everything will be alright @louvemaze - Tumblr Blog

heaven smells like summer | jjk 🖤☀️

Jungkook is a ghost in the machine — a man with no surname, no public face, and enough power at his fingertips to collapse lives with one command. You are a high-profile cybercrime and privacy lawyer standing between a young witness and a criminal ring built on organ trafficking, surveillance, and digital destruction. When the people you are fighting turn their cameras on you, an anonymous warning keeps you alive. Then another. Then another. You do not know who Jungkook is yet, only that the mafia watches to destroy, and he watches to protect.

Pairing: Hacker!Jungkook x Cybercrime Lawyer!Reader

Genre: hacker!au, cybercrime thriller, dark romance, really slow burn, lawyer!reader, underground cyber network, smut, angst, fluff

Word Count: 34k

Warnings: 18+ only, MDNI, dark romance themes, cybercrime, hacking, surveillance, consensual protective monitoring, organised crime, trafficking references, organ trafficking/black-market exploitation, murder, threats, intimidation, corruption, digital reputation destruction, stalking/tracking, morally grey behaviour, obsessive protection, forced proximity, masked rescue/fake kidnapping scene, fear/panic, intense emotional tension, explicit sexual content, power play, bondage/restraint themes, orgasm denial/overstimulation, marking, praise, aftercare.

⤷﹒Love You to Death: The Obsession Files - masterlist

a/n: I worked really hard to release it before I gave up with the proofreading. It may not be perfect but I have spent a month on this little baby. I love creating plots that are dark and with psychological tension. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did whilst writing it 💕

The first time Jungkook saved your life, you did not know his name. You only knew that the courtroom smelled faintly of polished wood, rain-soaked wool, and the kind of expensive cologne men wore when they had learned to hide rot beneath money. The judge sat above all of you, face unreadable beneath the soft glow of the overhead lights. The prosecution team had gone quiet beside you. The victim advocate had stopped writing. Even the detective at the back of the courtroom had his jaw clenched hard enough to hurt.

On the other side of the aisle, Namjoon leaned back in his chair as if he had not just submitted manipulated digital evidence into court with the confidence of a man who knew someone higher up would make the consequences disappear. He looked at you as if he expected you to flinch. You did not. You stood slowly, buttoned your blazer with calm hands, and looked from the digital records on the screen to the judge, then back to Namjoon.

“I did not think you could get any lower, Namjoon. But here we are.”

A few people shifted in their seats. Namjoon’s mouth curled. “Anything for the money.” You smiled then, but there was nothing kind in it. “Then I hope they paid enough for what is left of your conscience.” The courtroom changed after that. You could feel it before anyone said a word. The pressure. The sudden attention. The way the defence counsel’s polished confidence slipped for half a second before he covered it with a lazy laugh. The way the men in the second row, men who had no reason to be there except intimidation, stopped pretending they were bored.

The case was supposed to be about digital manipulation, privacy breaches, financial coercion, and a young woman who had been brave enough to testify against people everyone else was too frightened to name. It was not supposed to lead to hospitals. It was not supposed to lead to missing women. It was not supposed to lead to bodies found along mountain paths with organs missing and official reports that always seemed to close too quickly. But you knew what happened when powerful people were given enough time to clean a crime scene. They called murder a tragedy. They called evidence unreliable. They called survivors unstable. They called corruption procedure.

You had spent your career learning how to stand in polished rooms and say, no. No, that file was altered. No, that witness was coerced. No, that girl was not lying. No, you would not let money rewrite the truth. That afternoon, the judge granted a continuance for further forensic review. Namjoon was furious enough to stop smiling. The prosecution team looked like they had been given oxygen. The young victim’s mother cried quietly into both hands. You should have felt relief. Instead, as you left the courthouse through the lower car park, you felt watched. It was late enough for the sky over Seoul to have turned grey-blue, rain threatening in the clouds. Your heels echoed across the concrete. Your phone was in one hand, your bag in the other, your keys already threaded between your fingers because you had grown into a woman who understood that being calm did not mean being careless. Two men stood near the lifts. They were not looking at you directly. That made it worse. Your phone buzzed once.

Unknown Number: Do not use the lift.

You stopped. The men did not. One of them glanced at you from the corner of his eye, too quick to be accidental. Your thumb hovered over the message. Your pulse changed, but your face did not. Another message came through.

Unknown Number: Do not use the lift from the car park. Walk to the main lobby. Now.

You looked once at the lift doors. Then you turned. You walked toward the stairs with the measured pace of someone who had remembered an appointment, not someone whose spine had gone cold. Behind you, the men moved. Not fast. Not yet. You pushed through the stairwell door and climbed up one level, then another, heels sharp against concrete. Your phone buzzed again.

Unknown Number: Security desk. Front entrance. Do not look back.

You did not look back. By the time you reached the main lobby, your lungs had tightened and your hand hurt from gripping your keys. The security desk was bright, busy, and watched by several cameras. You walked straight to it and asked, calmly, if someone could escort you to your car because two men from the lower level had been following you. The guard’s expression changed. The men did not enter the lobby. That told you enough. Later, after a uniformed officer had taken your statement, after your car had been searched, after you had been told that perhaps you were understandably shaken after a stressful hearing, you sat in the driver’s seat with both hands around your phone and typed a reply to the unknown number.

You: Thank you, whoever you are.

For almost two minutes, nothing happened. Then:

Unknown Number: No worries.

You stared at those two words for far longer than they deserved. No name. No explanation. No demand. Just that. No worries. As if he had not stepped out of nowhere and shifted the direction of your life by inches. As if inches were not sometimes the difference between getting home and becoming another file. You did not know yet that the man behind the messages had no surname. You did not know that people in the underground said ghosts did not have surnames. You did not know that he had been watching corrupted traffic feeds for three days, following traces of altered evidence backward through servers that were never supposed to speak to one another. You only knew he had seen danger before it reached you. And that night, when another message came telling you not to go home, you listened.

He directed you to a small guesthouse on a quiet side street, the kind of place that did not advertise itself brightly and did not invite questions. There were fewer useful cameras nearby. That was what he said. Fewer useful cameras, fewer blind spots for people who understood how to use them. You should have been more frightened by how much he knew. You should have gone to the police, or your boss, or one of the detectives assigned to the case. But the police had not seen the men in the car park before he had. He had. So you went. The older woman at the front desk gave you a key without asking for your card. She only looked at your face for a moment too long, then said, “Second floor. Do not use the front door again tonight.”

You paused. “Did he send you?” Her mouth tightened. “Sleep if you can.” In the room, you locked the door, pushed the chair beneath the handle, turned off your personal phone, and sat on the edge of the bed with your coat still on. The wallpaper was old. The heating clicked too loudly. Outside, tyres hissed along wet road. For the first time that day, your hands shook. There was a soft knock at the door thirty-seven minutes later. You did not move until your phone, the one you had turned off, lit up with a message.

Unknown Number: Open the door. She is safe.

You looked through the peephole. The older woman stood there with a paper bag in her hands. Inside was a cheap phone, a charger, a bottle of water, a toothbrush, and a packet of crackers. The phone had one contact saved. Jungkook. You stared at the name. It did not feel real. It felt like a word someone had typed because a ghost needed to pretend to be human. The phone buzzed.

Jungkook: Use this from now on.

You sat slowly on the bed. “And if I do not?” The phone buzzed again.

Jungkook: Then they keep finding you faster than I can.

You did not like the way that answer landed. Not because it was dramatic. Because it was practical. You typed back with cold fingers.

You: Who are you?

Jungkook: Someone with a common enemy.

You: That is not an answer.

Jungkook: It is the only one that matters tonight.

You stared at the screen, your thumb hovering, anger and fear twisting together inside you. “I am not in the habit of trusting anonymous men who know where I sleep.” The reply came quickly.

Jungkook: Good. Do not start now.

That stopped you. Another message followed.

Jungkook: Ask for proof.

Your throat moved.

You: Fine. Prove you are not one of them.

He did not call. He did not tell you to trust him. He did not send some empty reassurance about being safe or protected or chosen by fate. He gave you proof. A file appeared on the phone, then another, then another. Metadata from the altered evidence Namjoon had submitted. Access logs. A time stamp discrepancy. A route map showing the men from the car park entering the courthouse twenty minutes before you left. A freeze-frame of one of them near the lift. Then one final message.

Jungkook: They were not there to scare you.

Your mouth went dry.

You: What were they there to do?

A long pause.

Jungkook: Move you.

You understood enough. You did not sleep much that night. Every sound in the hallway became a footstep. Every car passing outside became someone waiting. At some point before dawn, you sat on the floor with your back against the bed and read through the files he had sent you until your eyes burned. When morning came, you called your boss from the clean phone and told him the truth. Not all of it. Not Jungkook. Not yet. But enough.

He went quiet in the way he always did when he was angry on your behalf. He had been your mentor long before he became your boss; after you lost your family, he had taken you in professionally and emotionally without ever making you feel like a burden. He did not tell you to be brave. He did not tell you to come in. He said, “Where are you?” You looked at the small window, at the pale morning beyond it. “Somewhere safe for now.”

“For now is not good enough.”

“No,” you said. “It is not.”

There was a silence, then a long breath. “Tell me what you need.” You closed your eyes. That was why you had survived this profession as long as you had. Not because the system was good. Not because the law always worked. Because sometimes, rarely, someone inside it cared enough to stand beside you when the ground shifted.

“I need time,” you said. “And I need the court to accept that the evidence has to be reviewed properly. No shortcuts.”

“You will have both.” After the call ended, you looked at the clean phone.

You: Why me?

Jungkook did not answer immediately. You imagined a man somewhere in a dark room, surrounded by screens, deciding how much truth to give you. You hated that you were imagining him at all. Then the phone buzzed.

Jungkook: Because you hurt them in public.

Another message.

Jungkook: And because if they silence you, they bury the girl with you.

You swallowed.

You: That is not comforting.

Jungkook: It was not meant to be.

You let out a quiet, humourless laugh.

You: Do you ever say anything normal?

Jungkook: No worries.

You stared at that and, against every reasonable instinct left in your body, almost smiled. It took two days for him to tell you what he needed. A dead drop. Your personal phone and laptop had to be removed from your possession, copied, mirrored, stripped, hardened, and rebuilt. He sent instructions with the patience of someone who expected you to question every step. You did. He answered every question. He never demanded faith. He gave logic, routes, timings, camera angles, alternatives, contingencies.

“You sound like you do this often,” you told him over text, sitting in your office long after the others had left, the city glowing beyond the windows.

Jungkook: That is not a question.

You: It can be.

Jungkook: Then ask it properly.

You leaned back in your chair, tired enough to be honest. “What are you, Jungkook?” This time, he did not answer for a while. Then:

Jungkook: Useful.

You wanted to be irritated. You were. But beneath that, there was something else. A strange, reluctant steadiness beginning to form around the shape of his presence. Not trust. Not yet. But recognition. You had spent years reading evidence, statements, tone, omission, motive. Jungkook was careful. Too careful. But careful did not always mean false. Sometimes careful meant wounded. Sometimes careful meant experienced. Sometimes careful meant he knew exactly what happened to people who spoke too soon. You left your laptop and phone in a locker at a subway station three nights later. He had chosen the station because it was busy enough to hide in and old enough that half the cameras were badly positioned. You wore a cap, mask, and long coat, your heart loud beneath your ribs. When you walked away, it felt like leaving part of your life behind. Within an hour, the clean phone buzzed.

Jungkook: I have them.

You: And?

Jungkook: You have terrible password habits.

You looked down at your phone, offended despite everything.

You: I am being hunted by a criminal network and this is what you choose to criticize?

Jungkook: It is relevant.

You: I hate you.

Jungkook: No, you do not.

You did not answer. He was correct, which made it worse. For two weeks, you did not go home. You worked from the office, slept badly on the narrow sofa in your mentor’s spare conference room, changed in the staff bathroom, and lived on coffee so milky it barely deserved the name. The court accepted further forensic review. The prosecution team dug deeper. The detectives you trusted kept their circle small. Your boss walked you to your car every night even when you told him not to.

Jungkook worked without sleeping properly. You could tell from the timestamps. Sometimes he messaged at 3:14 a.m. to ask whether a file named one thing had ever been saved under another. Sometimes he sent you a fragment of code with a note that he had found malware embedded three layers deeper than expected. Sometimes he told you to delete an email without opening it. Sometimes, at dawn, he sent only:

Jungkook: Route clear. Leave in twelve minutes.

He did not soften things. That should have made him harder to like. Instead, his precision became part of your days. He never told you that you were safe. He told you what had been checked. He told you what was clean. He told you what to avoid. He told you when a building entrance had a camera blind spot and when a car had circled twice. He gave you facts, and the facts held. Two weeks after the dead drop, as you sat alone in the office with your shoes off and your glasses slipping down your nose, the clean phone buzzed.

Jungkook: You can go home now. I made it safe.

You read the message three times. Home. The word did not feel the way it used to. Still, you packed your files, put on your shoes, and called your boss from the corridor. He did not like it. You could hear that in the silence. But he knew better than to mistake your fear for fragility.

“Call me when you are inside,” he said.

“I will.”

“And if something feels wrong—”

“I leave.”

“No,” he said. “You call me and then you leave.”

You closed your eyes briefly. “Yes.” When you reached your penthouse building, every light felt too bright. Every reflection in the glass doors showed too much behind you. The receptionist smiled in a way that almost made you cry because it was ordinary and because ordinary had begun to feel like a country you had been exiled from. The clean phone buzzed in your pocket.

Jungkook: Lobby clear. Lift clean. Camera feed stable. Go.

You went. Your penthouse was exactly as you had left it and not the same at all. The cream sofa. The glass table. The neat shelves. The city beyond the windows. Your life preserved like a museum display while you had been elsewhere learning the shape of threat. You stood in the doorway for a long time. Then you typed:

You: Thank you.

Jungkook answered almost immediately.

Jungkook: Lock the door.

You did. Over the next weeks, his messages became part of your mornings. Route clear. Use south entrance today. Delay five minutes. Do not take the usual road. Leave now. Stay inside. Camera issue on level three. False alarm. You learned the rhythm of his protection before you learned the shape of his face. He learned yours in different pieces. Not through the cameras inside your home—he was careful about that boundary after you made it sharp—but through the way you worked, the cases you sent, the questions you asked, the fury you folded into polite legal language. He saw the victims you refused to reduce to evidence. He saw how often you asked whether the young woman and her mother were still safe before you asked about yourself. He did not compliment you.

He sent better firewalls. One night, after a brutal day of reviewing hospital connections and financial records linked to missing-person cases, you missed your 8 p.m. check-in by twenty-six minutes. When you remembered, your stomach dropped. You called him before texting. He answered on the fourth ring, voice rough with sleep. “Are you hurt?” It was the first time you heard him. Low. Tired. Controlled even through the edge of alarm. His voice did not sound like the voice of a man who spent his life behind screens. It sounded warm in a way you did not trust yourself to think about for long.

“No,” you said quickly. “No, I am fine. I am sorry. I forgot.” A pause. “You forgot.”

“I was reviewing the hospital donor list.”

“At eight in the evening.”

“I did not say it was wise.” His exhale came through the line, quiet and strained. “I do not check inside unless you fail to respond and there is reason to believe you are in danger.” You sat back slowly. “You have not checked?”

“No.”

“You could.”

“Yes.”

“But you did not.”

“No.” Your throat felt strange. “Why?”

“Because access is not permission.” You looked across your apartment, at the dark reflective windows and the cameras you had agreed to let him reinforce, and felt something loosen painfully in your chest. “Okay,” you said. “Okay?” “If I do not answer and you think I am in danger, you can check. Internal cameras. Emergency only.”

“I need a safe word,” he said.

“A safe word?”

“So you can know it is me if I ever have to reach you fast and cannot explain.”

The idea should have frightened you. Instead, the steadiness of his voice made fear feel like something that could be organized, named, planned around.

You thought for a moment. “Pomegranate.” Silence. Then, almost softer, “Pomegranate?” “It is hard to say by accident,” you said. “And easy to remember.” “That is very practical.” “Also mythological.” A pause. “Hades and Persephone,” he said. “You know it?” “I know enough.”

“Then you know pomegranates come with consequences.” Jungkook was quiet long enough that you wondered if he was smiling. You hated wondering that. “Pomegranate,” he said. “Good.”

The word became a strange comfort after that. A red seed tucked beneath your tongue. A reminder that even the underworld had rules if you knew how to speak them. The first real false alarm happened during a storm. Rain beat against the windows hard enough to blur the city. The lights in your building flickered once as you stepped into the lift from the underground garage. Your clean phone glitched, screen going black, then bright, then black again. Somewhere above you, during a power transfer, the elevator camera went briefly dark. By the time the doors opened on your floor, the phone had come back to life with six missed calls. Your heart kicked. You answered the seventh.

“Why did it take you that long to get upstairs?” Jungkook’s voice was calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that had teeth beneath it. You stepped out of the lift, looking both ways down the corridor. “The lift did not stop.”

“Your phone went dark.”

“The screen glitched.”

“The camera went down.”

“For how long?”

“Too long.” You unlocked your door and got inside, chest tight. “Jungkook.” He said nothing.

“I am inside.”

Still nothing. You leaned back against the door. For a second, you could hear only the storm and his breathing. Then he said, much quieter, “I am seventeen minutes away.” You closed your eyes. That was not a reassurance. It was a confession. Seventeen minutes away meant he had measured the distance. It meant he had thought about the worst thing happening inside that gap. It meant he had built systems and still understood that bodies could move faster than code in the wrong circumstances.

“I am okay,” you said.

“I do not like okay.”

“I know.” The silence changed. You opened your eyes, wincing because you already hated yourself for saying it. “Sorry.”

“It is fine.”

“It did not sound fine.”

“It is not useful for me to be anything else.”

You pressed the back of your head against the door and stared at the ceiling. You were learning that Jungkook did not break loudly. He narrowed. Months passed in increments of danger and ordinary life.

Court dates moved. Files multiplied. The young victim and her mother stayed hidden. More names surfaced, then disappeared behind sealed reports, dead ends, or people suddenly transferred out of departments. A hospital donor connected to the case boarded a private flight. A detective you did not fully trust began asking questions he should not have known to ask. Someone tried to breach your workplace server and found Jungkook waiting like a shadow with teeth. You kept working. So did he. Your life became smaller, but not empty. Your penthouse remained beautiful, expensive, controlled. You still had silk blouses, cream trousers, gold earrings, court shoes lined neatly near the wardrobe. You still drank coffee too late and highlighted documents in three colours. You still stood in rooms full of men who underestimated you because you were calm. But now, every morning began with a ghost.

Jungkook: North route is bad today. Use the bridge.

You: Good morning to you too.

Jungkook: It is raining.

You: That is not a greeting.

Jungkook: Take an umbrella.

He was always like that. Practical before kind. Care disguised as instruction. You learned to read the warmth by what he remembered: how you liked your coffee, which entrance made your shoulders tense, which courtroom had the bad camera angle, how late was too late for you to still be working without having eaten. You started asking about him too.

You: Have you eaten?

Jungkook: Yes.

You: Liar.

Jungkook: That is an accusation.

You: Your timestamps say you were working from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Jungkook: That does not prove I did not eat.

