Chapter 34 Kneel Before the Crown
Kneel Before the Crown
Taeyang
The waiting chamber is all glass and soft light—merciful lies. The air smells like crushed petals and old politics. I stand with my back to the window, counting the breaths between now and losing her.
Footsteps. A whisper of ward-light. The door opens, and she’s there. No crown, no entourage—just Yuna with a chain of silver at her wrist that hums like a warning and a face too calm to be anything but breaking. A guard closes the door from the outside. We’re alone, except for everything unsaid.
“Say it quick,” she murmurs, eyes on the floor. “They won’t give us long.”
I take a step and stop when the chain tenses. The magic hates me. It always has.
“Your father gave you a choice,” I say.
Her laugh is small and wrong.
“He called it that.”
“Then I’ll give you another.”
“Don’t.” She lifts her head. I see the storm she’s holding and hate the room for asking her to hold it quieter.
“Taeyang, it’s over.”
Two words. No air.
“No,” I say.
Her mouth tightens.
“I’m protecting you.”
“By cutting your own throat?” The anger in me rises like an old tide. “He won’t stop because you bow. Kings don’t trade mercy; they rent obedience.”
She flinches—minuscule, but I see it. I hate myself for the heat in my voice.
“I’m returning to the court,” she says, voice steady and dead. “I’ll take the rite. You’ll live.”
“That’s not living,” I bite out. “That’s a slower kind of killing.”
“Then let me die slowly,” she whispers, and the way she says it—like it’s a kindness—makes something feral tear loose in my chest.
She turns for the door. I move without thinking. My hand catches her wrist, careful—then not careful enough.
“Dammit, listen to me—”
She startles. It’s small—just a breath caught where it shouldn’t—but fear flashes through her eyes and finds every scar I’ve ever had. I release her like the handle of a blade I almost drove into my own heart.
“I’m sorry.” My voice strips itself bare. “I will never use fear to hold you.”
Before she can answer, my body chooses for me. I drop to my knees. The marble is cold. Good. I need the hurt. I need the lesson etched into bone. I take her hand—just her fingers, light as prayer. Head bowed. Chest open. Every weapon I am, put away.
“I don’t kneel to kings,” I tell the floor, because if I look up and see her eyes I’ll fall apart. “I kneel to what saves me.”
Silence. Her hand trembles in mine. The chain at her wrist hums like a snake deciding whether to strike. I thread my fingers through hers until the tremble evens out.
“Is this what it feels like to need someone?” The thought in my head breaks loose into sound.
I let it. “Hunger with a name. Thirst with a face. I was fifteen when I promised the world it could never make me need again. I was wrong. You undo every promise I made to survive. And I’m asking you to let me be undone. ”
Her breath stutters.
“Taeyang…”
I finally look up. She’s looking at me like I’m the first honest thing she’s seen all day. Her eyes are wet, but it’s not weakness. It’s a flood she’s been holding with her teeth.
“You don’t deserve to kneel,” she says.
“I don’t deserve to stand if standing means towering over you.” I swallow. It scrapes. “I shouted. I grabbed. I was the room that hurt you, not the door that opened. I will not be that again.”
Her fingers tighten. The chain pulses, offended. The bond answers anyway thin, muffled, stubborn as a weed growing through stone.
“I can’t be your death,” she whispers. “I won’t be the thing that brings your ruin.”
“You were never the ruin,” I say, and the truth comes out like I’ve been chewing glass to get to it.
“You’re the reason I stopped swinging at shadows.
If I must wear a leash to hunt my uncles under your father’s banner, I will.
If I have to say later to my rage, I will.
If I must bow to a throne so I can stand beside you, I will bow.
But I will not say we’re finished while your voice shakes like that. ”
Her chin trembles. She tries for steel, grief leaks through anyway.
“He said he’d kill you.”
“Then he’ll try,” I answer. “And he’ll learn I’m not the boy he murdered by proxy.”
A breath, ragged.
“If I reject you—”
“Don’t make me bless a lie to make you feel safer.” My hand tightens before I remember and force it gentle again. “Rejecting me won’t stop him. It’ll only make you bleed alone.”
She shuts her eyes. A tear slips free and lands on my knuckles. It feels like absolution. It feels like a sentence.
“Look at me,” I ask.
She does.
“Here is my vow,” I say, steady now. “I will never raise my voice to make you smaller. I will never use my hands to make you stay. If you send me away, I will go. But I will not leave because fear told me to. I will leave because you did.”
I press my mouth to her fingers—once, like a signature.
“And if you keep me,” I add, “I will learn whatever this is asking me to learn. Patience. Restraint. Diplomacy.” A dry, ruined laugh. “Humility.”
Her lips quirk despite the wreck of us.
“You?”
“Don’t tell anyone,” I whisper. “I have a reputation.”
The smallest breath of a smile. Then it fades, and I see the girl who jumped from the Star Bridge and laughed before she hit the water. I see the princess learning to breathe with chains on. I see the woman who chose herself in a room where choosing was treason.
“You can’t fix this by bleeding first,” she says.
“I’m not trying to fix it,” I say. “I’m trying to stay.”
A beat. Then another. The ward hums. The bond pushes against it like a heartbeat under a bruise. She slides her other hand into my hair—soft, careful, owner and mercy at once—and it almost breaks me.
“Don’t shout at me again,” she says, voice small and savage. “Don’t grab me like I’m something you have to win.”
“I won’t.” I mean it so hard my ribs hurt.
“Then stand.”
I rise slowly, keeping her hand. We’re breathing the same air, the kind that fills old churches and battlefields right before the prayer or the charge. Up close, the chain’s light gilds her skin; my mark answers under my shirt like it wants to brand my bones with her name.
“I’m scared,” she admits.
“I’m terrified,” I confess.
“Of him?”
“Of losing you to a choice that isn’t yours.”
A knock like a swallowed thunderclap. A guard’s voice, muffled:
“Highness.”
She doesn’t look away.
“Say it again.”
“What?”
“That you’ll stay, even when it’s ugly.”
“I’ll stay,” I say. “Especially then.”
Her gaze drifts to my mouth. Returns to my eyes.
“And you’ll kneel when pride gets loud?”
I huff a breath.
“I’ll kneel because you are the only crown I’ll ever recognize.”
Something loosens in her shoulders—some knot the palace tied and forgot. She lifts our joined hands and presses them to the place her mark glows beneath the chain. The magic sparks; the bond surges; for a heartbeat the ward’s hum sounds like a cage realizing the door is open.
“Then hear me,” she whispers, and her words tremble with everything she hasn’t been allowed to say. “I am not rejecting you. I am trying to survive you. Survive with you. If my father makes me a lesson, be the part of the lesson I choose.”
“I will.”
The door opens a handspan. A slice of cold light. The world barges in. She doesn’t let go.
“Walk beside me,” she says. “Not a step ahead. Not a step behind.”
“Yes,” I say, because there’s no other word left in me.
As we reached the threshold, I angle close enough that only she can hear:
“Call me monster in every tongue you own—just don’t call yourself alone.”
Her breath catches. The chain tightens reflexively; her grip on me tightens harder.
We cross the line together. I hold her hand like a relic and wonder—savage, humbled, finally honest—if this is what it feels like to need: not to devour, but to guard; not to own, but to stay.
I think it is. And I think it’s the first thing I’ve ever wanted that didn’t ask me to burn to have it.