a petal dripping red. Then she flipped, a controlled surge of muscle, landing in a crouch. Her blade quivered faintly in her hand, slick with blood, but her grip was steady, her intent absolute.

When she stood, slow and deliberate, her weapon streamed blood in a curtain, raining downward in a crimson baptism. She looked baptized in it herself. And now there were only seven. Seven masked men. Seven breaths, harsh and too loud for a room that no longer forgave mistakes.

They didn’t charge. Not now. They lingered just out of reach, circling like scavengers, hyenas doubting the lioness’s hunger. Around them the House of Blue Leaves was unrecognizable. Nearly twenty of their brothers lay scattered in ruin, limbs twisted, throats carved open, guts unspooled like spoiled fruit. The floor was drowning in it. And she, still upright, still breathing, stood as if she had stepped out of the center of a bomb.

Her breathing slowed, deliberate. Steam curled from her in ribbons, the heat of battle burning away like smoke from a dying forge. She lowered one knee to the ground. Not submission. Not weakness. A gesture older than language. Sword tip touched wood, chin bent slightly. A communion between warrior, blade, and earth. Stillness. Preparation.

Her face was mapped in blood. Some trails had already crusted black, others still warm and fresh, streaking down her jaw. A cut above her brow dripped in steady rhythm, feeding the topography carved into her skin. The yellow of her tracksuit, once bright as warning, was drowned in gore, its fabric lacquered red and black until it seemed like a second skin of ruin. She looked less like a woman than a revenant, dragged from the grave and reborn in slaughter. Her eyes burned through the mask of it all, sharp, steady, merciless.

The seven watched. None dared step first. Above them, Yoongi stirred at last.

He had been silent from the beginning. Watching. Waiting. But now his hand lifted. A flick of the wrist. The crimson fan snapped open with a sound sharp and final, thunder cracking in a library. Red silk flared against smoke and blood, bright as a wound. One gesture, one wordless decree: the final act had begun.

At the far edge of the room, shadow thickened. From it, another figure emerged: Jung-il. She slid along the ruined wall like oil, her presence more suggestion than flesh. Her hands skimmed the splintered wood until they found the seam. A click, subtle but decisive. The false panel opened. A junction box revealed itself like a grave pulled reluctantly into daylight. Her hand hesitated only a moment before dropping.

The lights died.

Not with drama. Not with spectacle. With inevitability, like a drowning man’s last breath, a hiss, a surrender.

Darkness took the room.

Sound replaced sight. The hiss of blades slicing air. Cloth shifting. The ragged breath of men. The drip of blood thickening the silence. The bodies cooling by the dozen. And outside, the wind keened against broken glass, a widow mourning in secret.

And in the dark, Y/N.

Crouched low, her body wound tight, stillness pressed into her bones like a coiled spring. The seven circled closer, wolves in borrowed flesh, blades bright in the weak moonlight crawling through shattered windows. Ash drifted in from outside, black snow settling across ruin, until the whole chamber looked like a snow globe filled with teeth.

She rose. Not survivor. Not victor. Something older. Something summoned from marrow and rage. The Jung sword caught the moonlight pale along its edge. Her suit was no longer yellow but lacquered red, the color of war made flesh.

The seven tightened formation, circling in, every step in rhythm, blades angled forward. Y/N matched them. Her body shifted with their rhythm, as if she already knew every stance, every flaw. She spun the sword once in her hand, deliberate, smooth, then stilled it. Her eyes narrowed. Ready.

The room itself held its breath.

Then everything broke.

They came all at once, bodies and blades colliding with hers. The air filled with shrieks of steel, shadows cutting across drifting ash. Their movements looked like choreography, but it was chaos dressed in precision. Y/N answered in the only language she had left: judgment written in steel.

Her blade tore arms from bodies. Masked faces split clean from jaw to temple. A man’s thigh opened under her stroke, the bone shattering as he fell. Blood sprayed in arcs, painting the walls, the lanterns, the broken screens. The blade dragged scripture into flesh, a new story written in ruin.

She dropped low, the sword’s edge whispering across the blood-slick floor like a serpent before striking. The circle tightened. She surged upward. Steel carved ribs, tore open a chest. A scream split the chamber, high and thin, until the jawbone tore loose and hit the floor beside a severed hand still gripping its katana. The body collapsed in halves.

Seven became six. Six became five. Then three. Then two.

Then nothing.

It ended not with triumph, not with a roar of victory, but with silence. The kind of silence that follows catastrophe, when the ground has finished shaking, when the crash has subsided, when only the heartbeat remains.

A snap broke it.

The breaker thrown again.

Light blazed overhead, fluorescent and merciless. The room was bathed in false gold.

The wreckage revealed itself.

Y/N stood at the center. Her blade hung low, dripping strings of blood and marrow. Her chest heaved, breath ragged, each inhale scraping her lungs raw. Her hair clung in ropes, plastered with gore. Cuts scored her face. Blood polished her skin until she gleamed in ruin. Still she stood. Still she looked outward.

The bodies were everywhere. The House of Blue Leaves was no longer a restaurant. It was a graveyard with no names, only remnants. The floor had become a tide of ruin, red and glistening, the lacquered wood drowned beneath pools that spread without care. Limbs lay strewn apart from torsos, hands curled as though they still clutched at weapons that were no longer there. Masks, split down the middle, revealed faces frozen in the last instant of their lives. Some contorted in rage. Others in shock. A few in something that might once have been fear.

Blood dripped from the light fixtures above. A slow, steady rhythm, fat drops falling one by one, pattering onto tables reduced to wreckage. In the far corner, a single lantern still burned, its light muted, fragile. It threw jagged shadows against the walls, grotesque silhouettes that danced over corpses and splinters, mocking what was left behind.

The koi pond had turned black-red, a living painting smeared into ruin. Fish glided slowly through the blood-clouded water, their scales flashing faintly as they twisted beneath the surface, as though nothing had changed. Life went on, oblivious, indifferent, even in the middle of slaughter.

Not all of them were dead. Not yet.

They crawled through the wreckage, dragging themselves across the floor with whimpers that broke the silence in fractured gasps. One pressed a severed hand to his wrist, pressing bone to bone, skin to skin, as if sheer desperation could sew him whole again. Another pulled himself by his elbows, his legs trailing uselessly behind, blood streaking across the floorboards in wide, uneven strokes. He muttered prayers through a broken jaw, his voice bubbling wet with every syllable.

Y/N stood at the center of it all. Her chest rose. Fell. She raised the Jung sword.

Not high. Not for theater. Not for display. With ceremony. She lifted it slowly, as though the blade itself carried the weight of every body it had cut down, as though raising it was an act of reverence. Her hand tightened on the hilt. Muscles trembled, her grip alive with fatigue and with fury. Then, with a sharp flick, she cast the blood from the steel.