You: Did you?

Three minutes passed.

Jungkook: No.

You: Eat.

Jungkook: Bossy.

You: Accurate.

He did not reply for ten minutes. Then:

Jungkook: Eating.

You smiled at your desk like an idiot and pretended not to. The day he saw you in the pool was the day you forgot to tell him your route had changed. Your building’s gym was quiet after court hours, the pool lit blue and silver beneath the ceiling lights. You had gone down because your body felt like a clenched fist. Because your mind had been full of missing women, medical reports, shell charities, and a photograph of a mother holding the hand of a daughter who had not stopped shaking since testimony.

You swam until your arms ached. Then you floated on your back and stared at the ceiling, ears underwater, world muffled. For ten minutes, no one wanted anything from you. No one needed proof. No one needed courage. No one was asking you to be the face of a fight that was slowly eating through every ordinary piece of your life. When you got back upstairs, the clean phone was waiting on the kitchen counter with one message.

Jungkook: Message me when you are back upstairs.

You froze. Then another:

Jungkook: You forgot to update me.

You looked toward the internal camera in the corner of the living room, suddenly aware of your wet hair, bare feet, loose shirt over your swimsuit.

You: Did you check inside?

Jungkook: No.

Your shoulders lowered.

Jungkook: Gym camera. Then pool.

You stared at the phone. You should have felt exposed. Instead, what unsettled you was the softness that followed.

Jungkook: You looked peaceful. I waited until you were done.

You read it twice. Then you wrote:

You: I was.

He did not answer for a while. When he did, it was only:

Jungkook: Good.

You did not know then that somewhere far from your apartment, Jungkook had sat very still in front of a wall of monitors and watched you float beneath blue light like something the world had not managed to touch. You did not know that, for a few minutes, his mind had gone quiet. You did not know that seeing you safe had felt like peace to him before he had the language to admit why. You only knew he had waited. And, somehow, that mattered. The first time you heard his voice properly for longer than a crisis was after a work dinner you had not wanted to attend.

It was supposed to be small. A few prosecutors, two detectives, your boss, and one senior consultant who liked the sound of his own voice enough to fill any silence. The hearing had gone well that week. Not a victory, not yet, but enough progress that everyone’s shoulders had lowered for one evening. You drank more wine than you meant to. Not too much to understand danger. Enough to soften the edges of it. You messaged Jungkook from the restroom, leaning against the marble sink with your phone in one hand and your lipstick slightly faded.

You: I may not update properly when I leave.

His reply came almost immediately.

Jungkook: How many drinks?

You: Rude.

Jungkook: Number.

You: Three.

Jungkook: Actual number.

You frowned at the screen.

You: Four and a half. Maybe five if we are counting the one I did not finish.

Jungkook: We are counting it.

You: You are annoying.

Jungkook: I am sending someone.

A man was waiting outside the restaurant forty minutes later, holding an umbrella in one hand and his phone in the other. He was not dressed like security. That made him better security. You stopped beneath the awning. “Who sent you?” His mouth twitched. “Hades.” Your drunk brain took a second. Then you laughed. The man did not ask why. He got you home safely. He walked you into the lobby, waited until the lift doors closed, then disappeared before you reached your floor. Inside your penthouse, you kicked off your heels, left your coat on the sofa, and dropped onto the cushions like your bones had dissolved. The clean phone rang before you could decide whether the ceiling was moving. You answered with your eyes closed. “I am alive.”

“You are drunk.”

“You are observant.”

“Drink water.”

“Bossy.”

“Accurate.” You smiled despite yourself, rolling onto your side. His voice was clearer through the phone tonight, low and close, threaded with exhaustion he did not bother hiding.

“Jungkook?”

“What?”

“Are you handsome?” Silence. Then, flatly, “Go to bed.” You opened your eyes. “That is suspicious.”

“It is practical.”

“No, it is suspicious. Why does it matter if I ask?”

“It does not.”

“Then answer.” Another pause.

“Quite the contrary.” You sat up too quickly and had to grab the arm of the sofa. “Quite the contrary? That is such an annoying thing to say.”

“You asked.”

“You could be lying.”

“My face is not relevant to your safety.”

“Your voice tells me otherwise. You are lying.”

“I am hanging up.”

“No, wait.” You leaned back, smiling at the ceiling now. “Why does it matter if you are handsome or not?”

“It does not.”

“It matters to me.”

“Why?”

You closed your eyes, warmth spreading through your face. “I need to have something to fantasize about.” The silence on the other end changed so sharply you felt it through the phone. For one beautiful, wine-soft second, you thought you had broken him. Then your phone buzzed. A photo. You opened it. And stopped breathing. You did not know what you had expected. A shadow, maybe. A blur. A man careful enough to hide even while revealing himself. Instead, he had sent a photograph taken in low light, face half-turned toward the camera, dark hair slightly messy, mouth unsmiling, eyes so sharp they made your chest tighten. He looked like someone the city would forget only because he commanded it to. Beautiful in a way that felt unfair. Dangerous in a way that made sense.

“Oh,” you said softly. Jungkook said nothing. You zoomed in before shame could catch you.

“If I had a voice and a face like you, little lamb,” you murmured, “I would never shut up about it.” Jungkook’s inhale was quiet. Then he said, “Drink water.” You laughed. “That is all you have to say?”

“Brush your teeth.”

“You are impossible.”

“Go to bed.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

This time, the silence was longer. When he spoke again, his voice had lowered by a fraction. “Please go to bed. Good night.” You woke the next morning on the sofa with a headache, a dry mouth, and Jungkook’s face still open on your phone. For one full minute, you stared at it in horror. Then you remembered what you had said. You dropped the phone onto your chest and covered your face with both hands. “No.” The clean phone buzzed against your sternum. You moved two fingers apart and looked.

Jungkook: Drink water.

You considered throwing yourself off the balcony. Instead, you typed:

You: I am sorry.

Jungkook: No need to apologize.

You stared at the message. Then, against your better judgment, you opened the photo again. He really was too handsome for his own good. The case moved faster after that. Or maybe it only felt that way because everything began breaking at once. The forensic review exposed enough manipulation to damage Namjoon’s submission badly. The young victim’s testimony held. Financial routes began connecting to logistics companies, private clinics, shell donors, and names that made even seasoned prosecutors go quiet.

At the next major hearing, several men tied to Black Loom’s logistics chain were taken into custody. Not the whole network. Not yet. But enough that, for one afternoon, the air changed. You walked out of court with your spine straight and your hands steady. Your boss squeezed your shoulder once. The detective at the back gave you a nod that felt like a promise. The victim’s mother held you so tightly your ribs hurt. You messaged Jungkook from the courthouse steps.

You: We got them.

For once, he did not answer immediately. Then:

Jungkook: You wounded them.

You smiled faintly.

You: That sounds like congratulations in your language.

Jungkook: It is.

Your smile faded as rain began to mist the steps.

Jungkook: Be careful tonight.

You looked up at the darkening sky. “Always.” The judge was found dead the next morning. Your boss called first, voice hollow. Then the detective from Violent Crimes, speaking in clipped sentences that told you more than his words could. The official line forming too quickly was suicide. The detective did not believe it. You did not either. The victim and her mother were still safe. That was the first thing you asked. The detective answered before you finished the sentence.

“They are safe. I checked myself.”

You sat on the edge of your bed, the clean phone in your lap, and felt something cold and enormous move beneath the surface of everything. Black Loom was not a gang. Jungkook said it later, after you sent him the details. He had been quiet for a long time, long enough that you knew he was moving through systems you did not have names for.

Jungkook: This is bigger than the men in court.

You: How much bigger?

Jungkook: Hospitals. Donors. Police contacts. Private security. Judges. International routes.

You closed your eyes.

You: Organ trafficking?

The answer came too slowly.

Jungkook: Yes.

You thought of the bodies found along mountain paths. The missing organs. The hospital donors. The powerful man whose transplant rumours everyone dismissed because no one wanted to be sued into silence. Your hand tightened around the phone.

You: I need names.

Jungkook: You need to stay alive long enough to use them.

After that, the cameras started behaving strangely. One second freezes when you entered police buildings. Traffic cameras turning too neatly along your route. A lift camera going grainy, then clear. A parking garage feed skipping exactly three frames when your car passed. Jungkook noticed before anyone else. Of course he did. You were in a police building reviewing statements when his message came through.

Jungkook: Your steps are being followed.

You looked at the fluorescent hallway, at the officers moving past with paper cups and tired eyes, at the camera in the corner. You typed:

You: I understand.

Then you put the phone away and walked into the meeting with your face calm. That was the thing about being afraid for long enough. Eventually, fear became another room you learned to work inside. The breach happened on a Thursday. You remembered that because it had been raining all day, the kind of rain that made the city silver and miserable, and because you had thought, absurdly, that you wanted to cook something instead of ordering in. Something normal. Something warm. Jungkook cleared your route from work. The building lobby was clean. The lift was clean. The hallway camera was stable. You entered your penthouse, locked the door, and placed your clean phone and laptop on the coffee table before going to change. Your blouse was half-unbuttoned when the lights flickered. Not off. Just once. You stilled. In the living room, the clean phone began ringing. You stepped toward the bedroom door. Then the cameras went dark.

Far away, Jungkook saw every feed from your penthouse black out at once. He did not swear. He did not panic. Not outwardly. He moved. The clean phone and laptop on your coffee table lit up white. Then they died. By the time you reached the living room, there was a thin curl of smoke rising from both devices. Your heart stopped. The apartment was too quiet. Somewhere near the service entrance, something clicked. You backed away slowly, one hand reaching for the nearest heavy object. A glass paperweight. Useless, but better than nothing. Your personal phone was gone. Your clean phone was dead. The cameras were blind. The windows reflected only your own pale face back at you. Then the balcony door shifted. You ran. Not toward the front door. Too obvious. You ran toward the corridor, toward the guest bathroom, because it had no windows and a lock and maybe, if you were lucky, enough time.

You were not lucky. A dark shape moved from the hall. You swung the paperweight with both hands. A gloved hand caught your wrist before it connected. You fought so hard your shoulder burned. You kicked, twisted, drove your elbow backward, tried to scream, but the figure was faster, stronger, silent in a way that made terror split open inside you. He forced you backward, one hand clamping over your mouth, the other locking your wrist, pushing you into the bathroom. You heard yourself make a sound you did not recognize. The door shut behind you. You tried to bite him. He caught your jaw.

“Pomegranate, little lamb.”

Everything stopped. Not your breathing. That came fast and broken against his glove. Not your pulse. That kept trying to tear out of your throat. But the world itself narrowed around those two words. Pomegranate. Little lamb. Your eyes snapped to his face, but he was wearing a black mask, hood pulled low, rainwater dark on his shoulders. His voice came again, lower now. “It is me.” Your knees almost gave out.

“Jungkook?” He released your mouth slowly but did not step away until he was sure you understood. Even then, one hand stayed near your arm, not gripping now, only ready.

“You scared me,” you whispered, and hated how small it came out. His eyes moved over your face, your throat, your hands, your blouse, the paperweight still on the floor. Checking damage. Counting breaths. Measuring the seconds he had lost.

“I had to get you out of sight. The apartment is compromised.”

“My phone—”

“Gone. Laptop too.” Your stomach dropped. He saw it and answered before you could ask. “Your files are safe.” You stared at him.

“The devices are gone,” he said. “Your files are safe.”

Only then did your body begin to shake. Not because of the files. Not really. Because the man who had been a voice, a message, a shadow in your systems, was standing in front of you with rain on his clothes and violence still coiled in his shoulders. Because he had crossed the distance between digital ghost and flesh in seventeen minutes or less. Because he had saved you and frightened you in the same breath. Jungkook looked toward the bathroom door. “We have to move.”

“How did they get in?”

“Service access. Maybe cloned credentials. Maybe someone in the building. I will know later.”

“You will know later?”

“Yes.”

The certainty in his voice should have sounded arrogant. It sounded inevitable. He removed his jacket and put it around your shoulders without asking. It was warm from his body despite the rain. Dark fabric swallowed your half-buttoned blouse, your shaking hands, the last fragile illusion that your penthouse had ever been safe. You followed him through your own home like it belonged to someone else. The living room smelled faintly of burnt circuitry. The balcony door was open a fraction. Rain tapped against the glass. Your beautiful apartment, with its cream sofa and polished floors and quiet luxury, had become a stage after the audience had left and the knives remained.

Jungkook moved through it without wasting a motion. He checked the corridor. The service entrance. The lift feed on a small device in his hand. He guided you through the back route, not the main lift, one hand hovering near your lower back but barely touching unless he had to. In the underground garage, a car waited. You did not ask where he had got it. You did not ask how many laws he had broken to get to you. For once, you were too tired to ask the correct questions. Only when the building disappeared behind you, swallowed by rain and distance, did you look at him properly. He had removed the mask. The photo had not lied. If anything, it had been merciful.

In person, Jungkook was more difficult to look at because he was real. Dark hair damp from the rain, jaw tense, eyes fixed on the road with an intensity that made the air inside the car feel charged. He was dressed in black, not stylishly, not carelessly, but like someone who had never wanted to be seen and had dressed accordingly. You should have said thank you. Instead, what came out was, “You are taller than I thought.” His fingers tightened briefly on the steering wheel. Then, after a pause, “That is what you want to say right now?” You looked out at the rain-blurred city and let out a breath that was nearly a laugh and nearly something worse. “I am in shock.”

“That is fair.”

“And you broke into my apartment.”

“I entered through a compromised access point.”

“That is a very criminal way to phrase that.”

“I am a very criminal person.”

You turned your head back toward him. He did not smile. That was the first time Jungkook told you the truth plainly, without softening it into usefulness. He was not a police contact. Not a private investigator. Not a clean informant with a badge waiting somewhere. He was the thing criminals feared only after everything they owned started collapsing around them. A ghost in the system. And now you were in his car, wearing his jacket, leaving behind the last place that had belonged only to you.

“Where are we going?” you asked.

“My house.”

You did not ask if it was safe. You knew he would not take you there if it was not. Jungkook’s house did not look like the home of a ghost. That was the first thing that hurt. You had expected concrete, glass, black walls, screens glowing in every room, something sterile and expensive and impossible to understand. Instead, he drove into a quiet neighbourhood where the streets were narrow and old trees bent over garden walls. His house sat behind a gate with chipped paint and warm lights glowing behind rain-streaked windows. It looked lived in. It looked like a place someone had once loved.

Inside, the air smelled faintly of wood, dust, clean laundry, and coffee. There were shelves that did not match, a worn sofa, a kitchen table with scratches along one edge, a hallway where shoes had once gathered in pairs. It was not polished like your penthouse. It was not designed to impress anyone. It was warmer than it should have been. Jungkook locked the door behind you, then checked two systems near the entrance. He did not touch you again until he had to guide you down the hall.

“You can take the bedroom,” he said. “Bathroom is across from it. Towels are in the cabinet. I will get you clothes.” You looked at him. “Where will you sleep?”

“I will not.”

“Jungkook.”

He glanced at you. You stopped. His face was too controlled. That was the problem. Not cold. Not indifferent. Controlled so tightly that you could see the strain only because, by then, you had spent months learning how he hid care inside logistics.

“Okay,” you said softly. “Show me the room.”

The bedroom was simple. Clean sheets. A heavy blanket. Curtains drawn over the dark window. A lamp already turned on. On the chair near the wardrobe, he placed a folded black hoodie and sweatpants that looked too large for you.

“I need to check the perimeter,” he said. “Then rebuild your phone access and contact your boss through a safe route.” You nodded. He hesitated at the door. It was so small you almost missed it.

“Do not go into the workroom yet,” he said. “It is not about you. It is sensitive.” The honesty of that was stranger than a lie would have been.

“All right.”

“If you need me, call out.” You held his jacket tighter around yourself. “Will you hear me?”

“Yes.”

He left. You showered with the bathroom door locked, though you knew locks meant less than they used to. You put on his clothes. The hoodie swallowed your hands and smelled faintly like him beneath laundry detergent and rain. Not cologne. Not smoke. Something warm, impossible, alive. Summer. You sat on the edge of the bed afterward and stared at nothing until your eyes burned. Your penthouse was gone. Not physically. You knew the building still stood, the furniture still arranged, the city still visible from those tall windows. But it was no longer yours in the way a place stopped being yours once fear entered before you did.

Your old life had not ended with a gunshot or a scream. It had ended with a camera feed going black. There was a soft knock on the door. You looked up. Jungkook stood in the hall with a glass of water in one hand and a phone in the other. No mask now. No jacket. Just black clothes, damp hair, tired eyes, and a stillness that belonged to someone who had spent too long surviving by becoming difficult to read.

“I need to call your boss,” he said. “You can speak to him. I will route it.”

You took the phone. Your boss answered on the first ring. The moment you heard his voice, something in you gave way. Not completely. You did not sob. You did not collapse. But your face crumpled for one second before you pulled yourself back together.

“I am safe,” you said first. Your boss went silent. Then he exhaled in a way that made you realize how frightened he had been.

“Where are you?”

“With someone who can protect me.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” you said, glancing at Jungkook. “But it is the safest one I have.” Jungkook looked away first. Your boss did not like it. You knew him too well not to hear that. But he trusted your judgment more than his fear, which was why you trusted him in return.

“You work remotely,” he said. “No court appearances. No office. Not until we know what happened.”

“I can still help.”

“I did not ask whether you could. I told you what is going to happen.”

Despite everything, you almost smiled. Jungkook raised an eyebrow, as if he could hear enough to understand. You looked down. “Yes, sir.” After the call, Jungkook took the phone back and ended the routed line. Your hands were steadier now.

“Thank you,” you said.

“You already said that.”

“Then hear it twice.” You looked at him fully. “You saved my work. The files. The case.”

“I saved your life.”

“You saved both.” Your voice grew quieter. “You do not understand what those files mean.”

“I do.”

“No. You understand systems. You understand data.” You tightened your fingers around the glass of water. “But I am the one who has to stand in court and make people listen. I am the one whose full name is attached to every argument. Every challenge. Every accusation. If those files were gone, if the chain of evidence was damaged, if they could say I was careless—”

“They cannot.” You stopped. Jungkook’s voice had not risen. It did not need to.

“They cannot,” he repeated. “Everything was mirrored before I triggered the burn. Forensic images. Metadata. Original structures. Access logs. I have them.”

You stared at him, and the room blurred for a moment. He shifted, uncomfortable beneath gratitude. “You are the face of this. I understand that. But I can stand behind you. I can give you everything I have from the dark.” There it was. Not a promise. A position. You were the face. He was the shadow. And for the first time since the car park, you felt the shape of what the two of you could become if the world kept forcing you together. Not trust. Not yet. But something with teeth. Something that could survive being afraid. You took a breath.

“Then we keep going.” Jungkook looked at you for a long moment. Then he nodded once.

“We keep going.”

The first quiet stretch after danger never felt peaceful. You slept in his bed while he sat somewhere beyond the closed door and rebuilt the world around you in silence. And somewhere deep in the city, Black Loom began to realize that the woman they had failed to move had not been alone at all. She had found a ghost. Or maybe the ghost had found her. Either way, the dark had answered.

