Genre: Mafia!au , Slowburn, Angst, Hurt, smut, TW (it is a mafia!AU, after all)
Pairing: Mafia!Jungkook x reader
Synopsis : In a world governed by clans and blood debts, nothing ever burns by accident; fading embers are nurtured carefully, mistaken for mercy and the gentle promise of warmth through the night. But fire answers to no one, and it has never spared whatâor whoâwas foolish enough to keep it close.
Wordcount : 120k
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12
Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15
Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18
Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21
Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24
Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27
Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30
Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33
Chapter 34. Chapter 35 Chapter 36
Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39
Chapter 40 Chapter 41
Teaser Book 2
Book 2 (completed)
Wordcount : 100k
Chapter 1 Chapter 2
Chapter 3. Chapter 4
Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8
Chapter 9 Chapter 10
Chapter 11. Chapter 12
Chapter 13 Chapter 14
Chapter 15 Chapter 16
Chapter 17. Chapter 18
Chapter 19 Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Book 3 (coming soonâŠ)
Wordcount: TBD
Announcement
Teaser
Chapter 1
Chapter 2 (coming soonâŠ)
Between the Li(n)es
Genre: Idol!au, mega mega Angst, mega mega Hurt, eventual mega Smut.
Pairing: Ex!Jungkook x reader (+featuring the one and only Mr. Harry Styles in honor of 2026 marking the comeback of all our husbands)
Iâm begging you to to please give us some Jungkook x Y/N scenes in book 3 if she survives. Theyâve been apart for so longđđđ Let it be them against the world please not have the world between themđđ IM SO DEVASTETEDđđ YOUR WRITING AND CHARACTERIZATION IS SO BEAUTIFULđđđ IM TOO ATTACHEDđđđ IâVE FORGOTTWN WHAT THEM BEING TOGETHER LOOKS LIKEđđđđđ
Thank you so much for this message!
I PROMISE you will get some proper Jungkook Ă Y/N interaction in this book. đ Iâm honestly so excited to dive back into their dynamic again because theyâre not the same two people who spent most of Book 1 lowkey trying to tear each otherâs throats out.
The challenge (and the fun) is finding the right balance between that old sparkâthe banter, the friction, the fact that they naturally push each otherâs buttonsâand the reality that theyâve both been through something genuinely life-altering since the Summit. Neither of them can simply go back to pretending none of it happened. Thereâs too much grief, too much guilt, too much longing, too much that has been left unsaid.
So donât expect them to suddenly become soft and lovey-dovey and perfectly communicative. Theyâre still Jungkook and Y/N. Theyâll still clash, theyâll still frustrate and challenge each other. But underneath all of that, thereâs now an understanding between them that simply didnât exist before, and I think exploring how that changes every interaction they have is one of the parts Iâm looking forward to writing the most.
Series Genre: Mafia!au , Slowburn, Angst, Hurt, smut, TW (it is a mafia!AU, after all)
Pairing: Mafia!Jungkook x reader
Wordcount: 9.3k
Masterlist
â
The ringing came first.
Before the pain, before the blood, before the cathedral floor rose up to meet her, there was only that strange, endless sound filling the inside of her skull.
Not a real sound exactly. Not something heard so much as felt. A thin, silver pressure buried deep behind the eardrums, humming through bone, spreading outward until the entire world seemed to exist beneath water.
Y/N remembered the sensation.
She was nine years old the first time she had learned how deep the lake behind the northern base truly went.
It had been summer, though northern summers were never quite warm enough to be trusted. The lake had remained cold beneath the surface, green-black and still, its reeds whispering softly against the banks while Jaebeom and two older boys dared one another to dive from the rocks.
Y/N had been too young to join them and old enough to resent the fact violently, so she had waited until no one was looking, slipped beneath the water, and swum down as far as her lungs would allow.
Down.
Down.
Down.
At first there had been bubbles and the white flash of her own hands. Then the lake had darkened around her. Sound had vanished. The world above became a wavering brightness, distant and unreachable, and pressure had begun to gather inside her head with a slow, intimate insistence. Her ears rang. Her chest burned. Her limbs floated oddly around her, no longer quite obeying.
For one suspended second, she had felt both peaceful and doomed, weightless in the green dark, certain that if she went any deeper she might simply forget which direction led back to air.
That was what death had felt like to her then.
Not violence.
Not fear.
Just silence, pressure, and the sudden, dizzying suspicion that the surface was much farther away than she had thought.
She didnât quite remember how she managed to get back to the surface that day.
She only remembered the water in her lungs and the ringing in her ears.
Now, in the ruined cathedral, she felt it again.
The bullet had not killed her.
It had passed so close to her face that the heat of it seemed to tear through her skin before pain could make itself known.
She had flinched at the last possible instantâsome animal reflex, some final refusal of the bodyâand the shot meant to open her skull had carved instead along the sharp line of her brow bone, splitting flesh just above her right eye. Blood poured immediately down the side of her face, hot and blinding, flooding her lashes, slipping into her eye until half her world became red.
But that was nothing.
Nothing compared to Lee Jooshil.
The Snake Matriarchâs grip convulsed once around her gown. Y/N felt the old womanâs body jerk violently against hers, felt the pistol scrape away from her temple, felt something wet and impossibly hot strike the side of her throat, her chest, the white silk of the dress.
For a fraction of a second she did not understand. Then Jooshilâs hand loosened, and blood came in a furious arterial rush, pulsing from the side of her neck where Jungkookâs blade had opened her. It sprayed with such force that it seemed less like bleeding than some endless barrel emptying, a bright, terrible fountain of life leaving the body too quickly for dignity.
Jooshilâs eyes widened.
Her mouth opened but released nothing other than a vague choking sound.
Then she dropped.
Y/N thought she might have followed a second later. She could feel her knees giving way, could feel the whole cathedral tilting sideways, stained glass and smoke and corpses sliding loose from their proper places. The ringing in her ears caused by the deafening gunshot swallowed everything. The shooting disappeared. The screaming disappeared. Even her own breath seemed to recede somewhere far beyond reach.
But she never felt herself actually hit the ground.
Hands caught her first.
One moment Jungkook had been across the cathedral, too far away, impossibly far away, separated from her by bodies and blood and all the terrible geometry of violence.
The next he was there.
Holding her.
His arms came around her before she understood she was falling, one hand braced behind her shoulders, the other at her waist, dragging her against him with enough force that pain sparked briefly through the fog.
His mouth was moving.
She could see it.
His face hovered above hers, wild and pale beneath the blood smeared along his jaw, eyes dark with something so nakedly terrified that it should have frightened her more than the gunshot.
She heard nothing.
Only the ringing.
His lips formed her name again and again.
Y/N.
Y/N.
Y/N.
She watched his mouth shape the question.
Are you hurt?
Then another.
Where? Where is it?
Then another, faster, more frantic, his hands moving over her with increasing desperation, searching through blood that was not hers, blood that might be hers, blood that had made a ruin of the dress and left no clean place to begin.
He looked at her brow, at the red pouring down her face, then at the bodice of the gown where Jooshilâs blood had spread in a grotesque bloom across white silk.
His hands hovered, pressed, withdrew, returned, as though he were terrified of missing some fatal wound hidden beneath all that red.
Y/N tried to answer.
Nothing came.
Her mouth opened and closed uselessly.
The ringing swelled.
Jungkookâs expression changed.
His head turned sharply, mouth moving toward someone beyond her field of vision.
Guys, somethingâs wrong.
She read that much.
Then:
I donât think she can hear me.
Another face entered her vision.
Jimin.
He crouched beside them slowly, carefully, not with the reckless speed of the battlefield but with the measured gentleness one used around frightened animals or people who had just been dragged partway out of death. Blood ran down one of his arms. His blonde hair was damp with sweat. Yet his expression, when he looked at her, was suddenly and startlingly calm.
He lifted one hand and signed.
Are you injured?
The sign was simple.
A Raven practice.
Anyone trained properly in the North learned it eventually. Speech was a luxury in certain circumstances. Sound carried. Breath betrayed. A hand gesture could save a life where a voice would end it. Y/N had learned those signs before she had learned half the languages her tutors later forced into her. Silent commands. Silent warnings.
Jimin repeated the question, with a slower hand gesture.
Are you injured?
Her body felt very far away.
She tried to lift her hand and found she could not quite remember how to make it obey. Her fingers twitched once against Jungkookâs sleeve. That was all. So she shook her head instead, a small, clumsy motion that made the cathedral lurch so violently she almost retched.
Jungkookâs grip tightened immediately.
Jimin looked from the blood on her face to the line of the wound at her brow, then spoke to Jungkook. Y/N could only read pieces of what he told Jungkook through the blur.
Shot was pretty close. Ears. Banged up.
Jungkook did not appear reassured.
Of course he didnât.
His eyes returned to hers, and his mouth moved again, slower this time, exaggerated enough for her to understand.
Can you hear me?
She stared at him.
His jaw clenched.
She wanted to tell him it was all right, though she was not entirely sure it was. Wanted to tell him the bullet had missed, or nearly missed, or missed enough. Wanted to tell him most of the blood wasnât hers. Wanted to make some dry comment about his face because he looked as though the apocalypse had just come and gone.
But the words remained somewhere below the surface.
Down.
Down.
Down.
She blinked through blood and looked around.
The cathedral was a war-scene.
Namjoon stood several feet away, cane planted firmly in the marble, looking down at Lee Jooshilâs corpse with an expression so still it almost resembled respect.
The Matriarch lay on her side, pearls scattered around her, one hand still curled faintly as if holding the shape of a command no one would ever obey again.
Beyond her, Kang men moved through the nave with efficient brutality, dragging white-clad bodies from beneath pews, stripping weapons, checking pulses only to decide whether another bullet was necessary.
A camera flash suddenly went off near the altar.
Then another.
Polaroids.
Y/N knew of that tradition.
It was for the family albums.
Thatâs what the Tigers called them. An absurdly gentle name for what they were. If Y/N had not known better, she might have imagined shelves filled with birthdays and graduations, sunburnt children at the beach, badly framed Christmas photographs, generations of Kims smiling stiffly.
Instead, the albums occupied an entire wall of the Kim archive, bound in red leather and organized by year. Inside were no weddings, no anniversaries, no first days of school. Only the dead. Thousands of them. Decades of violence preserved in fading Polaroids and glossy photographs. Men slumped across restaurant tables. Women sprawled on marble floors. Politicians, rivals, traitors, debtors, witnesses.
Some faces were peaceful, others frozen in terror. Beneath each photograph, a neat handwritten caption: name, date, location, operative.
Proof of completion. Proof of payment. Proof that the matter had been settled.
Every dead man photographed. Every mission dated. The ravens kept souvenirs for every kill. The Tigers kept books full of the faces of the dead. Accounts kept in excruciating detail. Page after page.
There would be many pages dedicated to this very day.
Too many.
She saw Yoongi near the transept, blood streaked across one cheek, speaking to a Tiger who carried two rifles and looked nauseous. Taehyung stood farther back with Soyeon, both turned toward her now. Soyeonâs face was unreadable, while Taehyung showed relief. Jimin was still close. Namjoon looked up from Jooshil at last.
And Jungkookâ
Jungkook was still trying to pull her back to him. Back to the surface.
His hand touched her jaw, careful despite the panic shaking through him. His lips moved slowly.
Look at me.
She did.
His mouth shaped the next words.
Letâs go.
She did not understand at first.
The idea of going anywhere seemed absurd.
Then his hand slid beneath her arm. He shifted closer, one knee braced against the blood-slick marble, and she realized he meant to stand. To take her out of this place. Away from the bodies, the cameras, the saints, the dress, the altar, the smell of iron and smoke and crushed orchids.
Can you walk?
She read the question on his lips.
Could she?
Y/N looked down at her legs as if they belonged to someone else. Beneath the ruined fall of the gown, her knees trembled faintly. Blood had dried on her hands. Her fingers were stiff. Her entire body felt hollowed out and filled with lake water.
Still, she nodded.
Jungkook did not believe her.
She saw that immediately.
But he helped her stand anyway.
The motion nearly undid her. The cathedral tilted hard to one side, and for a second she thought she would fall straight back into him. His arm locked around her waist at once, anchoring her. The contact should have hurt. Perhaps it did. Pain existed somewhere, distant and muffled, waiting for her to return to herself and collect it.
She did not return.
Not yet.
They walked through the finished battlefield slowly.
Jungkook kept one arm around her, half-supporting, half-holding, his body angled between her and the rest of the cathedral as though the danger had not ended simply because everyone left standing seemed to be theirs. She saw bodies being moved. Saw flashes of white photographs developing in gloved hands. Saw Kang men laughing silently, mouths wide and soundless. Saw a young Park soldier she recognized from the northern training yard lying with his eyes open beneath a broken pew. Saw little Lee Hyeoriâs ribbon crushed into the marble near the aisle, baby pink silk darkened almost black at one end.
Her stomach turned.
She looked away.
Jungkook felt the shift and tightened his hold.
Outside, the world had become too bright.
The rain had stopped. The clouds had thinned into a washed-out grey, and the daylight struck her face with almost indecent freshness.
She could hear the distant sound of police sirens. Though she already knew that by the time they arrived there would be nothing but an empty cathedral with broken windows with some bloodstains and bullet casings scattered about the place. Who knows what the press would write. It wasnât their concern.
Someone opened the car door.
Jungkook helped her inside.
The leather seat was cold beneath her.
Then he climbed in beside her and shut the door, and the cathedral disappeared behind tinted glass.
The drive back passed without sound.
Or perhaps there was sound and she simply remained beneath it.
The city moved outside the window in smears of wet concrete, traffic lights, blurred faces, ordinary pedestrians who would never know how close entire kingdoms had come to ending three streets away from where they bought coffee. Y/N sat in the back seat with her hands folded uselessly in her lap, still wearing the ruined wedding dress because no one had yet figured out what else to do with her. Blood stiffened the fabric across her chest. Ash clung to the veil pooled at her side. Her brow throbbed dully beneath a mess of drying red.
Jungkook sat beside her.
Too close and not close enough.
Every few minutes his mouth moved. She would catch only fragments.
Still with me?
Almost there.
Can you hear anything yet?
She could not.
Sometimes she shook her head. Sometimes she forgot to answer. Each time, his hand found hers afterward, fingers wrapping around hers with a pressure that was almost painful, then easing when he remembered himself. He kept doing it. Squeezing. Letting go. Squeezing again. As though he needed reassurance that she remained solid beside him.
Y/N let him.
She looked down once at their joined hands and felt nothing she could name.
Not comfort.
Not fear.
Not desire.
Only the sensation of his skin against hers, warm and insistent, a fact in a world that had lost the ability to arrange itself into meaning.
The Lees were dead.
Taeyong was dead.
Jooshil was dead.
Hyeori was dead.
Jaebeom wasâ
gone.
Jaebeom was gone.
She swallowed.
She had chosen not to follow him.
She was in a Kim car.
With Jungkook.
Driving to wherever it was they were heading.
The thoughts presented themselves one by one like objects placed on a table.
She recognized each one individually.
Together they made no sense at all.
After what felt like several hours, the the car turned through iron gates.
Y/N knew them.
Even through the haze, she recognized the long drive, the trees, the shape of the mansion rising ahead like a memory from another personâs life. The Kim compound was no longer the abandoned, haunted shell it had become after the Summit attack. Cars lined the gravel. Men moved between the entrance and the vehicles carrying crates, files, paintings wrapped in cloth, locked cases, equipment. The house itself still bore scarsâcovered windows, damaged stoneâbut it was awake now. Lit. Occupied. Returning to itself.
Mrs Shin stood at the top of the steps.
Small, severe, immaculate.
Waiting.
The moment the car stopped, Jungkook stepped out first and turned back for Y/N. She saw Mrs Shinâs face change when she saw the dress. Not shock exactly. Something that passed through her eyes and vanished before anyone else could see it.
Her mouth moved.
Y/N could not hear the words.
But she knew the shape of command when she saw it.
Men scattered.
Doors opened.
The house took her in.
There was no ceremony to it. No grand return, no dramatic threshold crossed beneath ancestral portraits and restored chandeliers.
Y/N stood in the middle of the hall in her blood-drenched wedding gown and watched the mansion assemble itself around her in silence.
Or perhaps not silence. Perhaps the house was loud. Perhaps people were speaking, arguing, unloading the spoils of extinction. Perhaps the floor creaked beneath hurried footsteps and radios crackled and doors opened and shut across the lower levels. She could see mouths moving. She could see Taehyung gesturing irritably toward a pair of men carrying a crate clumsily. She could see Soyeon speaking to Namjoon, one hand pressed to the wound at her side as though annoyed by its existence. She could see Mrs Shin taking in everything at once: Jungkookâs bloodied shirt, Y/Nâs torn veil, the bloody cut across her brow, the red soaked into the bodice of her dress.
But all Y/N heard was the ringing.
It had changed during the drive. It was no longer sharp enough to feel like a blade behind the ear. Now it had deepened into something lower, wider, almost oceanic, a pressure that filled the room before sound could. She stood inside it as though she had not yet broken the surface of the lake.
The world continued above her in distorted shapes and distant light. People moved. Their mouths formed words. Their hands reached. Their eyes flickered over her, then away.
Jungkook did not let go of her.
His hand remained at the small of her back, steady but not forcing, as though he feared that if he gripped too tightly she might shatter and if he loosened his hold she might drift away altogether.
When Mrs Shin approached them, his body shifted slightly in front of Y/Nâs before he realized what he was doing. The old woman noticed. Her eyes moved from his face to the hand still braced against Y/Nâs spine. Whatever she said made Jungkookâs jaw tighten.
Y/N read none of it.
Mrs Shin reached for her face.
Y/N flinched before she could stop herself.
The movement was small, shamefully small, but Mrs Shin saw it. Her expression changed in a way Y/N did not have the strength to understand. Not pity. She would have hated pity. Something closer to empathy, perhaps. The old womanâs hand slowed, then rose again more carefully, two fingers tilting Y/Nâs chin just enough to examine the cut through her brow. Her mouth moved. Jungkook answered. His words were too fast for Y/N to catch.
Then Mrs Shinâs gaze softened by a fraction, and Y/N realized, with a strange, detached sort of horror, that the old woman looked relieved.
Jungkook turned toward her, stepping into her field of vision until she had no choice but to look at him. His lips moved deliberately this time.
Bathroom.
Clean up.
Okay?
She stared at his mouth for a second after he stopped speaking, then nodded. He did not look convinced. Still, he guided her through the hall, past men who stepped aside with sudden awkwardness, past the great staircase where the carpet had been rolled back and several dark stains remained embedded in the wood from violence that belonged to an earlier chapter of the same cursed house.
The mansion looked both changed and unchanged.
Boxes lined the corridors. Men in black moved through rooms with clipboards. Curtains had been torn down to let in the grey afternoon light. Someone had removed the dust sheets from the furniture in the East sitting room.
They walked into the elevator.
The journey up to the attic stretched oddly, lengthening between one blink and the next. Jungkookâs hand stayed on her waist, tightening every time her knee threatened to buckle.
Jungkookâs mouth moved.
Y/N.
She looked at him.
He was trying not to frighten her. That much she could tell, though it sat uneasily on his face. Jungkook had always been many things, but careful was not the first word anyone would have chosen. Now he seemed to be measuring every breath before he let it out near her.
She hated it.
She loved it.
She felt nothing.
They reached the attic floor.
The living area still smelled faintly of old paper, dust and the strange dried-herb scent Mrs Shin seemed to carry into every room she touched. Y/N saw the door to what had once been her bedroom, it stood half-open at the end of the hall, but Jungkook led her first into the bathroom.
She squinted as he turned on the light. The shower, the claw-foot tub, the tiled floor, the mirror above the sink reflecting a woman she did not recognize.
Y/N stopped.
The bride in the mirror stopped too.
Blood had dried down one side of her face in a rust-colored sheet. Her left eye was still reddened where it had flooded into the lashes. The cut through her browbone looked both smaller and uglier than she expected, a raw line interrupting the arch of her brow. Jooshilâs blood covered the front of the gown in a vast red eruption, dark now in some places, still tacky in others, giving the impression that something enormous had torn through her chest. The veil hung crookedly from her hair. Ash greyed the white silk at the shoulders. There was blood beneath her nails. Blood in the hollow of her throat. Blood dried along the inside of her wrist where the tiny vial of blue powder still rested untouched.
The bride looked dead. Pale and thin.
Y/N stared at her.
Jungkook saw.
He moved quickly, too quickly perhaps, stepping between her and the mirror as though the reflection itself had become another enemy. His mouth formed words she only half-read.
Iâllâ
His gaze flickered helplessly toward the tub, the sink, the dress.
Iâll let you clean up.
He looked ashamed of the sentence before it finished leaving his mouth, as though some ancient etiquette had risen absurdly inside him at the worst possible moment. He made a movement toward the door.
Y/Nâs hand shot out and caught his wrist.
She did not think before doing it.
Her fingers closed around him with more force than she realized. Jungkook stopped instantly. The room went still around them. He looked down at her hand on him, then back at her face, and whatever he saw there made the careful distance he had been trying to maintain collapse.
Understanding passed through him.
Not all at once. It came painfully, visibly, as if he had to walk himself through it: the blood, the ringing, the numbness, the fact that she could barely remain upright and had no idea where her body ended anymore. She was not asking him to stay because of modesty forgotten or propriety suspended. She was asking because if he left her alone in that bathroom, she might simply remain standing there forever, trapped between the mirror and the lake-bottom ringing in her skull.
He nodded once.
Slowly.
Then he turned the lock.
The sound was small, or perhaps she imagined it. Either way, the click reached her through the ringing like a stone dropped into deep water.
Jungkook came back to her and lifted his hands, then stopped before touching the dress.
His mouth moved carefully.
Can I?
Y/N looked up at him.
It occurred to her, distantly, that a different version of herself would have found something to say. Something cutting. Something about him asking permission now of all times. Something to make him scoff and roll his eyes and pretend his hands were not shaking.
But that version of her seemed very far away.
She nodded.
Jungkook stepped behind her.