The spray arced across the air in a crimson crescent, hanging there for a heartbeat like a dying star. Then gravity claimed it, and it fell back into the ruin with the rest.

When she spoke, her voice was raw. Shredded by screaming. Cracked by survival. Yet steady. Clear. Cold.

“Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives…” She spoke in Korean, every syllable heavy, final, carrying like scripture. “…take them with you.”

The silence that followed was thick. Even the wounded froze, their prayers caught in their throats. The air itself seemed to wait, suspended, heavy with command.

She let it stretch, let the weight of it sink into their bones. Then her voice came again, softer, but carrying even further for its calm:

“But leave the limbs you have lost. They belong to me.”

Movement rippled through the wreckage. Crawling. Limping. Dragging. They obeyed. One stumbled, tripping over the body of a comrade, face smashing into the slick wood before he hauled himself back up. Another cradled his ruined arm to his chest, sobbing openly, his mask cracked and dangling by a single strap. A third scraped his body along the floor inch by inch, his teeth leaving a bloody trail as he pulled himself toward the door with shaking fingers. None of them looked back.

They spilled into the night like filth purged from a wound. The snow outside caught them, stained thick and red as they staggered into it. Their trails smeared across the white ground, the cold air hissing steam out of their wounds. Above them, flakes fell silently, drifting down in lacework patterns delicate and uncaring. Snow covered them like a shroud, disguising ruin in beauty.

Inside, Y/N did not move.

Her chest rose and fell in a slow, measured rhythm, her breath fogging faintly in the cooling air. The Jung sword tilted at her side, its tip dragging close to the lacquered floor like the tail of a predator too patient to strike. Her face carried no victory. Only control. The gravity of command earned one corpse at a time.

Then she turned.

Slow. Deliberate. Her body seemed to rise not by will but by some invisible pull, as if strings had attached to her bones and lifted her upright. Her eyes swept the ruin. Tables splintered into kindling. Lanterns broken, dangling like teeth from fractured jaws. Corpses sprawled across the koi pond, half-submerged, limbs slack, drifting with the fish.

And then she saw them.

Two had not fallen.

Mr. Ricker rose first. Massive. Immovable. He stood rooted like a pillar of stone, his body casting a shadow wide enough to consume the nearest wall. His arms folded across his chest, muscles drawn tight as steel cables beneath his coat. He didn’t twitch. Didn’t flinch. Only his eyes moved, sharp and calculating, ancient. The eyes of a man who had killed, who had seen killing, who had lived too long among it. Yet even in them, something shifted. Not fear. Something closer to recognition.

Beside him stood Yoongi Min.

Quiet. Black-clad. Watching from what was left of his throne. His face was hollowed by shadow, his eyes drawn deeper, carrying a silence heavier than words. The air around him seemed thin, starved, as though even oxygen dared not linger too close. He didn’t move. He didn’t look away.

Not even when her gaze caught his.

And it did. Hard.

The weight of everything between them filled the space, thick enough to choke the air. His eyes no longer glimmered with charm or cunning, not even cruelty. They carried only recognition. Recognition of her. Of what she had become. A reckoning shaped in blood that he himself had forged.

Her eyes shifted. Landed on the man beside him.

“You’re Mr. Ricker, right?” Her voice was cold but even, carrying more curiosity than mockery.

He inclined his head. A single, precise motion.

“And you’re Black Mamba,” he said. It wasn’t a question. It was certainty, spoken as though it had always been known.

She stepped forward. Careful. Deliberate. Not toward him, not yet, but toward the tension that bound them.

“Our reputations precede us,” she said.

“Apparently.”

Her head tilted. Her tone was sharp, curious, edged like the blade she carried. “So why don’t you wear your Kato mask? Cottonmouth managed to convince Koreans to do it. Why not you?”

His mouth twitched with something faint, too heavy for a smile but not entirely void of humor. From inside his coat, he drew something slender, lacquer catching the dim light. A stick. At its end dangled a mask, white and theatrical. Not for concealment. For ceremony. He held it up for her to see.

“I don’t like the rubber band,” he said quietly. “It messes up my hair.”

Her exhale came sharp, not laughter, but something close. Something darker.

“You shouldn’t work for him.”

The almost-smile flickered again, heavier this time. Regret curved its edge. “Too late.”

“It’s not too late to quit.”

He shook his head once. Firm.

“Yes, it is.”

Her eyes narrowed, voice harder now. Sharper. “No. It isn’t.”

His gaze lowered a fraction, then lifted again. His head shook slower this time. His voice came with a weight heavier than the ruin around them.

“No. I can’t.”

She didn’t waver. Something cracked through her expression—not weakness, not hesitation, but clarity, cold and sharp enough to cut the air.

Her voice lifted, not anger, not plea. Truth.

“Don’t say can’t.” Her grip flexed on the Jung sword. “There are no can’ts.”

Her eyes locked on his, bright and burning, command bleeding through every word.

“Yes. You. Can.”

Behind them, Yoongi’s voice cracked the air like a whip. Cold. Dismissive.

“What are you waiting for? Are you on a date? Attack her, you fool.”

The insult didn’t need volume. It bruised the silence heavier than a shout could have, landing between them with the weight of command. Y/N saw it land—saw the flicker across Ricker’s face, the hairline fracture in his stone composure. His jaw flexed once. His shoulders rolled with the faintest tremor.

Her voice came sharp, quick, searing through the moment before it sealed over.

“Oh my God…” she hissed, half in disbelief, half in venom. “He just called you a fool. In front of me. You’re going to risk your life, harm me, for a man who treats you like that?”

Something shifted in him. Subtle, but real. A man’s face tightening around a truth he had spent years ignoring. His eyes slid sideways, back toward Yoongi, and when they came to rest, they looked different. Not cold anymore. Hollowed. A man staring at the past one last time before letting it go.

Y/N’s tone dropped lower, cutting softer now, almost conspiratorial, as if she were giving him a secret meant only for him.

“I’ll owe you one.”

Ricker blinked once. Slow. Deliberate. Then, without a word, he slid his blade back into its sheath. The click of steel locking home was quiet, almost gentle, but it carried the weight of finality. It was not surrender. It was closure.

He turned enough for Yoongi to see. The King stood amid the ruin of his empire, framed in lantern light and blood, brittle with silent fury. His stillness no longer resembled command. It resembled aftermath, the hollow gravity of something already fallen.

When Mr. Ricker spoke, his words came in Korean, low and absolute.

“I quit.”

Then he stepped aside.

But not empty-handed.