For the first few days inside Jungkook’s house, you learned the shape of captivity when it was built by someone trying to keep you alive.

It did not look like chains. It looked like coffee placed beside your laptop before you asked for it. It looked like a blanket folded over the back of the sofa because you had fallen asleep there once and woken shivering. It looked like a black phone that never left your reach, a laptop hardened so tightly it felt less like a device and more like a locked room, and a man who moved through his own house as if every window, camera, sensor, lock, and shadow had to answer to him before he could breathe. Jungkook did not tell you that you could not leave. That would have been easier to hate. Instead, he gave you facts. The penthouse had been compromised. The building staff could not be fully cleared yet. The service entrance credentials had been cloned or purchased. Black Loom had seen enough to know your home was reachable and possibly enough to know someone else had intervened. Until he knew exactly how much they knew, you were not safe outside controlled movement.

“I do not guess with your life,” he said when you argued on the fourth day.

You were standing in his kitchen wearing one of his hoodies, your hair tied messily back, your laptop open on the table between you. You had spent the morning reading witness statements until your eyes stung, and the walls of his warm old house had started to feel like they were moving closer one inch at a time.

“I am not asking you to guess,” you said. “I am asking you to let me step outside for ten minutes.”

His face did not change, but you had already started learning the smallest ways he tightened. The stillness at his shoulders. The pause before he answered. The way his eyes moved to the nearest window and back to you as if he could see danger through plaster, brick, glass, distance.

“You can be angry with me,” he said. “You can hate the house. You can hate the cameras. You can hate that I am the person telling you this. But I am not opening a door until I know what is behind it.”

You wanted to snap at him. You wanted to tell him that your life had not belonged to Black Loom before, and it would not belong to him now, even in protection. But then he pushed a folder across the table. Inside were stills from the service corridor outside your penthouse. A blank patch in the building log. A cloned access card. A man looking up toward a camera a second before the feed died. Your anger did not disappear. It lost its footing. Jungkook leaned back, giving you space without leaving the room. “I can show you every reason. Every time.” You looked down at the images, throat tight. “That is not the problem.”

“I know.” You lifted your eyes. He seemed to realize what he had said a moment too late, mouth closing around whatever came next. You let it pass because his face looked tired enough already.

“The problem,” you said quietly, “is that I had a life.” His gaze lowered.

“I had a home. I had routines. I had terrible takeaway from the place near work because the delivery driver knew my building code. I had a barista who knew my coffee order. I had a pool downstairs and sunlight through the windows in the morning. Now every simple thing has to be checked, cleared, secured, permitted by threat level, and I am grateful because I know you are keeping me alive, but I am also angry because I did not choose any of this.”

Jungkook did not interrupt you. He did not defend himself. He stood across from you in black clothes, with one hand resting near the edge of the table, and listened as if every word mattered more because it hurt.

“I am not angry at you,” you said.

“You can be.”

“I am not,” you repeated. “But I need to say it aloud before it becomes something ugly.”

He nodded once. “Then say it aloud whenever you need to.” That was the strange cruelty of him. He made it difficult to resent him because he never tried to own the suffering his protection could not prevent. He did not pretend the house was freedom. He did not call confinement safety and expect you to thank him for the name change. He only built the walls as carefully as he could and stood there while you hated them. So you stayed.

You worked from his living room while he disappeared into the workroom at the end of the hall, the one room he had asked you not to enter. You learned its sounds before you saw its insides: the low hum of machines, the soft rhythm of keys, the occasional quiet voice when he spoke to someone through an encrypted call. Sometimes, past midnight, you would wake on the sofa and see a thin line of blue-white light beneath the door, proof that Jungkook had not slept. He made terrible coffee for himself and perfect coffee for you. That annoyed you more than it should have.

“You do know you are allowed to drink something that tastes good,” you told him one morning, watching him swallow coffee so black it looked punitive. He glanced at your cup. “Yours tastes good.”

“You made mine.”

“Yes.”

“So why do you hate yourself?” His mouth almost moved. Almost. Then he looked back at his screen. “I do not hate myself. I am efficient.”

“You are drinking punishment.”

“You are dramatic before nine.”

“You are drinking punishment before nine.”

He said nothing, but the next morning his coffee had milk in it. You did not comment. He knew you noticed anyway. Your boss checked in every day at first, then every other day when he realized you were still working more than resting. He did not ask for Jungkook’s name. You suspected he wanted to. You also suspected that if you gave it to him, he would quietly run every legal and illegal check he could get away with, then hate whatever he found and still accept that you were safer here than anywhere else.

The case did not slow just because your life had narrowed. If anything, Black Loom’s shape became clearer once Jungkook had you close enough to work without delay. You sent him court filings, financial notes, names from evidence logs, and half-formed theories. He sent back routes, metadata, bank structures, hidden ownership links, and sometimes only a single line that made your stomach drop. Hospital donor again. Same shell charity. Do not open that attachment. Police contact is dirty. Judge was not suicide. Those were the worst words. Judge was not suicide. You had known it, but knowing and seeing proof were different cruelties. Jungkook did not send everything at once. He had learned, somehow, when proof would steady you and when it would bury you. That frightened you almost as much as it comforted you. Two weeks became three. Then four. Then six.

You started measuring time by the ways the house accepted you. A mug you used more than the others stayed on the dish rack instead of being put away. Your case folders spread across half the living-room table. Your blazer hung beside his black coat near the door. A spare charger appeared near the sofa because you always forgot yours in the bedroom. Jungkook noticed everything. He never made a show of it. The only thing he refused to give you was the outside world. By the seventh week, you felt the lack of sunlight beneath your skin. It was the morning the envelope arrived at your workplace. Your boss called first. He did not describe it over the phone. That told you enough. His voice had gone very careful, the way people sounded when they had chosen each word before speaking because the wrong one might break something.

“What happened?” you asked. Jungkook was already standing on the other side of the living room, watching your face. Your boss exhaled. “A package came for you.” Your fingers tightened around the phone. “From Black Loom?”

“We believe so.”

“What was inside?” Jungkook crossed the room silently and stopped beside you, not touching, only there. Your boss said your name once, softly, and that frightened you more than an answer would have.

“What was inside?” you repeated.

“A finger.” The room lost sound. For a moment, you could see only the pale wall across from you and Jungkook’s shadow stretching along it.

“The victim and her mother?” you asked.

“They are safe,” your boss said immediately. “I checked. They are safe.” Your knees almost gave out. Jungkook’s hand closed around your elbow before you hit the table. Not gripping hard. Not pulling. Just anchoring.

“There was a note,” your boss continued, each word heavy. “‘If you do not stop, they will keep coming.’”

You closed your eyes. That was the point. Not only to threaten you. To make you feel responsible for every piece of violence they created. To turn your compassion into a weapon they could aim back at your chest.

“Send everything to the secure channel,” you said. Your voice sounded calmer than you felt.

“You do not need to look at it.”

“Yes, I do.” Your boss went quiet.

“I need to know who it belongs to.”

Jungkook’s hand did not leave your arm. When the images came through, he did not let them appear on your laptop first. He opened them on his own device, face cold, eyes moving over details with the precision of someone separating horror from evidence. Then he looked at you.

“You do not have to.”

“I do.”

He watched you for a second longer, then turned the screen. You knew the finger before the forensic markers finished telling you why. Not because you had known his hands well. You had not. You had met him twice, maybe three times, a young man barely older than the victim you were protecting, shaking in an interview room while pretending he was not afraid. Small-time fraud. Scam routes. Dark-web access. A boy who had tried very hard to act like a criminal because acting like one was safer than admitting he had been cornered by them. You had told him once that leaving early was the only chance men like him got. He had laughed. Then he had stopped laughing when you said his name.

“He tried to leave,” you whispered. Jungkook’s eyes sharpened.

“He tried to leave, and they sent him to me because he had no family.” Your throat closed around the last word. “They sent him to me because I warned him.”

Jungkook turned the screen away. You pressed both hands over your mouth, not to stop yourself from crying, but to stop yourself from making a sound Black Loom did not deserve to hear even in memory. That afternoon, Jungkook did something he had refused to do for weeks. He took you outside.

Not far. Not carelessly. He gave you a cap, a mask, and a route so tight it felt like threading a needle. He checked the streets, cameras, exits, cars, reflections, shop windows. The café was close enough to reach quickly and small enough to clear. He sat where he could see the door and the back entrance at the same time. You sat across from him with both hands wrapped around a flat white, sunlight touching the table between you. For a while, neither of you spoke. You lifted your face toward the window and closed your eyes. The sun was weak, filtered through clouds and glass, but it was real. It touched your cheeks like something remembered.

“I missed the sun,” you said. Jungkook went still. You opened your eyes. “I am not complaining.”

“I did not say you were.”

“I need to say that too.” His gaze stayed on you.

“I know why I have to stay hidden. I know why the house is safer. I know what you are doing for me.” You looked down into your coffee. “But I missed the sun. I missed ordering coffee from someone who did not know my threat level. I missed walking somewhere because I wanted to, not because the route had been cleared.” Jungkook’s voice was quiet. “I am sorry.” You shook your head. “Do not apologize for keeping me alive.”

“I can apologize for what alive costs.”

That hurt more than you wanted it to. You looked at him then, really looked. He was wearing a black cap pulled low, a mask covering half his face, dark clothes loose on his frame. Even hidden, he was too noticeable if someone knew what to look for. Not because he was loud. Because stillness had a shape around him. Because his attention changed the air.

“You did not make Black Loom,” you said.

“No.”

“And you did not send that envelope.”

“No.”

“And I am not going to stop.”

His eyes met yours. There was sunlight between you. A table. Two coffees. A city full of cameras and monsters. For one brief, impossible moment, it almost felt like you were two ordinary people sitting in a café because you had chosen to.

“I know,” he said, then seemed to catch himself. His eyes lowered. “You would not be you if you did.” You smiled faintly. “That was almost a compliment.”

“It was accurate.”

“Same thing from you.”

The corner of his eye creased slightly above the mask. You took that as a victory. Rain kept moving down the windows long after the house went quiet and a nightmare found you. It was not dramatic at first. That made it worse. You dreamed of court filings and coffee cups, of a young man laughing in an interview room, of his hands folded on the table. Then one finger was missing. Then all the lights in the room went red. Then his mouth opened and nothing came out except Black Loom’s note, folded over and over until the paper became skin. You woke screaming. Jungkook reached your room with a bat in one hand and murder in his eyes. He stopped only when he saw you upright in bed, sheets twisted around your legs, one hand pressed to your chest as if you were trying to hold your heart in place. The bat lowered. You stared at him, breathing in broken pieces. Then you broke too.

You moved before pride could stop you, before adulthood, professionalism, anger, dignity, fear, any of it could rebuild the wall. You stumbled out of bed and into his arms. Jungkook caught you like he had been waiting to fall with you. His body went rigid for half a second, then his free hand came around your back, the bat hitting the floor with a dull sound behind him. You buried your face against his chest and shook so hard it hurt. He did not tell you to calm down. He did not tell you it was only a nightmare. He held you with one arm around your back and the other hand cradling the back of your head, keeping you there as if the world would have to go through him to reach you.

“He tried to leave,” you said into his shirt. “I told him to leave and he tried, and they—”

“You did not cut off his finger.”

“They sent him to me.”

“They chose to hurt him.”

“Because of me.”

“Because of them.” You shook your head, but he held you tighter, not enough to trap, enough to insist.

“Listen to me,” he said. “The blame belongs to the hand holding the knife.” You closed your eyes. His heart was beating hard beneath your cheek. Not as calm as his voice. Not even close.

“I keep thinking,” you whispered, “if I had done more, if I had pushed harder, if I had protected him—”

“You cannot protect everyone before they let you.”

The words landed too gently to be cruel. That was why they hurt. You cried until the first violence of it passed, until the room came back in pieces: the lamp, the sheets, the fallen bat, Jungkook’s hand moving slowly over your back. His shirt smelled faintly of laundry, coffee, and that impossible warmth you had begun to associate with him. Summer in the dark.

“I can make tea,” he said eventually. You almost laughed. It came out broken. “Of course you can.”

“It helps.”

“You always say that like a man who needs evidence for kindness.”

He did not answer. You pulled back enough to look at him. He looked younger in the bedroom light, or maybe only more tired. His hair was messy from sleep he had clearly barely reached before you screamed. His eyes moved over your face carefully.

“Will you stay?” you asked. The question changed something. You felt it in the air before he spoke.

“Yes.”

He stayed. Not in a way that asked anything of you. Not in a way that turned comfort into debt. He picked up the bat, set it near the door, brought water instead of tea because your hands were still shaking, and sat on the edge of the bed until you lay down again. When you reached for him, he went still. Then he lay beside you on top of the blanket, fully clothed, one arm carefully beneath your head only after you moved closer first. You rested your forehead against his shoulder and closed your eyes.

“Are you going to sleep?” you murmured.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you need to.”

You were too tired to argue. The last thing you remembered before sleep took you again was his hand, light and steady over your hair, and the sense that he was watching the door even in the dark. By morning, something had shifted. Not enough to name. Enough that neither of you joked about it. The nightmare had brought back more than grief. It had brought back a name, a route, and a fragment of something the young man had once said before fear swallowed him. A place where people went when they wanted to disappear from Black Loom and often never returned. You gave it to Jungkook over coffee, still wearing his hoodie, your voice hoarse from crying. He listened without interrupting. Then he stood.

“I cannot do this part alone from here.” You looked up. “What part?”

“All of it.”

That was how he took you to Haven. The building looked like nothing. That was the first sign it was important. A low industrial structure tucked behind delivery routes and old concrete, no sign, no obvious security, no visible reason anyone would look twice. Jungkook drove through two route changes, one parking swap, and an underground entrance that opened only after he sent a sequence from a device that looked older than it should have. Inside, Haven was not the dramatic lair you might have imagined. It was fluorescent lights, concrete floors, screens, cables, coffee cups, people in hoodies, people in suits, quiet conversations, tension layered beneath routine. It looked like a workplace built by people who did not have the luxury of being legal. Then someone looked up. The man’s expression changed.

“Jungkook.”

One word. The room stilled. Chairs scraped back. Conversations died mid-sentence. People stood, one after another, as if the name itself had pulled a wire through the room. Some bowed their heads. Some lowered their eyes. A few looked genuinely afraid. You turned to Jungkook. He did not look powerful. That was the frightening part. He looked uncomfortable. His jaw tightened, eyes fixed ahead as if he wanted to get through the moment quickly. You had known he was dangerous. You had known he had reach, skill, access, enemies. But you had not understood until then that there were people who did not just work with him. They answered to him. The ghost had a kingdom after all. A man approached from the far side of the room, older than most of the others, sharp-eyed, calm, with the posture of someone who had survived long enough to stop wasting movement.

“V,” Jungkook said. V looked at you first, then at Jungkook, then back at you.

“So this is her.” Jungkook’s voice cooled. “Careful.” V’s mouth twitched as if he was not offended. “I meant no disrespect.”

“You rarely do by accident.”

That almost made someone nearby smile, though they hid it quickly. Jungkook turned to the room. He did not raise his voice much. He did not need to. “Black Loom. Full structure. All active Korean routes. Hospital channels. Donor networks. Police contacts. Judges. Shell charities. Organ movement. Missing-person overlap. Anything tied to the man whose finger they sent her.” A woman at the nearest desk looked up sharply. “Which part of Black Loom?” Jungkook’s face went very still.

“All of them.”

The room changed again. Not fear this time. Focus. Screens shifted. People sat. Hands moved over keyboards. Someone rolled a chair to another station. V turned to a wall monitor and began giving instructions with quiet authority. You stood beside Jungkook with your coat still on and realized that this was what happened when the ghost asked for war. Everyone stopped what they were doing and reached for a blade. V returned after a few minutes with a black laptop and phone. He held them out to you with both hands.

“For you,” he said. “Veni Vidi Vici hardware. Secure. Clean. Daily intelligence access will be routed through me until Jungkook says otherwise.”

You looked at Jungkook. He nodded. You took them. “Thank you.” V studied your face, then did something you did not expect. He bowed. Not like the room had bowed to Jungkook. This was different. Less fear. More respect.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

You froze. V turned slightly toward the room and raised his voice enough to carry. “For those who do not know, this is the lawyer who put Black Loom’s hyenas behind bars last week.” A few heads turned. Then someone clapped once. Someone else joined.

Within seconds, the sound spread across Haven, not loud enough to be careless, but warm enough to make your throat tighten. People who had bowed to Jungkook now looked at you with something like recognition. Not because you were with him. Because you had wounded the same monster they had been hunting from the dark. You blinked hard. Jungkook did not look at you. That was how you knew he understood. V gestured toward a side table. “The judge’s killer is tied to the same man moving the Jane Does through hospital channels. He is careful. Violent. We have partial lists of potential future victims, but some names are coded. Tomorrow, maybe, we can give you more.”

“Give me what you have,” you said. V’s eyebrow lifted slightly. You met his gaze. “Please.” He smiled, just barely. “I see why he likes you.” Jungkook went colder beside you. “V.”

“I said likes. Not loves. Relax.”

The room became very interested in pretending not to hear. You looked down at the laptop because your face had betrayed you enough for one day. Jungkook said nothing. But the drive back to his house was quieter than usual.

Outside, Seoul kept glowing as if nothing had changed; you worked at his kitchen table with Veni Vidi Vici files open on the new laptop, reading through names, routes, medical notes, missing-person overlaps, and scraps of code. Jungkook stood behind your chair once to point out a connection between a shell donor and a hospital board member. He was close enough that you felt the warmth of him along your back, close enough that his hand braced on the table beside yours. Neither of you moved for a second. Then he stepped away. You kept reading. That became the rhythm: evidence, restraint, coffee, danger, silence. The next day, Jungkook cleared a controlled visit to your penthouse so you could collect more clothes and personal documents. He did not like it. You knew that because he checked the building feeds nine times before breakfast and spoke even less than usual.

“The building looks clear,” he said finally. “Clear enough for a controlled visit. Not long.”

“Will you come with me?” He looked at you as if the question had offended him. You smiled faintly. “I wanted to hear you say it.”

“I am coming with you.”

The receptionist nearly cried when she saw you. She tried not to show it, which made it worse. She gave you the accumulated mail with trembling hands and told you she was glad you were all right. You thanked her. Upstairs, your penthouse looked untouched. You hated it for that.

Jungkook moved through the rooms with quiet efficiency, checking corners, vents, feeds, door sensors. You packed clothes with fast hands: blazers, silk blouses, trousers, underthings, shoes, the burgundy dress you had not worn in months, a jewellery pouch, a framed photograph you did not let yourself look at for too long. Then you opened the mail. Most of it was useless. Bills. Invitations. Legal notices. Thick envelopes from institutions trying to look more important than they were. One envelope sat near the bottom. Heavy paper. No return address. Red wax seal. You did not touch it at first. Jungkook appeared beside you as if the change in your breathing had called him. His eyes went to the seal.

“Black Loom,” he said. You looked up. “You are sure?”

“Yes.”

This time, he did not tell you not to open it. You broke the wax. Inside was an invitation. Elegant. Expensive. Polite enough to make your skin crawl. A formal celebration in a grand ballroom, hosted through a charity board tied to one of the hospital donors you had flagged two days earlier. No threats. No blood. No severed finger. Just your name printed beautifully on thick card, as if they were inviting you to dinner rather than pulling you toward the mouth of something. You read it twice. Then you laughed once, quietly, without humour.