The buttons ran down the back of the gown in a long, delicate line, absurdly beautiful work meant for an entirely different life. His fingers were clumsy at first. Not because he lacked dexterity, but because rage and terror had left their ghosts in his hands. He worked slowly, each button freed with a care that bordered on reverence, though there was nothing sacred left in the garment but what had survived being violated. Once, his knuckles brushed the skin between her shoulder blades and paused there. Warm. Hesitant.
Y/N stared at the tile wall.
The dress loosened around her ribs.
Air touched skin that had been trapped all day beneath silk, boning, blood, expectation. She inhaled too sharply and swayed. Jungkookâs hand came around her waist at once, steadying her before she fell. His mouth moved near her shoulder. She felt the vibration of his voice more than heard it.
When the last button came undone, the dress sagged heavily around her body and peeled.
The blood had dried in places, sticking silk to skin, and when Jungkook eased the gown downward, the fabric pulled against her chest and arms with a faint, tacky resistance that made her stomach twist. He moved even more slowly after that, freeing one shoulder, then the other, guiding the ruined bodice past bruises she had not yet begun to feel. The gown pooled at her feet like a slaughtered beast.
Y/N stepped out of it with Jungkookâs hands guiding her.
She was left in the thin slip beneath, stained where blood had seeped through, clinging damply to her skin. Jungkook looked away for half a second out of habit, then looked back because looking away was useless now and she needed him more than she needed his manners. He reached past her to turn on the taps. Water thundered into the tub, though she heard it only as a dull vibration beneath her feet.
Steam began to rise.
He found a clean towel in the cabinet and wet it at the sink. When he turned back, his face had changed again. Focused now. Almost grim. A man given a task concrete enough to keep him from falling apart.
He began with her hands.
The towel passed over her fingers, between them, across the backs of her knuckles. Blood loosened beneath the damp cloth in rusty streaks. He wiped carefully beneath her nails, then stopped when he saw how badly they were trembling. His thumb pressed once against her palm. She looked down at the point of contact.
His hand was trembling too.
He moved to her face next.
The first touch of wet cloth against the cut at her brow made her flinch so hard he drew back immediately. His eyes searched hers. She could read the apology before his mouth formed it. She shook her head once, impatient with both of them, and caught his wrist again, bringing the towel back to her face.
Do it.
She did not say the words.
He understood anyway.
He cleaned the blood from her eye first, slow strokes that blurred red into pink and then into something closer to skin. He rinsed the towel repeatedly, each time staining the sink. The water ran rose-colored, then clear, then rose again. Her face emerged in pieces from beneath the blood: cheekbone, eyelid, jaw, the split brow. When he reached the wound itself, his mouth tightened. He examined it with the intense concentration of a man forcing himself not to imagine the inch between the graze and death.
The bullet had kissed her skull and kept moving.
An inch.
Less.
Y/N knew he was thinking it because she was thinking it too.
Jungkook found a small first-aid kit beneath the sink, likely Mrs Shinâs doing, and pressed gauze carefully against the cut. The pressure brought her back into her body for one bright, painful second. She hissed silently through her teeth. He murmured something, brows drawn, then fixed a narrow band aid over the wound with hands gentler than she had known hands like his could be.
The tub filled.
Steam fogged the mirror until the dead bride vanished behind mist.
Jungkook helped her remove the ruined slip without letting his eyes linger anywhere longer than necessary. That, too, hurt in a way she did not understand. Not because she wanted him to look. Because she wanted something, and the wanting had not yet found a name.
When he helped her into the bath, the heat shocked her.
She sank into it with a sharp inhale, fingers closing around the rim as warmth rushed over chilled skin and bruised muscle. The water turned pink almost immediately. Blood lifted from her body in pale red threads, curling around her arms, her ribs, her legs. Ash floated briefly on the surface before dissolving. Jungkook knelt beside the tub fully dressed, sleeves rolled to his elbows, hair falling into his eyes as he dipped the towel into the water and began again.
Her arms.
Her shoulders.
The hollow of her throat.
He cleaned her like violence could be washed away if one were patient enough.
Y/N watched him through the steam and ringing and felt the first crack in the numbness.
It was not grief.
Not yet.
It was need.
A crawling, desperate need to feel the world in a way that did not arrive muffled and distant through water. The bath was warm, but it did not reach her. Jungkookâs hands were careful, but care hovered too gently at the surface. She needed pressure. Weight. Teeth. Something undeniable. Something to drag her back down into her body and prove that the cathedral had been left behind, that she had not remained beneath the saints with dust on her lashes, that she was not still nine years old at the bottom of the lake forgetting which direction led to air.
Her breathing changed.
Jungkook noticed.
His hand paused against her wrist.
His mouth moved.
Y/N?
She stared at him.
The ringing continued.
She wanted it gone.
She wanted the lake gone.
She wanted the dead girls gone, Hyeoriâs ribbon, Jooshilâs blood, Jaebeomâs hand, her motherâs face. She wanted the world to make sense or disappear entirely. She wanted to be touched hard enough that thought became unnecessary.
The water cooled.
Or perhaps she began shivering.
Jungkook drained the tub once the pink had deepened into something too close to memory. He wrapped her in a towel with awkward tenderness. He helped her stand. Helped her step onto the bath mat. Helped her into a robe Mrs Shin had somehow left folded on the counter, soft cotton smelling faintly of lavender.
Jungkook walked her to her bedroom.
The room looked the same as the last time sheâd seen it. Perhaps the Lees hadnât bothered to check the attic ti see if there was anything worth trashing.
The books she had been reading remained on the shelf. The curtains were half drawn. The bedspread was the same pale color as before. Someone had aired the room recently. It was obscene, somehow, that a room could wait. That a bed could remain made. That objects could sit quietly through wars, indifferent to whether the people who owned them returned whole, broken, or not at all.
Jungkook helped her sit at the edge of the bed, then knelt in front of her.
He had found another towel. He used it to dry her legs with the same grim gentleness as before, one hand lifting her ankle, the other rubbing warmth back into her skin. His head was bowed. The black strands of his hair fell forward, hiding part of his face. There was blood on his sleeve. Her blood, Jooshilâs, someone elseâs. She did not know. Perhaps it no longer mattered.
The ringing had begun to thin.
Not disappear.
Thin.
Enough that the world pressed closer around the edges.
Enough that she could hear the faint rasp of fabric when Jungkook moved.
Enough that she could hear, or imagine she heard, his breath catch when her hand slid into his hair.
He looked up, eyes wide as she tentatively leaned down andâ
Kissed him.
His breath caught.
The kiss was clumsy with exhaustion and forceful with desperation, her fingers suddenly tightening in his hair as if she could anchor herself there, as if his mouth were the surface of the lake and she had finally found it, allowing air back into her lungs. Jungkook froze beneath her for half a second, shock moving through him so visibly that any other day she might have laughed against his mouth.
Thenâ
he made a sound low in his throat, rough and animal, and kissed her back.
The world snapped into sensation.
Finally.
His hands at her waist. His mouth against hers. The solid heat of him between her knees. The mattress shifting beneath her. His breath. Her own. The pull in his scalp where her fingers held him. Pain at her brow when she frowned. She welcomed all of it. Every sharp, human, immediate thing.
Jungkook rose to his feet over her, one knee pressing into the bed, then the other, carefulness breaking apart under the force of months compressed into a single moment. He kissed her like a man who had been starving and hated himself for it, like restraint was not absence of hunger but the leash around its throat.
His hand came up to her jaw, tilting her toward him, and for several seconds neither of them seemed capable of anything but the frantic relief of contact.
Y/N pulled him closer.
Closer, still.
Not enough.
Nothing was enough.
His thumb settled beneath her chin, holding her there while he kissed her back with an intensity that bordered on anger. Not at her.
At everything.
At the months theyâd lost.
At the things they had done.
At the things they hadnât.
The robe slipped from one shoulder. His hand caught the fabric, stopped, then flattened instead against the mattress beside her head as if he could hold himself back. She made a small, broken sound of protest and dragged at him again. His weight came down on top of her more fully then, warm and heavy and real, pinning her to the bed in a way that should have frightened her and instead sent something like relief tearing through her chest.
Yes.
There.
Here.
She was here.
She was not in the cathedral.
Not at the altar.
Not at the bottom of the lake.
Here.
His mouth moved to her jaw, then the side of her throat, the beating pulse underneath.
Only thenâ
A helpless shudder ran through her, small at first, then strong enough that he felt it beneath his hands.
He stilled.
Completely.
Like a man hearing the crack of ice beneath his feet.
The absence of him was immediate and unbearable.
Y/N opened her eyes.
Jungkook was above her, breathing hard, face close enough that she could see the moment returning to him piece by piece. The bandage. Her shaking hands. The waxy pallor of shock beneath her skin. The fact that she was not kissing him from desire alone, not from any clean decision either of them could trust, but from panic, from drowning, from the animal need to feel anything other than the world ending again.
His expression broke.
Just slightly.
Then he pulled back.
Y/N reached for him at once.
He caught her wrists before she could drag him down again, not hard enough to hurt, but firm enough to stop her.
âNo,â he said.
She heard it.
Barely.
The word came through the ringing like a bell struck underwater.
No.
The humiliation of it cut through the fog before reason could. Her throat tightened.
âPlease,â she said, though she couldnât tell whether her voice carried.
She did not know what she was asking for.
That was the worst part.
Not him. Not sex. Not exactly.
Please make it stop.
Please make me feel something. Anything.
Please donât leave me alone in this body with everything that hasnât washed away.
Please.
Jungkookâs face twisted as though the word had hurt him physically.
âY/N.â
He said her name with such aching restraint that something inside her gave way.
She tried to speak again, tried to explain, tried to tell him that if he stopped touching her she would disappear again, back into blood and snow and the lake-bottom dark. But the words tangled somewhere in her chest and came out as a sound she did not recognize.
A sob.
Then another.
And then it all arrived.
Not gradually.
Not mercifully.
Everything her body had postponed in order to survive.
The gunshot. The blood. Jooshilâs throat opening. Little Lee Hyeori under her motherâs body. Jaebeomâs hand. The promise to wait. The cathedral. The lake. The choice. The cost. All of it returned at once, too large for breath, too large for thought, and Park Y/N broke beneath it.
She folded forward with a sob so violent it seemed to tear through her ribs.
Jungkook caught her immediately, panic flaring across his face as she shook in his arms, crying with a rawness that seemed to frighten both of them. Not graceful tears. Not controlled grief. Nothing she could swallow down and turn into anger.
His arms closed around her.
For one moment he held her the way he had wanted to hold her since the cathedral floor: desperately. His mouth moved against her hair, words she still could not quite hear, perhaps her name, perhaps an apology, perhaps nothing at all.
Then the door opened.
Mrs Shin entered without knocking.
Y/N saw Jungkook turn, saw guilt and fear flash across his face so nakedly that under different circumstances it would have been almost comic. Mrs Shin took in the scene in one glance: Y/N shaking uncontrollably on the bed, Jungkook half over her with his shirt open at the collar and horror written all over him, the towel fallen to the floor, the robe slipping loose.
Her expression sharpened into something lethal.
Jungkookâs mouth opened.
Nothing useful came out.
Mrs Shin crossed the room with astonishing speed for a woman her age and shoved him aside with both hands. Not gently. Jungkook actually stumbled off the bed, too stunned to resist.
âSilly boy,â she snapped at Jungkook, though her eyes remained on Y/N. âMove.â
He moved.
She gathered Y/Nâs robe closed with quick, efficient motions, one hand already pressing against her forehead, then her pulse, then beneath her chin.
For perhaps the first time in his life, Jeon Jungkook looked entirely outmatched.
Mrs Shin had brought a tray. It sat on the bedside table now, carrying things Y/N recognized in pieces: a glass vial, gauze, water, a syringe already prepared. The sight of the needle should have alarmed her. It didnât. Nothing did. The sobs continued tearing out of her, each one leaving her weaker than the last, until she felt herself turning blue.
Her chest spasmed violently.
She tried to inhale and couldn't.
There was no controlling it.
No stopping it.
Her entire body had become hostage to it.
Tears streamed relentlessly down her face, so fast she could barely see through them. They slid into her mouth, down her neck, soaked the collar of her shirt. She wiped at them once with the heel of her hand and immediately more replaced them.
Her shoulders shook.
Not trembling.
Shook.
Violent enough that her teeth knocked together.
Violent enough that her muscles had begun to ache.
Every attempt to calm herself only seemed to make it worse.
The harder she fought for air, the more her lungs refused to cooperate.
Broken, animal sounds she barely recognized as her own fought their way out.
Months of fear.
Months of grief.
Months spent holding herself together through sheer force of will.
All of it was coming out at once along with the adrenaline of the day leaving her bloodstream.
It felt endless.
As though something inside her had finally split open and everything she had been carrying was pouring out faster than she could survive it.
âAt this rate, sheâll collapse before she calms down.â Mrs Shin said, more to the room than to anyone in particular.
âWh-what do I do?â Jungkook muttered, panicked, his hands hanging uselessly at his side as he fought himself not to reach for Y/N seizing frame.
âSheâs not coming back down on her own.â
Y/N felt Mrs Shinâs hand close around her arm.
A pinch.
A brief burn.
Then warmth began moving beneath her skin.
Not the violent warmth of blood.
Not bathwater.
Something heavier.
Merciful.
The room softened at the edges almost immediately. The sobs did not stop, but they slowed, breaking apart into shuddering breaths she could no longer control. Mrs Shinâs hand smoothed her hair back from her damp forehead with such rare tenderness it hurt worse than the needle.
âThere,â she said, though Y/N only saw the shape of it. âEnough now.â
Enough.
Y/N wanted to agree.
Her eyelids grew heavy.
The ringing retreated at last, not gone but distant, sinking back into the dark water from which it had come. Through the narrowing slit of her vision, she saw Jungkook standing near the foot of the bed, pale and helpless and bloodstained, his hands hanging empty at his sides as though he had no idea what to do with them now that there was no one left to kill.
His eyes met hers.
For a second, before sleep took her, she thought he looked almost frightened that she might blame him.
She did not have the strength to tell him she didnât.
Then the room slipped away.
Mrs Shin stayed until Y/Nâs breathing became deep enough to satisfy her.
Only then did she stand.
Jungkook moved out of her way because he had learned that Mrs Shin did not walk around obstacles. She removed them. She adjusted the blanket over Y/Nâs shoulder, checked the bandage above her brow once more, then put the empty syringe back on the tray.
âShe will sleep,â she said.
Jungkook looked from Y/N to the syringe and back again. âFor how long?â
âAs long as her body needs.â
âThatâs not an answer.â
Mrs Shinâs eyes moved to him.
It was extraordinary how small she was and how quickly she could make a grown man feel twelve years old.
âIt is the only answer you are getting.â
Jungkook pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek and looked away, not because he was intimidated, but because arguing with Mrs Shin seemed like the sort of stupidity even he ought to have outgrown.
He heard the faint clink of glass as she fiddled with the tray. Outside the bedroom, the house continued to breathe around them: low voices through walls, footsteps along the lower corridors, doors opening and closing as men carried the bones of fallen empires back into storage rooms and studies and safes.
The war had ended but the work had only just begun.
Somehow that made it worse.
Mrs Shin took one last look at Y/N, an something in her gaze settled, gentled, remembered. Then she turned toward Jungkook.
âYou should be more careful.â
The words struck cleanly enough that he did not even think to defend himself. At first.
âI didnât mean toââ
âThat is rarely the point.â
His mouth closed.
For a while, Mrs Shin let him sit with that. She crossed the room, gathered the towel that had fallen near the bed, folded it once despite the fact that it was damp and useless, then set it beside the tray. Only after that did she look back at him.
Jungkookâs hands tightened at his sides.
The old womanâs gaze flicked toward them. Toward the blood drying at his cuffs, the scraped knuckles, the faint tremor he had thought he was hiding. She did not look angry, which was worse. Anger would have given him something to meet. This was assessment, and assessment had always been Namjoonâs territory. It made him feel exposed.
âI triedââ he said, though he hated the thinness of it as soon as the words left him.
Mrs Shin inclined her head. âYou did.â
There was no praise in it. No absolution either. Merely fact.
That almost undid him.
Because he had stopped. He had. God knew what it had cost him, though the cost was irrelevant now, almost obscene to think of. He had pulled away with every instinct in his body clawing in the opposite direction, with her mouth beneath his and her hands in his hair and months of wanting crashing through him so violently he had nearly mistaken surrender for relief. He had stopped because he had seen her eyes. Because the desperation there had not been desire, not entirely. Because somewhere inside the heat and hunger of the moment, the truth had cut through: she was trying to drown herself in him.
He had stopped.
And still Mrs Shin was right.
He had known only after nearly failing.
The thought made something sour rise in his throat.
Mrs Shin seemed to read that too, because she sighed, not unkindly. âShe is not made of glass, Jungkook.â
His eyes went to the bed.
Y/N lay curled slightly toward the window, the blanket tucked high beneath her chin, one hand visible against the sheet. Without the blood, without the gown, without the horrible white theater of the wedding, she looked almost innocent.
âNo,â he said quietly. âShe isnât.â
âBut neither is she made of steel.â
The words entered the room and remained there.
Jungkook had no answer for them.
Mrs Shin lifted the tray. âDo not wake her.â
Despite himself, a short, humorless breath escaped him.
Mrs Shinâs mouth barely moved. It might have been satisfaction. It might have been disapproval. With her, the two seemed closely related.
âIâll be outside,â she said. âIf she wakes confused or frightened, call for me.â
Then she left, closing the door softly behind her.
The quiet that followed was enormous.
Jungkook stood in the middle of Y/Nâs bedroom and did not move for several seconds.
Everywhere he looked, the day returned.
The cathedral. The knife. The gunshot. Red across white. Y/N falling. Y/N kissing him. Y/N sobbing. Y/N asleep now, drugged into the rest her body had been begging for and her mind had not known how to accept.
Jungkook crossed to the chair by the bed and sat down very slowly.
Only then did his body seem to understand that the battle had ended.
Pain arrived in layers.
His shoulder first, a deep grinding ache from the throw, the fighting, the rifle, the hours spent forcing an injured body to behave as though it belonged to someone younger and less breakable. Then his ribs. His side. His knees. The torn skin of his palm where the knife hilt had bitten into him. A headache pulsed behind his eyes, slow and vicious, timed to the memory of gunfire. When he exhaled, it trembled on the way out.
Y/N did not stir.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely between them, and forced himself to breathe quietly.
Outside the room, the mansion continued returning to itself.
That was what Namjoon would call it. Restoration. Reclamation. The Tigers moving back into their den with ledgers, weapons, names, debts and enough blood behind them to stain the foundations anew.
By tomorrow, perhaps even by midnight, men would be arguing in the study again. Someone would hang maps. Someone would bring coffee. Soyeon would insult people. Taehyung would break stuff. Namjoon would sit at his desk as though he had never been dead, cane resting within reach, and begin deciding what the world looked like after the collapse of the house of the Alabaster Snake cracked.
And Y/N?
Jungkook looked at her hand where it rested above the blanket.
What the hell was Y/N now?
The question sat beside him like another living thing.
Not a Lee bride.
Not anymore.
Not the Park princess either, though blood was rarely dissolved by choice alone and Jaebeom still breathed somewhere beyond their walls. Not a Tiger, not really, not in any legitimate way. Not a prisoner. Not a guest. Not an ally as cleanly as Namjoon might write on paper.
She had chosen them.
She had chosen him.
Or she had chosen not to follow Jaebeom.
Or she had chosen survival and landed here because all other doors had burned.
Jungkook did not know which version he was allowed to believe.
Perhaps all of them were true.
That was the problem with Y/N. She did not make anything mercifully simple. Even her presence in this bed felt like victory and punishment at once.
He had crossed hell to bring her home, only to realize he had no idea whether this place could be home to her, whether he had any right to want it, whether wanting it was already another kind of cage forced on her.
He rubbed both hands over his face and winced when dried blood pulled at his skin.
He needed to wash.
Change.
Report to Namjoon.
Find out where Jaebeom had gone, whether any Ravens had been captured, whether they were already planning a counter-strike, what the Kangs were expecting as payment, whether the bodies at the cathedral had been cleared before police arrived, whether the press had enough footage to become a problem. There were a hundred things to do. A hundred practical matters that required his attention, his anger, his hands.
He did none of them.
Instead he sat beside Y/Nâs bed and watched the rise and fall of her breathing.
For a long time, that was enough.
Then, because the mind was cruelest when allowed quiet, the cathedral came again.
Jungkook closed his eyes.
The day passed by in flashes.
He opened them again.
Y/N breathed.
In.
Out.
He focused on that until the room steadied.
At some point, he reached out before he had fully decided to. His fingers stopped just short of her hand, hovering there like a question he had no right to ask. Then, carefully, barely touching, he brushed his knuckles against hers.
Her skin was warm.
Alive.
The word did not come as relief this time.
It came as responsibility.
He had wanted her alive with such violence that he had never thought beyond the fact of it. Alive had been the destination. Alive had been the only prayer he was willing to make. Alive had been the answer to every nightmare. But now she was here, breathing under Mrs Shinâs blankets, and alive was not a conclusion at all. Alive was the beginning of everything they had spent months not saying. Alive was memory, consequence, shock, grief, the ghost of her brother walking out through smoke and the bodies of little girls on marble. Alive was pain waking tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.
Alive was harder.
Maybe that was what Mrs Shin had meant.
Survival, he was beginning to suspect, was not the clean triumph men imagined when they were still fighting. It was messier. Quieter. It arrived without music. It left blood in bathroom grout and ruined dresses on bedroom floors. It asked what you intended to do with the future now that you had made such a spectacle of demanding one.
Jungkook looked at Y/Nâs sleeping face and felt the answer move somewhere in him, vast and frightening.
He did not know.
For once, he did not pretend otherwise.
He did not know what she would want when she woke. He did not know whether she would remember kissing him and hate herself for it, hate him for stopping, hate him for almost not stopping, or remember none of it clearly enough for hatred to take a shape. He did not know whether she would stay in this house willingly once the shock lifted. He did not know what Namjoon would ask of her, what Jaebeom would do next, what the Kangs would demand in payment, what ghosts would climb into bed with her when the sedative wore off.
He knew only one thing.
He would not make her regret staying.
The thought settled with strange finality.
Not a vow spoken grandly beneath shattered saints. Not a declaration. Not something anyone would ever hear and turn into legend. Just a decision made in the dim quiet of a bedroom, beside a woman too exhausted to know he was making it.