He reached for the last of his weapons. Not the polished, factory steel worn by Yoongi’s men, but something older. Personal. The blade had lived longer than empires, etched down its length with the coiling body of a dragon, ink in steel, sin forged into metal. It was a weapon you named once and never spoke aloud again. He carried it not as a tool but as an heirloom.

And he set it down at her feet.

Y/N stood at the center of the cathedral they had built from blood, her body lacquered red, her hair clumped and matted, her face streaked with lines of ruin. She didn’t look like she wore the blood. It looked like it wore her, armor pulled across her skin, vengeance stretched over her shoulders. When Ricker placed the blade before her, it was not as a gift. It was an offering.

It didn’t fall with a clang. It landed soft, almost reverent, as though the floor had been waiting for it. The sound wasn’t iron on wood. It was closer to a kiss.

Ricker turned and walked. Not hurried. Not hesitant. Careful. Steady. The pace of a man who had survived too long by measuring every step through minefields and ambushes. His right hand brushed the sheath of his curved blade, its hilt polished smooth by decades of use. His left slipped into his coat pocket, closing around something smaller. Colder. A lighter. The same one he hadn’t sparked since Busan. Since the fire. Since her.

He moved through wreckage without looking down, stepping past the nameless, past the shattered furniture, past the ink of blood pressed too deep into the floor to ever be erased.

When he stopped, it was beside her.

Once, she had been just a girl with a borrowed jacket, laughing too easily, her smile chipped and reckless, not yet old enough to know what vengeance demanded. Now she stood in the middle of a battlefield, shaped into something more myth than woman. A revenant draped in survival.

Ricker didn’t look directly at her. He didn’t need to. She would hear him.

“About that one you owe me,” he said.

His voice was gravel, scarred by smoke, worn by silence. Not weary, not exactly. Just ground down. Y/N turned her head, the world pivoting on her axis. Her eyes met his.

“Yes?” she asked.

“I’m gonna collect someday.”

She didn’t blink. The corner of her mouth shifted, half defiance, half acknowledgment.

“I’ll be disappointed if you don’t.”

That was enough.

He walked on. Past her. Past Yoongi. Past the graveyard their war had carved into the walls. He did not look back. At the threshold, where the stink of blood thinned into the burn of winter air, he paused once. His eyes dropped, not behind, but down.

Lynn’s body twisted, broken, her arm gone, her face locked in agony. She was weeping still. Her skin was paler than usual, and Ricker was shocked she was alive at all.

“Tough luck about that arm, Lynn,” he muttered.

And then he stepped outside.

Out of the House of Blue Leaves. Away from the red and ruin. Into air so cold it scalded like baptism. The sky was heavy with stars, the moon swollen and jaundiced against the black. Snow fell thick and slow, spiraling in silence, turning alleys into graves disguised as wonderland.

Mr. Ricker vanished into it without trace. As if he had never existed at all.

Inside, Y/N didn’t move. The cold bit into her cheeks, sharpening her breath into pale ribbons that lifted and curled in the fractured air. Still, she held steady, her body rigid as if carved from stone. Across the ruin, Yoongi watched. His composure was the same as it had always been, carefully measured, untouchable, but a twitch at the corner of his mouth betrayed him. It was fleeting, but it was there. A ghost of amusement, like a man overhearing a private joke that belonged only to him.

“Very funny,” he said in English. His tone was smooth, unhurried, every word sliding like smoke across the silence. Beneath the calm, though, was steel, sarcasm so thin it cut without needing force. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Men like him never did.

The space between them shrank, not in distance, but in weight. The tension pulled tight, the way it does before the first step of a waltz, when both dancers already know the choreography and how the night will end. His gaze dropped to the blade in her hand, deliberate, lingering. He studied it the way a butcher studies a knife, not admiring, not dismissing, but assessing how much work it could do, and how quickly.

Then, without a word, he turned on his heel. The sliding door rattled open and closed behind him.

Y/N followed. Her steps were heavy, dragging through exhaustion, her lungs burning with every ragged breath. Around her, the ones who hadn’t fled still moaned, whimpering in half-conscious agony. They clutched at wounds too deep to mend, their voices fading into the background like the dying cries of animals in a snare. She ignored them. She walked up the steps, across the balcony, and out through the same door Yoongi had vanished into.

The cold struck her like a new world.

It was a small garden, blanketed in snow. Soft white covered every stone, every branch, every path, and the flakes kept falling, steady, silent, relentless. The design was precise, traditional, Japanese in style, each corner carefully balanced as though someone had arranged it by hand. She was sure Yoongi had chosen it himself. A pond lay in the far corner, half-frozen, rocks rising around it like sentinels. On the other side stood a low wooden fence, decorative, unnecessary, meant to keep form more than function. Y/N wondered what it looked like in summer—green, alive, with seats placed for guests to marvel at its order. It was beautiful. Too beautiful for blood.

Her gaze returned to him.

Yoongi sat perched on one of the stones by the pond, his suit sharp even in ruin, the large katana resting across his hands. Snow touched his shoulders, his hair, melted into his skin, and he didn’t move to brush it away. He looked serene, as if he were part of the garden itself. When his eyes found hers, there was no flicker, no hesitation. Only recognition.

“Rabbit,” he said.

Her chest clenched, her stomach tightening into hard knots. “Sugar,” she answered.

His eyes dropped to the Jung blade still hanging heavy in her grip. “Your instrument.” The word lingered, soft, edged. “Quite impressive.”

It wasn’t praise. It dripped like poisoned wine, sweet at the surface, bitter enough to kill underneath.

“Thank you,” Y/N said in Korean. Her voice was steady, almost gentle, as though she were reciting something sacred.

His brow lifted slightly, the smallest spark of interest. His eyes sharpened. Not with rage. Not with admiration. With calculation. The cold patience of a predator watching to see whether the prey would bolt, fight, or fold.

“Where was it made?” he asked, also in Korean. The shift in language was deliberate. Not louder, but heavier. He wasn’t asking about steel. He was testing her roots, probing the ground she had risen from.

“Gwangju,” she said. One word, sharp as any blade. Enough to make the silence taut as wire.

Yoongi didn’t flinch, but inside his stillness something cracked. Just a pause, barely longer than a heartbeat. But with him, even silence carried meaning. And this pause thundered louder than any gunshot.

“Who in Gwangju forged that steel?” His voice had lost its polish now. Stripped bare. Raw. It sounded like something corroded inside him long ago, waiting decades before it clawed its way out.

“Jung Hoseok.” Her tone didn’t waver. Flat. Steady. An oath sworn in blood and bone.

The name fell into the garden like a blade. The silence that followed pressed down harder than the snow. It lingered, sharp as a guillotine held mid-swing. Yoongi’s jaw twitched, small but enough. Recognition. Memory. A truth too old, too heavy, to stay buried.