“They want me to know they are not hiding.” Jungkook’s jaw tightened.

“They want to see who is protecting you,” he said. “They want to test how much you know. They want you inside their room so they can remind you how many powerful people stand between them and consequence.”

You looked at the red wax broken on the table. For a moment, you saw the courtroom. Namjoon’s smile. The judge’s empty chair. The young victim’s mother crying into both hands. The severed finger in a photograph you would never unsee. The café sunlight on your face. Haven applauding because the law had managed, for once, to wound something monstrous.

“I want to go,” you said.

“No.”

The word came out so fast it almost startled both of you. You turned. Jungkook stood very still, but the air around him had sharpened. “No,” he said again, quieter. You held the invitation between two fingers. “You do not get to decide before I explain.”

“I know why you want to go.”

“Then let me say it.”

His mouth closed. You looked down at the invitation, then back at him. “I want to show them I am not hiding. I am not the one caught in a web of crimes and deaths.” Jungkook’s eyes moved over your face as if he was searching for fear and finding something worse. Conviction.

“They will not attack you there,” he said. “Not physically. It is too public. Too many eyes. That is not what worries me.”

“I know.”

“They will make it beautiful. They will make it polite. They will put monsters under chandeliers and dare you to call them what they are.”

“I know.”

“They will watch you breathe.”

You stepped closer. “Then let them.” His expression changed, not much, but enough. You had seen him in the dark of your bathroom with a mask on. You had seen him in his kitchen making coffee like care was a problem to be solved. You had seen a room full of dangerous people bow to him. But this was different. This was Jungkook faced with the one thing he could not firewall: your will. He could build walls around your body. He could not make you smaller without becoming another prison. He looked away first.

“If you go,” he said, “I go.” Your heart did something foolish.

“Jungkook—”

“If you go, I go.”

“They may know your face.”

“They may.”

“They may be looking for you.”

“Then they can look.”

“That is not a plan.”

“No,” he said. “It is a condition.” You stared at him, anger and tenderness and fear knotting together until you could not separate one from the other.

“You are very difficult.”

“Yes.”

“I have noticed.”

“I assumed.” The absurdity of it almost made you laugh. Almost. You placed the invitation back on the table. The broken red wax looked like blood against the polished surface.

“Fine,” you said. “We go together.” Jungkook looked at the invitation, then at you.

“Together,” he agreed.

Hours later, the city had gone quiet, but Jungkook had not, the red invitation sat between you like a live thing. You worked for hours trying to understand why Black Loom had sent it now. Veni Vidi Vici found the charity links, the hospital donor overlap, the family names, the shell board, but nothing that explained the invitation’s exact timing. Jungkook checked the penthouse cameras repeatedly, then the building feeds, then the route logs, then Haven’s incoming intelligence. You read until the words blurred. By midnight, your shoulders ached. Jungkook stood near the workroom door, one hand resting on the frame. The blue-white light from inside cut around him, turning him into silhouette.

“If you have another nightmare,” he said, “wake me.” You looked up from the sofa. “What if you are in there?”

“Then knock.” You glanced past him into the room you had still never entered.

“You said it was sensitive.”

“It is.”

“But I can knock?” His gaze softened in a way he would probably deny. “Yes.” Something in your chest turned over.

“All right,” you said.

He disappeared into the workroom, leaving the door slightly ajar. Not open. Not closed. It felt like a beginning. You sat alone in the living room for a while after that, staring at the red-wax invitation on the table and the thin line of light cutting across the floor from Jungkook’s private room. Black Loom had invited you into its world. Jungkook had opened a door into his. You did not know yet which one would ruin you first.

The gala approached like a threat learning how to breathe. The red-wax invitation had stopped looking like paper and started looking like a pulse. It sat on Jungkook’s kitchen table for two days while the two of you tried to tear meaning out of it. Veni Vidi Vici traced the charity board. Jungkook mapped the hospital donor overlap. You built a list of every person invited who had ever appeared near a Black Loom case, shell clinic, missing-person file, or sealed court document. The list grew too quickly. Judges’ widows. Hospital board members. Private security donors. Old family names attached to new money and older sins. Every connection led to another connection until the room itself seemed threaded with invisible red lines. By the afternoon of the event, Jungkook had stopped pretending he liked any of it.

He did not tell you not to go again. He had already tried once, and you had already answered him. Instead, he became quiet in the particular way that meant he was turning fear into procedure. He checked the car route, then the backup route, then the walking approach from the valet entrance to the ballroom. He checked the hotel’s public feeds, private parking angles, traffic cameras, elevator access points, emergency exits, staff entrances, and five different ways to leave without looking like you were running. You stood in the bedroom and put on the burgundy dress. It felt like a decision.

The satin slipped over your skin in a dark wine sheen, soft at the neckline, narrow over the waist, falling cleanly along your body without armour or apology. You kept your jewellery minimal: a delicate necklace, small earrings, nothing that could be grabbed easily or missed if lost. Your hair stayed loose. Your lipstick matched the dress closely enough to make the red-wax seal feel less like a threat and more like a challenge returned. Black Loom had invited you in red. So you wore it back. When you stepped into the living room, Jungkook was already there. You stopped. For a second, the whole house seemed to pause with you.

You had seen him in black hoodies, oversized shirts, damp hair after rain, half-lit by screens, masked in your penthouse bathroom with danger still on his hands. You had seen him tired. Controlled. Unreadable. You had seen a room full of people stand because his name had entered before his body fully had. You had never seen him like this. The suit was dark charcoal, almost black, cut with broad, structured shoulders and a layered waistcoat that made him look taller, sharper, more impossible. The shirt beneath had a dark glossy finish at the collar, something almost leather-like, held with a precise tie detail and a simple bar. A fine chain disappeared beneath the waistcoat. His gloves were black. Not decorative. Not theatrical. Practical enough to remind you that elegance did not soften him; it only gave the danger a cleaner line. He looked like old money had learned how to kill a man without raising its voice. Jungkook looked up from fastening one glove. Then he stopped too. His eyes moved over you once. Only once. But it was enough to make the room feel warmer.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

You had been complimented by men who wanted something from you. Men in courtrooms. Men at dinners. Men who mistook polish for permission and intelligence for invitation. Jungkook did not say it like that. He said it like a fact he had failed to prepare himself for. You looked down briefly, not because you were shy, but because something in his voice had touched a place you had not known was waiting.

“You look…” You swallowed. “Different.”

“That sounds diplomatic.”

“It is not.” You looked at him again. “I have never seen you in a suit.”

“You have seen me in worse circumstances.”

“That is not what I meant.” His mouth almost softened. Almost. Then his gaze moved downward and paused at your ankle.

“Your strap is loose.” You glanced down. One thin heel strap had slipped free, dangling against your skin.

“I must have missed it.”

Jungkook crossed the room. For a moment, you thought he would point, or offer you the sofa, or tell you to fix it before you tripped. Instead, he stopped in front of you and said, quietly, “Let me fix that for you.” Your breath caught before you could stop it. He lowered himself to one knee. The movement should not have changed the air. It was practical. Simple. A heel strap, nothing more. But you remembered Haven. The scraping chairs. The bowed heads. The way everyone had gone still because Jungkook had entered the room. The underground bowed to him. And now he knelt for you.

He took your ankle gently, gloved fingers careful around your skin, and set your foot against his knee as if you were something precious and armed at once. He fastened the strap with slow precision, not because he needed the time, but because he was Jungkook and care was never careless in his hands. You looked down at the top of his dark head, the clean line of his suit, the chain near his waistcoat, the gloved hand at your ankle. Something shifted inside you.

Until then, you had known he was beautiful. You had known it the morning after the photo, drunk memory burning at the edges of your embarrassment. You had known it in passing, as an observation you could put away because danger gave you better things to think about. But this was the first time your body understood what your mind had been refusing. Jungkook was not only the ghost who protected you. He was a man kneeling at your feet with enough power behind him to make rooms go silent. And he had chosen gentleness. He secured the strap and looked up. The question in his eyes was not verbal. It was worse. It was careful. You wanted to say something clever. Something that would move the moment aside before it became too large to hold. Nothing came. Jungkook rose.

“You may create problems tonight,” he said, voice controlled again. You blinked. “Because of the dress?”

“Because Black Loom has probably never seen you like this.” Jungkook drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting near the gear shift, every motion so controlled it almost looked effortless. You watched the city lights slide over the dark leather of his gloves and thought of red wax breaking beneath your fingers. The hotel rose ahead in glass, gold light, and polished stone, too beautiful to admit what kind of people it had been built to welcome. Jungkook pulled up at the entrance without hesitation. The valet stepped forward with a professional smile, but it faltered slightly when he looked properly at Jungkook. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Enough for you to see. Jungkook handed over the keys as if the reaction meant nothing. Maybe it did. Maybe he noticed everything and simply chose not to care. Then his hand came to rest low on your back, steady enough to guide, light enough to ask, and you walked inside together. The warmth of the hotel closed around you at once. Marble floors caught the reflection of your dress. White flowers stood in tall arrangements along the entrance hall, too perfect to feel alive. Staff smiled with the careful blankness of people trained never to react, while the sound of rain and traffic faded behind glass and money. With every step, the ordinary city disappeared a little more. Jungkook’s hand stayed where it was. Not possessive. Not performative. A point of contact. A quiet reminder that if the room tried to swallow you, he was already there. Music reached you before the ballroom did, low and elegant, spilling through the open doors like a warning dressed as a welcome. Then you stepped inside. The ballroom was built to make people forget that power had a smell. It was all chandeliers, white flowers, polished floors, champagne, black suits, silk dresses, and the soft hum of money speaking to itself. People turned as you entered, not all at once, but in waves. A glance here. A pause there. A whisper that barely moved the lips. Older women with diamonds at their throats. Men with politician smiles. Hospital donors. Charity patrons. People whose names appeared on buildings, plaques, and closed reports. You leaned slightly toward Jungkook without looking away from the room.

“Do they know?” His hand remained steady at your back. “No. They are just looking.”

“They are looking a lot.”

“You are younger than most of them, unfamiliar, and very hard to ignore.”

“Was that a compliment?”

“It was the truth.”

You almost smiled. Then a man stepped into your path. He was closer to your age than most of the room, handsome in the polished way of someone who had never been denied anything long enough to learn humility. His suit was immaculate. His smile was easy. His eyes were wrong.

“Good evening,” he said. “Thank you for accepting my invitation. I hope you have a pleasant night.” The room seemed to tilt by one degree. Your invitation. Jungkook’s hand did not move, but the air around him changed. You looked at the man. “And you are?”

“Seokjin,” he said, smile deepening. “But you can call me Jin.”

Of course. A name that sounded harmless. A name that belonged in emails and charity boards and polite introductions under chandeliers. Jin. Jin. A man who could order blood through other people’s hands and still greet you as if you were old friends.

“You sent the invitation,” you said.

“I did.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see the woman who made so many powerful men nervous.” You felt Jungkook beside you, silent and lethal. Jin’s gaze moved to him. “And your companion?”

“With her,” Jungkook said. Nothing else. No name. No lie. No explanation. Jin’s smile sharpened as if the answer pleased him.

“How devoted.”

“How observant,” you replied. Jin laughed softly. “I can see why they dislike you.”

“They?” He lifted a glass from a passing tray but did not drink from it. “People who prefer their truths buried.” You looked around the ballroom. “You invited me into a room full of them.”

“I invited you into a room full of people who built this city.”

“No,” you said. “They purchased pieces of it.”

Jin’s eyes brightened. For a moment, you understood why Jungkook had been worried. Not because Jin was loud, or obviously cruel, or reckless. Because he enjoyed this. The conversation. The theatre. The careful placement of every word where it could cut without leaving blood.

“Come,” Jin said. “Let me show you what you came here to see.”

Jungkook’s hand pressed once at your back. A question. You answered by moving forward. Jin did not introduce you to people so much as reveal them. He gestured toward an older woman in pearls speaking to a hospital director and mentioned, lightly, that grief had made her generous after her husband’s sudden death. He pointed out a donor whose name appeared on three clinics and two sealed investigations. A police commissioner’s brother-in-law. A charity-board member who funded shelters while privately deciding which missing girls deserved to stay missing. A judge’s widow who held court socially in the corner, smiling beneath a chandelier as if justice had not died in her house long before her husband did.

“Black Loom is not hiding in basements,” Jin said, voice low enough that only you and Jungkook could hear. “You should know that by now.” You looked at the champagne flutes, the diamonds, the careful laughter.

“They are standing under chandeliers.”

“Some of them. Some only benefit from the light.”

The room pressed against your skin. You had seen corruption in documents. You had seen it in altered files, missing reports, unexplained transfers, evidence that arrived too clean or too damaged. You had built legal arguments against it. You had imagined greed in numbers and names and hidden accounts. Seeing it breathe was different. They were not monsters in the way children imagined monsters. They had soft hands. Tailored cuffs. Polite voices. They asked about grandchildren and foundation galas and the weather. They had drivers waiting outside and names on hospital wings. They smiled as if the dead were abstractions, as if missing women were unfortunate headlines, as if organs moved through the world on their own. You could smell perfume, champagne, expensive soap, money. Underneath it, rot. Your stomach turned. Jin watched you noticing.

“You put a few men behind bars,” he said. “Impressive men, to be fair. Useful men. But did you think that would stop anything? You cut one thread.” You turned your head toward him slowly. He smiled.

“The loom kept weaving.”

For a moment, you saw the severed finger. The young man in the interview room. The victim’s mother crying into both hands. The judge dead before his conscience could cost anyone more money. The Jane Does in hospital files with organs missing and names erased until they became cases instead of girls. You wanted to scream. Instead, you smiled.

“Threads can be pulled.” Jin’s expression stilled. Just for a second. Jungkook saw it. You knew he did because his hand at your back became warmer through the silk. Then Jin laughed, delighted. “I really do see it.”

“See what?”

“Why he came out of the dark for you.” The words were soft. They landed like a blade. Jungkook did not move. You forced yourself not to look at him. Jin reached into his jacket and removed a small sealed card. Cream paper. Red wax. Again.

“For your friends,” he said. You did not take it. Jungkook did. Jin’s eyes shifted to his gloved hand with interest too careful to be casual.

“There is a name inside,” Jin said. “Or part of one. A gift. Since you have been chasing lists.”

“Why give it to us?” you asked.

“Because I want to see what you do with it.”

“You want us to follow.”

“I want many things.” Jungkook slipped the card inside his jacket. “We are done.” Jin looked at him for a long moment. Then he smiled as if Jungkook had confirmed something.

“Of course.”

You turned away before your face could betray how badly the room had started to affect you. You managed another fifteen minutes. Maybe less. Time became strange after Jin left you near a cluster of donors and officials, his cruelty delivered with such elegance that no one around you had realized a threat had occurred. You stood with Jungkook beside you, your posture perfect, your glass untouched, your face calm enough to belong there. Inside, your body was rejecting the room.

Your throat tightened. Heat moved under your skin. The chandelier light fractured at the edges. Every laugh felt like a hand over a mouth. Every diamond flashed like a surgical instrument. You could almost hear the dead asking how people could sip champagne in the same world that had erased them. Jungkook did not ask in front of anyone. He only shifted closer. You turned your face toward him slightly, as if commenting on the music.

“I am about to collapse,” you said softly. “Get me out of here. Please.” His response was immediate. No panic. No visible alarm. He simply adjusted his posture, leaned in as if you had said something amusing, then placed a hand more firmly at your back.

“Of course,” he said, voice smooth enough for anyone listening. “We have another commitment.”

You did not know who he told. You did not hear the excuse. You focused on walking. One step. Then another. Chin level. Shoulders back. Do not let them see. Do not let Jin see. Do not give Black Loom the satisfaction of knowing that a room full of well-dressed murderers had made your knees weak. Jungkook guided you through the corridor with his body angled subtly between you and anyone approaching. His hand remained at your back, grounding, directing, protecting without making you look fragile. Outside, the night air hit your face like mercy.

The valet brought the car. Jungkook opened the door and helped you inside before anyone could see your hands shaking. He took the driver’s seat, pulled away smoothly, and did not speak until the hotel had disappeared behind you. Only then did his hand leave the wheel and settle gently on your shoulder. That was all it took. You folded. Silently at first. Tears slipping down your cheeks, breath shaking, your body curling smaller in the seat as if all the posture you had held inside that room had been borrowed from a version of yourself you could not sustain any longer. Jungkook said your name once. You shook your head.

“All those victims,” you whispered. “All those people I was trying to protect, trying to give their families closure, trying to bring home so they could be buried…” Your voice broke, and you hated that it did, hated that they could still reach you even after you left the room. “And the rich were sipping champagne as if it were another Tuesday.”

Jungkook stared at the road. His face did not change. That was how you knew something terrible had happened inside him. Not to you. For you. In the quiet of that expensive car, beneath the passing gold light of Seoul at night, Jungkook looked at your tears and made a decision with no witness but the dark. He had promised to help you before. He had protected you, guided you, hidden you, built walls around your life with code and caution. But this was different. This was not protection as a system. This was devotion sharpened into consequence. The people in that room had made you feel small because their pride had been wounded. Jungkook would remember that.

He would remember every face the button camera on his jacket had captured. Every handshake. Every whisper. Every donor who leaned too close to a judge’s widow. Every laugh that rose beneath the chandeliers while you stood there carrying the dead in your throat. Black Loom had aimed its blade at his pride. At you. And Jungkook, silent behind the dark, began to answer. He did not tell you that in the car.

He did not tell you when he drove through the city with one hand on the wheel and the other still resting lightly on your shoulder as if touch alone could keep you from disappearing into the grief of that ballroom. He did not tell you when he parked behind his house, turned off the engine, and sat for one quiet second before opening his door, because even then he was calculating faces, exits, names, vulnerabilities, consequences. Jungkook did not rage loudly. He became precise. You were still trembling when he came around to your side of the car. The night air had turned cold enough to bite through the satin of your dress, and your legs felt unsteady when you stepped out. Jungkook saw it before you said anything. He removed his suit jacket and placed it over your shoulders, the dark fabric warm from his body, heavy enough to feel like a temporary wall between you and the rest of the world.

“Come inside,” he said.

You let him guide you. The house looked impossibly gentle after the ballroom. Warm hallway light, old wood floors, shoes near the door, the soft hum of systems hidden beneath domestic quiet. You stood just inside the entryway in burgundy satin and his black jacket, feeling like you had carried the dead home with you and had nowhere to put them down. Jungkook locked the door, checked the security panel, checked something on his phone, then turned back to you.

“Sit.”

You should have argued. Any other night, you might have. But his voice was not commanding for the sake of being obeyed. It was low, soothing, careful. The kind of voice he used when he had already assessed that your body had done all it could do for one evening. You sat on the sofa. Jungkook lowered himself in front of you and took your ankle in one hand. You looked down at him.