He would not be another hand closing around her wrist.
Not even if every selfish, terrified part of him wanted to.
The door opened softly behind him.
Jungkook turned.
Namjoon stood in the doorway.
He had changed out of the bloodied clothes from the cathedral, though the clean shirt did nothing to hide the exhaustion carved into his face. His cane was in his right hand. The other rested lightly against the doorframe. For a moment, the two brothers simply looked at one another across the dim room.
Namjoonâs gaze moved to Y/N.
Then to Jungkookâs hand, still resting near hers.
Then back to Jungkook.
âShe asleep?â
Jungkook nodded.
Namjoon entered without asking permission and closed the door behind him quietly. He crossed the room with more difficulty than he would ever admit, lowering himself into the chair near the window only after the movement had become unavoidable. For several seconds he said nothing, merely watched Y/N with an expression Jungkook could not read.
Finally, Namjoon exhaled, his thumb moving over the handle of his cane. âI donât think any of us know the cost of this yet.â
The room seemed to darken around that.
Y/N slept on.
Jungkook looked at her again, at the bandage above her brow, at the faint bluish shadows beneath her eyes, at the hand resting above the blanket as though even sleep had not fully taught it to unclench.
âNo,â he said quietly. âWe donât.â
Namjoon was silent for a while.
Then he said, âi thought you might be celebrating with the boys.â
âI had stuff to take care of.â
âI can see that.â
Jungkookâs eyes flicked toward him.
There was a long pause.
âJaebeom?â
âGone.â
âNorth?â
âProbably.â
The word did exactly what Jungkook expected it to.
Nothing.
Everything.
His jaw tightened. Namjoon saw it, of course. Namjoon saw everything.
âWeâll get him.â
âI know.â
âNot tonight.â
Jungkook looked back at him.
Namjoonâs gaze held.
âNot tonight,â he repeated.
For once, Jungkook did not argue.
Because tonight Jaebeom could keep breathing.
Tonight the Kangs could wait, the dead could be counted, the war could arrange itself into reports and ledgers and strategy meetings without him. Tonight there was a woman sleeping in the bed beside him who needed someone to stay.
Tonight, he stayed.
Namjoon seemed to understand the decision before Jungkook made it aloud. He nodded once, then forced himself back to his feet with a small grimace he failed to hide.
âCome and see me tomorrow morning,â Namjoon paused. âWe need to talk.â
âAbout what?â
Namjoon stared at him for a long moment.
âPayment.â
He left before Jungkook could answer.
The door clicked shut again, and Jungkook was alone with the steady sound of Y/N breathing.
For the first time all day, there was no gunfire.
No ringing.
No screaming.
Only the house below them beginning its impossible work of becoming home again, and the woman in the bed beside him sleeping through the first night of a life none of them yet knew how to live.
â
Chapter 2 (coming soon..)
Masterlist
Here we are! I hope you liked it. How does it feel to finally get a first kiss after 220k words? Slowburn nation ariseeee. You will soon get plenty more Jungkook and Y/N interactions and believe me there is still so much to comeeeee. Iâll be waiting for reactions xxx
Series Genre: Mafia!au , Slowburn, Angst, Hurt, Smut, TW (it is a mafia!AU, after all)
Pairing: Mafia!Jungkook x reader
Wordcount: 1.5k
Masterlist
â
The first thing Y/N thought was that the fascinator had been a mistake.
Not the suit.
The suit was right.
Black, severe enough to offend every person waiting beyond the tinted glass. It had been chosen with intent, tailored with spite, pressed that morning by hands too nervous to meet her eyes. The gloves were right too, despite the heat. The sunglasses, non-negotiable.
But the headpieceâ
The headpiece was absurd.
She tilted her head, studying her reflection in the dark car window. The netting fell over the upper half of her face in a delicate black lattice, softening nothing. She looked like one of those film noir widows who appeared twenty minutes after the murder, smoking in doorways and lying to detectives.
Birdcage netting.
Thatâs what the hairstylist had called it. The irony was not lost on her.
Y/N adjusted the little hat again.
It tilted back into the exact same position.
âUseless fucking thing,â she muttered to herself.
The driver looked at her through the rearview mirror.
Only for a second.
Still.
She caught him.
His gaze dropped immediately, but not quickly enough.
âWhat are you looking at?â she snapped.
The poor manâs shoulders rose half an inch.
âNothing, maâam.â
âWhat.â
âNothing.â
His hands tightened on the wheel.
Y/N stared at him for another second, all sharpness and black silk and teeth, before the anger burned itself into something smaller.
Not the manâs fault.
None of this was his fault.
The poor guy was simply clocking in each morning and out each night. Trying to do his job.
Just like she was, ironically.
Besides, any reasonable man mightâve stared. Park Y/N was quite a sight that day.
She looked away first.
âSorry,â she mumbled, barely loud enough.
The apology landed worse than the outburst.
He looked more frightened.
âItâs quite all right, maâam.â
Of course it was.
Everything was quite all right.
Outside, August had turned the city white with heat. A temperature unnatural to a northern creature such as herself.
Almost as unnatural as the event she was about to attend.
Sunlight flashed against the hood of the car, against the procession lined along the curb, against the polished shoes of men standing too still in suits. The air above the pavement trembled.
Y/N grew irritated again. She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.
âDonât call me maâam.â
She had a headache.
Not from alcohol. Not entirely.
From the sweltering heat. From the lack of sleep. From the fact that every person outside this car was waiting for her to finally come out.
She had made a point of keeping them waiting.
The lock clicked.
Her eyes opened.
The door swung wide, sunlight flooded the backseat andâ
Soyeon appeared.
She leaned down into the opening, one hand resting on the top of the car, her expression hidden behind dark glasses of her own.
Y/N lifted one finger.
âDonât.â
Soyeon paused. âDonât what?â
âWhatever is about to come out of your mouth.â
Soyeonâs gaze travelled over her.
The suit.
The gloves.
The sunglasses.
The hat.
The entire insult of it.
âThe hatâs a nice touch.â
Y/N exhaled through her nose. âThere it is.â
âI was being sincere.â
âYouâre never sincere.â
âIâm frequently sincere.â Soyeon retorted. âPeople just happen to dislike the content.â
Y/N looked at her.
Soyeon looked back.
Neither of them blinked.
Then Soyeon added, âAre you sure thatâs the vibe you want to go with? You look like someone whoâs about to inherit their late husbandâs fortune.â
Despite herself, Y/N almost laughed.
It came dangerously close. A small, treacherous thing at the back of her throat.
She swallowed it.
âIâm hungover.â
âYou had one sip of champagne yesterday.â
âI didnât say it was from the champagne.â
Soyeon considered that, then nodded once, as if this was fair.
âLife?â
âAmong other things.â
âAh.â Soyeon glanced toward the building beyond the car. âThen yes. Reasonable.â
Y/N hated that this helped.
Not comforted her. No. Soyeon did not have the face, voice, or moral architecture required for comfort.
But it steadied her.
A little.
Outside, someone murmured into an earpiece. Another car door shut. Heat rolled into the backseat in visible waves.
âHow many?â Y/N asked.
Soyeon did not ask what she meant.
âInside?â
âEverywhere.â
âToo many.â
âArmed?â
âMost.â
âHostile?â
Soyeonâs mouth curved faintly. âThat depends on how charming you plan on being today.â
Y/N stared at her.
âRight,â Soyeon said. âAll of them, then.â
This time Y/N did laugh.
Once.
Short.
Unwilling.
âThere you go,â Soyeon said with a lazy smile.
Y/Nâs jaw tightened. âDonât.â
âWhat? Iâm being supportive.â
âYouâre being smug.â
âI contain multitudes.â
Y/N rolled her eyes behind the dark tint of her sunglasses and, it seemed Soyeon knew her better than sheâd thought becauseâ
âDonât roll your eyes at me,â the girl snapped, opening the door wider. âHere I am, offering help.â
âYou opened a car door.â
âIâve done less for people I liked better.â
âThat list must be microscopic.â
âNonexistent.â
Y/N looked at her then.
Really looked.
The immaculate hair. The knife-straight posture.
Soyeon.
The woman who had once looked at her with contempt, then told her the truth anyway. The woman who had somehow ruined her life and returned it to her in the same breath.
A strange thing passed between them.
Not friendship.
God forbid.
Recognition, maybe.
The kind born in locked rooms, over bad news, between women who had come to acquire the quiet certainty that if the world ended tomorrow, neither would be surprised to find the other standing beside her.
Soyeon tilted her head. âWhat?â
Y/N looked away. âNothing.â
âNo, go on. You looked almost sentimental. I was about to alert security.â
âShut the fuck up.â
âGladly. After you get out of the car.â
Y/N glanced past her.
The building waited at the top of the steps, pale and sun-struck.
Her stomach turned.
âIâm going to die before the day ends. Or hurl. Or both.â
Soyeon followed her gaze. âYou canât know that for sure,â she shrugged.
âIâm comfortable with instinct.â
âYour instincts usually involve arson.â
âTheyâve served me well.â
Soyeonâs mouth twitched. âThat is debatable.â
âFair enough.â
The men outside straightened as if some invisible string had been pulled through all of them at once. One by one, heads turned toward the car. The driver went very still. Farther away, behind the gates, the gathered crowd shifted into a single watching creature.
Y/N felt the attention before she saw it.
There it was.
The moment.
The little hinge on which a life turned.
She looked down at her gloved hands.
They did not shake.
That pleased her.
Then annoyed her.
Then meant nothing at all.
Soyeon extended her own hand.
Y/N stared at it.
âWhat is that?â
âMy hand.â
âYes, thank you. I recognized the anatomy.â
âThen take it.â
âNo.â
Soyeonâs eyebrows rose above the rim of her sunglasses. âNo?â
âI can get out of a car by myself.â
âThen do it.â
âI will.â Y/N looked up slowly. âEventually.â
Soyeon remained exactly where she was, hand out, expression unreadable, blocking half the sun and all of the exit.
âFor Godâs sake,â Y/N said.
âIf He was involved, today would look very different.â She shifted her weight to another leg, âNow take the hand.â
âWhy?â
âBecause if you fall on your face in those shoes, your street cred will suffer and Iâm not sure I want to watch that,â she shrugged. âAlso, itâs a hundred degrees and I, for one, would like to get this over with.â
âI knew the support was conditional.â
âIâd be worried if it wasnât.â
Y/N looked at the hand again.
There was no softness in the gesture. No pity. No sweet, female solidarity dressed up in silk.
It was a challenge.
A rope thrown across a ravine.
Get up.
Move.
Do not give them the satisfaction.
Y/N hated her a little for understanding.
She took the hand.
Soyeonâs fingers closed around hers, cool despite the heat.
For half a second, before Y/N stepped out, they stayed like that.
Joined.
Ridiculous.
Grim.
Then, Y/N finally stepped out of the car.
Heat swallowed her whole.
For a moment, the world went bright and soundless. Sun on black silk. Tens of eyes turning. Men shifting uncomfortably under her gaze.
She did not look at them for long.
She only looked ahead.
Beyond them waited the doors to the building. Waiting with its mouth open.
Y/N adjusted her sunglasses with her free hands, then quickly ripped the ridiculous headpiece off her hair and flung it onto the backseat, before slamming the car door shut with far more force than the situation required.
There.
Much better.
She smiled.
Not with joy, but rather because the violence of the gesture had allowed her some catharsis.
Not enough, of course. It would never be enough. But sufficient to allow the pressure behind her eyes to momentarily dissipate.
Soyeon saw it and smiled back. She released Y/Nâs hand but stayed at her shoulder.
âAny last words?â she asked.
Y/N looked toward the doors of the building.
âNo.â
âNo?â
âNo time.â
âFor what?â Soyeon asked.
âDo I really need to say?â
And together, dressed in black beneath the merciless August sun, they started up the steps.
Yes.
There would be time for arguing later.
Time for anger.
Time for revenge.
Time for regret.
But not today.
Todayâ
There was no time to die.
â
â
Masterlist
Sooooooo, what are you thinking??? Iâm sure youâre full of questions haha. I, too, would be terribly confused đ are you looking forward to this book? Chapter one will be posted very soon.
Series Genre: Mafia!au , Slowburn, Angst, Hurt, smut, TW violence, death (it is a mafia!AU, after all)
Pairing: Mafia!Jungkook x reader
Wordcount: 12.6k
Masterlist
Note: Be prepared, girlfriends. This may be the most intense chapter yet. Itâs long. Buckle up.
â
â
Security moved first, as trained men always did, though training only carried them so far into catastrophe.
Lee guards surged toward the altar from both side aisles, ivory-lined jackets splitting open to reveal holsters beneath expensive tailoring.
Park men had actually risen a second earlier, black suits moving in sharp coordinated bursts, some reaching for weapons, others turning instinctively toward Jaebeomâs last known position as though awaiting instructions, only to find that their leader had somehow already vanished.
Guests screamed and ducked beneath pews. A woman in pearls fell hard enough that Jungkook saw blood instantly streak from her temple onto the marble.
Chairs overturned. Flower arrangements toppled. Orchids scattered underfoot, crushed as the first return shots cracked through the nave.
They were shooting blind.
The Tigers were not.
From the gallery opposite Jungkook, the second sniper fired. A Lee uncle near the front took the round mid-rise, his white suit blooming red before he understood he had been selected. The shot sent a fresh wave of panic through the pews.
Suddenlyâ
Stained glass above the eastern wall shattered inward, not from bullets but from tens of Kang men in full gear bursting through.
Jungkook did not watch the glass fall.
He was already moving.
âShowtime,â Yoongiâs voice came through the earpiece, low and controlled.
At the rear of the cathedral, the back doors burst inward.
Smoke canisters rolled across marble, spinning beneath pews and along the aisle before vomiting thick grey clouds into the carefully arranged symmetry of black and white.
Through it came men in dark suits and tactical masks, Tigers moving with the clean brutality of a house that had spent months being mistaken for dead and had taken the insult personally. They did not rush. They marched. One team cut left toward the Park side, another right toward the Lees. More Kangs came behind them through the side exits and transepts.
For the first time all morning, the cathedral felt alive.
Jungkook left the rifle nest.
The plan had not called for him to descend immediately. The plan had included timing, cover, confirming primary targets, maintaining elevation until Namjoon entered and the Lee chain of command was sufficiently broken.
The plan, however, had been written by men who had not just watched Y/N stand beside a collapsing body with blood on her face.
So Jungkook did not ask permission.
He slung the rifle, drew his sidearm and moved.
The upper service corridor blurred past him in damp stone and low light. Somewhere behind him Jimin swore into the comms, then laughed once in disbelief and followed. Jungkook took the stairs too fast, boots skidding over worn steps, one hand catching the rail hard enough to scrape skin through his glove. A Lee man appeared at the second landing, gun half-raised. Jungkook shot him twice before the man finished turning. He stepped over the body without looking down.
By the time he reached the lower level, smoke had swallowed half the nave.
The world became fragments.
A flash of ivory disappearing behind a pillar. A Raven firing from the balcony. Taehyung tackling a guard through a row of chairs. Yoongi dragging a wounded Tiger behind a marble font while returning fire with infuriating calm. Kang men laughing near the transept as they pulled two Lee cousins out from beneath a pew by their collars. Bells somewhere overhead still vibrating from the earlier toll, each reverberation making the smoke tremble in the colored light.
And Y/N.
Always Y/N.
She had moved back from the altar now, though not far. The train of her veil had tangled near Taeyongâs body, white lace dragging through the red pooling beneath him. She looked down once, quick and assessing, not with grief but with the terrible practicality of someone who understood that dead bodies were obstacles before they were tragedies. Then, she finally lifted her gaze.
She saw him.
Through smoke, through broken light, through all the ruin between them, she saw only him.
For one second the entire cathedral narrowed to the line between them.
Jungkook felt the impact of it in his chest.
She was here. Alive.
He had known it, technically. He had seen her standing. He had watched her move. Still, knowledge and sensation were different things. Her eyes on his made the fact real in a way nothing else had.
She was alive, blood-spattered and pale and standing in the eye of the storm like she had been born there.
Her lips parted.
He took one step forward.
A blade struck the marble near his boot and snapped the moment in half.
Jungkook turned, fired toward the balcony and caught the Raven leaning over the rail before the man could correct his aim. The body pitched forward, struck the stone edge, and disappeared into the smoke below.
Another guard rushed him from the right. Jungkook broke his wrist against the pistol, drove an elbow into his throat, and shot the man behind him without fully turning. His mind worked with savage clarity now. Threat. Angle. Distance. Y/N. Threat. Reload. Y/N. Move. Y/N.
Y/N.
He had almost reached the altar when laughter cut through the chaos.
Jaebeom.
Of course.
The sound came from the raised dais near the Lee elders, half-obscured by smoke and fallen flowers. Jungkook found him in the same breath his gun did. Black suit, silver glint at the throat, hair immaculate despite the chaos, one hand braced casually against a cracked pillar as though the massacre had mildly inconvenienced him on the way to a more interesting appointment.
âYou always did have terrible timing!â Jaebeom called, voice bright with amusement. âWe couldâve at least had cake first.â
Jungkook fired.
Jaebeom moved like he had been expecting it. The bullet struck the pillar where his chest had been an instant earlier, sending pale stone fragments exploding.
The sight of himâalive, laughing, close enough to killâdragged something monstrous up through Jungkookâs ribs.
The cathedral fell away again, not toward Y/N this time but toward another body on another floor, Hoseokâs blood spreading where it should never have been, Hoseokâs laugh cut off mid-world, Hoseok dead because Park Jaebeom had decided betrayal made for good theater.
Jungkook adjusted his aim.
For Hobi.
He tracked the edge of Jaebeomâs suit behind the pillar, waited for the reappearance, finger tightening when suddenlyâ
Y/Nâs voice tore across the aisle.
ââu son of a bitch!â
Not frightened.
Warning.
He pivoted before he saw why.
The eldest Lee son had broken from the chaos near the front pews. Taejun, Jungkook remembered distantly. His face had gone bloodless with shock and rage, one sleeve stained from kneeling beside Taeyong, a knife heâd found on the floor clutched in his hand with no elegance at all.
He was running straight for her.
Jungkook fired, not at Jaebeom, not at the debt he had carried for months, but at the man crossing the altar with a blade.
The shot hit Taejun in the shoulder and spun him sideways. It should have dropped him. It didnât. Grief kept him upright. He stumbled, howled, and came on again, knife still in hand, eyes fixed on Y/N as if killing her might reverse the hole in his brotherâs skull.
Y/N moved too.
She was faster than Jungkook expected and slower than she should have been.
The distinction terrified him.
She stepped out of the knifeâs line, caught Taejunâs wrist, and drove the heel of her palm up beneath his jaw with enough force to snap his head back. Six months ago she would have had him on the ground before he finished falling forward. Six months ago there also would have been no dress, tight corset, no months of starvation and sleeplessness carved into her body. Now the miles of silk betrayed her. The hem caught under her heel. Her balance faltered for less than a second.
Taejun seized that second with both hands.
He slammed into her.
Jungkook reached them as Y/N hit the side of the altar steps, her skull striking marble with a sound that made his stomach turn. The knife came down. Jungkook caught Taejunâs arm mid-swing, twisted until bone shifted beneath his grip, and drove the butt of his pistol into the manâs face. Once. Twice. By the third strike, Taejunâs knees gave way. Jungkook kicked the fallen knife under the altar and put one boot against the manâs chest when he tried to rise.
âStay down,â he growled.
Taejun spat blood and wiggled helplessly.
Jungkook shot him in the groin.
This time the man shrieked but he stayed down.
Y/N had pushed herself upright against the altar, jaw clenched so tightly he could see the tremor in it. Blood from her late betrothed still streaked one side of her face. Dust clung to her veil. The shoulder seam of her gown had torn slightly, exposing bruised skin beneath white silk. She looked furious, which helped. Fury meant alive. Fury meant present. Fury meant her.
Jungkook caught her by the arm before she could pretend she was steady.
âAre you hurt?â
The question came out rougher than he meant it to.
Of all the things he could have said, that was what survived the wreckage.
Y/N stared at him.
She opened her mouth but nothing came out.
âY/N,â Jungkook said again, lower this time. âAre you hurt?â
For a moment, absurdly, she looked offended.
Around them, the cathedral continued collapsing into violence. Men were dying between overturned pews. A house was being dismantled in real time. The groom lay dead a few feet away. Her brother was somewhere in the smoke, watching, probably. And Jungkook, who had shot a man through the skull five minutes earlier and another five seconds ago, was asking if she was hurt.
âIâm standing, arenât I?â she said.
The answer was sharp enough, familiar enough, that something inside him relaxed.
He might have laughed if his throat had not closed around the sound of her voice.
His hand was still wrapped around her arm. Too tight. He knew it and could not quite make himself let go. His thumb slid down to the inside of her wrist where her pulse hammered beneath the skin, fast and human and undeniably there.
She looked at him, lips parted, as though another statement were begging to come out.
âYouââ
Youâre here.
You came back for me.
But something else came out instead, in spite of her best effort.
âYou look terrible,â she stated.
He looked at her blood-covered face, the torn dress, the wildness in her eyes, and felt something close to hysteria claw at the back of his teeth. A dumbfounded scoff escaped him.
âThatâs rich, coming from you.â
âOh, fuck you,â she rolled her eyes.
âFuck you.â
Her mouth twitched.
For the briefest instant, standing amid smoke and shattered glass and the dead, they were almost themselves.
Across the cathedral, above the screams and the gunfire and the terrible grinding sound of overturned benches scraping marble, a voice cut through the uproar with the smoothness of a knife drawn from velvet.
It was not shouted, not really. Somehow it did not need to be. The voice carried because, even in the middle of a massacre, Park Jaebeom spoke as though the room belonged to him. He reappeared, brushing dust from one sleeve with leisurely distaste.
Then, he began to clap.
Slowly.
Once.
Again.
A third time.
He looked around at the ruined cathedral with open appreciation, gaze passing over the dead groom, the smoke swallowing the aisle, the Lee men and women being slaughtered one by one into their ceremonial whites. His mouth curved, not in surprise or outrage, but in the private satisfaction of someone whose evening had finally become worth attending.