“You lie,” he hissed.

She didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Her stare locked on his, unyielding. Her face unchanged except for the faintest tug at her mouth. Not a smile. Not mockery. Just the smallest shift, like someone who had already seen the ending written and accepted the price of reading it.

His eyes dropped to her sword again, lips tightening as though he’d bitten into something spoiled. A brittle laugh scraped from his throat, short and humorless. He stepped forward once, and the garden bent with him. Heat rolled off his body, pressing into her skin. Not warmth, but weight. The kind legends wear, heavy as iron, walking in on the soles of their feet.

“Swords don’t get tired,” he said, calm again, voice honed to a razor edge. His eyes trailed over the stains dried into her tracksuit, red spreading through yellow in uneven strokes. “I hope you saved your strength. Because if you didn’t, you won’t last five minutes.”

She didn’t reply. Her silence was deliberate, drawn taut enough to feel like thunder before it cracks the sky.

Yoongi rose from the stone. Snow clung to his slippers, soaking them, but he didn’t care. He walked into the cleared space at the center of the garden, the area bare of ornament, reserved for something older than decoration. Behind him, a bamboo fountain tipped, spilled, and snapped back, the hollow clack of wood against stone echoing into the night.

His head tilted lazily. He gestured outward, toward the whitened garden around them. “If this is the last view you’ll get…” His voice thinned, distant, more memory than warning. “You could do worse.”

He opened his hand to the night. Snowflakes landed, melted instantly, and vanished into his skin. He didn’t notice.

He lowered himself with the same unbothered calm he had worn all night. First one slipper, then the other, he slid them off and nudged them neatly behind him. And then he bowed. His spine folded into the motion with precision.

Y/N followed every shift, her eyes locked, her stare absolute. The way she tracked him was scripture being written in smoke. Holy, dangerous, permanent even as it threatened to vanish. Her pulse thudded steady in her chest, a drumbeat echoing through the silence. She didn’t flinch when he began to rise, didn’t yield when his shadow stretched back over her, long and sharp against the snow. She stood rooted, blood soaking her body until the yellow of her tracksuit looked lacquered in red. She burned from within like iron cooling fresh out of the forge, radiating heat that had nowhere left to go but out.

When Yoongi straightened fully, the shift was absolute. Whatever softness had clung to him vanished. He no longer looked like a man at all. He was a weapon incarnate, a blade given flesh, honed by years of violence, inevitable as gravity. His right hand closed around the sheath with a careful reverence, fingertips brushing it the way one touches a relic too sacred to mishandle.

Then came the sound. The clean, final whisper of steel escaping wood. The draw was smooth, practiced beyond perfection, a motion too refined to belong to anyone but him. The air itself seemed to recoil, sliced open by the blade’s first taste of freedom.

Y/N felt it ripple through her body. Down her spine, into her chest, out across her skin. Her flesh went cold even as her blood still steamed, as if his sword had cut not the air but her directly, reminding her of inevitability.

He stood balanced now, blade in one hand, sheath in the other, his stance wide and grounded, his body rooted like an old tree that had weathered centuries of storms. The air around him seemed to contract, the night itself tightening until every sound grew sharper, every breath louder. He no longer resembled a fighter preparing for combat. He looked like something older, something elemental. Like a god who had descended only to demand tribute, his very breathing carrying the weight of judgment already passed.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. The silence between them was already alive with the challenge, vibrating through the cold like a wire drawn too tight, trembling under invisible pressure, waiting for the single strike that would snap it apart.

Y/N broke it first.

She surged forward, the Jung sword slicing through the air with such speed it parted the breath from his lips, grazing his cheek by the width of a thought. He didn’t blink. His own blade snapped up with perfect precision, intercepting hers mid-swing. With a sharp shove, he hurled her back, the impact jolting through her arms, rattling bone, reminding her brutally that Yoongi Min was not just myth. He was strength wrapped in silence, legend anchored in flesh.

Steel clashed again, harder now, the sound ringing out like thunder splitting the rafters. Snow shook loose from the beams above, falling in pale streaks that looked more like ash than purity. She stumbled back, lungs heaving, arms shaking with the weight of each blow, breath ragged in the cold. But Yoongi didn’t press. He stayed rooted, calm, watching her with the same look he had given her when they first met.

Then he came forward.

The restraint vanished. His strikes carried bite now, sharp, fast, precise. Each cut was meant to wear her down, to carve her away piece by piece until nothing remained standing. He was not reckless. Never reckless. But urgency coursed through him, a desperation woven into his precision. A man who knew power was slipping and meant to seize back every shred of it before it was gone. His blade swung like judgment incarnate, heavy, inevitable, the promise of execution written in steel.

Y/N met him. Parried. Absorbed each strike, each tremor, though her body screamed with every impact. The force rattled her teeth, scorched her lungs, but she yielded ground deliberately, pulling him in, letting him believe she was fading. Letting him believe his legend still cowed her. Because Cottonmouth always fought the same way: calculated, efficient, arrogant. And arrogance, no matter how practiced, always left an opening.

She found it. And she cut.

Her blade slid into the narrowest seam between them, no wasted motion, no hesitation, pure precision. Surgical. Merciless. It struck the sheath in his off-hand. For a heartbeat it seemed it might glance away. Instead the sound came sharp and dry, like winter bone splitting.

The relic fractured.

The sheath, his sacred companion whispered about with reverence, split in two.

The noise froze everything.

Yoongi’s face hardly moved, but his stillness spoke more than shock ever could. He let the halves fall from his fingers, soft into the snow drifting through the shattered windows. They landed almost silently, a whisper of wood against powder, but the silence that followed was thunderous, heavy enough to choke the air.

Y/N saw it. The flicker in his eyes. The fracture in the armor he wore like skin. The first spark of disbelief. He hadn’t thought she could touch him. Not truly. Not ever.

But the fight was far from done.

Their blades circled again, pressing, testing, each strike sharper and heavier than the last. The air between them thrummed with something raw, electric, alive, as though even gods leaned closer to witness which mortal would break first. Then the clash erupted again, steel on steel, louder, angrier.

There was no rhythm anymore. No pattern. Only instinct. Only survival. He lunged; she deflected. He spun; she ducked. Their swords carved silver arcs through the frozen dark, sparks flaring like fleeting stars. Her boots slid through snow turned slick with blood, her lungs tearing for air, every muscle aflame. She leapt, blade raised high, body screaming with the effort. But she was a fraction too slow.

Yoongi turned beneath her arc, movement smooth as water slipping downhill. His grip reversed in a blink, his blade flashing upward. The steel tore across her back in one clean, merciless stroke.