For a second, the earlier moment returned with a different ache. Before the gala, him kneeling had felt intimate in a way you had not been ready to name. Now, when he unfastened one heel and then the other, it felt like care stripped down to its oldest language. No performance. No witness. No ballroom. Only his gloved hands working carefully over the buckles while your fingers curled into the edge of his jacket. The first heel came off. Then the second. Your feet touched the floor, and you exhaled as if the shoes had been holding you upright by force. Jungkook set them aside. “Lay down for a bit.”

“I am not going to fall apart.”

“You already did,” he said, not unkindly. “You did it quietly. There is a difference.”

Your throat tightened. He helped you lie back against the sofa cushions and pulled the throw from the armrest over your legs. You wanted to tell him he did not have to do all of this. You wanted to say you were fine, or nearly fine, or would be fine soon. Instead, you turned your face toward the back of the sofa and closed your eyes because you were too tired to keep pretending strength was the same as not needing anyone.

“I will make tea,” he said.

Of course he would. You heard him move into the kitchen. A cupboard opened. Water ran. The kettle clicked. Small sounds. Domestic sounds. They should not have belonged to a man who could make a room full of underground operators stand by entering it. They should not have belonged to the same man who had recorded the faces of Black Loom with a hidden camera disguised as a button on his jacket and already sent them to Veni Vidi Vici before the valet had even brought the car around. But that was Jungkook. He did not divide care from violence. He simply chose who deserved which hand. By the time he returned with tea, you had fallen asleep.

Your body had been on alert for hours, spine locked, face controlled, grief swallowed beneath lipstick and posture. The second you were back inside his house, wrapped in his jacket, your body had decided that safety was more important than dignity and shut itself down. Jungkook stood beside the sofa with the mug in his hand and stared at you. You looked smaller in sleep. Human in a way the ballroom had not allowed you to be. One hand tucked beneath your cheek, lashes damp, mouth soft with exhaustion, the burgundy dress still catching low light beneath the black fall of his jacket. His phone buzzed once. V. Faces processing. First external disruptions started. Donor accounts flagged. Two shell routes freezing before morning. Jungkook read it.

Then he looked back at you. Black Loom had thought it was inviting a lamb into a room full of wolves. They had been wrong about you. They had been wrong about him too. Jungkook set the tea down, slid one arm beneath your knees and the other behind your back, and lifted you carefully from the sofa. You stirred once against his chest but did not wake. The sight of it did something ruinous to him, something he filed away with all the other things he could not afford to feel fully while enemies still had names and money and breath.

He carried you to the bedroom and laid you down with the same care he had used on your heel strap. He removed the jacket from your shoulders, covered you properly, and stood beside the bed for a long moment. Then he bent and kissed your forehead. Barely a touch. Enough to make a vow of his mouth without waking you to hear it. His phone buzzed again. Another confirmation from V. Jungkook looked toward the hall, toward the workroom, toward the machines waiting with their maps and feeds and sharp little doors into other people’s lives. Then he looked at you one last time.

“Nothing is going to hurt you,” he whispered.

It was not a promise the world could keep. So he would make it afraid not to. Over the next few days, Black Loom began to bleed. Not publicly at first. Public collapse came later, in courtrooms and news reports and whispered panic inside polished offices. This was quieter. Sharper. A donor account frozen for compliance review. A private transport route exposed to the wrong customs contact. A hospital board member unable to access three offshore shells before dawn. A security contractor’s hidden ledger delivered anonymously to two people who hated him enough to use it. A banker’s encrypted archive unlocked just far enough for fear to spread inside his own house. Jungkook did not sleep much.

You noticed because you had become too familiar with the shape of his exhaustion. The dark beneath his eyes. The way he stood with one shoulder braced against the workroom door when he thought you were focused on your own files. The half-full coffee cups abandoned throughout the house. The hoodie he wore for two days because he had forgotten clothes existed outside function. You worked too. Not because he asked. Because Black Loom had shown you its face under chandeliers, and now every document felt like a thread you could pull until something screamed. Veni Vidi Vici sent names, financial routes, coded references, partial lists. You built legal maps from illegal intelligence. You sorted what could someday survive court and what existed only to guide Jungkook’s dark hand toward the next weak point.

The card Jin had given you contained part of a name. Not enough. Of course not enough. Enough to prove he knew what you were chasing. Enough to direct you toward the next corridor of the maze. Enough to make Jungkook’s jaw tighten every time he looked at it because Jin had not made a mistake. He had extended an invitation inside the invitation. Follow me. On the fourth day after the gala, Jungkook stood at the living-room threshold and said, “Come with me.” You looked up from the table, surrounded by files, sticky notes, and a laptop screen full of names. “Where?”

“My workroom.”

The words stilled you more than they should have. You had passed that door a hundred times by then. You had seen light beneath it, heard the hum, watched Jungkook disappear inside as if part of him belonged more to that room than to the rest of the house. He had told you that you could knock if you needed him, but he had never invited you in. You closed your laptop slowly.

“Are you sure?”

“No,” he said. “Come anyway.”

That was honest enough to make you stand. The workroom was not what you expected and exactly what you expected at once. It was larger than the closed door had suggested, stretching into a converted back room reinforced with more equipment than any private citizen should have been able to obtain. Screens lined the main wall. Some showed camera grids. Some displayed maps, routes, financial webs, court structures, hospital networks, faces from the ballroom captured in sharp stills from the hidden button camera. There were handwritten notes beside digital ones, evidence boards beside code, red lines connecting names, locations, institutions, bodies. Your life was there.

Your penthouse. Your office. The courthouse. The hotel ballroom. Haven. The café where you had said you missed the sun. The judge. The victim and her mother, their location blocked even on his own board. Black Loom’s suspected routes. Missing-person photographs arranged with more care than the official files had ever given them. You stood in the doorway and forgot how to move. Jungkook remained a few steps behind you, giving you room to look and room to leave. You understood that too. This was not only a workroom. It was his war room. His mind made visible. The dark he had promised to give you, with all its secrets exposed.

On one screen, the ballroom faces shifted in a grid. Seokjin appeared in the centre, smiling politely beneath chandelier light. Around him: donors, officials, widows, directors, patrons, men who had never touched a knife because their money had done the cutting for them. On another, a list of disruptions updated in quiet green text. Jungkook had been dismantling pieces of them while making you coffee. You turned slowly. He stood near the door in black clothes, hair messy from running his hand through it too many times, eyes shadowed with sleeplessness. The glow from the screens cut across one side of his face, turning him half ghost, half man.

“You should know what I am doing,” he said. “Before you decide you can live with it.”

There it was again. An exit. Offered gently. Offered before you asked. Offered because somewhere inside him, Jungkook still believed people stayed only until they understood him properly. You looked back at the screens. There was horror here. Illegality. Trespass. Invasion. A hundred things you would have condemned in another context, in another room, before the law had shown you how easily it could be bought, delayed, manipulated, made useless by men who drank champagne while victims disappeared. Then you looked at the photograph of the young man whose finger had been sent to you. You looked at the judge’s name. The hospital routes. The missing women. The ballroom faces. Finally, you looked at Jungkook.

“You thought this would make me leave?”

His face gave nothing away. That answered enough. You crossed the room toward him. Jungkook did not move. Not when you stopped close enough to see how tired he truly was. Not when you lifted a hand and brushed a lock of hair away from his forehead. Not when your fingers lingered near his temple, soft against the place where his exhaustion lived.

“I have seen monsters in courtrooms,” you said. “I have seen men smile while lying about girls they helped destroy. I have seen evidence vanish because someone rich made a call. I have seen the law kneel for people who should have been begging forgiveness from graves.” Jungkook’s eyes searched yours.

“You are not the thing that scares me in this room,” you said.

Something in Jungkook broke quietly. Not enough for the room. Enough for you. You kissed him first, and it was not graceful. It was not planned. It was months of warnings, routes, coffee, fear, proof, grief, sunlight, nightmares, and his hand steady at your back in a ballroom full of murderers. It was the way he had knelt for your heel. The way he had carried you to bed. The way he had given you proof before trust and exits before promises. It was the way he had stood behind you in the dark long before he ever touched you in the light. Jungkook went still for half a breath. Then his hand came to your waist. Not pulling. Holding. As if he needed to make sure you were real before he allowed himself to want. The second kiss was his, and it undid you. It began measured, because Jungkook was measured in everything, because even desire had to pass through the discipline of a man who had survived by never taking what was not freely given. His mouth moved against yours with a control sharp enough to make your knees weak. His hand only tightened at your waist when you stepped closer. His other hand lifted to your jaw, bare thumb brushing the line of your cheek with a gentleness that almost hurt.

Then you made a sound into his mouth. Soft. Ruined. His discipline split down the middle.

Jungkook moved you back against the edge of the desk, not enough to frighten, but enough to remind you that beneath all that patience was strength he had been keeping on a leash. The desk met the backs of your thighs. His body followed. Warm, solid, impossibly close. His hand braced beside your hip. The other slid into your hair, fingers threading through it, tilting your face up so he could kiss you deeper.

The kiss changed. It became hunger forced through discipline. Want held back only because your choice still mattered more to him than his own need. You forgot the screens. The maps. The faces of monsters watching from frozen frames. You forgot the law, the files, the house, the war waiting outside the room. Everything narrowed to the edge of the desk beneath you, his body between your legs, his hand in your hair, his mouth taking yours like he had been starving in silence and had only now found something he was allowed to taste.

“Do you know what you do to me?” he murmured against your mouth, voice low, almost rough. “Do you know what you do to my discipline?”

You reached for him. Jungkook made a low sound when your hands closed in the front of his hoodie. His body pressed closer, one knee nudging between yours, not forcing, only asking with the shape of him. You opened for him before he had to ask aloud, and the moment he felt it, his grip at your waist tightened.

His mouth left yours only to find your jaw, then the side of your throat. You tipped your head back before pride could reach you. He noticed. Of course he noticed. Jungkook noticed everything. His lips touched the place beneath your ear, slow enough to make your breath catch, then warmer, open-mouthed, tasting the pulse he had spent months trying to keep beating.

“I have counted every room in this house where I wanted to touch you,” he said, so quietly it felt more dangerous than a confession. “Do you understand that? I knew the exits. I knew the cameras. I knew every route out. And all I could think about was how close you were.”

His hand slid from your waist to the curve of your thigh, fingers flexing once through the fabric of your dress before stopping. He pulled back. Not far. Only enough to look at you. His breathing had changed. So had yours. His forehead almost touched yours, but he did not kiss you again. Not yet.

“Little lamb,” he said, voice low enough to make your whole body tighten, “please do not kiss me if you are not going to stay.”

Your lips parted. “This is more than a kiss to me,” he said. “This is a vow.”

The room went silent around you except for the hum of machines. You understood, then, that Jungkook was not asking you for a night. He was not asking for comfort, distraction, gratitude, adrenaline, or need born from fear. He was showing you the threshold before you crossed it because his heart, hidden thing that it was, had already turned sacred at the sight of you.

You lifted both hands to his face. You kissed him again. No hesitation. No clever answer. No making the choice smaller so it could hurt less. You kissed him like staying had already happened. Jungkook made a quiet sound against your mouth, almost wounded.

Then his hands moved. One beneath your thigh. One at your back. He lifted you from the desk as if discipline had only been waiting for permission to become strength. Your legs wrapped around his waist. The sound he made then was different. Lower. Less controlled. “Tell me,” he said against your lips. “Tell me you are here because you want me. Not because you are afraid. Not because you are grateful. Me.” “I want you.” His eyes darkened. “That is the only answer that lets me keep touching you.” He carried you out of the workroom, and the hallway disappeared in pieces: warm lamplight, the shadow of his shoulder, your fingers in his hair, the hard line of his body beneath your thighs. Your back touched the wall just outside the workroom. The impact was gentle. The intent was not. Jungkook held you there, pinned between the wall and the heat of him, not because you could not move, but because he needed to feel that you were choosing not to. His hips pressed forward once, controlled and ruinous, and the friction pulled a broken breath from you before you could swallow it. He stopped immediately. “Again?” he asked, voice wrecked. “Yes.” His forehead pressed to yours. “Use words for me. I do not guess with your body.” Your hands tightened in his hair. “Again, Jungkook.” He kissed you like the sound of his name in your mouth had cut the last wire holding him still. At the bedroom door, he set you down just enough to turn the handle, his body still close, his breath still touching your mouth. You tried to kiss him again, impatient now, but he caught your chin between his fingers and made you look at him. “Last chance,” he said, voice rough. “If this is fear, we stop. If this is gratitude, we stop. If this is because you saw what I did to Black Loom, we stop.” You reached for him. “I see you. That is why I am still here.”

He closed his eyes for half a second. When he opened them again, the last of his control did not disappear. It changed shape. He took you into the bedroom and set you on the edge of the bed, not dropping you, not letting you fall, placing you there with the same terrible care he gave to everything that mattered.

Black clothes. Dark hair. Mouth marked by yours. Eyes fixed on you as if the sight required discipline. He removed his gloves slowly. One finger at a time. The leather slid free with a quiet pull, then another, then another. He set both gloves on the bedside table with a precision that made your body ache. You had seen those hands on keyboards, weapons, steering wheels, your ankle, your files, the edge of your fear. Bare now, they looked almost too human. That made them worse.

He touched your face first. Then your throat. Then the strap of your dress. Each place he touched, he watched you. Not like he doubted you. Like he was learning the exact language of your consent in every breath, every tilt of your chin, every time you moved closer instead of away. “Tell me if you want me to stop,” he said. “I will.” You held his gaze. “Promise me.” “I promise.” His fingers slid beneath the strap and eased it down your shoulder. The dress shifted with it, satin slipping against your skin. His eyes followed the movement, and for the first time, you saw his control falter before he could hide it. His thumb brushed the newly exposed skin near your collarbone. Once. Twice. Then his mouth followed. He kissed your shoulder first. Slow. Warm. Then the hollow beneath your collarbone. Then the place where your pulse betrayed you. He undressed you as if every inch revealed had been trusted into his hands. Not taken. Trusted. The other strap fell. His palms settled at your waist, waiting until you lifted your hips for him. Only then did he draw the dress down, letting the satin slide over your ribs, your waist, your hips, his fingers following the path as though your body was a map he had spent months refusing to read and could no longer deny himself. When the dress slipped away, he dropped to one knee between your legs. Your heart stuttered. Haven had bowed to him. Jungkook knelt for you. Again. Only this time, there was no heel strap. No polite excuse for the position. His hands rested on your thighs, warm and bare, thumbs moving slowly over the inner seam of your legs.

He looked up at you from there, and the hunger in his face was so open that your first instinct was to reach for the blanket. He caught your hand before you could hide. “No,” he said softly. His thumb moved over your knuckles. “Let me look at you.” Your face warmed. “You are staring.” “Yes.” “That was not a complaint.” “I would not have stopped staring.”

His mouth touched the inside of your knee. Your fingers twisted in the sheets. He kissed higher. His hands held your thighs open with infuriating gentleness, thumbs stroking slow lines into your skin, his mouth trailing warmth along places no one had ever made feel sacred and obscene at the same time. You looked down at him and found him already watching you. That ruined you more than anything.

“I want to hear what you sound like when you stop holding back,” he murmured against your thigh.

You almost hated him for moving away. Then your hands found the hem of his hoodie. He stilled. You pulled once. He obeyed. The hoodie came off over his head, and the sight of him made your breath catch. Lean strength. Old scars. Inked shadows disappearing along his ribs and shoulder. The body of a man who had survived more than he said and trained himself to look untouchable because being touched had once meant being known.

You touched him because you could. Because he had spent months as a voice, a warning, a message, a ghost with hands you imagined before you ever felt them. Your fingertips traced the line of one tattoo near his chest. His eyes closed. The sound he made was quiet enough to be a secret. You leaned forward and kissed the mark. Then another scar. Then another. His stomach tightened beneath your mouth. His fingers slid into your hair, not pushing. Holding. For one ruinous second, you understood that tenderness did not make him calmer. It made him worse.

He guided your face back to his and kissed you deeper now, messier, no longer pretending at distance. He pushed you back onto the bed and followed you down, one knee between yours, body covering yours in degrees: first his hands, then his mouth, then his weight. When his chest pressed to yours, you gasped into his mouth. He heard it. Felt it. Answered it by rolling his hips once against you. Your back arched. Jungkook stopped moving again.

“Do not keep stopping,” you breathed. His jaw tightened. “I am trying.” “To stop?” “To stay worthy of what you are giving me.”

Your throat tightened. You pulled him down and kissed him harder. That was the end of the soft beginning. Jungkook’s mouth moved down your throat again, then lower, over your chest, over your ribs, over the places your breath broke beneath him. He did not let the moment turn vague or distant or pretty enough to hide behind. He made you feel all of it. His hands sliding under your back to lift you closer. His mouth closing over sensitive skin until your fingers dug into his shoulders. The slow drag of his body against yours. The heat of him between your legs. The way he kept watching you, like your pleasure had become the only language he still trusted.

Then his hand moved to the bedside drawer. He paused before opening it. Your eyes followed. When he withdrew the coil of red rope, both of you went still. The rope lay across his palm, vivid and dark in the low light. Not a threat. Not a surprise forced into the room. An offering.

“I bought it after the gala,” he said. “I thought about throwing it away.” “Why did you keep it?” His eyes lifted to yours. “Because I could not stop thinking about the red wax. Your dress. Pomegranate.” His hand closed loosely around the coil. “And because there is a story about a red thread that ties destined people together. Invisible. Unbreakable. It felt…” He looked away for a second, jaw tense. “Dangerous to want that.” Your heart hurt. “Jungkook.” “I will not use it unless you want it.” You sat up slowly, the sheet pooling at your waist, and held out your hand. He gave you the rope. It was softer than you expected. Warm from his hand. Red as fate. Red as warning. Red as all the things Black Loom had tried to turn into fear. You wound part of it once around your own wrist, loosely, and held the end out to him. His eyes darkened. “Show me.” Jungkook’s breathing changed. Not because of the rope alone. Because of what you had given him with it. Trust made visible. Surrender chosen with steady eyes. Fate placed in his hands, not as a cage, but as a vow. He took the rope back carefully.

“Colours,” he said, voice low. “Green means continue. Yellow means slow down. Red means stop. Pomegranate means everything stops. No questions. No hesitation. No pride.” You repeated it back to him, and something in his face softened so fiercely that the rope itself felt less like restraint and more like a language the two of you had invented because ordinary promises had never been enough.

He tied with the focus of a man writing code that could not afford an error, except this was warmer, slower, sacred. He explained each movement before he made it. Checked the pressure. Slid two fingers beneath every wrap. Asked you to flex. Asked you to breathe. Sometimes he stopped only to kiss the place he had just wrapped, as if even beauty required permission. Sometimes he asked you to pull, and when the rope held, his breathing changed.

When he was done, your wrists were secured above you. Not painfully. Not frighteningly. But undeniably. Red rope against the sheets. Red rope against your skin. Red rope holding your choice where he could see it. Jungkook sat back and looked at you. His face changed so openly that your own breath caught.

“What?” you whispered. He shook his head once, as if speech had become the one system he could not access. Then, rougher, “You trusted me.” Your throat tightened. “Yes.” His hand moved from the rope at your wrist down along your arm, over your shoulder, to your chest, your waist, your hip. Possessive without ownership. Worshipful without softness becoming weak.

