Chapter 32 Unforgivable
Unforgivable
Taeyang
The ribbon burns a line into my palm. It’s Yuna’s—violet, soft, a promise I tied myself—and now it’s the only thing that didn’t slip through my fingers.
I’m still kneeling in the sanctum wreckage, glass crunching under my boots, the taste of lightning on my tongue.
The circle that swallowed her leaves a scorched ring in the stone, humming like it might open again if I bled enough on it.
I press my hand to the mark on my chest until it hurts.
The bond is there, but far muffled, dragged behind walls I can’t see. Every time I reach for her, I hit something cold and ancient, and it throws me back like I’m a boy again, clawing at a door that won’t open while everything I love burns on the other side.
Unforgivable.
The word finds a home and makes a nest out of all my old losses—parents, first love, the parts of me I buried to stop feeling—and now it adds her to the pile. Not gone. Not dead. Taken.
Bootsteps and wings. Rheon is first through the blown doors, shadows curling off his shoulders, Seori at his back with her blade bare and her eyes already reading me like a battlefield.
Jisoo follows—quiet rage, careful hands—Minji sliding in at his side, her gaze raking the ruins for the seam a plan might fit through.
“Where?” Rheon asks.
I point to the burned circle. My voice is wreckage. “Sanctum sigil. Court-bound. He used a royal seal.”
“Kaelen,” Minji breathes, the name a bruise.
I nod once.
Seori steps into the ring and closes her eyes.
“It’s keyed to the inner palace. The old wing. The chamber the King keeps for… corrections.”
“Severance,” I snarl, and the glass under my hands fractures.
Jisoo crouches beside the circle, fingertips hovering over the ash.
“Transport wards leave a shadow. I can track the echo for a few hours, maybe less.” He glances up. “But getting in won’t be a matter of stealth. He’ll be waiting. With law behind him.”
“Law,” I spit. “He wrote orders to wipe out my family. He can write a thousand more. I’ll write the last one in blood.”
“Taeyang.” Rheon’s voice tightens, steel sheathed, not soft. “If you storm the palace now, you’ll start a war you can’t finish alone. And he’ll use you as proof you’re exactly the monster he warned them about.”
I’m already moving. He steps into my path. I don’t shove him. I want to. Seori’s hand finds my wrist. Not a cage. An anchor.
“Breathe,” she says, the word a command I’ve learned won’t break me. “We are getting her back. Hear the part where I said we.”
The bond flares—distant, bruised. Yuna is alive. Fear spikes through me anyway.
“She was right there,” I whisper. “I touched her. I”
“I know.” Seori squeezes once. “You get her back by choosing a door we can all fit through.”
“What door?” I growl. “He sits on a throne made of rules, and every rule is built to break me.”
Minji straightens, eyes already mapping.
“Then we make the rule work for us.” She looks to Rheon. “We bring a banner. We ask audience.”
Rheon’s mouth lifts at one corner.
“A white flag in a black court.”
“Not white.” Jisoo pulls a folded parchment from his coat and sets it, very gently, on the broken table.
Wax seal. Old. Fae crest. “We bring a writ. The extermination order from the High Archive. The one the King signed against your blood. We put it in front of his Council and call it what it is—an act of war he hid under ceremony.”
My vision narrows.
“You have it.”
“I have a copy,” Jisoo says. “Authenticated. Enough to force a hearing. Enough to make him think twice about trying to sever a royal-bonded princess while representatives of another realm stand witness.”
Seori nods, catching the rhythm.
“We offer terms he can sell to his own fear.”
I hate that I understand. I hate that I’m already agreeing.
“Terms,” I grind out.
Minji ticks them off, clean and ruthless.
“Immediate, unharmed release of Yuna into neutral custody. Public suspension of all severance rites. A joint task—your task—sanctioned by the Crown to remove the House Korr uncles and their loyalists from the borders. In return, the demon realm recognizes the treaty line, withdraws active hunt parties, and delivers proof of each uncle’s defeat to the Fae Council. ”
My stomach turns.
“You want me to ask the man who killed my family for permission to kill my uncles.”
“No,” Minji says. “I want you to put a leash on his story. Make him need you.” Her voice softens without losing its edge. “You’re not asking. You’re offering him a way to keep his face while you get Yuna back.”
