You Lied to Me
Yuna
He looked at me like I was fire—and still reached for the burn.
His palm was warm on my cheek, his thumb brushing my bottom lip like a promise he wasn’t sure his mouth could keep.
The wardlights hissed and steadied. Moonstones in my braid ticked faintly against each other when the wind turned.
It should have felt like relief—his voice softened, his edges put away.
It didn’t. The ache in my chest unspooled slow and cruel, thread pulled from a dress you can’t stop from coming apart.
Because even inside his tenderness, I saw it: the wall. It rose the moment a crown touched my head. Built from grief he refuses to bury and ghosts that insist on being fed. He hadn’t forgiven me—not the hiding, not the timing. Not really.
“You’re not the enemy,” he’d said, and the words were gentle.
But his silence screamed. I stood in the middle of that quiet, heart raw, staring at the man who used to tilt my world with a glance and now couldn’t hold my eyes without flinching like light hurt.
“I would’ve told you,” I whispered, the truth small enough to choke on.
He didn’t answer.
“I wanted to tell you.”
Wind skimmed the frost from the flagstones at our feet. Still nothing.
So I stepped closer and forced the rest past the stone lodged in my throat. “Every time I looked at you, all I saw was the pain you keep trying to drown. And I knew that if I told you—who I am, who my father is—you’d never look at me the same.”
His jaw tightened. Confirmation, ugly as it was clean.
“I wasn’t wrong, was I?” I breathed.
Taeyang turned his face away, like the sight of me singed. Something small and breakable inside me folded without a sound.
“You said I lit something in you,” I heard my voice climb and tremble, treacherous as a new foal. “I didn’t ask for that. I didn’t ask to be your match or your curse or your salvation. I just—” I swallowed, because truth is a blade with two edges. “I just wanted to be yours.”
My voice cracked on the last word. The ward hum pressed at my ears. He stayed quiet, and the quiet wrapped around us like ice.
“I waited for you,” I said, tears burning cold at the corners of my eyes. “Through the nightmares. Through the bond-burns and the way my mark wouldn’t be still. I waited.”
He finally looked at me. The gold rim had crept back into his eyes—guilt and regret banked like coals, and behind them something worse: fear.
“You’re not the girl I met,” he said softly, as if softness could blunt what it was.
The words went in like a knife finding a gap in armor. I kept my spine straight and let them fit. “Maybe not,” I whispered. “Maybe I grew into the crown you hate so much.”
“I don’t hate—”
“But you don’t trust me.”
Truth hung between us like poison caught in glass—visible, undrinkable. I wiped at my cheeks with fingers that wouldn’t stop trembling. When I spoke again, the sound was a thread. “You looked at me like I was everything. Now all I see is someone trying not to fall.”
“Because if I fall,” he rasped, throat working, “I won’t survive it.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“I never said it was.”
“But I feel like it is,” I said, and the words broke me on the way out. “Every time you flinch. Every time you pull away. Every time you almost say what you want, and then you don’t.”
He took a step toward me. Instinct made me take one back. The bond pulsed—one beat begging, one beat bracing.
“I can’t keep chasing a ghost,” I said, the ember in my chest guttering in a draft I couldn’t find. “And I can’t keep being punished for blood I didn’t choose.”
His mouth opened. Closed. No apology. No plea. No fight. Only the old companion he carries like a weapon: silence.
Something final settled over the courtyard. Even the wardlights seemed to dim, as if the palace itself didn’t want to watch.
So I turned.
My skirt scraped frost. The moonstones in my hair chimed once—a tiny sound, a little star dying. I walked, and when the wind rose behind me, I let it pick up the brittle music of my heart breaking and carry it down the long colonnade where portraits pretend not to listen.
Maybe he would hear it. Maybe he wouldn’t.
Either way, I was done bleeding for a love still debating whether it wants to live.