“My beautiful little lamb,” he murmured, and the gentleness of it made the darkness in his voice worse. “Do you have any idea what that does to me?”

You did not get to answer. His mouth returned to your body. This time, he did not let the scene blur into implication. He kissed his way down your stomach, one hand spread over your hip to keep you grounded, the other sliding beneath your thigh to open you for him. Your first instinct was to reach for his hair, but the rope stopped you. The restraint turned the instinct into a helpless pull above your head, and Jungkook looked up at the sound it dragged out of you. “Do you want your hands free?” he asked. You shook your head. His thumb pressed slowly into your hip. “Words.” “No,” you breathed. “Keep them there.” His eyes darkened. Then his mouth lowered down to your wet core. Your head fell back against the pillow. The first touch of his tongue made your whole body jolt. Jungkook’s hand tightened at your hip, not holding you down, holding you with him. His mouth moved slowly at first, like he wanted to learn every reaction before he let himself become hungry. He found the rhythm that made your thighs tremble and stayed there until your breath broke apart. Then he stopped just long enough to kiss the inside of your thigh. You made a small, desperate sound. He looked up. There were men who would have looked smug. Jungkook looked ruined. That ruined you more. He returned to you with less patience. His tongue worked on your wet core relentlessly, his fingers pressing into your thigh, his mouth warm and precise and devastating. Every time your hips lifted, he followed. Every time you tried to close your legs, overwhelmed by the pleasure, he kissed the trembling muscle there and opened your legs again with a low murmur that sounded too much like praise to survive. His mouth left you only long enough for him to look up. “Colour.” “Green,” you gasped. His face changed. Then he slid one finger into your pussy. Slow. Measured. Watching. The stretch of his finger made your back arch. He stilled until your body softened around him, then moved again, curling his finger with a precision that made your breath snap. His mouth returned to your clit at the same time, and the world narrowed to him. His tongue. His fingers. The rope. Your body no longer pretending it could stay quiet.

He brought you to the edge and held you there, learning the exact shape of your pleasure until you shook with it. Each time you thought he would let you cum, he drew back just enough to make you gasp his name like a plea. He pressed his lips to your skin afterward as if apology and hunger could live in the same touch. “Jungkook,” you breathed. He added another finger. Your pussy clenched around his fingers. His eyes nearly closed. “Again,” he murmured against you. “Say it again.”

Your face burned. He moved his fingers deeper, his mouth returning to your clit with a pressure that made thought impossible. You said his name again. This time, it broke. Jungkook answered with a low sound against your skin, and the vibration of it pushed you too close too fast. Your wrists pulled against the red rope. His free hand spread over your stomach, grounding you, keeping you with him as pleasure gathered too sharply to hold. “Breathe for me,” he said, voice wrecked. “Do not disappear on me. Stay here.”

You tried. You really did. Then his fingers curled again, his mouth found the exact rhythm that made your vision blur, and you came apart with his name in your mouth and red rope around your wrists. Jungkook did not look away. He watched your face, listened to the break in your breathing, followed every movement of your bound hands and trembling body as if your pleasure were the only system in the world worth understanding. He held you through every wave, murmuring you back into your body, telling you to breathe, to stay with him, to let him carry what you did not have to carry alone. He kissed his way back up your body while you were still shaking, mouth wet, hair falling across his forehead, eyes dark enough to steal the air from the room. You tried to turn your face away, overwhelmed by the force of being seen like that, but he followed you. “No hiding from me,” he said against your cheek. “Not now.” His fingers were still inside you. Moving slower now. Too slow. Your body jerked. “Jungkook.” “I heard you.” The words came out rough, dangerous, and too tender at once. He kissed the corner of your mouth. “I heard you, little lamb.” You almost hated him for how well he knew where the edge was. He pushed you further, dragging another kind of desperation out of you, turning pleasure into something too sharp, too bright, too much. Tears gathered at the corners of your eyes. Jungkook saw them instantly. He stopped. Not away from you. Stopped. His whole body locked above yours. “Too much?” he asked. His voice shook with restraint. You pulled against the rope and shook your head. “Words.” ”No,” you breathed. “Not too much.” His eyes searched yours. “Are you sure?” “Yes.” A pause. Then you whispered, “Please.” Something wild moved through his face. “Good.” The word was soft. Your whole body answered anyway. When he finally came over you fully, when the rest of his clothes were gone and there was nothing left between his skin and yours except heat, breath, rope, and choice, Jungkook paused. Even then. Even aching. Even shaking. Even with his mouth swollen from yours and restraint hanging by one fraying thread. He paused. You lifted your bound hands as far as the rope allowed and touched his jaw with your knuckles. “I am here.” His eyes closed briefly. Then he guided his cock into you slowly. So slowly it hurt. So slowly you felt every inch of the stretch, every tremor in his discipline, every breath he forced through his lungs to keep from taking too much too quickly. His forehead dropped near yours. A sound broke low in his throat, raw enough to make your chest ache. For a moment, neither of you moved. Your body held him. The rope held your wrists. Jungkook held everything else. His hand gripped the sheet beside your ribs hard enough to twist it. His other hand pressed to your hip, thumb trembling against your skin.

He looked down at you, eyes dark and nearly helpless, and still found the discipline to ask without asking. Are you here? Are you sure? Are you still choosing this? You answered by lifting your bound hands as far as the rope allowed and pressing your knuckles to his cheek. He turned his face into the touch. The tenderness of it made the heat worse. Made the whole room feel too small for what had been waiting between you for months.

“Jungkook,” you whispered. His eyes opened. You moved your hips. That undid him.

He kissed you like he had to keep the sound inside you, like if you filled the room with what he was doing to you, the world might hear and come take it away. His first movements were slow, deep, held together by sheer force of will. Every thrust dragged a sound out of you that made his jaw tighten. Every time your pussy tightened around him, his breath caught against your mouth. He did not become careless. Not even then. But his discipline grew darker at the edges.

His hand slid beneath your lower back and lifted you into him, changing the angle, drawing a broken sound from your throat that made his restraint fracture across his face. “Again,” he murmured. “Let me hear it again.” You could not have stopped it if you tried. He moved deeper, harder, still watching you, still listening, still adjusting every time your body answered him.

The bed shifted beneath you. The rope pulled tight above your head. Your wrists flexed because you wanted your hands on him, wanted your nails in his back, wanted to drag him closer even though there was no space left between you. Jungkook saw it. Of course he saw it. “Do you want out?” he asked, stopping even though stopping clearly cost him. You shook your head, breathless. “No.” His eyes searched your face. “I want to touch you,” you whispered.

Something in him softened and broke at once. He reached up, loosened one knot just enough to free one of your hands, then guided it to the back of his neck. The moment your fingers slid into his hair, his eyes closed. For one second, he looked undone by that more than anything else. Then he kissed you again and moved like the touch had given him permission to fall apart. The pace changed. No longer distant from what he wanted. His hips drove into yours with enough force to push you deeper into the mattress, his hand locked at your thigh, keeping you open, keeping you close, keeping every movement exactly where both of you needed it. His mouth moved over your throat, your jaw, your lips, stealing sounds from you and giving you his own in return: low curses, broken praise, your name spoken like something sacred dragged through fire.

“You look beautiful like this,” he said against your mouth. “Bound for me. Trusting me. Do you understand what that does to me?”

You could not answer. He moved harder. Your answer came as a sound. Jungkook took it like proof. “How long do you think I have wanted you?” he asked, voice rougher now, less polished, less protected. “How many nights do you think I sat outside your life and told myself wanting you was the one line I would not cross?” His hand tightened at your thigh. “You were in my house. In my clothes. At my table. Sleeping in my bed while I sat outside that door and tried not to think about what you would feel like under my hands.”

You moaned softly his name, your walls clenching around his hard cock. He cursed softly. “Like that,” he breathed. “Exactly like that.” The filth of it hit harder because it was Jungkook saying it. Jungkook, who hid care inside instructions. Jungkook, who gave proof instead of promises. Jungkook, who had spent months holding himself back with both hands and now sounded almost angry with how much he wanted you. At the months of distance. The locked doors. The cameras. The fear. Every reason he had kept his hands to himself when wanting you had been slowly taking him apart. The rope held one wrist above you. Your free hand clung to the back of his neck. His skin was hot beneath your palm. His pace built until the room stopped being a room. It became red rope. Warm skin. The scrape of sheets beneath your back. His breath at your throat. Your name in his mouth. His body moving into yours with a rhythm that made you forget courtrooms, dead judges, severed fingers, gala chandeliers, and every monster that had tried to make your body a place of fear.

Jungkook wanted to replace all of it. You could feel that in every movement. He wanted to ruin every memory Black Loom had left on your skin and cover it with his hands, his mouth, his voice, his name. He wanted you undone. Safe. Claimed by choice, not owned. Wrecked, but only where he could hold you through it.

When your body began to tighten again, he felt it immediately. His forehead dropped to yours. “Stay with me,” he whispered. “Let me feel you.” You whispered his name once more. Not as a plea this time. As permission to fall with you.

You came again with your wrist bound above you and his mouth at your throat, clenching around him hard enough to drag a curse from him. Jungkook came inside you with his face buried against your shoulder, shaking silently, holding himself so close that you felt the moment he broke as if it had happened inside your own chest. For a while after, there was only breathing. His body warm over yours. The rope still red around one wrist. The night outside the window. The screens in the workroom dark beyond the hall, monsters waiting, war waiting, consequence waiting. But not yet.

For a few minutes, there was only the weight of him easing carefully from you, his hands already gentling, already checking. He murmured your name like an apology and a prayer. Then he reached up to untie you with the same care he had used to bind you. The rope loosened. Your wrist lowered.

He kissed each mark, each place the rope had pressed, not because you were hurt, but because he had touched you there and needed to answer for even the gentlest restraint. He rubbed warmth back into your fingers, watched the colour return, then brought your hand to his mouth and held it there longer than necessary, eyes closed as if he were memorising the fact that you had trusted him and survived his wanting.

“Are you all right?” he asked. You opened your eyes. He looked terrified. That almost made you cry. You lifted one hand to his face. “I am more than all right.” His eyes searched yours, unwilling to accept softness without evidence. So you gave him proof. You curled into him. Jungkook gathered you close with a breath that trembled only once. He pulled the blanket over both of you, checked your wrist again, then your other hand, then your breathing, then your face, as if there might be a hidden wound somewhere desire had left behind and he would not rest until he found it.

“Water,” he said. You made a small sound of protest into his chest. He kissed your hair. “Not negotiable.” “You are very bossy after sex.” His mouth paused against your hair. Then, very quietly, “I am trying not to be terrified after sex.”

Your heart squeezed. You lifted your head. Jungkook looked away too late. The admission sat between you, bare and wounded. He could tie rope around your wrists. He could dismantle criminal empires from a dark room. He could walk into Haven and make ghosts rise from their chairs. But this, your softness afterward, your body trusting his, your eyes still looking at him like he had given you pleasure instead of becoming a danger to survive, frightened him.

You touched his jaw. “You did not hurt me.” His face tightened. You softened your voice. “Jungkook.” He looked at you. “You did not hurt me.” This time, he listened.

He made you drink water anyway. Then he disappeared only long enough to return with a damp cloth and the kind of aching care that should have embarrassed you but instead made something inside you ache. He cleaned you slowly, checking your face with every movement, pausing whenever your breath changed, murmuring apologies when there was nothing to apologize for. You let him because care was easier for him than being cared for, and because maybe love, for now, meant accepting the language he knew until he trusted another. When he finished, he checked your wrist one more time. “It is only a mark,” you said. His thumb moved over the faint red line. “It is my mark.” The words came out low. Almost ashamed. Almost possessive. Your body warmed again through the exhaustion. His eyes lifted to yours, and the look there made your breath catch. Not ownership. Something more dangerous because it was more vulnerable. Responsibility. Wonder. Want, still. You took his hand and pressed it flat over your heart. “It was my choice.” Jungkook’s throat moved. “Yes.” Then he bent and kissed the inside of your wrist.

Later, when you were clean, warm, and half asleep against his chest, you traced a finger along one of the tattoos near his chest. He smelled like summer again. Clean skin. Warm sheets. Something impossible beneath all that darkness. “You are very intense,” you murmured. His hand moved slowly over your back. “That sounds diplomatic.” “It is not.” His mouth touched your hair. You smiled against his skin. For once, he did not tell you to sleep. He only held you, one arm around your waist, his other hand resting over the wrist he had tied, as if even in rest he needed to make sure the place where you had trusted him stayed warm.

Outside, Black Loom continued bleeding. Inside, for one night, the dark did not get to have either of you. Morning came softly. You woke tangled in sheets and Jungkook, your wrist faintly tender, your body heavy in a way that made your face warm when memory returned. Jungkook was awake, because of course he was, propped slightly against the pillows, one arm around you, eyes lowered to your face. For a moment, neither of you spoke. Sunlight touched the edge of the curtains. His house was quiet. Your body remembered him with every small ache, every warm place, every mark left by rope and mouth and hands that had asked before taking anything. Jungkook looked at you as if he was waiting for regret. You shifted closer instead. His arm tightened around you. Only then did he breathe.

“You did not sleep,” you murmured.

“I slept.”

“You are lying.”

“A little.”

You made a sleepy sound of disapproval and pressed your face against his chest. His body went still, then relaxed by degrees, as if even after everything, being held was harder for him than holding. For three days, life became almost cruel in its gentleness. You made coffee badly on purpose so he would take over. He pretended not to notice. You worked at the kitchen table while he worked beside you instead of vanishing into the workroom for hours. V sent files and pretended not to know why Jungkook sounded less homicidal on calls. You ate takeaway on the sofa with your legs tucked beneath you and Jungkook’s hand resting absent-mindedly near your ankle as if touch had become a place he was learning to return to. The red rope stayed folded in his bedside drawer. Not hidden. Not displayed. Known.

The world did not become safe. You were not foolish enough to believe it had. But for those few days, danger moved around the edges instead of standing in the room with you. You woke beside him. You watched him make coffee. You caught him looking at you when he thought you were reading. You kissed him in the hallway and felt the way his restraint still faltered, even now, as if each touch surprised him by being allowed. On the fourth day, the message came. It arrived on one of Jungkook’s dead channels, an old contact route that should not have been reachable by anyone outside a very small number of ghosts. No sender. No signature. Only seven words. We see the ghost beside the lamb. Jungkook read it once. Then again. You watched his face close. Not with fear. Fear would have been easier. This was calculation turning cold enough to freeze the air.

“What is it?” you asked. He locked the screen.

“Jungkook.” He looked at you, and the softness of the last few days disappeared behind something older.

“They may know who I am.”

The sentence did not fully make sense at first. Jungkook was careful. Jungkook was impossible. Jungkook was the man who saw everything before it reached you. Then you remembered the ballroom. Jin’s eyes on his gloved hand. His smile when Jungkook said only, With her. Why he came out of the dark for you. Your stomach tightened. “Do they?”

“I do not know.”

“Is it proof?”

“No.”

“Then it could be bait.”

“Yes.”

“But you are already planning to send me away.” His silence answered. You stood too quickly. “No.”

“Little lamb—”

“No.” Your voice sharpened, fear turning itself into anger because anger was easier to stand on. “You do not get to do that. You do not get to make this decision alone because someone sent a message.”

“If it is true—”

“If it is true, we deal with it.”

“If it is true, being near me puts you in direct danger.” You stared at him. “I am already in direct danger.”

“Not like this.”

“Do not do that.” His jaw tightened. “Do what?”

“Decide that your fear is logic and my choice is emotion.” That hit. You saw it hit. For a second, Jungkook looked as if you had opened a wound he had been trying to keep clean. Then the mask returned.

“I need to isolate,” he said. “I need to know whether they have a name, a face, a pattern, a location, or only a pressure point. If they have compromised anything connected to me, I cannot investigate properly while keeping you here.”

“Then I go to my boss.”

“No.”

“My penthouse.”

“No.”

“Another safe house.”

“No.”

“So Haven,” you said bitterly. His mouth did not move. You laughed once, without humour. “You already called V.”

“I am going to.”

“Of course.” Jungkook stepped closer, but stopped when you stepped back. That hurt both of you. You saw it in the way his hand flexed once at his side before going still.

“I am not sending you away because I regret anything,” he said.

“You are sending me away because you think you can protect me better if I am not close enough to be yours.” His face changed. You had named it too accurately.

“I am sending you to people who can keep you alive if my systems become unreliable.”

“And what about what I choose?”

“You can hate me for it.”

“I do not want to hate you.”

“I know.” You looked away sharply. He went silent. That phrase again. That instinctive, soft, terrible phrase he used when he understood too much and still did the thing that hurt. Your eyes burned.

“I stayed,” you said. “I told you that was my vow.”

His voice dropped. “And I am trying to make sure you live long enough to regret it if you need to.” The words landed like a slap because you understood what lived beneath them. Everyone leaves. Everyone regrets him. Everyone eventually sees too much and chooses daylight. Jungkook was trying to give you an exit by force before the world took the option away. You stepped close again, anger breaking open into something more fragile. “I am not them.”

“I know.”

“No, you do not.” Your voice shook. “You think you do, but you do not. Because if you knew, you would understand that sending me away without letting me stand beside you does not feel like protection. It feels like you are taking my vow and deciding it belongs to you.” His face went pale beneath the low light. For a moment, you thought he might break. Instead, he reached for his phone.

“V will be here in twenty minutes.”

You stared at him. Then you nodded once, because if you spoke, something worse than anger would come out. You packed in silence. Not much. The VVV laptop. The secure phone. Clothes. Files. The red rope stayed in the drawer, and the sight of it nearly undid you. Jungkook saw you look. He said nothing. That was worse. When V arrived, he did not joke. That told you everything. Haven took you in like a locked hand. Your room there was small but safe, with a bed, desk, reinforced door, no windows, and systems you knew Jungkook had checked even if he was not there. V gave you new access routes, a secure message channel, and a look that held too much sympathy for a man who knew better than to offer comfort cheaply.

“He is doing this because he is afraid,” V said after Jungkook left. You stared at the closed door.

“I know.”

“Not of them.” Your eyes moved to him. V’s expression was quiet. “Of being the reason you get hurt.” You swallowed hard.

“I know that too.”

For the next few weeks, you lived in Haven and hated every minute of safety. You worked because stopping would have broken you faster. Veni Vidi Vici gave you documents, intelligence, fragments of Black Loom’s structure. V checked on you without making it obvious. Your boss called and offered to increase security enough to move you back to the penthouse if you wanted, but you said no before he finished. He understood. You heard it in his silence.

“If I ever had to identify a severed finger of yours because I let my guard down,” he said quietly, “I would never forgive myself.” You closed your eyes.

“I know.”

This time, the words were yours, and they hurt no less. Jungkook messaged through secure channels. He sent short updates: No proof yet. Still checking. Stay inside. V has the new packet. Sleep if you can. Eat something. Do not use the third terminal today. I saw the route issue. It is handled. You replied with case notes, arguments, anger folded into analysis, small details you refused to let become pleas. He responded to all of it except the parts where love pressed too visibly against the words. Around the fourth week, you found the email.

