Chapter 14 The Prince of Wrath
The Prince of Wrath
Taeyang
There’s blood on my knuckles. Again.
It’s drying in the old splits of skin, flaking rust-red over bone, a ritual as tired as it is useless: find something to fight, win, bleed a little, pretend the noise inside me got quieter.
It never does.
The training ground looks like a battlefield that refused to end—scorched stone, shattered sparring poles, sand gone black where my temper kissed it.
The guards keep their distance now. They’ve learned the turn of my shoulders that means don’t.
Even the miasma sky—the demon realm’s permanent bruise—hangs back, as if the air itself has had enough of me.
It used to sit easy on my lungs. Not anymore.
Now it feels like trying to breathe underwater because I know she couldn’t breathe here. Not without me.
Yuna.
Every step I took away from her carved another channel through me, a riverbed with no water, the shape of something that should be flowing and isn’t. I kept running anyway, because staying—staying would have ruined her.
That’s the lie I was proud of: sacrifice, dressed in armor. Truth is smaller and meaner.
She is light. I am rage. She is fae royalty, born of wild magic and moonfire and the kind of grace that survives a thousand courts.
I am the knife they throw when they don’t care where it lands.
I was bred to break things and then call that purpose.
What right did I ever have to stand beside her and call it fate?
My jaw locks until my teeth hurt. The bond answers the thought like it’s a challenge.
Heat flares under my ribs, a spark turning greedy.
The mark ignites and starts to eat its way outward—fire through ice, light through scar—until I’m pressing my palm flat to my side and cursing through my teeth.
The sound rattles the obsidian arch to my left.
A hairline crack skitters through the stone like a fleeing thing.
“Not now,” I snarl at myself, at destiny, at whatever ancient cruelty thought making one soul out of two was a kindness.
But it’s already happening. The burn dives deeper—and then I feel her.
Not memory. Not wish. Her.
Soil under her nails from replanting. Wisteria’s soft breath moving her hair.
The steadying weight of a bench’s cold edge beneath the curve of her knees as she folds into herself so she doesn’t fall apart.
The single, stunned bloom of a laugh that breaks in the middle and doesn’t know what to do with its own echo.
I sway. My knuckles bump the wall, and the world jumps. She still wears the mark.
Worse—so do I.
I look down. Fae runes and demon fire knot together low on my ribs, bright as if my skin were thin paper and someone held a candle on the far side. It sears through old scars like a new story refusing to fit into the space where the pain used to live.
“You’re a fool,” I tell the man using my body like a ruin he’s proud of. “You left. You made her think she wasn’t enough.”
She always was. She always is.
Another wave hits—sadness, loneliness, longing—and I’m on my knees in ash before I know I moved, breath gone thin, vision gone bright at the edges.
It’s almost funny, how a prince without a crown can be brought low by the gentlest, quietest things.
A bench. A garden. A girl whispering into flowers like they have good advice.
The guards at the far edge of the ring pretend not to see me. One of them, old enough to remember my first berserker turn, sets a waterskin on the post and backs away with his hands open. I hate the fear in his eyes and deserve it anyway.
I press my palm harder to the mark. The ache sharpens, edges out the shame, and what’s left is want, relentless and clean.
I think of her eyes when she’s angry—how they flare like someone threw daylight at them.
How her laughter curls around my spine and coaxes the beast to lay its head down like it remembers it has one.
How she touched the inside of my wrist and said, delighted, There. You do have a pulse.
If she asked me to burn down the heavens, I would ask if she wanted the ashes sifted or left to the wind.
She never asked for anything but honesty. I gave her absence and called it mercy.
A memory I’ve tried to bury claws its way up: a green court, a jeweled smile, blood in an arc so precise it was almost beautiful.
The fae king didn’t just kill my family; he made it a performance.
That’s the shape of my hatred and the weight I put on her shoulders without asking.
The worst part? Yuna is not her father’s court, and I knew it even as I used his shadow to make her smaller so I could pretend leaving was noble.
Rheon’s voice—real or remembered—drops into the hollow I made. You can’t run from fate forever, brother.
Maybe not. But I can still ruin what it points me toward. That’s what I’m good at: cutting the rope before I learn how to climb it.
I drag a breath through grit and stand. The ring tilts, then levels.
The mark throbs, not cruel, not kind—just insistent.
Across the thread, she goes very still. I feel her palm settle over her collarbone, the way she calms skittish things.
For a beat our hands meet without touching.
My throat works around words I never learned to say right.
I told myself I left to keep war from her door. The truth is I left because I was afraid that once I let her in, I would not be able to let go, and loving me has always been a way to invite loss to dinner.
Someone like me doesn’t get happy endings. We get blood, and war, and names carved into stone where we practice sounding them out until they stop meaning home.
And yet—
If she reached for me now, if her fingers slid through the space between this breath and the next and closed on mine, I would go quiet like the tide under the pull of a patient moon. I would crawl through fire just to say her name in the same room as her again.
The ash shifts under my boots. I look down at my hands—scarred, split, the same hands that have ended men and held her like she was holy—and I make a choice that is too little and exactly everything:
I stop running.
Not forever. Not in a way that redeems anything. Just for this breath, and then the next, and the next, until choice becomes practice and practice becomes a path.
If she turns me away, I will keep her safe from the distance she asks for.
If she lets me speak, I will put the ugly truth between us first so she can see it and decide if she still wants to build anything on top of it.
If she cannot forgive me, the fault will belong to me and will not be a story I tell about her.
The mark warms under my palm, an animal settling. Across the bond comes the faintest answer, like a knuckle against a door. Not a summons. Not a command. Just there.
I reach for the waterskin, drink until the cold makes my teeth ache, and set it back where the old guard left it.
When I lift my head, I catch my reflection in the black glass of the arch—eyes still rimmed in gold, mouth set like I’m braced for a blow.
The prince of wrath looks back at me and for the first time in days, I don’t look away.
“I’m coming,” I tell him, because a man who only ever spoke to ghosts should practice saying things out loud. Then I say it to the bond, to the garden, to the girl sitting very still so she doesn’t fall apart. “I’m coming.”
No thunder answers. No prophecy clicks into place. The only reply is the quiet I broke and the way it doesn’t break back.
I lace my torn gloves, roll my shoulders until the ache evens out, and step out of the ring. The guards let me pass without a word. The crack in the wall keeps spreading, patient as ivy.
As I cross the threshold, the mark glows once—bright enough to paint my ribs gold from the inside—and settles, as if wrath itself has conceded there are fires worth walking toward with empty hands.
If she reaches for me even once, I’ll be there. And even if she doesn’t, I will go.