âWell done,â he drawled. âReally. Iâm impressed.â His gaze flicked toward Taeyongâs body with only passing interest. âMost weddings are an assault on the spirit, but this oneââ he lifted one hand, âtop-notch entertainment.â
Jungkookâs hand tightened on Y/Nâs shoulder hard enough that pain flashed through her already battered body.
She did not look at him. She did not have to. She could feel the change in him instantly: the heat leaving him, the fury narrowing, becoming something colder and far more dangerous. His gun had already begun to rise.
âDonât,â she murmured.
He either did not hear her or did and chose to ignore it.
Jaebeomâs eyes found the weapon, then Jungkookâs face, and his smile sharpened with something close to delight. âOh, Jungkookie,â he sighed, stepping over a fallen flower arrangement. âMy favorite stray. I assure you, Iâm glad you made it.â His eyes swept over him: the blood spattered along his jaw, the rifle strap cutting across his shoulder, the gun in his hand, the look in his eyes. âLate, of course. But fashionably so. And look at you, ready to murder me in front of my own flesh and blood.â His mouth softened into something almost fond. âHowâarousing.â
âDonât come any closer,â Jungkook growled.
âJesus, relax, will you?â Jaebeom lifted both hands with lazy innocence. âIâm unarmed, see?â
Then, before anyone could decide whether he was insane or merely arrogant, he began walking toward them.
The strangest part was that people moved.
Even now. Even in all this. Guards stumbled out of his path as though some old instinct had survived the collapse of every other order. A wounded Lee lowered his pistol rather than risk firing near the Park leader. One Raven, bleeding badly from the shoulder, tried to intercept him and stopped at a small gesture from Jaebeomâs fingers. It was absurd, Y/N thought, watching her brother cross a battlefield as if it were a dining room. Absurd, and horribly familiar. Jaebeom had always, like his father before him, possessed that talent for making danger appear social.
Jungkook shifted in front of her.
Not enough to block her entirely. Enough to draw a line.
Jaebeom noticed immediately. Of course he did. His gaze dropped to the subtle movement, to Jungkookâs body now angled between them, and something brief and unreadable passed across his expression before amusement covered it neatly again.
âNo need for heroics,â he said lightly. âIâm not here to fight.â His eyes returned to Y/N. âIâm only here to take whatâs mine.â
The sentence landed before she could brace for it.
Mine.
Y/N stepped out from behind Jungkook before he could stop her.
A flash of alarm crossed his face, quick and vicious, but she ignored it. She was tired of standing behind men while they discussed ownership in increasingly creative terms. Tired of being moved from one side of a war to another as though the only meaningful question was whose hands would close around her next.
The hem of her gown dragged through blood as she moved forward. Taeyongâs blood. Perhaps someone elseâs by now. It hardly mattered. The white of the dress had always been a joke. She hadnât been pure in a very long time.
Jaebeomâs smile widened.
âThere she is,â he said. âAtta girl. Letâs go.â
Y/N looked at him for a long moment.
The cathedral roared around them. Gunfire broke somewhere high above. Behind Jaebeom, the house of Lee continued collapsing one scream at a time.
Jaebeom extended one hand.
Not demanding.
Not pleading.
Simply waiting.
As though everything that had happened inside the cathedral was merely an unfortunate delay.
As though the dead groom cooling beside the altar, the shattered stained glass, the bodies strewn across marble and the collapse of dynasties were all temporary inconveniences standing between him and an outcome he still considered inevitable.
Y/N stared at the offered hand.
And for one absurd, treacherous moment, the cathedral vanished.
She was six years old again.
**
The lake, a mile from the base, had frozen overnight. Snow covered the banks in uneven drifts and the cold had turned her cheeks raw. She stood at the edge of the ice with tears gathering angrily in her eyes, boots planted firmly in the snow while Jaebeom waited on the opposite side.
"Youâre being ridiculous," heâd grumbled, shuffling across the ice and towards her.
"Itâs deep," sheâd moaned, looking down at the lake.
"Itâs frozen solid."
"B-but what if it breaks?"
He had rolled his eyes with all the dramatic suffering only a thirteen-year-old boy could muster.
Thenâ he had held out his hand and made a promise.
"I won't let go."
**
Slowly, Y/Nâs gaze lifted from the hand to his eyes.
And suddenly she understood something she should have understood years ago.
The offered hand was no longer an offer.
It might have been, once.
But Jaebeom never really asked.
He only ever took.
The distinction had always been meaningless to him.
In his mind, those things were love.
That was what made it so sad.
Not frightening.
Not infuriating.
Sad.
Because standing there amidst the ruins of everything, Y/N realized Jaebeom genuinely did not understand why, this time around, she wouldnât take his hand.
He could understand betrayal.
He could understand ambition.
He could understand manipulation.
But choice?
Choice made no sense to him.
Not when it concerned her.
Not when it contradicted him.
Not when she belongedâ
No.
The thought arrived with startling clarity.
That was the whole point.
She didn't belong.
Not to him.
Not to the Lees.
Not to the Tigers.
Not to anyone.
For the first time in a very long time, Y/N felt something close to pity.
Then she looked at the hand one last time and thought of every promise her brother had ever made.
I won't let anything happen to you.
I'll take care of it.
Trust me.
I won't let go.
And Jaebeom had somehow kept his promise.
He never had let her go.
That was precisely the problem.
He never would.
Y/N closed her eyes.
âLeave,â she finally said, her voice soft.
For the first time since he had stepped out from behind the pillar, Jaebeomâs smile flickered.
Not fear.
No. Jaebeom had never given fear away that cheaply.
It was more like irritation at an unexpected line in a script he had written himself. A momentary failure of the world to behave according to his design. He recovered quickly, but not quickly enough.
âThatâs not how this works.â
He reached for her.
Not violently. Not even urgently. With something far worse: certainty. The effortless entitlement of a man reaching for a trinket he owned, a door he had the right to open, a person whose refusal had never truly occurred to him as a possible outcome.
Y/N stepped back.
A single motion that carried far more violence than anything else currently happening in that cathedral.
Jaebeom stilled.
For one suspended second, the brother she had known as a child looked back at her through the face of the man who had ruined them both.
He stepped closer, lowering his voice so that the words belonged only to the three of them, intimate despite the massacre unfurling around them. âY/N,â he warned, âDonât be dramatic, little lark. Letâs go home.â
There it was.
The nickname.
Little lark.
Their motherâs voice had lived inside those words once. Warm hands. Soft hair. A sweet pressed secretly into her palm after a reprimand. The memory of being loved before love became indistinguishable from debt. Jaebeom knew that. He always knew exactly which doors to open and which ghosts to let out.
Y/Nâs throat tightened.
âHome?â she repeated. The word tasted like ash on her tongue.
âThatâs right.â His voice hardened beneath the sweetness. âOur home.â
The word might have worked once.
That was the cruelest part.
Months ago, even after England, even after her fatherâs blood, even after everything, there had still been some ruined corner of her willing to turn toward that word like a dog hearing a whistle.
Home.
The northern cold.
The halls where their motherâs perfume still somehow haunted every room. The place that had made her and broken her and taught her to call both things inheritance.
But now she looked at Jaebeom and felt nothing pull her back.
Well.
Not nothing. That would have been easier.
She did feel grief.
But not obedience.
Never again.
Jaebeom reached for her again.
This time Jungkook stepped between them.
The movement was immediate, violent in its restraint. He placed himself chest-to-chest with Jaebeom, close enough that the barrel of his gun nearly brushed black silk. He did not waver.
âTouch her,â Jungkook said with an eerie calm, âand I promise you there wonât be a force on this earth capable of protecting you.â
Jaebeomâs brows lifted. âBold.â
Jungkookâs jaw clenched. âI still owe you a bullet, remember?â
The smile that crossed Jaebeomâs face then was all teeth and old poison. âAh,â he said softly. âThatâs right. For your friend. The one I skewered at the Summit. Hoseok, was it?â
The name changed the air.
Y/N felt it pass through Jungkook like a blade finding bone. His whole body went still, not with shock but with the effort not to obey the impulse that had nearly consumed him in the maze, in the bunker, in every sleepless hour since Hoseokâs blood had dried.
For a second, she thought he might do it. Thought he might shoot Jaebeom where he stood and damn whatever came next.
Jaebeom saw it too.
That was why he had said it.
Y/N shifted. Her hand finding Jungkookâs arm.
He did not look at her. But his finger eased half a fraction from the trigger.
Jaebeom noticed that too and there it was again, that faint fracture in the performance. Not jealousy, exactly. Not surprise. Something uglier.
He leaned slightly to look past Jungkook, eyes fixing on her with renewed sharpness. âY/N,â he said, the coaxing gone now, âdonât embarrass yourself. Youâre coming with mââ
âNo.â
One word.
Barely audible.
It landed anyway.
Jaebeom stopped.
For a moment the entire cathedral seemed to recede behind him. The smoke, the gunfire, the screaming Lees, the Ravens retreating by degrees. All of it became background to the impossible fact of her refusal.
His smile snapped shut.
âY/Nââ
âIâm staying.â
There it was.
Not shouted.
Not dramatized.
Not even cruel.
She said it as one might state a fact discovered after a long illness, something terrible and simple and no longer avoidable. Iâm staying. Three words that reached back through every corridor of their childhood, every lesson in loyalty, every oath, every punishment, every time he had mistaken possession for protection and protection for love.
Jaebeom stared at her.
For several heartbeats he did not look like the leader of the Raven clan.
He looked like her brother.
No softer, perhaps. No less dangerous. But younger somehow, stripped by disbelief into something almost human. Y/N saw the wound open before he covered it. The insult of it. The betrayal. The grotesque hilarity of having survived bloodlines and fathers and enemies only to lose her to the one thing he had never seriously considered: her own free-will.
Then the mask returned.
Slowly.
âYouâll regret it,â he said.
âProbably,â she eventually replied. âBut not today.â
Something almost like admiration flickered in his eyes.
It vanished before it could become anything useful.
Behind him, a shot cracked from the north balcony and a Lee guard who had been creeping too close folded against a pew. The interruption seemed to wake the cathedral again. A Raven shouted something about snipers on the upper gallery. Another dragged a wounded cousin toward a broken side door. The Lees were splitting apart now, some firing blindly in rage, some crawling toward barricaded exits, some kneeling over bodies as though grief might serve as armor.
The whole house was coming undone in real time, its purity spilling across the marble in red.
Jaebeom did not look back at them.
He looked only at Y/N.
Unreadable was too simple a word for what lived in his face. Fury, yes. Wound, yes. Amusement, somehow.
But underneath all of it was something Y/N did not want to name.
Loss.
He lifted one hand.
Not toward her this time.
To his men.
The Ravens began to pull back.
No panic. No disorder. They melted from their positions like shadows retreating from a door opened too wide, gathering their wounded where they could, abandoning the dead where they could not. One by one, black suits disappeared into smoke and side exits.
Jaebeomâs gaze finally shifted to Jungkook.
âYou think this ends here?â he asked quietly.
Jungkook said nothing.
The gun remained in his hand.
Jaebeom smiled thinly. âIt doesnât.â
Then he turned.
Y/N watched her brother go.
He moved with the same elegant arrogance as always, stepping over broken glass, blood and crushed orchids without looking down. He paused once, not quite turning back. For one strange, awful second she thought and, perhaps, secretly hoped he might say something that would change her mind.
He did not.
He merely lifted two fingers in a gesture that was neither farewell nor forgiveness, and vanished into the wreckage with what remained of the Ravens trailing after him.
For a moment, the space he left behind felt louder than the battle.
Then everything rushed back at once.
Screams. Gunfire. Footsteps. The crash of another pew overturning near the side aisle. Y/Nâs pulse climbed high enough to choke her, and beside her Jungkook did not move. He remained facing the space where Jaebeom had disappeared, gun still raised a fraction too high, jaw locked.
It had cost him something to let Jaebeom leave.
She understood that.
He still owed him a bullet.
For Hoseok.
The desire to run after the Raven leader pulled at him like a hook beneath the ribs. One step, Jungkook thought. One clean line through the transept. One bullet put exactly where it had been owed since Hoseokâs body hit the floor.
His hand tightened around the gun.
Beside him, Y/N swayed almost imperceptibly.
The movement was small enough that most people would have missed it.
Jungkook didn't.
His head turned immediately.
The sight steadied him more brutally than any command could have.
Vengeance would have to wait.
One day, he promised himself.
One day.
Y/N was still standing.
Barely.
The fight with Taejun had done more damage than she'd let anyone see. Her skull had hit the marble hard. Her shoulder sat wrong beneath the torn silk of her gown.
But it wasn't the physical injuries that worried him.
It was her eyes.
For the first time since he'd known her, Y/N looked distracted.
Not confused.
Not frightened.
Elsewhere.
As though half of her remained in the conversation that had just ended.
As though some part of her was still standing across from Jaebeom.
Still hearing his voice.
Still looking at the hand he'd offered her.
The realization unsettled him more than he cared to admit.
Y/N was many things.
Angry.
Reckless.
Stubborn.
Infuriating.
But she was never unfocused.
Never absent.
Never the sort of person who stopped paying attention to a room full of enemies.
Now she looked as though she were seeing ghosts.
"Y/N."
Her gaze shifted toward him.
Not immediately.
A second later.
As though she'd had to travel a considerable distance to return.
"You with me?"
One corner of her mouth twitched. She nodded in response.
Relief loosened something in his chest.
Only slightly.
Then suddenlyâ
The front doors to the nave finally burst open.
The sound should not have carried. In truth, it barely existed at all: a heavy shift of old hinges and deep wooden groan of doors. Yet the movement drew attention through the ruined nave with the certainty of a bell tolling. Men turned. Guns hesitated. Even the smoke seemed to part toward the entrance, dragged by the damp air rushing in from outside.
Kim Namjoon walked into the cathedral.
Unhurried.
His cane struck marble as he marched.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The sound carried through the nave with impossible authority, each strike punctuating the silence. A Tiger moved automatically to flank him, but Namjoon dismissed him with a slight flick of his fingers.
Two Lee loyalists understood too late what his arrival meant and lunged from the right. One had a pistol half-raised, hand shaking badly enough to make the barrel useless. The other clutched a knife in both hands like a prayer. Namjoon did not break stride. He pivoted once, cane sliding in his grip, and the weighted end cracked across the first manâs jaw with a sound that cut cleanly through the cathedral. Teeth scattered white across red marble. Before the body finished falling, Namjoonâs cane hooked behind the second manâs knee and took him down face-first before landing a crushing blow to his skull.
âApologies for the late arrival,â he finally declared mildly, his voice carrying without effort through the wreckage. âMy invitation appears to have been lost in the mail.â
Jungkook felt something in his chest snap back into place.
That was a Tiger.
Not a ghost. Not a rumor. Not a secret kept behind locked doors and whispered plans. Not the half-dead man Jungkook had fallen to his knees before days earlier, overwhelmed by the cruelty of hope returned too late.
A proper Tiger.
The Lees understood it too.
âYou,â a dying Snake rasped, his trembling finger lifting toward Namjoon. âYouâre supposed to be dead.â
Namjoon inclined his head slightly, almost courteous. âYes,â he replied. âCommon misconception.â
Jungkook saw the realization move through them in waves: first disbelief, then horror, then the slower, more devastating understanding that this was not an interruption. This was not a skirmish, not a rescue, not a desperate attempt by remnants to reclaim dignity from disaster. This was an ending. The Tigers had returned to bury a dynasty.
And suddenly, watching his brother, Jungkook was no longer standing inside a cathedral.
He was back in the Lee Estate.
Back at the Summit.
Back in the worst moment of his life.
He remembered Hobiâs blood on his hands and seeing Jaebeom disappear.
Remembered the rage.
Remembered the certainty that if he could just catch him, just reach him, just put a bullet through his skull, then somehow everything would make sense again.
He remembered leaving Namjoon behind.
And he remembered what happened afterwards.
The gunshot.
The world ending.
The awful realization that while Jungkook had been chasing vengeance, his brother had been left exposed.
The guilt of it had never truly left him.
How could it?
Every consequence of the past year could be traced back to that single choice.
A moment of tunnel vision.
A moment of selfishness.
A moment when Jungkook had abandoned one person he loved to pursue another he despised.
And now here he was again.
Jaebeom had just walked away.
The urge to follow still clawed at him.
The debt remained unpaid.
Hoseok remained dead.
But Namjoon was standing in the open.
Visible.
Exposed.
And Jungkook felt something inside him tighten.
Not again.
Never again.
And suddenly the choice became impossible.
Because of Y/N.
She stood by his side and every instinct in his body wanted to stay exactly where he was.
He had only just gotten her back.
Only just found her.
The idea of voluntarily putting any sort of distance between them felt vaguely intolerable.
Particularly when she looked like that.
Particularly when she seemed so strangely fragile.
Not weak.
Y/N had never been weak a day in her life. But fragile in the way cracked glass is fragile.
One more impact away from breaking.
His hand found her elbow almost without thinking. The contact steadied her slightly. Or perhaps it steadied him.
Y/N followed his gaze.
Understanding appeared immediately.
Of course it did.
She looked toward Namjoon.
Then back at Jungkook.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
There were too many things sitting between them.
Too many things left unsaid.
Then she gave a small nod.
âYou should go to him.â She swallowed thickly. âHeâs your brother.â
The words landed strangely in her own ears. Less than five minutes ago, she had stood and watched her own brother disappear. She had let him go. Or he had let her go. She wasnât sure anymore which version hurt more.
The irony sat bitterly on her tongue. Go to your brother. As though blood did not have a way of pulling in opposite directions until it tore a person apart at the seams. Yet despite everything her own brother had become, despite the bodies and the betrayals and the years of damage stretching between them, she understood exactly what was happening inside Jungkook. The fear. The obligation. The terrible certainty that if something happened while you were looking elsewhere, you would carry that absence for the rest of your life.
And so she said it again, quieter this time.
âGo.â
His fingers tightened slightly around her arm. It was absurd how much that one syllable cost him.
He wanted to argue. Wanted to tell her to get behind the altar, behind a pillar, behind him. Wanted to press a gun into her hand and know she had one more thing between herself and the world, wanted to drag her with him by the wrist rather than suffer even three seconds of distance now that he had finally reached her.
Instead his hand rose to her shoulder and stopped there, gentler than he felt, fingers brushing torn silk and blood-warm skin beneath it as though touch alone could prove she would not vanish the moment he looked away.
âWait for me?â
The words came out before pride could stop them.
Y/N looked at him.
Jungkook hated the nakedness of what he had just said, hated that it was not strategy and not command and not even really about Namjoon waiting exposed across the nave.
It was something else.
The plea of a man who had grown painfully accustomed to turning around and finding her gone, to reaching for her only after she had already slipped beyond reach. Into the maze. Into the North. Into the Lee estate. Into another manâs house, another manâs future, another manâs plans.
She had become, somewhere along the way, a thing he kept trying to hold and failing to keep: fog between his fingers, a bird beating its wings against the cage of his hands, Eurydice already falling back toward the dark.
Her eyes softened by some measure so slight another man might have missed it.
âI will,â she answered.
And because the fates were crueler than any enemy in that cathedral, because it seemed to take special pleasure in ordinary promises spoken moments before ruin, sheâd actually meant it this time.
Jungkook, however, still did not quite know whether to believe her.
Still, Namjoon stood in the open, exposed, and Jungkook had already lived once with the consequences of choosing anything over his brother.
So he let his hand fall from her shoulder.
Then he turned toward Namjoon and began forcing his way through the chaos toward his brotherâs side, unaware that the next time he would turn to her, she would once again be slipping from his fingers like smoke.
And behind him, for one brief, fatal moment, Park Y/N remained exactly where he had left herâalone with her thoughts, alone with her ghosts. For better or for worse.
Jungkook cut through the last of the fighting with his jaw clenched so tightly it hurt.
Every instinct screamed at him to look back.
The urge was almost physical.
A constant pressure between his shoulder blades, every instinct demanding that he turn around and make certain she was still there.
Still alive.
Still waiting.
But he had already made this mistake once.
The memory of the maze still lived somewhere deep inside him, sharp as broken glass. He remembered the sickening realization that while he had been looking in one direction, disaster had arrived from another.
So he kept his gaze on his brother and kept walking.
Past the dead.
Past the shattered pews.
Past the last pockets of fighting.
By the time he reached Namjoon, the immediate threat around the entrance had already been neutralized. Soyeon stood with her pistol hanging loosely at her side, expression unimpressed as ever despite the bodies scattered around her boots. Taehyung had acquired blood somewhere along the wayâwhether his own or somebody elseâs was impossible to tellâand was looking around with the eager disappointment of a man realizing there were fewer people left to kill than heâd hoped.
Namjoon turned as Jungkook approached.
For a second neither spoke.
The moment stretched.
âAbout time,â Namjoon finally said.
Jungkook barked a short laugh.
âNice to see you too.â
âWell.â Namjoomâs gaze swept the cathedral one final time. âShall we finish this?â
Onlyâ
The sentence had barely left his mouth when movement flashed near the altar.
Something suddenly changed.
Jungkook noticed it first in Namjoon.
One moment, his brother had been standing there with that faint trace of amusement still lingering at the corner of his mouth. The next, it was simply gone. Not replaced by anger or alarm, but erased entirely, as though somebody had wiped the expression clean from his face. His gaze had shifted past Jungkookâs shoulder and fixed itself on something in the distance, something that caused every line of his body to go unnaturally still.
The reaction spread outward almost immediately.
Taehyungâs expression followed a heartbeat later.
The easy grin vanished.
His shoulders went rigid.
Soyeon actually stopped moving.
Which, more than anything else, made Jungkookâs stomach drop.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody pointed.
Nobody shouted.
Yet suddenly all three of them were looking at something over his shoulder.
Something behind him.
Something bad enough that the color had begun draining from their faces.
The silence lasted less than a second.
It felt much longer.
Jungkook didnât turn immediately.
For one terrible heartbeat he already knew.
But he refused to believe it.
After all, sheâd promised.
I will.
The words echoed through his memory.
She had promised she would still be standing exactly where he left her.
Only thenâ
Did Jungkook finally allow himself to turn around.
His breath caught so violently it hurt.
Because against all expectations, Y/N had kept her promise.