Not because someone handed it to you. Because you had started learning how Veni Vidi Vici thought. Because Jungkook had taught you that deleted did not always mean gone, that older men with too much power and too little technical humility often believed empty folders were graves instead of shallow soil. The message came from an executive-team channel tied to Black Loom. To Jin. Coded language. Half-letters. Location fragments. Urgency hidden under formality. Your pulse changed as you read it. Then you read it again. And again. By the time V reached your desk, you had three maps open, two partial translations, and a list of possible coordinates.

“You found something,” he said. You did not look away from the screen.

“I found him.” V leaned closer. His face changed. Not surprise. Confirmation. You picked up the secure phone and messaged Jungkook.

You: We need to meet.

His reply came three minutes later.

Jungkook: Is it urgent?

You looked at Jin’s name on the screen.

You: Yes.

Another pause. Then:

Jungkook: I will pick you up.

You stared at the message until the letters blurred. For four weeks, you had wanted to see him so badly that wanting had become part of your breathing. Now he was coming. And Black Loom, somewhere beyond all your walls, kept weaving.

Jungkook came for you in the rain. Of course he did. By then, you had started to believe that all important things in your life happened beneath bad weather: warnings, escapes, revelations, the first time you saw his face, the first time he carried you through the threshold of his house like the world had finally become too cruel to let you walk alone. Rain had become part of the language between you. Water over windows. Static in cameras. Wet roads under expensive tyres. The city blurred until only danger and his voice remained clear.

V walked you to the underground exit at Haven without saying much. He had given Jungkook the files already through an encrypted channel, but you carried the physical paperwork anyway: printouts, diagrams, coded fragments, maps, names, three separate notebooks, and a folder so thick it barely closed. Some part of you needed the weight of it in your hands. Proof that the last four weeks had not only been waiting. Proof that separation had not made you useless. Jungkook was outside the inner door, hood pulled up, black coat damp at the shoulders, face sharper than memory and worse for it.

For four weeks, you had seen him only through messages and the ache those messages left behind. Sleep if you can. Eat something. V has the new packet. No proof yet. Stay inside. Do not use the third terminal today. I saw the route issue. It is handled. Now he was real again. You stopped. So did he. V, wisely, looked at neither of you. Jungkook’s eyes moved over your face first. Then your shoulders, your hands, the files, the dark circles beneath your eyes that no amount of stubbornness had managed to hide. He looked like he wanted to touch you and had decided before arriving that he would not let himself. That hurt more than if he had stayed away.

“You found the email,” he said.

Your mouth almost trembled. You pressed it into a line. “I found Jin.” His gaze changed. Not surprise. Not exactly. Recognition. V opened the exterior door. “House route is clean. Two alternates ready. I will keep the Haven channel open.” Jungkook nodded. “Thank you.”

“Bring her back if anything flickers.”

“I will.”

You looked between them. “I am standing right here.” V’s expression softened by a fraction. “That is usually the problem, ma’am.” Jungkook shot him a look. V did not look sorry.

The drive back to Jungkook’s house felt like sitting beside a wound that refused to bleed. You had imagined this moment too many times during the nights at Haven. In some versions, you were angry. In others, you reached for him the second the car door closed. In the weakest versions, the ones you hated yourself for most, you begged him not to send you away again. In reality, you sat with the folder on your lap and watched rain move across the windshield while Jungkook drove in silence. His hands were bare on the wheel. You noticed that before you noticed anything else. No gloves. No barrier. Just the same hands that had tied red rope around your wrists with reverence and later touched each mark as if even chosen restraint required apology.

“How bad is it?” he asked. You forced yourself back into the work. Work was safer. Work had edges.

“Worse than we thought structurally. Cleaner than we thought digitally.”

His gaze flicked toward you. You opened the folder. “The email was not meant to exist outside a closed channel, but someone older in the executive chain got lazy or scared. Maybe both. It was deleted, but not properly buried. V helped me recover the residue.”

“Older members,” Jungkook said.

“They still think deleted means gone.” He looked back at the road. “Useful arrogance.”

“That is what I said.”

His mouth almost softened. Almost. That tiny almost hurt too. At the house, nothing had changed and everything had. Your mug was still in the cabinet. The throw still lay over the sofa. The workroom door was still at the end of the hall. His bed was still somewhere beyond rooms you had memorised too intimately to pretend they were only shelter. You laid the paperwork across the kitchen table, then the living-room floor when the table became too small. Jungkook changed into black clothes and came back with coffee you had not asked for. You accepted it without looking at him because your hands were not steady yet. Then you began.

The email gave you the shape of a territory. Jin was not merely a charming Black Loom figure who liked hearing himself threaten people under chandeliers. He sat at the executive level, or close enough that the distinction barely mattered. One executive per region. Korea. U.S. routes. Japan. Several others marked only by initials and coded symbols. Under each executive, three major operatives: the people Veni Vidi Vici had started calling Black Loom’s hyenas because right hand sounded too respectful for men who fed on what others killed.

“They expand by offering power first,” you said, kneeling beside a spread of maps and files. “Hospital access. Security. Protection. Donations. Political backing. If someone influential cooperates, Black Loom gives them more influence. If they refuse, or if they are too ethical to be useful—”

“They kill them,” Jungkook said.

“Or threaten families until someone breaks.”

Jungkook stood over the map, one hand at his mouth, eyes moving through patterns faster than you could say them. He had always looked dangerous behind a screen, but seeing him with paper and evidence around him made something old and legal in your chest ache. You had once believed truth only mattered if it could be carried cleanly into court. Now you were sitting on the floor of a hacker’s house with illegally obtained intelligence spread across your knees, trying to decide which parts of it could be purified enough to hurt monsters publicly. You had changed already. You did not yet know how far. For hours, you spoke and Jungkook listened. You explained coded structures, territorial assignments, names that repeated across witness statements and donor boards, locations connected to transport routes, missing-person overlaps. Every time your voice caught from exhaustion, he noticed. Every time your hand trembled, his eyes dropped to it.

He did not interrupt to tell you to rest. He knew you would refuse. So he waited until you reached for a folder near his knee, then caught your hand gently before you could lift it. You looked up. Jungkook was already kneeling in front of you. The room went quiet around the two of you, though no machine had stopped humming, no rain had stopped falling, no danger had left the city. He turned your hand over and kissed your knuckles. Once. Slowly. Your breath caught so sharply it embarrassed you. His mouth lingered against your skin. Not enough to become something else. Enough to tell you he had missed you in a language he trusted more than speech.

“Jungkook,” you whispered.

His eyes lifted. The hunger in them was not hidden well enough. Four weeks at Haven had not only separated you from his house. They had separated you from his hands, his coffee, his bed, his body beside yours in the morning, the red rope folded in a drawer like a secret both of you had touched and survived. You had missed him with a desperation that made you angry at your own heart. But he had missed you too. You could see it now in the way he held your hand as if letting go too quickly would reveal too much. You could have reached for him then. Part of you wanted to. Instead, you slid your fingers around his.

“If you want to take a break,” you said softly, “we can take a break. You’re safe here for now. If you want to have a nap or some coffee, just tell me and we’ll do that. You’re safe with me.”

Jungkook went very still. You had watched him build safety around you for months. Routes. Cameras. Firewalls. Doors. Warnings. Systems. Touch. Tea. Proof. You had never seen anyone give it back to him. That was why the words hurt him. His eyes lowered to your joined hands. For a moment, he looked younger. Exposed in the way of a man who had not expected to be offered shelter by the person he was trying to protect.

“I do not know how to do that,” he said.

“Then we learn.” His thumb moved once over your knuckles.

“Together?” he asked. Your chest ached.

“Together.”

The break became takeaway on the sofa because neither of you trusted yourselves to make proper decisions near a bed yet. You ate noodles from cartons, knees tucked beneath you, documents still covering half the floor. Jungkook sat close enough that your thigh touched his. Neither of you moved away. For a while, you let yourselves pretend that the world had shrunk to warm food, rain, and the quiet glow of lamps. Then Jungkook told you about the missing-person files he had found. You told him about the deleted email residue. He said older Black Loom members were going to become the weak point. You said arrogance usually was. He looked at you then, and the softness that passed between you was almost unbearable.

“I want to come back,” you said. His face closed by a fraction. You hated that fraction.

“To the house,” you clarified, though both of you knew what you meant. “To this. The routine. Working here. Sleeping here. Coffee that you pretend not to make exactly how I like it.”

“It is not safe yet.”

“Nothing is safe.”

“That is not the same answer.” You turned slightly toward him. “If they had anything else, would I still be in Haven?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. That should have comforted you. It did, in the worst way.

“What did the message say?” you asked. Jungkook looked at the window.

“Jungkook.”

“If they had sent anything else, you would still be in Haven,” he said again.

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only useful one tonight.” You stared at him, then looked away before anger could become fear in a shape he would blame himself for.

“One more day,” he said quietly.

You looked back. His mouth was tense. “We try to figure everything out tomorrow. One more day before we decide whether you come back fully.” It was not enough. It was more than he had given before. So you accepted it.

Later, you joked that you wanted a nap because the bed at Haven was not comfortable and V had the emotional range of a locked filing cabinet when it came to pillows. Jungkook’s mouth almost softened before he caught it. “Of course,” he said. “Let me wrap up, and I’ll come lie with you.”

The ordinary intimacy of that sentence nearly undid you. You kissed him softly before leaving the room, not deep enough to start what both of you were trying very hard not to start on the living-room floor with Black Loom maps beside your feet. Just your mouth to his, a promise placed gently instead of urgently. He watched you go. Then he checked everything. Penthouse feeds. House perimeter. Haven channels. Building access logs. Network walls. Traffic patterns. Camera flickers. Jin’s known channels. V’s reports. Everything that could be checked, he checked, because Jungkook trusted love only after every possible danger had been forced to answer first.

When he finally came to the bedroom, you were awake. Of course you were. He stood in the doorway, face shadowed, and for one second both of you were back in the workroom: the threshold, the vow, the knowledge that a door once opened could never become innocent again. Then he crossed the room. This time, there was no red rope. This time, there was only reunion. His mouth found yours with less ceremony and more ache, and when you pulled him closer by the front of his shirt, his breath broke against your cheek like he had been starving for the sound of you. “Do you know what it did to me?” he murmured. “Four weeks without your hands on me. Four weeks knowing exactly where you were and still not being allowed to reach you.”

For a while, you only kissed. That was the first true indulgence: not rushing because danger had trained both of you to count minutes, not apologising for wanting more than survival. His hands moved over your back, your waist, your face, returning again and again as if confirming that Haven had not swallowed you, that Black Loom had not stolen the warmth from you, that distance had not taught you to regret him. When you whispered his name, his forehead dropped to yours and he breathed like a man who had been holding his lungs closed for a month. “Again,” he said, low and rough. “Say it again. I need to hear it when I can touch you.”

It was slower than the first time, but not softer for long. He undressed you with hands that paused whenever emotion threatened to outrun want, and you undressed him with the quiet certainty of someone no longer afraid of wanting him openly. He traced your wrists even without rope there, thumb moving over the places red had once marked you. “No rope tonight,” he said. “No rope.” His eyes moved to yours. “Just me.” “Just you.” His mouth touched the inside of your wrist. “Then keep your hands on me. I want to feel you choose me without anything holding you there.”

There were fewer words because your bodies remembered enough. Still, he asked. Quietly. Are you here? Are you tired? Do we stop? And each time, you answered by pulling him closer, by touching his face, by letting your mouth find the places stress had carved into him while you were separated. His shoulders. His throat. The tense line of his jaw. Jungkook took every kiss like proof, and when your nails pressed into his back, his control slipped hard enough for you to feel it in the way his hips settled between yours. “There,” he breathed against your mouth. “That is what I missed. You not being careful with me.”

When he finally let himself touch you the way he wanted, the hunger was softer around the edges but no less consuming. It had grief inside it now. Relief. Four weeks of restraint turning into heat. Four weeks of messages, coded channels, locked doors, and sleep that never truly came, all of it unwinding beneath his hands. He moved over you with one hand beneath your lower back, lifting you into him, the other locked around your thigh as if the shape of you against him was the first thing that had made sense in weeks. “I thought about this,” he admitted, voice wrecked. “You in my bed again. Your legs around me. Your voice saying my name like I had earned the right to come home.”

When he moved into you, the whole room seemed to narrow to warmth, breath, rain, and the way he looked at you like the world had made one good thing and then placed it under threat. He was still careful. He would always be careful with you. But beneath the care was hunger, and beneath the hunger was the grief of four weeks spent choosing distance for the sake of safety. The vow was already there in the way you opened for him, in the way his hand slid beneath your back, in the way he paused every time your breath changed and moved again only when your body answered yes. “Stay with me,” he said, mouth at your jaw. “Not in Haven. Not in the case. Not with him. Here. Under me. With me.”

He took his time because there had not been enough time. Because there might not be enough again. Because the house was quiet, the maps were waiting, V was hunting coordinates, Jin was somewhere inside the web, and still, for this hour, Jungkook let himself be a man coming home to the only person who had ever made the dark feel survivable. Your pleasure came slower this time, rolling through you in waves instead of breaking all at once, and he followed it patiently at first, then deeper, less clean around the edges when your body tightened around him. “That sound,” he whispered, almost ruined. “I thought about that in every room you were not in.” When he finally broke apart above you, silent and shaking, you held his face between your hands and kissed him as if you could give him somewhere to come back to.

Afterward, he checked you the way he always did. Water. Blanket. Wrist. Face. Breathing. You let him because care was easier for him than being cared for, and because you had learned that sometimes love meant accepting the language someone knew until they could learn another. When he finally lay beside you, you curled into him. His hand moved over your back, slower now, less vigilant for a few impossible minutes.

“Sleep,” he murmured.

“You first.” A pause. Then, softly, “Bossy.”

“Maybe I am.”

His breath warmed your hair. You smiled with your eyes closed. For one more night, the dark let you keep him.

By morning, Veni Vidi Vici had found the location. Jungkook read the message while standing barefoot in the kitchen, hair damp from a shower, black shirt clinging slightly at the shoulders. You were making coffee badly on purpose, mostly because it had become one of the few harmless ways to irritate him. His expression changed before the phone lowered.

“What?” you asked.

“V found the place.”

The cup in your hand stilled. Jungkook turned the screen toward you. The White Sanatorium. The name looked wrong in the clean black text of the message. Too elegant. Too clinical. Too pure for something connected to Black Loom. V’s message continued beneath it: abandoned hospital wing, private mountain estate, officially unused for years, recent movement suspected. Your stomach tightened.

“White,” you said.

“False purity,” Jungkook replied.

“Organ trafficking.”

“Likely.” You set the cup down. “We need to go.”

“No.” You looked at him. His eyes narrowed. “Do not start.”

“Then do not say no like I am not part of this.”

“You are part of this. That is the problem.”

“The problem is that I am the only one here who knows how to read some of those files in context.”

“V can take pictures.”

“V does not have my legal eye.”

“Your legal eye is not bulletproof.”

“Neither are you.” He looked away first, which meant you had won and he hated that you had won. When V called, the argument continued with witnesses.

“Motorcycle,” you said.

Jungkook turned his head slowly. V, on the screen, looked delighted and concerned at once. You pointed at the map. “If the place is on a mountain estate, the car is too visible on narrow routes. Motorcycle is faster, less conspicuous, easier to abandon if we need to move on foot.” Jungkook stared at you.

“And we need at least three exits,” you continued. “Main road, service road, forest path if one exists. We do not enter until all three are mapped.”

V looked at Jungkook. “She is starting to sound like you.” Jungkook did not answer. But he looked at you with something that moved through warmth into pain. Pride, you realized. And fear of what pride meant. You went at night. The mountain roads were dark and narrow, trees pressing in on either side, leaves moving restlessly in the wind. You rode behind Jungkook, helmet secured, arms around his waist, feeling the controlled power of the motorcycle beneath you and the cold air cutting through every seam of your clothes. V rode ahead for part of the route, then split off to take the second entrance.

The White Sanatorium rose from the estate like a dead thing pretending to sleep. It had once been beautiful. That made it worse. Pale stone, long windows, ivy crawling over one side, a private drive cracked by weather and neglect. An old hospital wing attached to what might have been a wealthy family’s mountain retreat, abandoned officially, preserved unofficially, too expensive to decay honestly. White walls. Black windows. No lights. Jungkook helped you off the motorcycle, his hand steady at your elbow. “Stay close.”

“I was planning to wander alone through the organ-trafficking sanatorium.” His eyes flicked to you. You shrugged. “Humour helps.”

“No, it does not.”

“It helps me.”

“Then continue.”

You almost smiled. V met you near a side entrance with two other Triple V operators. No one spoke loudly. No one used unnecessary light. Jungkook checked the lock, then a device near the door, then nodded once. Inside, the air smelled of dust, cold metal, and something medicinal that should have faded years ago. Your breath fogged faintly. The corridors were long and pale, paint peeling in strips, old signs still mounted near doors: treatment rooms, storage, records, restricted access. Some areas were thick with dust. Others were not. That was the first sign of recent use. A line disturbed near the wall. A clean patch on a handle. Footprints too new to belong to a ghost. Jungkook noticed everything. So did you, now. That frightened you more than the building.

The deeper you went, the more the place stopped feeling abandoned and started feeling paused. As if Black Loom had stepped out minutes before you arrived and left the air holding its breath. In one records room, you found boxes stacked behind a cabinet that should have been too heavy to move. Inside were files. Missing people. Some old. Some recent. Your hands shook as you opened the first folder. A young woman. Twenty-two. Last seen near a clinic connected to one of the donor routes. No official closure. No family notified beyond a generic missing-person update. In the back of the folder, a notation you recognized from hospital logistics. Your throat closed. Jungkook stood beside you. He did not touch you, but his presence wrapped around the moment like a hand. You opened another. And another.

“Recently handled,” you whispered. The dust along the folder edges had been disturbed. Someone had touched these within days, maybe weeks. V appeared in the doorway. “We have two more rooms like this.”

“Photograph everything,” Jungkook said. “Do not move more than we need.”

You kept reading. That was your flaw, maybe. Or your strength. You kept reading even when it hurt. You read because someone had to know their names as names, not entries, not routes, not inventory. You read until Jungkook’s hand finally closed gently over the folder.

“Enough.” You looked up.

“We need to move,” he said.

Something in his voice made you stop arguing. He turned slightly, eyes moving to the corner of the room. A tiny red blink reflected once in the glass of an old cabinet. Camera. Active. Watching. Your blood went cold. Jungkook did not react outwardly. He did not swear. He did not grab you. He simply looked at V in the doorway and said, very calmly, “We have what we need.” V’s expression did not change either. But one of the operators behind him disappeared down the corridor. Jungkook took the folder from your hand, closed it, and placed it exactly where it had been. Then he turned to you.

“We are leaving.”

You nodded once. The walk out felt longer than the way in. Every corridor seemed to have acquired eyes. Every dark doorway looked less empty. Jungkook’s hand remained at your back, guiding but not rushing, while V moved ahead and the second operator took the rear. The building did not stop you. That made it worse. Outside, the cold air hit hard. V swung onto his motorcycle without a word and left first, fast enough that gravel spat behind the tyres. Jungkook put your helmet on you himself, fingers careful beneath your jaw.

“Jungkook,” you said quietly.