Rheon taps the parchment.
“He cares for power more than hate. He won’t ignore a solution that lets him keep both. Especially if this writ is hanging over his head where his courtiers can see it.”
“And if he refuses?” I ask.
Jisoo’s eyes darken.
“Then we don’t walk in. We bleed in. But we do it with an extraction route, three safehouses, and a diversion at the east gate that makes your uncles look like the lesser fire.”
Silence. Breathing. The sound of my heart trying to beat its way out of my ribs. I hate plans that look like begging. But this isn’t begging. It’s war by another name. It’s walking into a throne room with a leash in one hand and a knife in the other and saying choose.
I look down at the ribbon in my palm. It’s warm again, as if it knows I’m choosing the path where she lives.
“Fine,” I say. “We do it your way.”
Relief moves the air. It doesn’t touch the place in me that’s already at the palace door, tearing it off the hinges.
Rheon starts assigning.
“Seori and I front the delegation. Jisoo guards the writ and speaks to their legalists in old tongue. Minji runs the shadow net and extraction. Taeyang—”
“Perimeter,” Minji says, meeting my eyes. “One breath away. You are the blade we draw if the King blinks wrong.”
I nod once. It tastes like rust and restraint.
“Signals,” Seori adds. “One bell for stall. Two for release. Three for betrayal.”
“Four,” I say, flat.
They look at me.
“If I say four,” I clarify, “it’s because I’ve already chosen wrath. You get everyone out.”
No one argues. They know better. Or they love me enough to let me be the wall and not the ruin.
We move. The sanctum becomes a war room.
Broken glass is kicked aside to make room for maps.
Minji scratches routes onto the table with a shard of mirror—outer garden stairs, servant passages, an old aqueduct that runs beneath the royal baths and meets a cistern by the southern gate.
Jisoo mutters to the parchment until the wax warms and the seal re-floats true.
Seori braids her hair back, clean and tight, then folds a hand around mine for the length of one breath, and I remember how to count to ten.
Rheon studies me.
“You said unforgivable,” he says softly when we’re alone at the edge of the circle.
“I meant myself,” I answer.
He shakes his head once.
“You were a heartbeat late to a door built to close on you. Save your rage for the ones who chose to lock it.”
“Kaelen chose,” I say. The name is ash.
Rheon’s gaze hardens.
“Then he will live to regret it, or he won’t live.”
I don’t promise mercy. I don’t promise anything. We ride before dawn—no armor that shines, no banners that brag. The “peace envoy” looks like what it is: four people too dangerous to be dismissed. At the palace threshold, we lift a cloth the color of truce.
It isn’t white. It’s violet cut from Yuna’s spare sash, knotted through a staff Seori snaps from the queen’s own garden. Petals cling to the fabric and refuse to fall.
At the gate, fae sentries cross spears until Jisoo speaks the old words and shows the old seal. Courtiers swarm. Whispers multiply. The rumor of the writ walks ahead of us like a fifth member of the delegation.
Inside the antechamber, a steward with a mouth like a knife requests our weapons. We hand over steel. We do not hand over what matters.
“Remember,” Minji murmurs as doors yawn toward the throne room, “we are here to make him want what we want.”
“What I want,” I say, because I need to hear it out loud, “is Yuna safe.”
“And what he wants,” Jisoo adds, “is to keep his crown from cracking on the floor.”
Rheon glances at me, the ghost of a smile on his mouth.
“Today, brother, you are a diplomat.”
I flex my fingers once and feel the ribbon bite.
“Today,” I correct, “I am a blade that learned a new word: later.”
The herald slams a staff. Names roll like thunder. The hall fills with faces. The King sits high, cut from winter, a tired god pretending he never bled. I swallow fire and step to the line Seori drew at my feet.
“Your Majesty,” Jisoo says, voice smooth, carrying, dangerous. “We come under truce to present a writ of your making and terms of your keeping.”
Courtiers lean in. The King’s eyes flicker. I stand very still and imagine the path from here to the old wing, how many breaths it takes to cross, how many men I’d have to break to reach a locked door that has my heart behind it.
Hold, little fae, I tell the bond, whether it hears me or not. Breathe. I am coming.
Unforgivable is a word I will save for those who earn it. The rest of me will be very, very careful until I get my hands on the only thing I refuse to lose.