She had not moved.
She was exactly where he had left her.
The problem was that she was no longer alone.
Lee Jooshil had risen from the wreckage.
The Matriarch had always seemed carved rather than born, now the architecture of her had cracked. One side of her hair had come loose from its pins. Blood streaked one sleeve nearly to the elbow; whether it belonged to her or one of her sons no longer mattered. Her face had gone pale beneath the powder, but her eyesâ
The look in them turned Jungkookâs blood cold.
Not anger.
Anger would have been manageable.
This was something far worse.
The expression of a woman who had already lost everything and therefore had nothing left to fear.
Nothing left to preserve.
Nothing left to bargain with.
Nothing left except the desire to make someone else understand what that felt like.
Which is why she now stood with one arm wrapped around Y/Nâs throat and the other pressing a pistol against her temple.
The cathedral stilled.
Not completely. Nothing that broken could become truly silent again. Somewhere a wounded man moaned. Somewhere smoke hissed from a spent canister. A piece of glass fell belatedly from a high window and shattered against the floor.
But the battle stopped breathing.
âMove,â Jooshil rasped, voice low and shaking, âand the girl dies.â
Jungkook froze mid-step.
The sight of Y/N pinned against Jooshilâs body, neck bent slightly, blood drying on her cheek, gun pressed into the delicate hollow near her temple, did something to him that had no name. Rage was too ordinary for it. Fear too small. It was an animal thing, ancient and immediate, a command written somewhere beneath thought: move and she dies; stay still and she dies; choose wrong and she dies.
âDrop your weapons,â Jooshil screamed.
The command ricocheted through the space.
No one moved.
Her voice broke, not from weakness but from the force of grief trying to become law. âDrop them,â she shrieked again, digging the barrel harder into Y/Nâs skin until Y/Nâs eyes narrowed despite herself, âor I swear to God I will paint the altar with her.â
The effect moved outward like a shockwave.
Tigers froze first. Then Kangs. Even the few remaining Ravens, already half-vanished into retreat, halted in doorways and shadows, caught by the sudden reversal of gravity. Around the cathedral, guns remained raised but unfired, every man present understanding the same terrible fact at once: no shot was clean enough. No one was close enough. No one could guarantee that Jooshilâs finger would not tighten before a bullet reached her.
Jungkook could not look away from Y/N.
Her chest rose and fell beneath torn white silk. A strand of hair had stuck to the blood on her cheek. She did not scream. Did not plead. Did not look at Jooshil. Her eyes were forward, unfixed, as though she were listening to something far away.
âJungkook,â Namjoon said quietly.
The sound barely reached him.
âDo as she says.â
For a second Jungkook did not understand. Then Jooshil pressed the gun harder, and understanding arrived like a knife.
His fingers flexed around his pistol.
Everything in him rebelled.
Every instinct screamed against lowering it. The weapon was the only thing in his hand, the only thing between helplessness and the woman holding Y/N hostage. Dropping it felt like tearing out a piece of his own spine. But the angle was impossible. The trigger was too close. Jooshil was trembling, and trembling hands were worse than steady ones because fear and grief did not require intention to kill.
âI said drop them,â Jooshil breathed.
Very slowly, Jungkook lowered the gun.
Jooshil smiled against Y/Nâs hair.
âThatâs right,â she whispered. âGood boy.â
The pistol struck the marble.
The sound was unbearable.
One by one, the others followed. Steel met stone across the cathedral in hollow, uneven impacts: rifles, pistols, knives, magazines emptied from palms and belts. It sounded less like surrender than burial. Each weapon falling was another measure of power stripped away, another man admitting that the entire war had narrowed to the small black mouth of Jooshilâs gun.
Y/Nâs face changed.
Barely.
A flicker of rage sharpened her mouth, tiny and bright enough that Jooshil felt it.
âYou,â the Matriarch murmured against her ear, tightening her grip until the torn fabric dragged painfully across Y/Nâs collarbone, âwere supposed to restore my house. Instead you dragged your filth into it.â
Y/Nâs jaw set.
Namjoon stood at the head of the aisle, cane planted firmly before him, his expression unreadable in a way Jungkook knew meant he was thinking through every possible death in the room. âRelease the girl,â he said. âA deal is a deal.â
Jooshil barked a laugh that cracked apart midway through.
âA deal is a deal?â she spat. âMy sons are dead. My house is ash. And sheââ her fist tightened in Y/Nâs gown, pulling her closer, using her like proof, punishment and shield all at once, âthis one did not hold her end of the deal she made.â
Y/Nâs cheek still carried Taeyongâs blood.
She did not wipe it away.
âSo she still owes me a life,â Jooshil said, voice dropping into something almost calm. âItâs only fair.â
Jungkookâs body had gone rigid.
He could see everything. That was the torture of it. The tremor in Jooshilâs wrist. The exact angle of the gun. The shine of sweat along her finger where it rested too close to the trigger. The place where Y/Nâs pulse moved in her throat. The distance between them. The impossibility of it.
Before he could stop himself he found himself stepping forward.
âThen take mine,â he said.
Y/Nâs eyes snapped to him.
All the color left her face.
The words had come before thought, but once they were spoken they became the only truth in him. âTake mine,â he repeated, and his voice steadied because the offer itself steadied him. âThis deal started with me, didnât it? Let it end with me too.â
Jooshil watched him.
For one terrible second, Jungkook thought she might consider it.
Then she smiled.
He made it one step before Jooshil jerked Y/N backward so violently her head struck the Matriarchâs shoulder, the gun digging into her scalp hard enough to make her flinch.
âAh-ah,â Jooshil sang, twisting Y/Nâs arm behind her. âAnother step and youâll be wiping pieces of her off the walls.â
Jungkook stopped so abruptly pain shot through his knees.
âOkay,â he said, hands lifting at once. His voice sounded nothing like his own. âOkay.â
Jungkook lowered himself to his knees, hands raised behind his head, eyes fixed on Y/N as if looking away might be the thing that killed her.
Y/Nâs first instinct had been to survive.
That, at least, had not yet been beaten out of her.
Even with Jooshilâs arm locked around her, even with the pistol pressed hard enough against her temple that she could feel the circular bruise of it forming beneath her skin, her body began its old, efficient inventory before thought had fully caught up. Weight distribution. Grip. Angle of the wrist. Distance to the elbow. Pressure against the gun. The slight instability in Jooshilâs stance, right foot braced badly against blood-slick marble. If she twisted quickly enough, if she let her knees buckle, if she drove her shoulder down and turned inward, there was a chance she could break the old womanâs hold before the trigger finished moving.
A chance.
Not a good one.
But a chance.
Then she felt the vial in her sleeve.
Tiny. Cold. Still there.
For one strange second, she saw Chanâs face in the dressing room again, the blue powder catching the light inside the glass, his mouth twisting around that terrible little joke. Something blue. Insurance. Contingency. One last private refusal hidden beneath bridal silk.
She could do it.
The thought arrived with perfect clarity.
All it would take was one motion.
A cough. A stumble. A turn of the wrist. The vial crushed between her fingers, the powder released upward in one sharp breath, close enough for Jooshil to inhale before she understood what had happened. The Matriarch would not die immediately. That was not how the flower worked. But she would die. Minutes, perhaps. Less if grief had already weakened her heart. Enough time for Y/N to watch the certainty leave those pale, furious eyes. Enough time for one final, elegant little fuck you.
The possibility should have pleased her.
It did not.
Because what Jungkook had not known, what no one had seen, was that the second he had turned to walk towards Namjoon, Y/N had finally had the time to look around.
And God, what she saw.
Taeyong lay beside the altar where he had fallen, the delicate ivory of his suit ruined beyond recognition. His brother Taejun was sprawled several feet away, one hand still curled uselessly toward the knife he would never reach again. Near the first pew, the youngest Lee sonâs sickly frame had folded in on itself. Arin, too, lay half-hidden beneath the crushed fall of an overturned floral arrangement, her pale hair darkened with blood, one shoe still on, the other lost somewhere in the wreckage, her body as slight and inconsequential in death as her family had tried to make her in life.
There were Ravens, too.
That was what caught her next.
Black suits scattered among the ivory. Men she had known since childhood. Men who had watched her grow up. Men who had trained beside her, drunk beside her, whispered about her exile in halls and then lowered their eyes when she returned. Some of them had deserved death. Some had not. Most had simply been born into machinery older and hungrier than any single personâs guilt.
And thenâ
She saw it.
Two small bodies near the Lee side of the nave, almost hidden beneath the collapsed shelter of their motherâs arms.
Little Lee Hyeori and her sister.
Y/N did not move. Bile rising at the back of her throat.
For a moment her mind refused the sight entirely.
It could not be them. Not the little flower girls who had stood in her dressing room earlier with their matching ribbons and solemn eyes, not the ones who had been instructed to smile prettily and carry petals down the aisle.
Children did not belong on the blood-slick floor like that. Children did not belong beneath a woman who had tried and failed to make her body a shield. Children did not belong in the arithmetic of houses.
And yet there they lay. Pale and still.
Forever small.
Something inside her went quiet.
Not soft.
Not merciful.
Quiet.
The fight did not leave her because she was weak. It left because, for one terrible suspended moment, she understood the full shape of what had happened here and felt her own hands in it. Not on the trigger. Not on the knife. Not on every throat cut in the cathedralâs underbelly or every bullet fired through smoke. But there nonetheless. In the maze. In the bargain. In the choice to save one life and alter the course of all the rest. In every debt paid with another debt, every survival purchased on credit until the bill arrived in the bodies of little girls who had never known enough of life to deserve being counted among its losses.
Maybe she could kill Jooshil.
Maybe she should.
The Matriarch had lost everything. Her sons, her house, the future she had bred and arranged and starved and polished into being. There would almost be mercy in ending her now.
But Y/N could not make herself reach for the vial.
The blood on her hands was already too much.
More death. More mothers folding over children. More sisters dragged from brothers. More sons kneeling beside fathers. More girls growing up with holes where families should have been. More little birds taught to fly because the nest had been burned beneath them. Taught to hunt because no one would feed them.
No.
Not one more.
Not from her hand.
The vial remained cold against her skin.
Y/N let it stay there.
And slowly, beneath Jooshilâs shaking grip, beneath the gun, beneath the shattered saints and the sunlight and the terrible weight of all the dead, she stopped looking for a way out.
The pistol pressed harder against her temple.
But Y/N barely felt it anymore.
The cathedral had become strangely distant.
She heard only her own breathing.
Everything else had fallen away.
Jooshilâs voice reached her as though from underwater. The shouting. The distant gunfire. The crackle of smoke and fire and collapsing order. All of it seemed to belong to another world now.
The world had narrowed to the cold circle of metal pressed against her temple and the steady rise and fall of air in her lungs.
In.
Out.
In.
Out.
The strange thing was that she wasnât afraid.
She knew she should have been.
A lifetime of instinct insisted that she should have been clawing for an escape route, calculating distances, searching desperately for some weakness in Jooshilâs grip.
Instead she found herself feeling oddly calm.
As though some great storm inside her had finally exhausted itself.
Then warmth touched her face.
The sensation was so sudden and unexpected that for a moment she thought she had imagined it.
A shaft of sunlight had broken through the shattered stained-glass window above the altar. It spilled across her cheek in a wash of gold and crimson and sapphire, the fractured colors shifting softly across her face.
The storm outside, too, must have passed.
How strange.
The thought drifted through her mind with surprising clarity.
For months it had felt as though she had lived beneath storm clouds.
Years, actually.
And now, at the very end of it all, the sun had chosen to appear.
Slowly, almost absently, she lifted her gaze.
The saints watched from above.
Their painted faces floated amongst fractured stained glass and shafts of colored light, untouched by the carnage unfolding beneath them. For centuries they had watched men pray beneath them. Weddings. Funerals. Baptisms. Confessions. Now they watched a massacre with exactly the same expressions. Patient and eternal.
At the center of the ruined window stood Saint Agnes.
Y/N recognized her immediately.
A martyr carrying a lamb in her arms.
The patron saint of young girls, led willingly toward death rather than surrender what she believed.
She looked down at Y/N with a gentle expression. Not sorrowful. Not pitying. The sort of look a mother gave a child who had finally arrived at an answer on her own.
Y/N thought of her mother.
Thought of that fated morning in the woods.
Of frost crunching beneath their boots. Of Ji-eunâs hand wrapped around hers. Of the way she had kept glancing over her shoulder as though listening for something only she could hear.
And then she thought of the moment that came after.
The moment a figure emerged from between the trees.
The urgency in her motherâs voice.
Run. Donât look back.
Y/N had spent years resenting her for it.
Wondering why her mother had not run too.
Why she hadnât fought harder.
Why she had not clawed her way to survival with every last ounce of strength she possessed.
The questions had followed her across countries and years alike.
The questions of a daughter who had always mistaken resilience for strength.
Standing beneath the shattered saints, she finally understood how unfair those questions had been.
Because perhaps her mother had known something.
Known the moment Park Sanghoon caught up to her. Known from the look in his eyes. From the knife in his hand.
Yes. Y/N had spent years believing her mother should have fought harder.
Yet, standing there now, with a gun pressed against her temple and death breathing quietly against the back of her neck, she wondered whether her mother had simply understood something she herself was only learning now.
That there are fates that cannot be outrun, and times when struggle ceases to be courage.
When it became denial.
Times when all roads had already narrowed into one and the only choice left was how you would meet the inevitable when it finally arrived.
Not on your knees.
Not begging.
Not broken.
But standing.
Yes.
Perhaps there came a point when the bravest thing a person could do was accept what could not be changed.
The thought settled over her quietly.
Like sunlight.
Like snow.
Snow.
Her gaze lifted toward the ruined ceiling.
White dust drifted from fractured stonework high above the cathedral, disturbed by gunfire and collapsing masonry. It floated down lazily through beams of light.
Like snow.
The sight would have been beautiful if it were not occurring in the middle of a massacre.
Maybe Jooshil was right.
The thought came unexpectedly.
A life for a life.
That had been the bargain from the beginning, hadnât it?
In the maze, under falling snow, Y/N had reached into the natural order of things and altered it with her own hands. A man bleeding out had been meant to die. Instead she had bargained. Traded. Intervened.
She had played God.
Perhaps there had always been a price attached to that choice.
Perhaps every story required balance in the end.
Perhaps the debt had simply taken longer than expected to come due.
She looked back to the stained glass window. To Saint Agnes.
A strange peace settled inside her.
Not happiness.
Not relief.
Peace.
The sort that arrives when all arguments have finally been exhausted.
When all bargaining ends.
For as long as she could remember she had been burdened.
Burdened by expectations. By grief. By debts. By the obligation to sacrifice pieces of herself and carry the weight of other peopleâs choices.
But now, for maybe the first time ever, she felt light.
Whatever happened next would happen.
She had made her choices.
She would not take them back.
Not any of it.
For she finally knew, with the certainty of the high priestess, that there were things no amount of fighting could control.
Death.
Love.
Loss.
The people we become.
The people we save.
The people we fail.
The people we love.
If this was the price, then so be it.
The realization should have frightened her.
Instead it tasted like a sweetness she had seldom known.
Freedom.
She had once believed freedom to be synonymous to flight.
But what good was the freedom to run if fear dictated every direction you chose? What good was flight if your entire life became a series of escapes?
She had spent years outrunning everything under the sun but today she found she no longer wished to flee at all. Whatever happened next, it would find her standing.
Perhaps this was the secret her mother had carried into death.
Perhaps freedom was not found in leaving.
Perhaps true freedom was found in choosing to stay and face your fate.
And for the first time in her life, nobody was choosing for her.
Not her father.
Not Jaebeom.
Not the Lees.
Not the Tigers.
Not fate itself.
The choice belonged entirely to her.
She could spend her final moments fighting aimlessly.
Or she could stand her ground
Soâ
For the first time in her life, Park Y/N stopped running.
And let the storm come for her.
â
Jungkook saw it happen.
He would never have been able to explain how.
Later, if someone asked, he would not have been able to point to a specific expression. A movement. A gesture.
Only that one moment Y/N had been fighting.
And the next she wasn't.
Not physically.
That wasn't what terrified him.
It was the same thing as earlier. Behind her eyes.
The frantic calculation vanished.
The tension left her shoulders.
Even her breathing seemed different.
As though some endless argument had finally reached its conclusion.
And she lookedâ
Peaceful.
The realization hit him like a punch to the chest.
No.
Every instinct in his body recoiled from it immediately.
No.
Anything but this.
Because Jungkook knew exactly what he was looking at.
He had seen it before.
Not in Y/N.
In dying men.
Men who had fought and struggled and cursed until suddenly they stopped.
The moment they accepted what was coming.
The moment they let go.
The moment they decided there was no point fighting anymore.
Heâs seen it in Hoseokâs eyes the night of the Summit.
Ice flooded his veins.
His stomach dropped so violently he thought he might be sick.
Because Y/N was not looking for an escape.
She wasn't looking at Namjoon.
Wasn't looking at the exits.
Wasn't searching for an opportunity.
She had stopped.
And somehow that terrified him more than the gun.
More than Jooshil.
More than the possibility of death itself.
The certainty landed in his chest with sickening force..
"No," he heard himself think.
The word arrived with startling clarity.
No.
Absolutely fucking not.
Not after the attic. The jungle. The maze. The Estate. The base. The fucking wedding.
Not after months spent tearing himself apart trying to reach her.
The thought filled him with a fury so absolute it eclipsed everything else.
The fear.
The gun.
The blood.
The cathedral.
All of it vanished beneath a single, overwhelming certainty.
If she had decided to stop fightingâ
then he would fight hard enough for the both of them.
He was still on his knees, hand raised and joined behind his head. He swallowed and let his fingers drift discreetly to the inside of his sleeve.
And for the first time, maybe ever, Jungkook found himself grateful for the time he spent at the northern base.
The realization dawned on him that, should he ever cross path with Chan again, he might actually have to thank him.
Because Lee Jooshil had made three fatal mistakes.
The first one being letting Jeon Jungkook live amongst Ravens.
The irony of it nearly choked him. The Lees had believed they were punishing him when they sent him north. They had imagined him buried among enemies, isolated, humiliated, softened by captivity and waiting. Instead, they had placed him in the hands of people who distrusted every visible weapon, every open door, every surrender offered too neatly. They had sent a Tiger to the Ravens and expected him to rot, never considering that Ravens might actually teach him a trick or two.
Never let them know what you carry, Chan had told him, drawing a blade from somewhere beneath his sleeve so smoothly it had seemed less like movement than magic. Or where.
At the time Jungkook had thought it ridiculous. Paranoid. Raven theatrics dressed up as wisdom.
Now his gun lay on the marble where Jooshil could see it, obediently discarded, a piece of theater she had believed. She had watched him drop the weapon and mistaken the act for disarmament. She had looked at a kneeling Tiger with empty hands raised behind his head and thought she understood the shape of the threat.
That was her second mistake.
His thumb found the ridge of the hilt beneath his sleeve. The blade was raven steel, Chanâs parting gift. It slid into his palm with cold intimacy but the relief of finding it there was immediately swallowed by the horror of what it meant to use it.
For months, the Ravens had tried to teach him what to do with knives. He had hated it with the particular resentment of a man forced to be bad at something in public. Guns had always made sense to him. Guns were honest in their own brutal way: line, distance, pressure, consequence. Knives were different. Knives, to him, were arrogant little things, unforgiving of pride and even less forgiving of panic. Chan had told him that again and again, usually while watching Jungkook bury a blade into the wrong part of a target, the floor, or once, memorably, a young recruit, three feet to the left of where he had been aiming.
Again, Chan would order, in that maddeningly calm voice.
And Jungkook, sweating through his shirt, arm aching, temper fraying, would throw again.
He wasnât gifted. That was the truth of it. It wasnât in his blood. He had not been elegant or instinctive or precise in the way Ravens seemed to be, as if they were born knowing how to hide sharp things against their bodies and smile while using them. He had learned by failing. By missing. By throwing until his shoulder burned and the skin between his fingers split, until the motion became less a skill than an argument he refused to lose. The improvement had come slowly, grudgingly, dragged out of him by stubbornness rather than talent.
Now the entire room had narrowed to whether stubbornness could be enough.
Jooshil stood too close to Y/N. That was the fact his mind returned to with vicious insistence. Too close for comfort, too close for confidence, too close for any of the easy courage men boasted about afterward. Her body was pressed against Y/Nâs side, one arm twisted in white silk, the pistol driven hard into the fragile space near Y/Nâs temple. One inch too far, and the blade could strike the wrong flesh. One second too late, and Jooshilâs finger could finish curling around the trigger. One startled movement from either woman, one bad breath, one tremor in Jungkookâs hand, and the attempt to save Y/N would become the thing that killed her.
The thought did not pass cleanly through him. It lodged.
For an instant he could see it with perfect, nauseating clarity: the knife meant for Jooshil buried instead in Y/Nâs throat, or shoulder, or chest; the shocked little sound she might make before the blood came; the way Jungkook would have to live inside the knowledge that his own hand had completed what all their enemies had begun.
His grip almost tightened too much around the hilt. He forced it loose by a fraction, remembering Chanâs voice again.
Blades donât require brute strength, only commitment.
And Jungkook was nothing if not committed.
Across the cathedral, Y/Nâs eyes found his.
The noise of the room seemed to fall behind glass.
She saw it. Of course she did. She saw the subtle change in his shoulder, the minute adjustment in the angle of his elbow, the way his raised hand had ceased to be surrender and become preparation. She saw him reaching for the only weapon left in a room that believed him empty-handed.
And because she was Y/N, because she understood violence as fluently as breath, she also saw the risk.
She knew how close Jooshil stood. Knew the blade might not land where he wanted it to. Knew that if he missed by so much as a breath, the price would be paid in her body. The understanding passed between them without language, enormous and terrible, and for one unbearable moment Jungkook waited for her to stop him. To shake her head once. To tell him no with her eyes. To deny him this final gamble because she had always been better at accepting loss than he was.
She did not.
She looked at him through the smoke and the blood and the fractured sunlight, and after the smallest pause, she nodded.
Barely.
A movement so slight no one else would have caught it.
But Jungkook did.
It was not permission. Permission was too simple a word for what that gaze carried. It was not surrender either, though she had found some strange stillness in herself he could not bear to look at for too long.