Pain ignited instantly. White-hot. Blinding. Violent. Fire streaked through her nerves, exploding down her spine. She didn’t scream, but the sound caught in her throat, jagged as glass. Her knees buckled and she hit the snow hard. Cold rushed to meet her, flooding the wound, dragging her breath into broken gasps. Blood spilled fast, soaking into the yellow tracksuit already stiff with ruin, blooming across her skin like a war flag.

Above her, Yoongi stood tall, his shadow stretching long across the snow, swallowing her shape.

And then he grinned.

It spread slow across his face, deliberate, cruel, never reaching his eyes. He didn’t need it to. The curve of his mouth alone was venom enough.

“Silly little church girl,” he murmured, each word laced with disdain, dropped into the night as carelessly as ash flicked from a cigarette. His sword rested easy across his shoulder, casual, as though it belonged there more than his own skin. “Who likes to play with samurai swords.”

He angled the blade so the moonlight kissed its edge, drawing a thin strip of light down its length until it gleamed like a promise. His voice dropped quieter, colder, every syllable sharpened to venom.

“You can’t fight like a samurai.” A pause. His mouth curled sharper. “But you can die like one.”

The steel shimmered with certainty.

Y/N didn’t move. Not at first. Her breath rattled shallow through her chest, scraping her throat raw, each inhale jagged, each exhale torn from broken lungs. Blood poured down her back in burning rivers, soaking into the snow until it clung sticky and dark against her skin. Her body screamed with a thousand voices—stay down, quit, let it end. Every nerve begged for surrender. Every fiber pleaded for mercy.

But deeper than the agony, older than exhaustion, something stirred. Something forged years ago in El Paso, when the world had tried to bury her under blood and betrayal. The part they thought they had left rotting in the dust. The part beaten until it broke, and then hardened into something that could not. That part rose now, louder than the pain, louder than death itself.

Faces burned through her mind like smoke from a pyre. Tommy, crooked grin, mischief and warmth. Their child, round cheeks, eyes wide with innocence stolen too soon. The chapel, flowers still fresh, laughter echoing in its walls before bullets turned joy into carnage. All of it rushed back. Not as sorrow. Not as grief. But as fuel. Not hope. Not resilience. Rage.

Her grip tightened on the Jung sword’s hilt, slick with sweat and blood. Her other hand clawed into the snow, nails tearing against ice until she found purchase. She bit down hard, swallowing the cry that wanted to rip free, and began to rise. Inch by inch. Every movement was agony. But still she climbed, dragging herself upright like something pulled unwilling from the grave. The blade dug into the frozen ground, an anchor, a staff, a tether to the living. Her breath spilled in clouds, ragged and uneven, but real. Alive. She rose. Not fast, not graceful. Intent. A revenant refusing burial.

Yoongi watched. He didn’t move. Didn’t mock. Didn’t taunt. His smirk, always present like armor, was gone. For once, his face carried only disbelief.

And then she stood. Shaking. Blood-soaked. Snow clinging to her hair and shoulders like ash falling from a ruined cathedral. But upright. Alive. Her breathing steadied, still heavy but controlled. Her eyes locked on him, not with hatred alone but with something sharper, older. Something carved into marrow.

“Attack me,” she rasped. Her voice cracked, raw as torn leather, but steady. “With everything you have.”

He did.

His blade came down in a blur, steel shrieking as it cut through the night. She met it, just barely, sparks snapping through the air as the two swords collided. The sound tore across the ruin like an animal’s cry. They spun, pressed, steel biting steel. She moved differently now. Not cleaner. Not easier. But with fury boiling through her veins, lightening her bones, driving her forward when her body should have quit. Each strike he gave, she answered. Not perfect, not without strain. But enough. Enough to hold him. Enough to bite back.

Then she shifted. Fast. Low. Her blade swept inside his guard, precise as a scalpel. She felt it connect, the resistance of flesh, the scrape of bone beneath. Heat burst over her knuckles. Yoongi’s breath caught. He staggered, silk and linen tearing as blood spread dark across his suit.

He didn’t fall. But he faltered.

His eyes rose back to hers. The sharpness remained, but the arrogance was gone. What replaced it was bare, unarmored. Not weakness. Something heavier. Recognition.

She didn’t move. She didn’t press. She waited.

A beat stretched. His shoulders dipped, just slightly, the tip of his blade lowering as though dragged by the weight of something unseen. And when he finally spoke, it wasn’t in English. It came in Korean, quiet, almost worn.

“For ridiculing you earlier,” he said, his voice rough at the edges, “I apologize.”

She blinked, slow. A tear welled at the corner of her eye but refused to fall. Her stare didn’t soften, but it deepened. She held him there. Saw him. And for the first time in years, he saw her too.

Memory struck him then. Not polished. Not neat. Jagged. Raw. He was back in the council chamber, smoke hanging thick in the air. The long table stretched forever, lined with men who thought themselves untouchable. He had stood there in his pressed black suit, silence daring them to doubt him. Not his mind. Not his power. Him. His blood. A Japanese mother. An American father. A boy scavenging from two countries that never wanted him. He had clawed his way out of rubble, spit, and fists until they had no choice but to crown him. He remembered the moment. The words spoken evenly, clean as a guillotine: insult that, and you will lose your head.

And yet, tonight, he had done it himself. To her.

He had spat on her survival, her blood, her scars. Turned her marrow into mockery. For what? Dominance? Habit? Fear?

The memories kept coming. Her laughter, loud, reckless, too alive for the shadowed rooms they inhabited. Her rough hands closing over his as they brewed bitter tea in a cracked kitchenette in Seoul. Her voice in the dark, reciting poetry by candlelight when the power failed, her cadence soft, reverent. His Rabbit. Not timid. Never timid. Quick. Clever. Always just out of reach. His friend. His quiet. His peace. Before ambition stripped him hollow and filled the cavity with stone.

Yoongi wasn’t a man who entertained regret. Regret was weakness, and weakness had no place in his kingdom. Faces of the dead blurred into faceless ghosts. He had long since burned away their weight. But not hers. Y/N never left. She had lived under his ribs all these years, a wound that never scarred, a ghost that never stopped whispering. Since the massacre at Two Pines, her name had lived on his tongue like ash.

The hotel came next. Cracked walls stinking of mildew and cheap rot. They had holed up there before the storm broke. Taehyung sat with his whiskey glass, immaculate in his suit, calm like the eye of a hurricane. Yoongi remembered the sickness in his stomach. Not from the job, but from what it was going to cost.

“It could have been a mistake, Tae. You don’t have to do this. You’ll regret it. For the rest of your life, you’ll regret it.” His voice had been low then. Not pleading, but near it.

