Prologue
Taeyang
I haven’t slept in months.
Not without her face carving through my mind like a blade.
The bond won’t let me forget.
It coils around my ribs like barbed wire — a phantom heat that flares in the silence, in the dark, when the world is too quiet and my lies catch up with me.
She wasn’t supposed to matter.
Not to me.
She’s fae — everything I was raised to despise.
Light, beauty, mercy. I am wrath. I am war.
I wasn’t meant to want.
But her voice still echoes in my skull, soft and stubborn. Her scent—like spring rain and steel—still lingers in my lungs. I see her when I close my eyes. Worse, I see her when I open them.
Yuna.
I hate that I know her name like a prayer.
I keep telling myself the bond is just magic. A trick. A curse. A fucking joke the gods are playing on me for sins I can’t even remember committing.
But the burn doesn’t go away.
Every time she’s near, my pulse stutters. My magic flares. I touch my chest and feel the mark where fate branded me like an animal—and still, I tell myself it’s nothing.
I don’t want a mate.
I don’t want her.
Because wanting her means letting go of the monster I’ve spent centuries becoming.
Because loving her... means she can break me.
And I’ve been broken once before.
So, I run.
I train harder. I fight longer. I volunteer for missions that might kill me. I bleed in silence and laugh when I shouldn’t. And still, no matter how far I go—
She’s there.
In my nightmares. In the quiet. In the way I flinch when someone says her name like its salvation.
I denied her. I pushed her away. I lied.
But fate doesn’t care about my scars. Or my silence.
Because the truth is this, She is the one thing I can’t burn. And I think she’s going to ruin me.