It was trust.
And trust from Park Y/N was no gentle thing. It had weight. It had teeth. It placed her life in his hands and did not flinch from what that meant.
Jooshil felt something shift, even if she did not understand it. Her arm tightened around Y/N, dragging torn silk against the blood at her collarbone, and the muzzle pressed harder into her temple.
âDonât move,â she snarled. âDonât you fucking dare.â
Jungkook did not look at her.
He looked at Y/N.
Only Y/N.
The line of the throw existed now, not cleanly, never cleanly, but there. A narrow, vicious possibility cut through smoke and light and the ruin of the cathedral. He could see where the blade had to go. He could also see every way it could go wrong. There was no courage in ignoring that. Courage, if it existed at all, was knowing exactly how badly a thing could fail and choosing it anyway because every other road had already closed.
Somewhere beyond Y/Nâs shoulder, Jooshil was still shouting at Namjoon about victory and sons and the ashes of her house. Jungkook barely heard her. His mind had gone elsewhere for half a heartbeatâto the maze, to the snow, to Y/Nâs hands slick with his blood, to the debt he had not known he owed until it had already reshaped both their lives. He thought of Orpheus then with a savage clarity that felt almost like a curse. A man descending into the underworld for the woman he loved and losing her at the threshold because he obeyed the rules of the underworld.
Jungkook had never been good at obedience.
He knew what he had to do.
Because Lee Jooshilâs third and final mistake had been putting a gun to the head of the only person Jeon Jungkook had ever failed to walk away from. He had crawled all the way to the bottom of Hell for her, through smoke and blood and the ruins of kingdoms, through months of lies and grief and every lesson he had hated until it became the only thing left between her and death.
There was no room for hesitation.
The knife left his hand without sound.
That, later, would be the part Jungkook clung to the most.
Not the gunshot. Not the blood. Not the scream that tore out of him afterward, though he would not remember making it. The silence of the blade. The obscene grace of it. A thing so small and sharp carrying so much consequence across the cathedral as though the world had suddenly reduced itself to a line drawn through the air.
For one fraction of a second, it seemed to move too slowly.
He saw it turn once in the light.
Silver catching gold.
Jooshil saw it too.
Her face changed with a speed that would have been satisfying in any other life. The fury was still there, grief still contorting her mouth around whatever accusation she had been about to hurl at Namjoon, but beneath it something sharper broke through. Recognition. Then disbelief. Then the first true flash of fear Jungkook had seen from her.
Not fear of death.
Fear of being outplayed.
She had looked at him kneeling on the marble with his gun discarded and his hands raised behind his head and thought a Tiger without a gun was only a boy on his knees.
She understood too late.
Her hand tightened.
Whether she meant to fire, whether pain startled the motion from her, whether her body simply obeyed some final violent instinct before thought could intervene, Jungkook would never know.
There was no clean sequence, no mercy of before and after.
The knife entered flesh and the gun went off almost together, violence folding into violence so tightly that his mind could not separate one from the other.
A gasp.
The gunshot cracked through the cathedral.
And Y/Nâ
vanished beneath red.
It struck her with such force, such suddenness, that for one suspended heartbeat Jungkook did not understand what he was seeing. The white of her gown, already ruined by smoke and dust and Taeyongâs blood, seemed to open all at once into crimson. It spread across her bodice in a wild bloom, splashing over the silk, catching in the lace, running down the pleats of the skirt with a speed that felt impossible, indecent, alive. Red climbed where no red should have been. Red swallowed the careful embroidery. Red made a wound of the dress itself.
His mind emptied.
Not with calm.
With horror.
There had been a knife. There had been a gun. There had been Jooshil pressed against Y/N so closely that their bodies had overlapped in his vision, one white sleeve twisted into another, one movement hidden by the next. He had aimed for the old woman. He knew he had. He had seen the line. Trusted the line. Chosen the line because there had been no other road left.
A terrible, useless intelligence tried to wake inside him. Tried to measure the pattern, the direction of the spray, the angle of Jooshilâs collapsing body, the jerk of the pistol, the way Y/Nâs shoulder had turned at the last instant. Tried to make a wound out of the stain, a source out of the color, a conclusion out of catastrophe. It found nothing.
Only red.
The human mind had a habit of protecting itself from certain moments.
It blurred edges.
Removed details.
Left only fragments behind.
For years Jungkook would remember the sunbeams coming through the shattered windows
He would remember the dust drifting from the shattered cathedral ceiling.
He would remember blood spreading across white silk.
Most of all, he would remember Y/N.
Standing perfectly still beneath the ruined saints.
Her eyes on his.
Unmoved, almost.
Not because she was untouched. God, no. There was too much red for that. But because whatever she had found inside herself in that final moment had not yet left her. The strange peace remained there, under the shock, under the blood, as if some part of her had already walked ahead and was looking back at him from a place he could not reach.
More dust loosened from the damaged ceiling.
A fine pale veil of it sifted through the shafts of stained-glass light, drifting down over the altar and the bodies and the ruined wedding flowers. It settled in her hair. Along the torn edge of her veil. On her eyelashes. White against blood. White against black. White against the red spreading wider across her gown.
Snow.
Snow beneath his body while she bargained for his life.
Snow falling now inside a cathedral in spring, because apparently the universe had a cruel sense of symmetry.
He tried to move.
Nothing in him obeyed.
For the first time in his life, Jungkook understood why men froze before impact. His heart hammered once, violently, then seemed to disappear altogether.
And as paralysis rooted him to the spot, the very first words of this very book came back with the bitter inevitability of prophecy.
Jeon Jungkook was no stranger to death.
He had believed that once.
He had believed many stupid things.
Death had lived beside him for years, intimate as breath. It had taken his mother before he was old enough to understand that some absences grew larger with time instead of smaller. It had taken men in alleys, in boardrooms, in cars, in houses full of expensive furniture and cheap fear. It had taken Hoseok, and that grief had carved something out of him that no victory would ever replace. Jungkook knew loss. He knew the taste of it, the shape, the weight it left in a room after everyone stopped saying the dead manâs name.
But standing there, watching crimson suddenly consume the white silk of Y/Nâs gown, he understood that death still had one cruelty left to teach him.
His own death had always seemed simple.
Deserved, even.
A bullet, a blade, a reckoning. An ending that would arrive one day with all his sins walking behind it. He had imagined it often enough to mistake imagination for readiness.
But her deathâ
No.
His mind refused the word even as his body understood it.
Her death was not an ending.
It was continuation.
That was the horror of it.
The world would go on. Morning would come. Doors would open. Men would speak. Wars would end or not end. Namjoon would plan, Taehyung would rage, Jimin would laugh too loudly in rooms where nobody knew what else to do. Somewhere, absurdly, flowers would keep blooming. The sun would continue its vulgar little habit of rising. And Jungkook would be expected to remain inside that world, breathing through day after day in a life that had been emptied of the person he had unknowingly built every tomorrow around.
Somewhere between the attic and the cathedral, between snow and blood and all the terrible things they had never said aloud, Park Y/N had become the quiet assumption beneath every future he had failed to admit he wanted.
Her death would not be grief.
It would be punishment.
It would be every life he had not yet lived collapsing before he reached it.
By the time his body finally obeyed him, her knees finally gave out.
Series Genre: Mafia!au , Slowburn, Angst, Hurt, Smut, TW (it is a mafia!AU, after all)
Pairing: Mafia!Jungkook x reader
Wordcount: 4.7k
Masterlist
â
The first wagon had left before dawn.
It moved without lights through the industrial outskirts of the city, past shuttered factories and service roads drowned in the last of the night rain. The vehicle itself looked unremarkable from the outside, the kind used to transport construction equipment or cheap furniture across districts no one cared to police too closely. Its tires cut through puddles with a low hiss. In the back, beneath a canvas tarp stiff with damp, ten men sat in silence among crates of weapons, stolen clerical garments, forged identification badges, and three sealed cases bearing the Kang insignia scratched crudely into the side.
Jungkook sat closest to the doors, one boot braced against the metal floor, rifle resting across his knees.
Nobody spoke to him.
That had been true for most of the past two days. Not because there was nothing to say. There was too much, if anything. Too many plans, too many names, too many maps spread across tables in rooms that smelled of cigarettes and damp concrete. Too many men arguing over entry points, casualty estimates, sewer access, bell towers, snipersâ nests, Lee security rotations, Park evacuation patterns, guest lists, etc.
Too many ways to say the same thing politely: they were about to walk into a cathedral and end a dynasty.
Namjoon had stood at the head of the planning table with both hands folded over the carved handle of his cane, face half-lit by a hanging bulb, and explained the operation with the calm, precise cruelty of a man who had spent the past month deciding exactly how much mercy remained in him and found the answer wanting.
The House of Lee had tried to erase the Tigers at the Summit. Therefore, the House of Lee would be erased in turn.
Not weakened. Not humbled. Not sent a message. Erased. Dismantled. Brick by brick, account by account, heir by heir, until nothing remained but legal debris, scattered servants, and frightened men pretending they had never worn ivory.
The Kangs had liked that.
Of course they had. Rats understood extermination. They did not speak of honor, purity, legacy, or rightful order. They spoke of corners, tunnels, drains, locked doors, forgotten basements. They spoke of what happened when snakes grew arrogant enough to forget that rats lived inside the walls.
The Lees and Parks had built the new order after the Summit under the assumption that the Tigers were broken, the Chois too distant, and the Kangs too low, too crude, too disorganized to matter. That had been their first miscalculation.
âBig mistake,â one of them had said during the first meeting, chewing tobacco with his back teeth and grinning around the dark wad of it. âEveryone always remembers to look up for birds. Out for dogs. Down for snakes. Nobody checks under the floorboards until itâs too late.â
Jungkook had not liked them.
None of the Tigers had.
The feeling had been fairly mutual. The Kangs were vulgar, practical, obscene in their efficiency, men who made fortunes from appetites the other clans pretended not to have while profiting from them quietly through third parties and offshore accounts.
Pimps, organ brokers, smugglers of bodies and pills and debts. They wore cheap leather jackets over expensive watches and laughed at things that made even Yoongiâs expression sharpen.
Their loyalty was not to blood or banners but to opportunity, grievance, and the exquisite pleasure of watching the old families choke on their own superiority.
But Namjoon had been right.
The Kim Tigers, or what was left of them, needed the Kang Rats.
The alliance had come together faster than expected.
The planning that followed, however, had not.
For nearly a week, safehouses and warehouses across the country had become war rooms. Maps spread across tables. Schedules. Floorplans. Guest lists. Routes in and routes out.
Names.
Many names.
The Kangs approached the whole thing with unnerving enthusiasm.
Not because they hated the Lees particularly.
Hatred implied emotion.
The Kangs simply understood business.
And business, as several of them had cheerfully explained over drinks one evening, required thoroughness.
Jungkook remembered sitting through one such meeting while a Kang man twice his age casually discussed the logistical difficulties of disposing of several hundred bodies.
The conversation had revolved around transportation capacity.
Nothing else.
No outrage.
No moral hesitation.
Not even a shameful, downturned glance.
Just arithmetic.
At some point, Jungkook had realized the man was being entirely serious.
The Kangs trafficked people.
Sold organs.
Ran enough vice operations to keep half the peninsula's politicians awake at night.
Sentimentality had long since been carved out of them.
One Kang woman â a plump lady with gold teeth and a fondness for opium oilâ had merely shrugged when the subject of surviving family members arose.
"You leave one angry little orphan alive," she'd said, "and twenty years later he's got you at gunpoint, explaining his tragic little backstory."
Several people had laughed.
The discussion moved on.
Jungkook hadn't.
Because the truly unsettling part wasn't the Kangs.
It was Namjoon.
Namjoon had not laughed.
He had not smiled.
But he had not objected either.
Instead he had simply looked down at the plans spread across the table:
âThen weâre agreed,â heâd said, "No survivors."
The room had gone quiet.
The House of the Snake would be erased.
Every son.
Every daughter.
Every uncle, nephew, grandchild and cousin eight times removed carrying Lee blood.
The entire rotten tree uprooted. Namjoon wouldnât give the snake the opportunity to grow a new head.
Jungkook remembered watching the room afterward.
Watching Taehyung look away.
Watching Yoongi say absolutely nothing.
Watching everyone silently understand that arguing would accomplish very little.
Because Namjoon had come back from the dead carrying something darker with him.
Perhaps it had arrived along with the bullet lodged near his spine.
Perhaps it had always been there.
Either way, it sat behind his eyes now.
Cold.
Patient.
Merciless.
The Lees had taken his clan.
His fortune.
His home.
His brother.
His future.
And for several months, they had taken his life too.
Now he intended to return the favor.
As for the Parks...
Jungkook looked out the truck window.
That subject proved far less controversial.
The Tigers' appetite for Park blood remained healthy.
No clan had forgotten whose signatures appeared on the agreements.
Whose soldiers had helped secure the Summit backstabbing.
Whose banners had flown alongside the Lees while Tiger blood soaked the marble floors.
The fact that Y/N happened to be a Park complicated matters for Jungkook.
For absolutely nobody else.
By the third night, the Kangs had already produced cathedral floor plans older than most governments, bribed two maintenance workers, bought a Lee driverâs gambling debt, identified the priestâs nephew as an addict, and located a disused service corridor beneath the sacristy that had not appeared on any official map since the 1970s.
Their intelligence was filthy, intimate, horrifyingly useful. They knew which cousin slept with whose wife, which uncle required blood-pressure medication, which Lee guards had mistresses in Kang territory, which Ravens on outer perimeter duty had enough debts to be persuadable and which ones needed killing instead.
Jungkook had listened to all of it with his jaw locked and his hands clenched beneath the table.
Then one of the Kangs suggested blowing up the cathedral.
Not dramatically. Not with malice. Almost lazily, as though proposing they take a shorter route through traffic.
âWhy waste the manpower?â he had said, tapping ash into an empty teacup. âRig the foundations, blow the whole thing up, collapse the nave during the vows. Lees, Parks, guests, priests, flowers, everybody dead instantly. Clean enough. No survivors to come back and bite us in the ass with a tragic little origin story ten years from now. Who cares ifââ
Jungkook had crossed the room before anyone could stop him.
The first punch broke the manâs nose. The second cracked something in his jaw. By the third, the chair had gone over backward and two Tigers were hauling Jungkook off by the shoulders while three Kangs drew guns and Namjoonâs cane came down against the table hard enough to split the wood.
Nobody spoke for several seconds after that.
Blood dripped steadily from the Kangâs face onto his shirt. Jungkook stood breathing like an animal, chest heaving, eyes black with the kind of rage that did not burn so much as freeze everything it touched.
Namjoon had looked at him for a long moment.
Then at the Kang.
âNo explosives,â he said.
The Kang had spat blood onto the floor and laughed through his ruined mouth. âTouchy one, your brother.â
âNo explosives,â Namjoon repeated, and this time the room understood that the matter had closed. âThey deserve to feel every second of it. To watch the walls close in. To spend their final minutes begging for a way out. And then, when they finally realize there isnât one, I want them to witness their house falling beam by beam, knowing there is nowhere left to run.â
Jungkook felt a sort of relief wash over him.
Later, when the others had dispersed, Jungkook found him alone beside the maps, one hand braced against the table, his cane resting against his thigh. For a while neither of them spoke. Jungkook expected reprimand for his lack of self-control. Warning. Something about discipline, timing, not letting emotion compromise the mission.
Namjoon gave him none of that. Only silence.
âThank you,â Jungkook said.
âShe saved my life, too,â Namjoon replied at last, eyes still on the floor plans. âI donât forget my debts.â
Jungkook swallowed.
The words should have comforted him.
They didnât.
They sat inside him with everything else he now knew: the ring, the corpse, the bullet, the deal, the wedding. Y/N alone among the dead, placing Namjoonâs signet on another manâs hand and firing into a face so no one would know the difference. Y/N kneeling beside Jungkook in the snow, bargaining her life away while he bled beneath her hands and mistook her for an Angel of Death.
He had spent months hating her for surviving.
Only to discover she had spent that same night ensuring he did.
The wagon hit a pothole, jolting him back to the present. Across from him, one of the Kang men swore under his breath and shifted a crate with his boot. Beside Jungkook, Taehyung checked the magazine in his pistol for the fourth time, though they both knew it was full. Yoongi sat with his eyes closed, head tipped back against the metal wall, looking for all the world as though he might be sleeping. He wasnât. Jimin crouched near the rear window, peering through a narrow tear in the canvas every few minutes as the city thinned and the roads widened.
Beyond them, sealed in the dark with weapons and men who had already accepted the shape of the day, Jungkook thought of Orpheus.
It was absurd, really. He had never been much of a reader. Books had always seemed to him like another language spoken by people who had time to sit still.
But there had been books in Y/Nâs childhood bedroom outside the Raven base. He had looked at them once out of boredom, then again out of curiosity, then again because every object in that room had felt like a clue to a woman he had failed to understand while she was standing right in front of him.
Books on shelves, books stacked on the desk, books with torn paper marking pages, books abandoned open-faced. One. Ovidâs Metamorphoses. There were plenty of stories.
Orpheus had gone down into the underworld for the woman he loved.
Jungkook remembered that much.
He remembered thinking the story was stupid. Walk out. Donât look back. How hard could that be? One instruction. One road. One chance. Men had ruined themselves for less, he supposed, but even then the tragedy had annoyed him.
Now, watching the black outline of the cathedral rise slowly beyond the rain-streaked glass, Jungkook understood the story differently.
Hell was not fire or darkness, or some imaginary place.
Hell was sitting in the back of a wagon with a rifle across your knees, approaching a wedding you were seconds from being too late to stop, knowing the woman inside had already made peace with a sacrifice you would rather tear the world apart than allow.
Jungkook had not prayed in years.
He did not pray now.
But as the cathedral bells began tolling somewhere ahead, deep and sonorous through the thinning morning, Jungkook lowered his gaze to the rifle in his hands and felt something colder than hope settle into place.
Certainty.
He had crawled this far.
Through smoke. Through blood. Through the ruins of everything he had once believed unbreakable. Through the Raven base and the Lee estate and every miserable day that had taught him how much damage a person could endure without dying.
He had crawled all the way to the bottom of Hell for her.
And unlike Orpheus, Jeon Jungkook had absolutely no intention of walking out alone.
The wagon slowed a couple blocks from the cathedral.
No one had to tell them they were close. The air itself had changed, thinning into that strange ceremonial quiet that gathered around disasters before they happened. Beyond the narrow slit in the canvas, Jungkook caught glimpses of polished black cars lining the curb, private security posted beneath stone archways, guests in dark coats and pale dresses hurrying out of the rain beneath umbrellas held by men paid not to look at them directly.
It was a rainy morning.
A storm in the air.
Still, the city had folded itself around the event. Streets rerouted, cameras redirected, police made politely blind. It would have looked like any other wedding to anyone stupid enough to believe in surface appearances.
Jimin shifted first, rolling his shoulders as though waking his body from stillness. Taehyung tucked his pistol beneath his jacket and checked the small earpiece hidden beneath his hair. Across from them, the Kang men began fastening clerical collars around their throats with the ease of men who had worn far worse disguises for far worse reasons. They had brought cassocks, delivery manifests, floral invoices, security badges, even a sealed crate of communion wine with the Lee crest stamped on the side.
Yoongi opened his eyes.
The movement was small, but the wagon seemed to register it. Men who had been muttering under their breath went quiet.
This was what had always unsettled Jungkook about war. Not the blood. Not the screaming. The preparation. The way men could approach killing with the same attention one might give to repairing a machine, each gesture practical, each object assigned a purpose. Gloves. Silencers. Blades. Radios. Names crossed off guest lists in red ink.
The first team exited through the front.
The second waited thirty seconds before following.
Jungkook remained where he was until Yoongi touched two fingers to his knee. Only then did he rise, ducking beneath the low roof of the wagon, rifle case in hand. The morning rain had softened to a mist, hanging over the narrow service alley behind the cathedral like breath. Stone walls rose on either side, old and blackened by decades of weather, their carved saints made eyeless by soot. Somewhere beyond them, muffled organ music trembled faintly through the walls.
The sound turned Jungkookâs stomach.
It was beginning.
A Kang in a priestâs coat opened the side entrance with a stolen keycard and a smile that suggested he had never once in his life doubted that even God could be bribed. The guard inside barely looked up from his phone before Jimin stepped behind him and ended the matter with one hand over his mouth and a blade drawn neatly across his throat. He lowered the body with care, almost tenderness, easing it behind a stack of folded altar linens. Blood soaked silently into white cloth.
âWasteful,â one of the Kangs muttered, eyeing the linens.
Yoongi looked at him.
The man shut up.
They moved through the cathedralâs underbelly without speaking. Narrow corridors. Storage rooms. A staff kitchen smelling faintly of coffee and wilted herbs. A stairwell where the damp had crept into the stone until the walls sweated beneath their palms. The building was older from the inside, less immaculate than the polished nave above. Here the cathedral showed its bones: pipes, wires, cracked plaster, service doors painted the same dull grey as the floor. A sacred place, Jungkook thought, was still only a man-made thing if you entered it from the wrong door.
At the first landing, a Lee guard stepped out of a corridor with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and enough time to look surprised.
Taehyung shot him twice in the chest with a suppressed pistol.
The sound was soft. Insultingly so. Two flat coughs swallowed by stone and distance. The man struck the wall before sliding down it, leaving a dark smear behind his shoulder. Taehyung caught the body by the collar before it could hit the floor too loudly, face utterly blank in a way Jungkook knew meant he was angry enough to be useful.
They kept climbing.
The higher they rose, the clearer the music became. Organ notes swelled through the walls in grand, holy waves, rising above the faint murmur of guests and the creak of the old building settling around them.
With each flight, Jungkook felt the distance between himself and Y/N shrinking into something unbearable.
He had spent months with hardly any distance but emotional distance, no barrier but ignorance and pride and every vile thing other people had done to keep them apart. Now there was only stone, security, timing, and the thin mechanical delay between breath and gunshot.
It should have felt easier.
It didnât.
By the time they reached the gallery level, his hands were damp inside his gloves.