Taehyung’s eyes had been stone. “A mistake? Don’t insult me. She faked her death. She left me to mourn her. And now she’s marrying some clown with a salesman’s grin and a haircut from hell? That’s not a mistake. Forgetting your anniversary is a mistake. This is betrayal.”

He drank again, rage stiffening every word. Namjoon and Jimin had tried too, voices raised, reason thrown into the storm. Nothing landed. Nothing could touch the fury. Only Brandi Phoenix smiled that night, her grin sharp, unbothered, thrilled. She had no honor, no loyalty. If she hadn’t worn their colors, Yoongi would have slit her throat years earlier.

He had turned away from them, the taste of disgust thick on his tongue. He didn’t want to see their faces anymore. Didn’t want to hear the silence that meant consent. The hallway outside was dim, reeking of stale air, and Namjoon was there, back against the wall, arms folded tight, jaw locked like stone. His eyes shadowed, heavy.

“Any luck?” Namjoon asked without looking.

Yoongi shook his head. He didn’t slow. There was nothing left to say. Nothing either of them could throw into the air that would shift the rails they were already bound to. Some burdens you didn’t stop. You carried them. All the way down.

Two Pines went under faster than Yoongi could have ever believed. Twenty minutes. That was all it took. Less time than a cheap lunch break, less time than a throwaway episode of some half-watched drama. Twenty minutes to turn a wedding into a graveyard.

At first, the chapel had been alive with fragile joy. The kind of ordinary happiness that feels almost too soft for the world. Laughter rose in small bursts, chairs scraped lightly against the wooden floor, music hummed in the air like a prayer. For a moment, it had felt untouchable. Then it broke. Silence cracked like glass splitting under weight, and the screaming began.

Brandi moved first. Of course she did. Jealousy had been leaking out of her for weeks, thick and sour, and when the moment came she unleashed it like venom. Her fists landed hard, sharp, each strike carrying something personal she never dared speak aloud. She grinned as she hit, grinned as Y/N staggered back, grinned like it was relief to finally let her cruelty show. Yoongi never asked why it was so easy for her. Never wanted to know what rot in her chest made violence taste like joy.

Namjoon followed. He stepped in without hesitation, his face fixed and unreadable, but Yoongi saw it—the difference. His blows were precise, controlled, aimed high, deliberate. Always above the waist. Always away from her stomach. Some part of him, buried under rage and loyalty, still wanted to leave one piece of her untouched.

Jimin was next. His punch was clean, practiced, a sharp crack across her cheekbone that spun her sideways. She stumbled straight into Yoongi’s reach, and before thought could catch up, before choice could intervene, his body acted. His heel whipped into her jaw, a roundhouse born not of will but of training, reflex tightening his muscles before his mind even spoke. She went down hard.

And even then, she didn’t shield her face.

Her arms folded around her belly instead, protective, desperate, as though she could hold the small life growing inside her safe with nothing but her shaking hands. Blood soaked into the white silk of her dress, staining it with streaks of red and brown. Her chest rose and fell in uneven gasps, lips parting like she wanted to speak but couldn’t find the air. Then, barely audible, fragile as a dying ember, Yoongi heard it. Close enough to catch. Close enough that it seared.

“Tae…”

Not anger. Not fear. Not even plea. Just worn-down exhaustion. The voice of someone trapped in a nightmare, reaching for a name like it could anchor them.

She looked ruined. A painting left out in the rain, colors bleeding, edges dissolving into nothing. Her hair plastered to her face, her hands trembling as she clutched her stomach. And over it all, the footsteps came. Measured. Calm. Almost casual. Across the broken chapel floor.

Yoongi turned.

Taehyung was already raising the gun. The shot split the chapel wide open, a sharp and final crack that burned the air. One bullet. Straight to the head.

Yoongi flinched. Not from the sight, but from the sound. The sound of something ending.

He turned away. Toward the open doorway where the desert stretched endless, sand shimmering under merciless sun. His throat locked. His hands shook. The only words he managed came out hoarse, stripped of weight, lost almost before they left his mouth.

“I’m sorry.”

But they meant nothing. Too late to matter. Too late to change a thing.

That day clung to him like smoke. Years passed, and it never loosened its grip. It followed him into the quiet, crawled behind his eyes whenever he shut them. Twenty minutes replayed for decades. And now, here in the snow, staring at her—bloodied, alive, breathing—it surged back, jagged and merciless. She should have been gone. He had believed she was gone. But she wasn’t. And everything he had buried clawed back up through the ice.

When their eyes met, something shifted. Not sharp. Not dramatic. But heavy. A weight pressing into the space between them. Something real. Not enemies. Not allies. Something harder. Survivors. Of each other. Of everything.

Y/N felt it too. Her chest tightened, her throat threatened to close around the weight rising there. But she forced it down. She remembered Hoseok’s words, burned into her like scripture: For those regarded as warriors, the vanquishing of thine enemy must be the only concern. Suppress all emotion. All compassion. Kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be God Himself.

She wanted to believe she was that hardened. That the years had stripped every softness out of her, left her nothing but steel. But here he was. Yoongi. Still breathing. Still silent. Watching her with eyes she once knew better than her own.

He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just stood there. Less a man than a relic, haunted, guilt and regret clinging like frost to his skin. Snow drifted down soft and indifferent, blanketing ruin in white. Blood thickened the air metallic and sharp.

Her sword trembled in her grip. Her arms shook. Not from the cold, but from something deeper. Something raw. Something she didn’t want to name.

She stared at him, and when her voice came it carried clean across the ruin between them.

“Accepted.”

Yoongi’s eyes closed for a single breath, and when they opened again, the fight in them had changed. No pride left. No mask of command. No sneer of defiance. What lingered instead was quieter, dimmer. A flicker that might have been recognition, or something thinner still, the faint outline of forgiveness. His chin dipped almost imperceptibly, a bow so small it might not have existed at all. Then his hands tightened around the hilt of his weapon, and all that softness vanished. No more words. Just steel.

“Ready?” Y/N asked. Her voice rasped, frayed at the edges, more breath than sound. She wasn’t expecting an answer.

But a tear still slid down her cheek.

“Yeah,” he whispered.

He came at her fast. The blade cut the air with a hiss, movement sharp and efficient, the kind of precision that only comes from a lifetime sharpened down to muscle memory. His first strike was low and wide. Not reckless. Testing. Probing her balance, her resolve. She didn’t step back. She met him, her sword colliding with his in a crack like stone splitting. The impact shoved them close, shoulder to shoulder, blades grinding, breaths mingling in clouds of frost. For a sliver of a heartbeat, it felt old. Familiar. Like echoes of a life when their hands hadn’t yet been soaked in ruin. Then he tore away, slipping into the wrecked garden like smoke dissolving in the wind.