A Kang technician crouched beside an access panel, coaxing open the wiring. Another man watched the corridor. Jimin stood with his back to the wall, gun low, eyes half-lidded and cruelly alert. In the dimness, with his blond hair tucked behind his ears and his Raven training buried beneath years of Tiger loyalty, he looked like the exact sort of mistake every clan had made at least once: someone they had failed to kill because they had failed to understand what he might become.
The technician gave a soft click of his tongue.
The security feed looped.
The gallery door opened.
Warmth struck them first.
Not sunlight. Not yet. The warmth of bodies gathered in expensive clothes, perfume, candles, flowers arranged in such abundance their sweetness had begun to turn. Jungkook stepped through the narrow door into the shadowed upper gallery and stopped.
Below him, the cathedral opened like a wound dressed for celebration.
White marble stretched from entrance to altar, veined faintly grey beneath carpets laid in ceremonial lines. Orchids spilled from columns and railings, too many of them, their pale heads bending beneath their own weight.
Guests filled the pews in disciplined symmetry: Parks in black along one side, Lees in white and ivory along the other, each clan arranged like two sides of a chessboard when seen from above.
The vaulted ceiling disappeared into shadow and candlelight. High windows filtered the dull morning into muted color, saints gazing down from fractured blues and reds and golds, serene above the old violence of men pretending this was anything other than a transaction.
Jungkookâs eyes went straight to the aisle.
She had not arrived yet.
For one dangerous second, relief weakened him.
Then a Kang voice crackled low in his earpiece. âPosition.â
Jungkook forced himself to move.
The sniper nest had been chosen two nights earlier from photographs and plans, an upper maintenance balcony half-concealed behind a row of carved stone angels along the eastern wall. From there, he would have a clean line to the altar.
He knelt behind the stone balustrade and opened the rifle case.
His hands knew what to do. That was the mercy of training. The body continued even when the mind began its treachery. Scope. Magazine. Suppressor. Bolt checked once, then again. He fitted the pieces together with a calm he did not feel, every motion precise enough that anyone watching might have mistaken him for steady.
He was not steady.
Down below, the organ shifted.
The doors at the rear of the nave began to open.
Jungkookâs breath stopped.
At first there was only light widening along the aisle, a cold glow spilling over white stone. Then the veil appeared, a pale spill of fabric catching candlelight as it moved. For half a second his mind rejected what he was seeing.
Y/N walked alone.
No father. No brotherâs arm. No escort delivering her like property.
Alone.
The sight should have made him proud. It did, distantly, beneath the horror. Even now, dressed by enemies, surrounded by men who had priced her life against treaties and territory, she had found some small way to refuse the shape they tried to force upon her. Her spine was straight. Her chin lifted. The veil trailed behind her in a measured river of white silk, and the bouquet in her hands looked almost too delicate against the blood he imagined, against the things he knew those hands had done.
She looked thinner. That alone made him sick.
She was still beautiful, though.
The thought hit him with such violence that for a moment he hated himself.
Beautiful was too small a word, too soft, too useless for the ache that opened beneath his ribs.
He kept his eyes on her.
Halfway offered to the altar, not because she had been conquered, but because she had understood long ago that her body was the only currency this world ever accepted from her.
His finger hovered near the trigger guard.
Not yet.
Lee Taeyong waited at the altar, face composed, hands folded before him as though attending a negotiation rather than his own wedding. Jungkook had no particular hatred for him before that morning. Dislike, perhaps. Contempt. The vague disgust reserved for men willing to benefit from cages they claimed not to have built. But as Y/N reached him and turned toward the priest, that changed with startling ease.
Hatred did not require much, it turned out.
Only proximity.
Only the sight of another man standing where Jungkook had no right to stand, beside a woman who had never belonged to any of them and yet kept being claimed in the language of clans.
The priest began to speak.
Jungkook heard none of it at first. His scope found Taeyongâs face, then lost it as Y/Nâs veil shifted in the foreground. Too close. Fuck. The angle was worse than it had looked on the plans. Taeyong stood half a step nearer to her than expected, his shoulder nearly aligned with hers whenever he turned to listen.
Jungkookâs jaw tightened as he adjusted.
Breathed out.
Waited.
The priestâs voice rolled upward, warm and practiced. Legacy. Union. Strength. Stability. Jungkook watched Taeyongâs mouth move in response, watched Y/N stand perfectly still beside him. She did not look frightened. Somehow that was worse. Fear would have meant she still believed something might happen. That she expected rescue, disaster, reprieve. Instead she looked calm.
âHurry up,â someone whispered in his earpiece.
One of the Kangs.
Jungkook did not answer.
The voice came again, lower this time, annoyed. âThe second she says it, sheâs a Lee. You understand what that means, right?â
Jungkookâs eye remained fixed to the scope.
âShe becomes one of them.â
Still he did not answer.
Not because he failed to understand.
Because he understood perfectly.
That was what sickened him.
Once the vows were complete, she would no longer be collateral. She would be part of the household marked for extinction. A name absorbed into the enemy ledger. Another white-clad body in a cathedral full of them.
Namjoon had been clear. No survivors from the house of the Snake.
Jungkookâs palm tightened around the rifle.
Below, Taeyong began speaking his vows.
Loyalty. Protection. Respect.
Jungkook nearly laughed.
Instead he steadied his breathing.
The shot was there and not there. Each time Taeyongâs head turned, each time Y/N shifted half an inch, the world rearranged itself into impossible fractions. Jungkook had killed men at worse distances. Moving targets. Dark rooms. Rain. Cars. He had shot through glass, smoke, panic. But never like this. Never with the one person he could not miss standing close enough that a mistake would not merely haunt him.
It would end him.
The priest turned to Y/N.
Jungkookâs heartbeat changed.
It did not quicken. It sank, heavy and sick, each beat a hard, deliberate blow against his ribs.
âMiss Park?â
Through the scope, he saw her blink.
For the first time since she had entered the nave, something in her seemed to return from far away. Her eyes lifted toward the pews, past Taeyong, past the priest, scanning the room. Jungkook watched her gaze pass over the Lees, the Parks, the rows of pale and dark features.
He wondered if her eyes were looking for his in the crowd. Or if some part of her already knew he was there. If she had felt the weight of his gaze. Felt it settle on her shoulders like a hand.
The thought was stupid.
Self-indulgent
Impossible.
Still, his breath caught when her gaze paused, just faintly, somewhere beneath his balcony.
Then the priest repeated the question.
The cathedral seemed to narrow around her.
Jungkook placed the crosshairs at the exact point where Taeyongâs skull separated cleanly from the space Y/N occupied. His finger settled against the trigger. The whole world entered the space between pressure and release.
Y/N lifted her chin.
Her mouth opened.
âI dââ
Jungkook fired before she could finish.
From the gallery, pressed against stone with the rifle braced hard into his shoulder, Jungkook felt the violence of the shot in his own bones more than he heard it.
The suppressor swallowed the worst of the sound, reducing the act itself to something small and perverse, a flat metallic crack that disappeared almost immediately. For one sickening instant, nothing appeared to happen at all.
The bullet struck cleanly.
Well.
As cleanly as a bullet to the head can strike.
Jungkook had aimed true.
Through the scope, Jungkook saw a spray of blood hit the side of Y/Nâs face, her veil, the white silk near her shoulder. He saw her blink once, not yet frightened, not even horrified, merely interrupted. Her hand lifted slowly to her cheek with the unthinking confusion of someone brushing away rain. Only then did she look up to her betrothed.
Jungkook stopped breathing.
Taeyongâs body remained upright for one impossible heartbeat, then fell to the floor.
Jungkook shifted the rifle.
Below, Y/N lifted her head.
Her gaze moved toward the pews.
Jungkook followed her gaze and found Lee Jooshil.
Even without the scope, Jungkook would have known the sound that followed belonged to a mother.
It began before sound fully emerged from her throat, visible first in the way her body jerked up from the pew, one hand clawing against the pearls at her neck. Her face had gone an astonishing shade of purple beneath the powder, veins standing out along her temple, eyes fixed first on the ruin of her son and then snapping upward, searching for blame with the speed of instinct. When those eyes landed on Y/N, something old and animal tore through the cathedral.
The scream ripped out of her.
And then the spell broke.
The cathedral erupted into chaos.
â
Okayyyy got ourselves Jungkookâs pov for the ceremony, are you looking forward to see what happens next? Will orpheus walk out alone?
Series Genre: Mafia!au , Slowburn, Angst, Hurt, smut, TW (it is a mafia!AU, after all)
Pairing: Mafia!Jungkook x reader
Wordcount: 6.9k
Masterlist
â
The room smelled like orchids.
Too many of them.
White blooms that crowded every surface of the bridal suite â the dressing table, the marble mantel, the windowsills â pale petals opening wide beneath gold light.
Y/N stood very still by the windows. Her gaze travelling everywhere but the mirror with superstitious zeal.
The gown weighed against her ribs. Hand-stitched silk layered over brutal internal structure, the corset pulling her spine straight enough to ache. Lace climbed delicately along her throat and collarbones in patterns resembling frost spreading across glass. The veil spilled behind her in impossible lengths of white organza, swallowing the hardwood floor whole.
It was beautiful.
Correct.
Every detail had been chosen with suffocating precision until she resembled exactly what the Lees wanted the country to see beside their son: elegance without scandal. Grace without visible blood beneath it.
She hated it instantly.
Earlier, the seamstresses had circled her in reverent little swarms, adjusting hems and sleeves with trembling excitement. One had actually teared up fastening the final buttons.
So radiant.
So lovely.
A perfect bride.
Y/N had breathed in when required. Tilted her chin when instructed. Allowed herself to be arranged like an offering.
Now they were gone.
Now the room sat in oppressive silence broken only by the soft hiss of the wind outside. A storm brewing.
Her gaze drifted unwillingly toward the edge of the mirror.
White silk.
Dark hair beneath the veil.
She looked away immediately.
Turned her attention to the flower arrangements.
The orchids had already begun decaying.
No one else would notice it. The rot remained subtle â browning edges hidden beneath fuller blooms, water clouding faintly inside crystal vases, petals beginning to curl inward.
Beautiful things spoiled quickly indoors.
Trapped and arranged when they were meant to blossom freely in the wild.
Something ugly twisted suddenly beneath her ribs.
Before she consciously decided to move, Y/N crossed the room, grabbed the nearest orchid arrangement, and ripped one of the flowers violently from its stem.
The sound startled her.
White petals scattered across polished wood.
She stared at them.
Then reached for another.
And another.
By the time the knock came at the door, half the arrangement had been dismantled, pale flowers littering the floor around the hem of her gown.
Y/N froze.
The knock came again.
âCome in.â
The door opened quietly.
She was surprised to see Chan stepping inside.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
He closed the door behind him. His eyes moved once over the suite â the overturned vase, the torn flowers, the white petals scattered on the floor â before landing on her.
The dress.
The veil.
Something in his face changed.
Not enough for anyone else to name. Chan had learned the same lessons she had about masks and timing and the usefulness of a blank expression. But Y/N had known him before he became so good at hiding things. She saw the smallest break in him, the slight stillness in his shoulders, the way his gaze caught for half a second at her hand and then dragged itself back to her face.
âDid they send you to make sure I didnât climb out the window?â she asked.
Her voice came out dry enough to almost sound like herself.
Chanâs mouth twitched.
âSomething like that.â
She glanced toward the balcony doors, where thin light slipped through the gap in the curtains.
âBit insulting, really. Theyâre bolted.â
âI guess they know enough not to underestimate you.â
A breath escaped her then. Not quite a laugh.
He stood a few feet inside the room, hands at his sides, dressed in Raven black that looked severe against all the bridal white.
Y/N was still surprised by how tall heâd grown after sheâd been sent away. Or perhaps heâd grown broader. Or perhaps she had simply preserved him in memory at the age they had both been when everything seemed smaller and simpler. His shoulders had filled out. His hair was shorter now, cut close enough to sharpen his face. There was a faint scar near his jaw she did not remember, pale against his skin.
But his eyes were the same.
Still steady. Still annoyingly gentle in the exact way he tried so hard not to be. Still looking at her as though beneath the dress and the diamonds and the approaching disaster, she remained the same girl who had once sat on a frozen training wall beside him at twelve and pretended not to shiver because Ravens did not shiver where others could see.
He looked down at the destroyed flowers again.
âShould I ask?â
âNo.â
âGood.â
Silence settled.
Y/N turned slightly away from the mirrors.
Chan noticed that too.
Of course he did.
Back then, he had noticed everything.
She had pretended not to notice his crush for a while back then, not because it was subtle, but because naming it would have required doing something about it. Chan had been good at hiding devotion. It only ever lived in all the small things: the warmer gloves he wordlessly passed her before night patrols, the way he took the worse position whenever they had to split cover, the reports he let her present first because he knew the older men would interrupt less if she spoke before they had time to prepare their condescension.
The other Ravens had hated her in the beginning, or at least hated the idea of her.
The bossâs daughter.
Too young.
Too delicate.
Too protected, they assumed, though none of them had seen what Park Sanghoon called protection behind closed doors.
Chan never treated her like she was ornamental. He never once made the mistake of thinking her fatherâs name made her soft. When senior operatives side-eyed her for being a girl on routes they thought should belong to sons, Chan simply took position beside her and matched her pace.
He had always been faithful like that.
âYou lookâŠâ he began.
âDonât.â
The order came out gentle.
Chan let the compliment die immediately.
A tiny muscle worked in his jaw, but he nodded, accepting the boundary the way he always had. Too easily, perhaps. That had always been one of the dangerous things about him.
He could never quite refuse her anything.
Once, years ago, she had tested that.
She had been sixteen and restless in a way she had not yet known how to diagnose. The night had been wet and cold, snow hammering against the windows of the guard tower. She had gone there after an unexpected discovery, with blood beneath her nails and no desire to return to her room, where every object seemed to belong to a girl she no longer was.
It had not been romantic in the way silly books insisted such things should be.
There had been no grand confession.
No candlelight.
No music.
She had simply looked at him and decided she wanted to know.
What it felt like.
What all the fuss was about.
Whether the thing women were told to guard like treasure truly changed them once given away.
Chan had understood what she was asking without her even saying a word.
Still he had asked, very quietly, if she was sure.
She had nodded yes.
Afterward, he had not looked triumphant.
Not smug.
He had simply let her rest her forehead against his chest, one hand resting lightly between her shoulder blades. He hadnât said a word. Hadnât asked why. Hadnât asked her to stay when she suddenly got up and casually put her clothes back on.
Y/N had loved him a little for that.
Not enough.
Never in the way he deserved.
But enough to remember.
And today, standing in a bridal suite full of rotting orchids, he looked at her exactly the same way he had then.
âEveryoneâs already seated,â he said at last.
She hummed in response.
âThe Lees seem impatient.â
âThe Lees can choke.â
His mouth twitched again, but the almost-smile faded quickly. He stepped closer, and the air between them shifted. Close enough now that she could smell the faint clean soap Raven barracks always stocked in bulk. Familiar things. Anchoring things.
âTheyâre listening,â he murmured.
She did not react.
Of course they were.
The Lees would not leave her be. The bridal suite had been set up with no more than the illusion of privacy. There were ears in the walls, probably in the flowers too, perhaps some poor idiot stationed behind the paneling pretending not to breathe.
Chan lifted a hand as though adjusting the fall of her veil.
The gesture would look harmless to anyone watching.
His fingers brushed her shoulder as he leaned in, mouth close to her ear.
âSay the word,â he breathed, so quietly even the walls would have struggled to catch it. âAnd we go.â
Her throat tightened.
She had expected many things from today.
Cruelty from her brother.
Ceremony from her future mother-in-law.
Awkwardness from the groom.
She had not expected rescue.
Not from Chan.
Not now.
Not after she had already trained herself not to want it.
For one forbidden second, the offer opened inside her like a window.
She saw it with humiliating clarity: the two of them leaving through some servantsâ corridor he had undoubtedly already mapped, her veil torn off and shoved into a dumpster, white silk gathered in both hands as they ran. She saw a stolen car. A border crossing. A port city with cheap hotels and no clan insignia carved into the walls.
She saw herself sleeping somewhere without a knife under the pillow.
Waking up and not knowing what to do with an ordinary morning.
Running with someone.
That was the part that almost broke her.
Not running alone.
Not surviving alone.
With someone. She had considered the idea once before. Though the person in question did not carry Chanâs face.
The image lasted less than a breath.
Then she killed it.
Y/N pulled back just enough to meet his gaze in the mirror.
âA deal is a deal,â she said softly.
The words sounded exhausted.
Not brave or noble.
Just exhausted.
Chanâs eyes darkened.
âYou donât owe them your life.â
âNo,â she said. âI owe someone elseâs.â
The understanding moved across Chanâs face like pain he had no right to show and could not fully hide. It would have been easier if he hated Jungkook. Perhaps he did, a little. Men were allowed ugliness in private. But Chan had always been too honest with himself to mistake his jealousy for anything righteous.
That perhaps, if he had held her back years ago, if he had asked her to stay that night in the guard tower, if he had been selfish enough to ask this of her, the world might have bent differently. Her father would not have found her in that training room with murder already half-formed in her bones. She might not have killed mighty Park Sanghoon. She might not have been sent away. She might have stayed.
And who knows what else mightâve happened after that night? If only theyâd been given the years they deserved.
He might have learned eventually how to ask for things.
She might have rejected him.
She probably would have.
But perhaps that would have been enough.
To live a life unburdened by an endless string of what-ifs.
Chan looked away first.
He had never argued with her when it mattered.
Maybe that really had always been the problem.
A silence settled.
There was a question she wanted to ask him.
It rose so suddenly she nearly spoke it aloud.
Have you heard anything?
Is he alive?
She knew Jungkook had run. Jaebeom had delivered the news with a smile on his face just over a week prior. She hadnât heard anything since.
The questions pressed painfully against the back of her teeth.
But she swallowed them down.
To ask Chan about Jungkook today would have been cruel in ways even she could recognize. It would mean taking this strange aching loyalty he had carried for her all these years and kicking it to the ground.
So instead she asked the other question.
The practical one.
The one she was allowed.
âDid you bring it?â
Chan went still.
Only for a second.
Then he sighed softly and reached into the inside pocket of his coat.
When his hand emerged again, he was holding a tiny glass vial no longer than her pinky finger.
At the bottom of it lay an inch of fine blue powder.
Y/N stared at it quietly.
The faded bruised blue of dried petals ground carefully between patient hands.
Chan rolled the vial once between his fingers before handing it over.
âSomething blue,â he said quietly.
A faint laugh nearly escaped her at the irony.
She closed her fingers around the glass instead.
âYou know,â he said dryly, âmost brides have a different idea of what constitutes a wedding gift.â
A faint almost-smile touched her mouth despite herself.
âIâve never been one to dream of kitchen appliances.â
For a moment she simply looked down at the vial.
At the crushed remains of something that had once been alive.
Once soft.
Once growing stubbornly through melting snow high in the northern forests.
The same flower Chan had picked years ago. She had been fourteen and bleeding lightly through her gloves from cracked knuckles when he had offered it to her.
Y/N had laughed at him.
Called him sentimental, or stupid, or some other cruelty that she could come up with.
Dropped the flower to the ground before anyone could notice and start teasing.
Then retrieved it when no one was looking.
The dried bloom had lived ever since pressed carefully between the pages of one of her journals.
Had she kept it because Chan had given it to her?
Or was it because she had later discovered, buried halfway through one of those botanical textbook she kept around, that once dried and ground finely enough, the petals of that specific northern bloom produced a remarkably efficient poison?
Perhaps it was both.
Perhaps neither.
The ambiguity remained even to her now.
Chan watched her expression carefully.
âYou kept it,â he said quietly.
Y/N turned the vial once, watching the powder slide softly against glass.
âYou sound surprised.â
âIt was a long time ago.â
âAnd?â
âAnd you called it pathetic.â
âIt was pathetic.â
That earned a laugh from him. Brief and low.
Then his eyes drifted toward the vial again.
The amusement faded.
Outside, somewhere far below the suite, cathedral bells began tolling the quarter hour.
Time moving forward regardless.
Chan lowered his voice slightly.
âSo, I assume the groomâs not making it to the honeymoon.â
Y/Nâs fingers tightened faintly around the glass.
âI promised them a wedding,â she murmured.
Not a marriage.
Chan heard the distinction immediately.
His jaw shifted once.
âAnd⊠yourself?â
The question hung heavily between them. She knew exactly what he meant. What he feared she might do with her something blue.
Y/N looked down at the blue powder.
For a moment she genuinely did not know the answer.
That was perhaps the most frightening part of all.
Finally she slipped the vial carefully into the hidden fold within her sleeve.
âI like contingency plans,â she said quietly.
It did not reassure him.
If anything, it made something dark flicker briefly across his face.
Chan closed his eyes briefly, then reached once more into his coat pocket.
âI brought you a replacement,â he said quietly.
Her brow lifted slightly.
From his hand emerged a single small blue flower.
âThe last if the snow melted this morning,â Chan said softly, looking toward the window. âSpring doesnât wait for anyone.â
Y/N stared at the flower.
The last time she had seen those blue petals fresh and open, she had been fourteen and far crueler than she knew how to measure. She had thought throwing it away meant winning something. Proving something. She had not yet understood that some kindnesses, ought to be cherished.
She reached out carefully and took the flower from him.
Their fingers brushed briefly.
And she finally said what she shouldâve said all those years ago, when he had first offered it to her.
âThank you, Channie,â she said, the old nickname slipping out instinctively
And this time he understood she meant it for much more than the flower.
Because she knew exactly what he was trying to do.
Remind her there were still things in the world capable of surviving winter.
Remind her that spring returned whether people deserved it or not.
That it was worth living to witness another season.
Y/N wasnât entirely convinced.
Still, Chan watched her tuck it into her bouquet among the white blooms. The blue disappeared almost completely unless one knew to look for it. Like a secret bruise she had to bear.
He knew.
She knew.
That was enough.
âIâm not staying,â he said after a long silence.
Y/N nodded.
âI figured.â
âI donât want to watch.â
The honesty of it hurt more than accusation would have.
âI understand,â she said.
He looked at her for a long time then. As if trying to memorize her.
Another knock sounded sharply at the door.
The bridal attendants this time, or Lee security, or whichever executioner had been assigned to escort her downstairs.
Chan moved toward the exit.
At the door, he paused.
âY/N.â
She looked up at him and felt, with sudden terrible clarity, that this might be the last time.
He did not say goodbye.
That would have been too much.
Instead he said, âfor what itâs worthâŠâ
The sentence remained unfinished. After all this time, words that couldnât be spoken aloud. They didnât need to be.
She nodded. It was better that way.
âI know,â she breathed out.
He finally opened the door and slipped out into the corridor without looking back, leaving the suite cold behind him.
â
When the time finally came, YN approached the doors to the nave only to find her brother waiting before them.
Leaning lazily against one of the marble columns as though he had all the time in the world.
He wore black.
Not mourning black. Raven black, with silver glinting faintly at his cuffs and the pin on his collar beneath the warm cathedral light. The effect should have looked severe.
Instead it merely made him appear exactly what he had always been: Park Sanghoon reincarnate.
When his eyes landed on her, his mouth curved immediately.
âAh,â he said lightly. âHere comes the bride.â
Y/N did not answer.
His gaze traveled over her slowly. Not leering. Not even particularly cruel at first. Simply attentive in a way that made her feel abruptly overexposed.
âYou clean up well,â he remarked.
âWhat are you doing here?â
âMy dear sister,â he replied with exaggerated patience, âyou are moments away from marrying into the Lee dynasty. Iâd say familial attendance is expected.â
His gaze drifted downward then.
To the bouquet in her hands.
To the small blue flower tucked almost invisibly among the orchids.
If he noticed it, he gave no indication.
Instead he pushed himself away from the column and stepped closer.
âBesides,â he said, âitâs tradition.â
A faint smile.
âIâm sure Father wouldâve walked you down the aisle.â
A pause.
Then, almost conversationally:
âHad he not been, you know⊠dead.â
The words slipped neatly beneath her ribs exactly where he intended them to.
Not grief, exactly, but rather the grotesque contradiction of occasionally missing the man they had both called father. The man whose throat she had sliced open. Missing fragments of him anyway. The rare vague memories of a person she wasnât fully sure had ever truly existed.
Jaebeom continued to watch her carefully.
His gaze dropped toward the heavy Lee diamond resting against her finger.
âYouâll do well here,â he said conversationally. âYouâve always understood how to play the long game.â
âHave I?â
âOf course.â His tone softened almost imperceptibly. âYou played it beautifully the night of the Summit.â
Y/N said nothing.
Jaebeom leaned slightly closer, lowering his voice though no one stood near enough to overhear.
âDo you ever regret it?â he asked quietly.
Her jaw locked. Once again she chose not to reply.
His smile widened faintly.
âHeâs not here, by the way.â
Y/Nâs expression did not move.
âdidnât even RSVP.â
âI donât know who youâre referring to.â
âMm.â Jaebeom tilted his head thoughtfully. âThose Tigers and their manners. I still canât believe he actually took off.â His gaze sharpened slightly. âI suppose I mustâve overestimated hisâdevotion.â
Her fingers twitched once against the bouquet.
Tiny.
Almost invisible.
Jaebeom noticed anyway.
He always noticed.
âYouâre quiet,â he murmured. âI hope youâre not having second thoughts. The flower arrangements cost a pretty buck.â
Her patience was wearing thin.
âWould you mind shutting up for once in your life.â
He hummed thoughtfully at that.
For a moment it was blissfully quiet. Like the calm before a storm.
Then, after a beat:
âYou know,â he said, âyou really do look like her.â He paused. âToday more than ever.â
Y/N went still.
Of everything he could have said, that was the one thing she had not wanted spoken aloud.
Because it was true.
It was hideously, unmistakably true.
That was why she had refused to look at her reflection all morning. Why every mirror in the suite had begun to feel threatening, like polished windows into something she did not wish to see.
For a second something almost strange entered Jaebeomâs expression. Not softness exactly. Her brother did not possess softness in any recognizable human form.
But there was something there. A memory
Y/N wondered suddenly whether Jaebeom had spent years, like her, trying not to remember their mother at all, only to walk into this cathedral today and find her standing alive again in another body.
Eomma.
Yes.
Their mother had looked exactly like this on her wedding day.
The image lived in Y/Nâs memory: that single grainy wedding photograph hidden for years inside her motherâs copy of Ovidâs Metamorphoses, tucked carefully between Book V and VI.
The story of Persephone and Hades.
The irony had been lost on Y/N when she first found the photograph at eleven years old.
Ji-eun standing beside Park Sanghoon in layers of white silk, one hand resting lightly over the beginning swell of a pregnancy not yet visible to strangers.
Seventeen years old.
A child, really.
Y/N remembered sitting cross-legged on the floor of her motherâs abandoned rooms for hours staring at that photograph while rain battered the windows.
She had traced the outlines of Ji-eunâs veil with her fingertip wondering whether her mother had known, even then, how badly it would all end.
Whether she had looked at the doors of the chapel and briefly considered running.
Now here she stood in another white dress, another marriage, another transaction.
For one ugly irrational second, Y/N hated her mother for it. Not fairly or logically.
But with the helpless resentment daughters sometimes carried toward women who failed before them.
âI suppose,â Jaebeom said quietly, âhistory does have a tendency to repeat itself with insulting precision.â
This time his voice carried none of the earlier mockery.
Because this â this right here â was the cruelest thing about Jaebeom.
Not the violence.
Not the manipulation.
Not the sick little habit he had of pressing against bruises just to see how much pain people could tolerate before they broke.
But the fact that every so often, without warning, you caught sight of the boy he had once been before this family hollowed him out too.
The little boy who had kissed Y/Nâs eyelashes reverently when she was born and whispered solemn promises against their motherâs shoulder that he would protect his little sister forever.
Or years later, the gangly teenager who had clung to Y/Nâs small hand through their motherâs memorial service so tightly her fingers hurt for a week afterward.
The young man he couldâve become.
It never lasted more than a second or two. This time was no exception.
Then his gaze drifted once more over the gown.
Over the diamonds.
Over the veil.
And whatever softness had appeared vanished completely.
âThe tragedy,â he said mildly, âis that Mother walked into this naĂŻvely.â His eyes returned to hers. âYouâre doing it fully informed.â
A faint shrug.
âTo think you spent your whole life trying not to become her.â
His mouth curved slightly.
âAnd now here we are.â
The cathedral bells began tolling somewhere above them.
Once.
Twice.
A deep sound vibrating through marble and bone alike.
Showtime.
Jaebeom extended his arm toward her.
âShall we?â
Y/N looked at the offered arm.
Then at him.
Then beyond him toward the towering doors leading to the nave.
The threshold.
Once crossed, the machinery of the day would begin moving too quickly to stop.
Vows.
Witnesses.
Signatures.
A life narrowing permanently into one irreversible direction.
The tiny glass vial hidden within her sleeve pressed coldly against her wrist.
Insurance.
Contingency.
Choice, however ugly.
Y/N stepped forward.
For one brief second Jaebeom genuinely seemed to think she intended to take his arm.
Instead she walked past him completely.
âTradition,â she said coldly over her shoulder, âcan go fuck itself.â
Something flashed across Jaebeomâs face then.
Not anger.
Amusement.
âFunny.â His mouth curved slightly. âFor a second there I actually thought youâd gone soft.â
She didnât reply.
âPoor Lees.â He went on. âThey really have no idea whatâs waiting for âem.â
The cathedral doors began opening slowly before them.
Cold light spilled outward first, followed by organ music swelling through the widening gap.
Y/N inhaled once.
The orchids in her bouquet smelled faintly rotten now.
Good, she thought.
Let them.
Let the petals brown at the edges and collapse inward. Let the sweetness curdle into something sour. Let every beautiful white thing in this cathedral decay exactly the way it deserved to.
And when the rot finally reached the roots, let it take everything with it.
She tightened her grip around the stems and walked forward alone. Head held high.
The marble beneath her heels gleamed so brightly it almost resembled water.
For one absurd fleeting moment Y/N thought of ice lakes in the northern forests beyond the Raven territories â the kind that looked perfectly solid until they cracked beneath your weight without warning.
Alluring surfaces had always been the most dangerous ones to trust.
The space unfolded before her in impossible scale.
White stone rose in vaulted arches overhead, disappearing into ceilings painted with saints who, to Y/N, looked vaguely horrified to be witnessing any of this. Hundreds of white flower arrangements in symmetrical rows along the nave.
And people.
So many people.
The arrangement was deliberate.
On the left sat the Parks in black. Faces cut from stone. They watched her with the grim stillness of soldiers attending an execution ordered by their commanding officer â obedient, silent, quietly aware there was no way around it.
On the right sat the Lees in alabaster and silver and all shades of ivory.
Black on one side, white in the other. A stark contrast for an event meant to seal the permanent union of two houses.
The organ swelled louder around her.
Y/N did not search the crowd.
That required effort.
Because some humiliating buried part of her still wanted to.
Wanted to glance toward the back rows and find dark eyes watching her from the shadows. Wanted one impossible confirmation thatâthat he was alive, that he had come, that she had not traded everything for a ghost.
But hope was a dangerous thing. Hope distracted. Hope made people sloppy seconds before impact.
So instead she kept her gaze fixed ahead and counted her steps silently as the veil whispered softly behind her.
The diamonds at her throat felt heavier now. A collar disguised as jewelry.
At the altar, Lee Taeyong waited. Posture perfectly straight, hands loosely clasped before him. He looked less like a groom awaiting his bride than a statesman preparing to sign a treaty.
Perhaps that was exactly what this was.
When she finally reached the altar, Taeyong inclined his head slightly.
Y/N still wasnât entirely sure what to make of him.
That in itself was unusual. Y/N prided herself on understanding people quickly. Everyone eventually revealed the same things beneath the polish: hunger, fear, vanity, cruelty. Most men were disappointingly transparent once she watched them long enough.
Taeyong remained⊠difficult.
Not because he concealed himself particularly well. Strangely, it was almost the opposite.
He was simply⊠elsewhere.
She had not spent much time with him since the night of the Summit. He kept mostly to his own quarters in the estate, appearing at dinners and meetings punctually before disappearing again like someone mindlessly fulfilling obligations. When he and Y/N spoke, he was courteous. Never touching her unnecessarily. Never cornering her alone. Never once asking whether she regretted the arrangement.
He turned out to be far more complex than sheâd expected.
Which, in its own way, made him stand out than the rest of his family.
See, Y/N had come to find that the Lees, despite the image they projected to the world, were not subtle people.
Taeyongâs older brother, Taejun, had spent the last months watching Y/N the way starving men watched banquet tables. Even seated beside his own wife â elegant, exhausted, perpetually pregnant-looking despite having birthed no sons â his gaze lingered too long on Y/Nâs mouth, her throat, the shape of her hips. His two daughters, Jooshil, fourth of her name, and little Hyeori, were always dressed beautifully in some failing attempt to compensate for the fact they had failed him simply by being born with two chromosomes X.
Y/N had seen the two little girls earlier that morning when they were sent to her suite carrying baskets of flower petals for the ceremony.
Little Hyeori had gushed. Telling Y/N she was the most beautiful woman in the world. And how she couldnât wait for her own wedding day. Of course, Y/N hadnât had it in her to tell the little girl the truth. Sheâd only told her sheâd get everything she deserved and more. Jooshil IV stared silently at Y/Nâs diamonds while her sister stole sugared almonds from the tray beside the dressing table whenever attendants looked away.
The child had hidden the candy inside her sleeves with the efficiency of someone already accustomed to scarcity despite living in obscene wealth.
No one corrected her.
No one really noticed.
Because daughters in the Lee household existed in a strange limbo between ornament and disappointment.
That was certainly a statement Lee Arin would agree with.
Yes.
Taeyongâs only sister.
Forgotten Arin.
Technically not forgotten at all, Y/N supposed. More⊠discarded in plain sight.
Arin drifted through the estate in silk slips and half-buttoned cardigans, smelling faintly of expensive perfume and vodka at all hours of the day. Her wrists resembled snapped branches and her teeth were sharp like those of some carnivorous beast, which was ironic considering Y/N had never seen the girl swallow anything solid other than the occasional olive swimming at the bottom of a martini glass.
She was mostly ignored by the rest of the family. Although Y/N did note that the Lee Matriarch had a habit of discussing her daughterâs body around the dinner table. Too fat and skeletal at once, somehow.
Arin usually responded by staring at her untouched plate, taking another pill, and chasing it with white wine before anyone could comment further.
And no one ever did.
Arin wasnât necessarily to pity, though. She was notoriously capricious, entitled, rude to the help, and she never made any effort toward Y/N either. No curiosity. No hostility. Barely acknowledgment. As though Y/Nâs arrival merely represented another expensive object entering a house already overcrowded with them.
Then there was Minseok.
The third and youngest son.
Weakling was cruel word.
But not inaccurate in his case.
He possessed the translucent fragility of old aristocratic blood folded too many times into itself. Pale skin stretched too thin over delicate bones, dark crescents permanently bruising the skin beneath his eyes.
Y/N had caught herself once wondering whether centuries of the Lees marrying strategically within the same closed circle had finally begun collecting payment from their bloodline.
The poor boy laughed too quickly at jokes that werenât funny and coughed blood discreetly into embroidered handkerchiefs and shaky hands. Jooshil watched him with the exhausted disappointment of someone staring at a horse born lame.
But she still loved him. The way she loved all four of her children: fiercely, possessively, as extensions of herself destined to outlive her. They were not merely heirs. They were her legacy.
Yes.
Y/N had spent months slowly learning the ecosystem she was about to marry into.
And presiding over all of it sat Lee Jooshil, the third of her name.
Matriarch.
Widow.
Snake queen.
She ruled the family with terrifying softness. Never raising her voice. Never visibly threatening anyone. Yet entire rooms shifted themselves instinctively around her moods.
Y/N had spent endless afternoons trapped beside Jooshil as she spoke endlessly about her children with almost religious conviction.
And despite it all, Lee Taeyong had remaimed impossible to pin down.
Sometimes Y/N caught things.
Small things.
The almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw whenever his older brother made some crude remark about marriage. The studied indifference with which he endured endless conversations about heirs and bloodlines and future sons. The fact that he never once looked at Y/N the way the other men in his family did.
Not because he was respectful.
Because he simply⊠didnât want her that way.
The realization had arrived quietly one evening during a suffocating family dinner while Jooshil discussed grandchildren over untouched sea bass. Taeyong had been listening politely enough, but his attention had drifted briefly toward one of the bodyguards standing beside the wall.
Only for a second.
A glance too quick for most people to notice.
But Y/N noticed things professionally.
And suddenly so many pieces rearranged themselves neatly into place.
His distance.
His courtesy.
The strange absence of ambition and hunger in a family of predators.
The exhaustion beneath it all.
Ah.
That.
Oddly enough, it made her pity him slightly.
Not because he was trapped into marrying her. They were both trapped. But because unlike her, Taeyong had been born into a family where survival depended entirely upon performing masculinity correctly. Producing heirs. Continuing bloodlines. Wanting the right people in the right ways.
And Y/N suspected Taeyong had spent most of his life understanding, with growing horror, that he did not. The wedding night ought to be as uncomfortable for him as it would be for her.
Beside her now beneath cathedral light, he stood perfectly composed. Beautiful in the cold careful way marble statues were.
Y/N looked at him properly then.
It seemed the young man may have been just like her after all.
Not monstrous.
Not innocent either.
Y/N took her place beside him and turned toward the priest, who began speaking immediately.
Words drifted through the cathedral.
Union.
Legacy.
Stability.
Strength.
Families joined beneath God.
Y/N listened without listening.
Her thoughts wandered elsewhere against her will.
Back to snow.
Always snow.
Snow falling silently over her motherâs corpse while hot tears burned tracks down Y/Nâs raw red cheeks.
Snow up to her knees as she limped back from her initiation into the clan. Lungs on fire, iron on her tongue.
Snow collecting silently in the maze while Jungkook bled into it beneath her feverish hands. Snow turning pink around her knees while Lee Joosil waited calmly for her answer.
Snow burying everything in sight except for one single, delicate little blue flower clinging stubbornly to life.
Still,
A deal is a deal.
Beside her, Taeyong repeated his vows steadily.
His voice was low. He promised loyalty. Protection. Respect. The usual stuff.
Y/N lowered her gaze briefly toward the bouquet in her hands.
Toward the hidden blue flower tucked quietly among the orchids.
Spring doesnât wait for anyone.
Chanâs voice echoed faintly through her brain.
Yes.
Life had the audacity to continue regardless of grief. Regardless of blood. Regardless of the people left buried beneath both.
âMiss Park?â
The priestâs voice cut gently through her thoughts.
Y/N blinked.
The cathedral swam back into focus around her.
She had drifted farther than intended.
âSorry,â she said automatically.
A faint ripple moved through the crowd.
The priest smiled politely enough to conceal irritation.
Then repeated the question.
âDo you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?â
Silence descended.
Hundreds of people holding themselves very still waiting for history to move.
Y/N looked at Taeyong.
Beyond him, the cathedral blurred faintly at the edges.
Jaebeom stood near the front pews with his hands clasped behind his back, his expression stern, though Y/N couldâve sworn there was melancholy there, too. Or maybe she was sentimental. A fatal flaw she shared with her mother despite her best efforts.
A deal is a deal.
The thought arrived again.
Not conviction this time.
Resignation.
Y/N inhaled slowly.
Then raised her chin back toward the priest.
âI dââ
But a sound split through the cathedral.
Sharp and metallic. A strange compact popping sound that took her brain one fatal second too long to recognize.
Something warm and wet instantly hit the side of her face.
The human mind, Y/N would later discover, did strange things in the face of catastrophe. It took the next second of her life and stretched it obscenely thin, unraveling it into separate unbearable fragments that memory would replay for years afterward. In reality, what followed could not have lasted more than a heartbeat. But inside her mind, it stretched endless.
Y/N blinked and lifted one hand automatically to wipe her cheek.
Only her fingertips came away red. Crimson.
The music had stopped.
Or perhaps it hadnât.
Perhaps her hearing had simply narrowed violently inward.
Beside her came a sound.
Not a scream.
A soft, wet, choking exhale.
Y/N turned her head.
Slowly.
And for one endless, terrible second her brain still refused to understand what her eyes were seeing.
Taeyong remained standing.
Still exactly where he had been a heartbeat earlier beneath cathedral light.
Onlyâ
Something was wrong with his face.
No.
Not wrong.
Missing.
The left side of his head.
It had collapsed inward grotesquely above the jaw, bone and blood and something pale sprayed across white marble behind him. His right eye remained open in stunned blankness while the other side simply longer resembled anything human, obliterated by what could only have been a bullet.
Y/N couldnât breathe.
Time stretched obscenely thin.
She saw part of Taeyongâs wedding collar slowly darkening crimson near the shoulder.
Saw the tiny involuntary twitch of one hand at his side.
There was remarkably little noise afterward.
Only the wet ruin of damaged breathing.
Then gravity remembered him.
Taeyong swayed once.
A strange almost graceful motion, like exhaustion finally catching up to him.
His remaining eye flicked toward her.
Then his body folded.
Dead weight collapsing forward onto polished marble with a sound Y/N knew would follow her for the rest of her life.
The bouquet slipped out of her grip and fell to the floor next to him.
She did not move.
She couldnât.
She pressed her lips together instinctively, only to find that she could suddenly taste blood.
Taeyongâs blood.
Blown across her face seconds earlier in the wake of the shot, now warm and metallic against her tongue like some grotesque parody of communion wine.
Her pulse had become enormous. Deafening. She could feel every beat separately inside her throat.
Then, very slowly, she lifted her head.
And looked out toward the pews.
The faces staring back at her did not look real.
Hundreds of people frozen. Mouths slightly parted. Eyes widened but not yet screaming. A roomful of powerful people still trying to convince themselves they had not just witnessed a manâs skull opened beside the altar.
The Lees in white.
The Parks in black.
Motionless.
Like figures trapped inside a painting.
And thenâ
Y/Nâs gaze landed on Lee Jooshil.
The Matriarch had gone an astonishing shade of purple.
Horror surged visibly upward beneath powdered skin so violently it transformed her entire face.
The old woman had half-risen from her chair already. For one stretched impossible second, her eyes were stuck to what remained of her son on the cathedral floor.
As though her mind physically could not force the image into coherence.
Then her eyes snapped upward.
Already hunting for blame.
They landed on Y/N.
The blood vessels in her eyes a perfect mirror to the crimson pattern on Y/Nâs wedding dress.
She stood motionless beside the corpse.
And something inside the Matriarch finally broke.
The scream that tore out of her did not sound human.
The kind of sound dragged upward from somewhere older than language. A mother-animal sound. Pure rage wrapped around devastation.
It ripped through the cathedral with such force that several people physically flinched.
It was as though the spell suddenly shattered.
And the cathedral erupted into chaos.
â
â
Chapter 20
Omggggggg we are reaching our climax what did you think????? I struggled a lot with that one. Kept going back and forth on what to include and what to cut. I hope you all liked it though! Feedback is always appreciated
you are mother in writing storiesâŠhope you are doing goodâŠDaily i used to check whether u hv updated next chapter đ Come back soon we miss u nd ur story đ much invested ln ur story đ
Your message was so so sweet thank you đ«¶
Iâm back nowwwww I hope youâre enjoying the new chapters, thereâs more to come very soooooon
what do i feel like their interaction at the gallery was lowk her trying to hint what was coming đ¶âđ«ïž
Itâs actually soooooo interesting that you point that out because for the LONGEST time I kept going back and forth on whether she knew or not. Originally I did toy with the idea that the Troilus and Cressida metaphor was her trying to pass Jungkook a warning without openly saying anything that would put her in hot water. I even had an earlier version where, as Taeyong escorted her away, Jungkook called out:
âYou never told me what became of Troilus.â
She looked over her shoulder.
âHe shouldâve run,â she finally answered, something grave in her tone, âwhile there still was time.â
But eventually I decided she genuinely didnât know about the deal with the Lees/the attack on the Tigers, because realistically thereâs just no universe where she wouldâve let that unfold untouched if she had known. Our girl wouldâve done something.
So the gallery scene became something much crueler to me: tragic irony as she unknowingly foreshadows their fate (and with a painting that hangs in the house of her future betrothed no lessđ„Č)