She followed. Snow cracked under her boots, each step a mirror of his, their paths tracing opposite arcs around what had once been a decorative fence. They circled each other slowly, deliberately, the rhythm steady, inevitable, like a drumbeat under the winter moon. She didn’t let herself see the red soaking the snow, or the fragments of what had once been joy scattered across the ground. Her eyes never left him.

When they met again, he struck.

And this time, she was ready.

Her blade rose with certainty, cutting through the air fast and quiet. The sound that followed wasn’t theatrical. No scream. No staggering collapse. Just the wet, dreadful rip of something being undone. Blood spattered the snow in a sharp arc, painting white into red. Her cut had been merciless. 

The crown of his head split in a single stroke, the severed scalp tumbling away, landing soft in the snow like it had always belonged there.

Yoongi didn’t drop. Not immediately. He swayed, blinking slow, his fingers loosening around the hilt until his sword slipped from them and fell into the snow with a tired, muted thud.

“That really was… a Jung Hoseok sword,” he murmured. The words weren’t meant for her. They weren’t meant for anyone. They just drifted out into the night, carried on the breath of a man surrounded by ghosts.

For a single heartbeat, he stood still. His gaze fixed past the garden, past the broken walls, out toward some horizon no one else could see. The snow seemed untouched there. The pond, the rocks, the faint trace of bamboo. It all held a serenity that hadn’t yet been stained. His vision dimmed, the edges graying, then darkening as the world folded in. He sank slowly, knees first, then onto his side, as though the earth itself was guiding him down.

And as he fell, memory found him. Not the betrayal. Not the blood. Not the chapel gunshot that should have ended her years ago. No. He went further back. To a boy of eleven, curled under a bed. His father’s body convulsing. His mother drowning in her own breath. The metallic reek of blood. The mattress above him shuddering as a blade tore through, missing him by inches only because the killer hadn’t checked twice. He had lived that night not by strength, not by will, but by oversight. And decades later, he had become the same kind of shadow that once entered his home.

There was no fear in him now as the snow drank his blood. Only inevitability. It was over. Finally. Maybe he could have finished her. Maybe. But deep inside, he understood the truth. Some part of him had always been waiting for this. For her. To end what neither of them could ever bury.

Silly Rabbit, he thought as the darkness closed in, edges collapsing, the center fading. Trix are for kids.

Then he was gone.

His body tipped into the snow.

Y/N stood with her back to him, sword still raised, her grip white-knuckled though her arms trembled from exhaustion. Blood traced the edge of the Jung blade in slow, deliberate lines, dripping to the ground with the rhythm of a clock. The sound it made against the snow was delicate, almost tender, as if mocking what it had cost to make it fall.

Behind her, silence thickened. For a heartbeat, it seemed endless. Until the second sound came. Heavier. Denser. The surrender of a body giving itself to the ground.

She didn’t turn. Not yet. She couldn’t.

The weight of it moved through her like a second heartbeat, echoing in her chest, promising it would not leave her even when the blood had dried from her skin. Her shoulders shook, not with cold, but with the truth of what she had just done. She had killed Min Yoongi. Cottonmouth. The man who had given her her first name, her first lesson in betrayal, her first target. Her first revenge.

And it didn’t taste like triumph. It tasted like ash dissolving on her tongue.

Justice had always been a lie. She felt it now with a certainty that hollowed her chest. It didn’t bring back the dead. It didn’t repair what had been broken. It only carved new wounds in places already scarred. Hoseok had told her once: kill without feeling, let compassion die. But Hoseok had never buried his blade in someone he once loved. He had never been forced to split open history and walk away from it breathing.

She had. And her humanity had stayed. And now it punished her.

At last, she turned. Slowly. Carefully. Her gaze slid across the snow until it found him slumped, still, no longer legend or predator. Just a man cooling in the cold. The hair she once combed through her fingers lay several feet away, matted with blood. And for a moment, all she could remember were motel nights with the hum of broken air vents, the smell of his shampoo, his voice curling against her skin like smoke.

Now he was silence.

Her knees threatened to buckle as she staggered toward the bench at the garden’s edge. She dropped into it, her body giving under the weight of everything she had carried. The sword trailed behind her, dragging across stone until it clattered against rock, exhausted as she was.

The Hoseok Jung blade gleamed beneath the moon, terrible in its honesty. It had done exactly what it was built to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Y/N leaned forward, her elbows braced to her knees, fingers buried in her hair, face hidden. But the sobs still came. Low, broken, torn out of her like splinters.

Why am I crying? she thought.

This was what she had wanted. What she had earned. Four years of silence and rage chewing at her bones, four years of a life spent bleeding toward this one moment. And still the tears came, because justice didn’t rewrite the past. It only added weight to the ruin already there.

She wasn’t reborn. She wasn’t absolved. She was still the Black Mamba. Still the woman who slit throats in Shanghai. Still the one who left bodies cooling in Hongdae. Still the one Taehyung once called his favorite. She had tried to change once. She had tried to marry Tommy. Tried to build a life of softness. Tried to be a mother. But love hadn’t been strong enough to rewrite her blood.

Tonight she had killed more men than in any job Taehyung ever gave her. Eighty-eight, maybe more. Guards. Mercenaries. Hired shadows who never asked why. Their blood clung to her boots, to her skin, painted her yellow suit into lacquered red. The only one who had escaped was Jungkook Jeon. And even that wasn’t mercy. Just luck. Temporary.

But Yoongi. Oh, Yoongi.

She had killed her friend.

She hadn’t stopped to think while it was happening. The fire in her chest had burned too hot, too wild, leaving no room for hesitation. Rage had been oxygen, the only thing keeping her upright when grief would have buried her. No one had told her what it would feel like to cut down someone who once made her laugh at 2 a.m. Someone who once brought her tea without asking. Someone who once let her read poems in the dark while he listened, his head resting against hers. No one had told her how hollow it would feel to turn a memory into a corpse cooling in the snow.

His death didn’t feel like a beginning. It felt like a gravestone. His, and hers. Something in her had gone into the ground with him.

She sat there until her back ached, until her knees locked, until the cold pressed into her bones and made her numb. The garden held its stillness, snow falling quiet as forgiveness that would never come. When at last she moved, it was slow, each gesture pulled out of her like resistance. She reached into her coat and drew a folded square of white cloth.

It looked wrong in her hands. Too clean, too gentle for a night like this. She had carried it for years, worn soft by time, though she had never used it. She had stitched it herself, back when she still believed revenge could be neat. Containable. Something she could control. The thread was black, tight, unyielding. One word stood there, stark as prophecy:

Taehyung.

She crouched beside Yoongi’s body. For a moment she just looked at him, eyes fixed but hands still. She didn’t touch his skin. She didn’t reach for his hair. She didn’t even brush the blood darkening his suit. There was nothing left for her to hold onto. Only the sword.

The cloth came from her pocket, soft from years of carrying it, edges frayed from being folded and unfolded too many times. She wrapped it around the Jung blade and began to clean. Each stroke was slow, gentle. A rhythm formed in her hands.

The steel caught the faint light of the snow-muted sky. For a heartbeat it looked clean, sharp, whole. But she knew the truth. It would never be clean again. Not after this. The blade had taken something it couldn’t return. Something she couldn’t return.

When she slid it back into its sheath, the sound was quiet, almost gentle. Like a door closing in another room, final enough to echo.

Snow drifted around her, slower now, heavier flakes falling in quiet arcs. It should have looked peaceful. To anyone else, it might have. As if the sky itself was mourning, soft and sorrowful. But Y/N felt no peace. Not a trace. Only the gnawing weight of what still lay ahead.

She rose. Her legs stiffened under her, joints screaming from the fight, her whole body worn raw. She moved anyway. Step by step. Her boots crunched over shattered tile and frozen blood, across the ruin she had written with her own hands. A ruin that could never be rebuilt. Lantern light guttered out behind her, leaving only shadows and snow. The wind bit at her face, but the cold no longer reached her. She didn’t feel it. She only moved, forward, because forward was the only direction left.

At the edge of the lot, her motorcycle waited. Silent. Patient. The one constant that had never betrayed her. She crouched beside it, fingers stiff as she pulled her pack open. Inside, beneath spare cartridges and blood-stained cloth, was the notebook. Leather-bound, cracked along the spine, heavy despite its size.

She flipped it open. The pages were crowded with names, scrawled in dark ink, messy but certain. A list carved out of vengeance, a scripture written in blood long before tonight. She turned back to the first page.

1. Yoongi Min — Cottonmouth

She uncapped her pen. She drew a line through it. One down.

The wind howled through the wreckage behind her, low and aching, like something wounded that would never heal. She closed the book and shoved it back into her bag. There was more work ahead. Always more.

Lynn Easton was still inside. The woman with the shrill ringtone, the laugh that scraped against nerves, the one who thought cruelty was clever. Y/N felt nothing for her. Not rage. Not hatred. Not even contempt. She was just another name. Another task. Another line waiting for its stroke.

She lifted her eyes to the sky. It had shifted now, pale gray thinning into the edges of blue. Snow fell in crooked lines, carried by the wind. A flake landed on her cheek, melting instantly into warmth. She still carried warmth inside her somehow, though she couldn’t tell if it was mercy or punishment.

A smile flickered against her lips, faint, tired, not belonging to joy. The kind of smile born from grief too deep to cry out loud.

“Goodbye, sugar,” she whispered. Her voice was soft, but she meant it. Every syllable.

Then she turned.

▪────  ⚔  ────▪

Framed in the jaundiced glow of the trunk light, Y/N barely looked human. The light painted her in sick shades of yellow, cutting across the helmet that consumed her head. That was what erased her more than anything: the helmet. Smooth. Gleaming. Faceless. Chrome yellow, polished so clean it reflected the ruin around her in warped, liquid shapes. Round as a skull. No eyes. No mouth. No trace of a person beneath. It stripped her down until nothing was left but intent. Not armor. Not protection. A declaration.

I’m not here to be seen. I’m here to finish something.

Snow slid down its curve in thin sheets, dripping like wax from a candle. Whatever softness Y/N might have once carried—wife, mother, lover, friend—was gone. Under that helmet she wasn’t a woman anymore. She was the shape vengeance takes when it finally stands up. A blade that happened to breathe.

The view from the trunk distorted everything. Angled upward, the world pressed in too close, too wrong, as if whoever looked was the one trapped inside. And in truth, they were. Because that was where Lynn Easton lay.

Folded in on herself. Barely alive.

Once, she had been untouchable. The legal architect behind Seoul’s dirtiest dealings. The immaculate woman who turned chaos into contracts and blood into profit. Now she was curled fetal, reduced to something that could only be called meat. Her silk blouse clung to her body, ruined and dark with blood that had thickened to black under the jaundiced light. Her left arm was gone. Not severed clean, but torn jagged, stolen the way vengeance always steals: ugly, deliberate, leaving only ruin. She had tried to fight it. Torn a strip of her own blouse and tied it around the stump, frantic, desperate. But the cloth had soaked through hours ago, and now it hung useless, just another reminder of what she had lost.

Her face told the rest. Mascara bled down her cheeks in crooked rivers. Her lips trembled soundlessly. The screaming had ended long before, the kind of screaming that still believes someone might come, that help might arrive. What came after was this: the shallow drag of breath, the hollow vacancy in her eyes, the stunned look of someone still alive when they shouldn’t be. She stared up at Y/N with that emptiness, like looking at something that shouldn’t exist at all.

Y/N didn’t move. Didn’t speak. She stood at the lip of the trunk, framed in the sick light, visor catching the glow until it looked sculpted from glass. Still. Eternal. A statue left behind by a civilization already burned to dust.

Then she shut the trunk.

Darkness swallowed Lynn whole.

The engine ignited, low and furious. Tires screamed against the ice, flinging snow in ragged sprays as the car ripped away from the chapel ruins. The Mazda XOXO, ridiculous name, bubblegum pink paint, now looked obscene. Smeared with blood across its hood, gleaming stupid under the blur of snow. A toy turned weapon. Its headlights tore the storm apart, searchlights cutting across a world that looked like the end of everything.

Behind the wheel, Y/N sat rigid. Helmet still on. She didn’t grip the wheel like someone possessed. There was no frenzy, no chaos. Every shift of the gear was a shovelful of dirt. Every mile, a nail driven into a coffin. She wasn’t chasing. She was burying. Her spine never touched the seat. Her hands never loosened. Her eyes never closed. Forward. Always forward.

Then suddenly she stopped.

The road was nothing. No signs. No houses. Just snow stretching into the horizon, silence piled heavy on the world. The storm had thinned here. Even the air felt like it was holding its breath.

The trunk creaked open.

Lynn blinked against the dim light. Disoriented. Worse than before. Her blood had crusted, drying her blouse into something stiff and brittle. Her skin was chalk-pale, drawn so thin it looked ready to split. But she still saw it, that shape above her. That helmet. Faceless. The visor gleamed, warped with light until it seemed almost liquid, like looking at a god through water, impossible to grasp.

In Y/N’s hand was a syringe.

Not plastic. Not sterile.

Gold.