“Not here.”

He got on the motorcycle. You climbed behind him. He did not take the road you had used to arrive. You noticed within thirty seconds. The route bent left instead of down. Narrower. Darker. Trees tighter. An escape route, not a return. Your arms tightened around his waist. Jungkook covered one of your hands briefly with his own, then returned it to the handlebar. Not reassurance. Confirmation. Something had gone wrong. You did not go home. That told you more than any explanation could.

Jungkook rode until the mountain thinned into coastal road, until trees gave way to dark water and the city became a distant glow behind you. He stopped near an empty stretch of beach where the wind moved cold off the sea and no one stood close enough to hear anything that mattered. When you removed your helmet, your hair whipped across your face. Jungkook was already messaging V. You waited. You had learned the difference between silence that hid and silence that worked. Finally, he said, “V is checking the house.” Your stomach dropped. “You think Jin knows it.”

“I think Jin wanted us to find that place.” The sea hissed against the shore. You looked at him. “The files were real.”

“Yes.”

“The camera was real.”

“Yes.”

“So why lead us there?”

Jungkook stared out at the water, face cut in profile by moonlight and distant road glow. “Because he is not leaving clues by accident.” Jin. The name sat between you like the red-wax invitation had once sat on the table.

“He wants us to follow,” Jungkook said. “He wants us to know enough to keep moving, not enough to finish it. He is careful. Too careful. The ballroom, the card, the email, the sanatorium. They are not mistakes. They are doors.” You wrapped your arms around yourself against the cold. “Doors to what?”

“To him.” You looked away. The wind pushed at your coat. Somewhere beyond the dark water, unseen things moved with the tide.

“Why?” you asked. Jungkook did not answer quickly. That was how you knew the truth would hurt.

“Because I worked for him.” The world narrowed. For a second, the sea, the road, the cold, the sanatorium, all of it receded until only those words remained. You turned back slowly. “What?”

“Before,” Jungkook said. “Years ago. Not under my name. Not my face. He never had that. I was a ghost even then. But he hired me through layers. Jobs. Systems. Information extraction. Protection, sometimes. Destruction, other times. I did not know the full structure at first.” Your voice came out too calm. “And then you did.” His jaw tightened. “Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I left.”

“People leave you,” you said softly. His eyes flicked to yours.

“You left him.”

“Not cleanly.”

You absorbed that. It should have made you step back. Maybe a better person would have. Maybe the version of you who still believed systems sorted the guilty from the damned would have reached for professional distance, legal logic, clean moral lines. But you had lived too close to the dark now to pretend everyone inside it had entered through the same door.

“What does he want?” you asked.

“Me,” Jungkook said. The answer was too immediate.

“And you.” That was worse. You swallowed. “Why me?”

“Because you are useful. Because you hurt them. Because you understand cybercrime and law, which makes you dangerous in a way most hackers are not. Because you do not scare easily.” His voice lowered. “Because I came out of the dark for you.” The beach felt suddenly colder.

“The ballroom,” you said.

“He watched us.”

You thought of Jin’s smile. With her. How devoted. Why he came out of the dark for you. The room had been bait. And you had both walked in beautifully dressed, hand at your back, heart already visible to someone who knew where to look. Jungkook turned toward you fully. “I am too deeply in love with you to let him pull you into his world.” The words struck harder because he did not dress them up. No poetry. No softness. Just truth. Your throat tightened around his name.

He continued as if stopping would kill him. “Being away from you hurts. Being close to you has started hurting too because I cannot stay away. I cannot get you out of my mind. Before I knew your face, I knew your routes. Your coffee order. How late you worked. The way you asked about victims before yourself. You were on my screens and in my systems and somehow my personal hell started feeling like paradise because you were inside it.” Your eyes burned.

“Jungkook.”

He shook his head once. “Living with you made me feel normal. Happy. For the first time in years. And that terrifies me because nothing about my life should feel normal to you.” You stepped closer. “Does it feel wrong to love me?” His face changed. That question hurt him differently.

“No,” he said. “That is the problem.” You breathed in shakily.

“Loving you feels normal,” he said. “Like coffee in the morning and your files on my table and your mug in my sink. Like a life I was never supposed to have. Loving you feels like the only gentle thing I have ever done without calculation, and that makes it suicide.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No.” The answer came before the fear. You closed the space between you and touched his coat. Jungkook looked down at your hand as if it was the one thing in the world capable of undoing him.

“I can adapt,” you said. “I already have. I can learn patterns. I can detect danger. I can work with V. I can—”

“No.”

“You do not get to decide what I can become.” His eyes lifted to yours. “I know what this world does.”

“No,” he said, and the quiet of it hurt more than volume would have. “You know what it does to victims. You know what it does in court. You know what it looks like when it is dragged into evidence. You do not know what it does when you live inside it long enough that you start becoming useful to it.” You wanted to argue. You could not find the words fast enough. The sea moved behind him, black and endless.

“If going back to him is what it takes to keep you out of his reach,” Jungkook said, “I would do it.” Something inside you went very still.

“That is not protection,” you whispered. “That is surrender.”

“For me, maybe.”

“For us.” His jaw tightened.

“There is an us,” you said. “Do not insult me by pretending there is not.”

He looked at you then, and for one terrible second, everything he felt was visible. Love. Fear. Want. Grief before loss had even happened. Then his phone buzzed. V. Jungkook read the message. House clean. No breach. No watchers found. Routes stable. You should have been relieved. Jungkook only looked colder. You returned home before dawn. Home. The word had changed again. The house was still warm, still safe, still full of your files and his coffee and the red rope in the drawer. But Jungkook moved through it differently now. Quieter. Further away though he stood in the same rooms. He checked the perimeter, then disappeared into the workroom without asking if you wanted tea. You stood in the hallway and watched the door close. Not fully. But enough.

Over the next week, both of you worked like people trying to outrun a prophecy. You did not discuss the beach. Not directly. It lived beneath every exchange. In the way Jungkook avoided touching you unless necessary. In the way you pretended not to notice. In the way V’s messages became sharper, faster, more urgent as the evidence from The White Sanatorium unlocked other doors. The files were real. That was the cruelty. Jin had baited you with truth. The Sanatorium records connected to missing people, drug routes, mule movements, organ trafficking, private clinics, shell donors, hospital boards, and transport logs. Jungkook and Veni Vidi Vici found the digital residue. You built the legal shape around it. Together, you made the evidence impossible to bury in one place. You did not send it to one police station.

You sent it to three. Then cybercrime. Then trusted prosecutors. Then two journalists through layers so thick even Jungkook seemed briefly satisfied. Anonymous packets. Location proof. Missing-person files. Drugs. Mules. Organ movement. Names connected to routes. Enough to make denial expensive. Enough to make silence dangerous. Enough to turn Black Loom’s own breadth against it. Over the next two weeks, the public collapse began. People were brought in for questioning. Offices went dark. Hospital donors resigned from boards. Private security firms suddenly found themselves under investigation. Prosecutors who had spent years pretending not to see certain names were forced to speak them under pressure from other divisions. The news used careful language at first: alleged trafficking routes, suspected organized network, possible medical corruption. Then the missing-person names began leaking. Careful language became harder.

Haven celebrated the day Jin was taken into custody. It should have felt like victory. For a few minutes, it almost did. The underground room was louder than you had ever heard it. Someone had brought alcohol. Someone else had ordered enough food for three times the number of people present. Screens still ran operations in the background, but people were smiling, clapping one another on shoulders, laughing in exhausted disbelief. V handed you a drink.

“You did good, ma’am.” You looked at the screens, at the headlines, at the blurred photograph of Jin being guided through a private entrance by officials trying very hard not to look afraid.

“We wounded them,” you said.

V’s expression softened. “Sometimes that is how empires start dying.” Jungkook stood near the edge of the room, half in shadow, watching the celebration with a quiet expression you could not read. You crossed to him, carrying two drinks, and held one out. He took it.

“You should look happier,” you said. His eyes stayed on the screen showing Jin’s custody transfer.

“I am thinking.”

“You are always thinking.”

“Yes.” You leaned closer. “Is everything fine?” His phone buzzed before he answered. You saw only the shift in his eyes. Tiny. Devastating. He looked at the message for no more than two seconds before locking the screen.

“What is it?” you asked.

“Nothing.”

“Jungkook.”

He looked at you then. The room around you was celebrating. V was laughing with someone near the far table. A young operator raised a bottle in your direction. Screens glowed with the first public wound Black Loom had taken in years. Jungkook said, “Everything is fine.” You wanted to believe him. That was the last time you saw him. The first day he did not answer, you told yourself he was working. Jungkook disappeared into systems sometimes. He lost hours, half-days, nights. He would resurface with a new route, a warning, a packet of evidence, a demand that you eat something. Silence from him was not new. This silence was.

By evening, your body knew before your mind would admit it. You messaged him again. No answer. You called. Nothing. You contacted V. No reply for nine minutes. When V finally called, his face told you before his mouth did. You were back at Haven by then because you had not been foolish enough to stay at the house once the silence became wrong. Or maybe you had gone there because some part of you knew the house without Jungkook would become unbearable, and Haven at least had witnesses for the moment your heart understood what had happened.

“Has he come back to you?” you asked. V’s jaw tightened.

“No.” The room tilted.

“He cut connections,” V said. “All of them. I cannot reach him.” You sat down because your knees had stopped being reliable.

“Did you know?” you asked. V did not pretend to misunderstand.

“Did you know he worked for Jin?” The silence was answer enough. Your breath left you.

“Yes,” V said quietly. “I knew.” You laughed once. It sounded nothing like you. “Of course you did.”

“I did not know he would go through with it.”

“With what?” V looked away. Your heart began to break before he spoke.

“He told me,” V said, “that if things became too risky, he would go back to his old life.”

The beach returned. If going back to him is what it takes to keep you out of his reach, I would do it. Loving you feels like suicide. Another time, he had said, when V asked if either of you wanted another drink after Jin was taken into custody. We can discuss it another time. Another time had never existed.

“What did Jin offer?” you whispered. V’s face was grave. “I do not know the exact terms.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No,” he said. “I can guess.” You closed your eyes.

“Jungkook returns,” you said. “Jin removes me from the target list.”

V said nothing. The lack of denial finished what hope had been trying to survive. You pressed a hand to your mouth. Not to stop a sob. Not yet. To hold yourself together for one more second because if you fell apart now, you were not sure there would be enough of you left to gather. Jin would not stay behind bars. Jungkook had known that. Too many lawyers. Too much blackmail. Too many people to sacrifice in his place. Jin did not need freedom immediately to be dangerous; he only needed leverage. And Jungkook had given him the one thing he wanted most. The best ghost he had ever had.

One Jungkook was worth twenty top-tier hackers. Quality over quantity. You saw it then with sick clarity: the ballroom had not only been a threat. It had been an assessment. Jin had looked at Jungkook’s hand on your back, his stillness beside you, the way he answered with her and nothing else, and understood exactly where to place the blade. He did not need to kill you. He needed to make Jungkook believe he could. Your lungs refused to fill properly. V crouched in front of you, careful not to touch without permission.

“He loved you,” he said. The past tense hurt so badly you almost flinched.

“Do not.”

“He loves you,” V corrected, voice rougher. “He would not have done this otherwise.”

“That does not make it better.”

“No.” You looked at him through the blur in your eyes. “Why did he bring me here?” V’s brow tightened.

“To Haven,” you said. “Why did he bring me here if he knew he might leave?” V’s expression changed. Softened. Broke, perhaps, in the quiet way men like him allowed themselves to break.

“You are the only person he ever brought into Haven,” he said. “And that means something.”

You stared at him. There were griefs that knocked. There were griefs that entered without permission. This one moved into your chest and closed the door behind itself. The only person. Not a passing weakness. Not a mistake. Not a liability he had tolerated until he could remove you from danger. The only person he had brought into the place where his ghosts bowed, where his world lived beneath fluorescent light and encrypted walls. You had been the exception. And he had still left. That was the shape of Jungkook’s love. A door opened for you. A body placed between you and the blade. A vow made in red rope. A disappearance arranged like protection. You lowered your face into your hands and finally broke. V stayed.

He did not tell you to breathe. He did not tell you Jungkook would come back. He did not lie. He only stayed in front of you while the first wave of grief took you apart in the room Jungkook had once entered like an uncrowned king. Later, when you could stand, V walked you to one of the protected rooms. You slept at Haven because Jungkook would have wanted the perimeter checked, because even gone he had left instructions in everyone’s bones, because you did not know where else to put your body when the house still smelled like him and the world had become too large. You called your boss the next morning. For the first time since you had known him, you did not know how to sound strong.

“I need to stop working,” you said. He did not ask why immediately. That kindness nearly destroyed you.

“All right,” he said. You pressed the phone hard to your ear. “I cannot do it.”

“Then you will not.”

“The system failed,” you whispered. “We did everything. We brought evidence. We protected witnesses. We exposed them. We sent proof everywhere, and still—” Your voice broke. “I could not save him.” Your boss was quiet for a long time. Then he said, gently, “Come home when you can.” You almost laughed. Home. What a cruel word.

“I do not know where that is anymore.”

“I know,” he said. “But when you need me, I am here.”

You tried to return to work twice. The first time, you opened a case file and stared at the first page until the words rearranged themselves into Jungkook’s last message that did not exist. The second time, you made it through half a meeting before someone said procedural limitations and you had to leave because the phrase sounded too much like a coffin closing. The law had been your weapon. Your shield. Your faith, maybe, though you would never have called it that.

Now it felt like a locked door you had thrown your whole body against, only to realize the person you needed most was on the other side and the key had been purchased by a man like Jin. So you quit. Your boss did not stop you. He looked older when you told him. Tired. Heartbroken in the restrained way of a man who had already lost too many people to systems that asked for patience while monsters adapted faster.

“If you ever need anything,” he said, “you call me.” You nodded, hands folded tightly in your lap. “Thank you. For everything.”

“You do not stop being mine because you leave the job,” he said.

That was when you cried. Not loudly. But enough. Haven was the one place you chose to go. V found you in the main room hours later, standing before a wall of screens you did not yet know how to read properly.

“I want you to train me,” you said. He did not look surprised. That made you angry.

“No,” he said. You turned.

“No?”

“No.”

“You do not get to say no.”

“I absolutely do.”

“I need to learn.”

“No, you want to chase him.”

“Yes.”

“At least you are honest.”

You stepped closer, grief burning cleanly into fury now. “Train me.” V’s face hardened. “This is not a skill you learn and stay clean.” The room seemed to quiet around you. He continued, voice low. “You touch this side of life, it burns you. It does not leave because you decide you have had enough. It changes how you think. What you can justify. What lines look movable. You still have something close to a normal life.” You laughed. It came out sharp enough that someone nearby looked over, then quickly away.

“My normal life is gone.”

“Not completely.”

“Jungkook is gone.” V flinched.

“I could not save him through the law,” you said. “I could not save him by being clean. I could not save him by trusting that evidence and procedure and enough truth in enough places would be enough. So do not stand there and tell me to preserve a life that failed the one person I needed it to save.” V stared at you for a long moment. Then he looked toward the screens.

“He knew this would happen,” he said quietly. Your anger faltered.

“Jin,” V clarified. “Not the details. But the direction. He knew if Jungkook went back, you would follow the wound.” You swallowed.

“Then train me well enough to make him regret being right.” V closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, something had shifted. Not approval. Resignation. Grief, maybe.

“If I train you,” he said, “you do exactly what I say until you are good enough to argue.”

“I can argue now.”

“No,” he said. “You can speak. You cannot survive.” You held his gaze.

“Fine.” V nodded once.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Six.”

You looked back at the screens, their light reflecting in your eyes. For months, you had been the woman Jungkook protected from the dark. By morning, you would begin learning how to enter it. And somewhere, under Jin’s hand, Jungkook would not know that the sacrifice he made to keep you clean had already begun to stain.

Grief did not make you elegant. That was the first thing you learned after Jungkook disappeared. People liked to make grief beautiful when they spoke about it from a distance. They gave it clean metaphors. Empty rooms. Rain on windows. Flowers left beside photographs. A black dress, a quiet woman, a candle burning in a room where no one spoke too loudly. Your grief was not like that. Your grief was ugly.

It left dirty mugs near your bed at Haven because you forgot to take them back. It made you sleep in clothes you had worn for two days. It made you read the same sentence sixteen times without understanding it. It made you furious when people asked whether you had eaten, then furious when they stopped asking because you had made it difficult to care for you. It made you sit on the edge of a narrow bed in a windowless protected room and stare at your hands because you remembered red rope there and could not decide whether the memory felt like a vow or a wound.

For the first month, you stayed at Haven because V insisted and because some part of you understood that Jungkook would have wanted every route checked even after he was gone. That was the cruelty of him. He had left, and still his caution remained in the people around you like a second language. No one said his name unless you did first. That was worse.

V gave you a room, a terminal you did not yet know how to use properly, and enough space to fall apart without an audience. Your boss called every day for the first week, then every other day when you stopped answering like a person. He never sounded impatient. He never sounded disappointed. He had known you before Jungkook, before Black Loom, before Haven, before your life became routes and cameras and encrypted phones. He had known the version of you who believed that if truth was documented carefully enough, if evidence was preserved properly enough, if the argument was sharp enough and the right people were brave enough, the system could still be forced to work. You tried to return to her. You really did.

The first time you opened a case file after Jungkook vanished, you sat with your laptop in front of you for three hours and read the first paragraph until the words blurred into black lines. The second time, you joined a remote meeting and lasted twenty minutes before someone said procedural limitations with the solemn confidence of a man who had never watched the person he loved trade himself to a monster because procedure could not move fast enough to save him. You turned your camera off. Then your microphone. Then you left the call and vomited in the bathroom at Haven until there was nothing left in your body but shaking. The law had been your weapon. Your structure. Your clean blade. The thing you sharpened yourself against when grief first entered your life years ago and your boss found you standing in the ashes of a family you could not get back. He had taught you how to survive inside institutions without letting them swallow your voice. He had taken you in, not as a daughter exactly, not as a replacement for anything, but as something close enough that losing his disappointment would have broken you almost as badly as losing his love. When you told him you had to quit, he did not argue. You sat across from him in his office, hands folded in your lap, wearing clothes that still looked like your old life from a distance. Cream trousers. A black blouse. A coat cut well enough to suggest control. But your face had changed. You saw it in the way he looked at you. He knew what people looked like when something inside them had stopped negotiating with the world.

“I cannot do it anymore,” you said. He leaned back slowly.

“The system failed,” you continued, because if you stopped speaking, you would either cry or take it back. “We brought evidence. We protected witnesses. We sent proof to every place we could. We made it public enough that they could not bury all of it, and still Jin got what he wanted. Still Jungkook—” His name cut you. Your boss’s face tightened. You breathed through it. “I could not save him from himself. I could not save him from Jin. I could not save him by being good at my job.”

“That is not your failure.”

“It feels like mine.”

“I know it does.”

You looked at him sharply. He lowered his eyes, and for a moment, he was not your boss, not your mentor, not the man who had helped build you back into a functioning thing after loss. He was only someone who knew that sometimes the truth did not help fast enough.

“I will not stop you,” he said. “I wish I could. I wish I had the right. But I do not.” Your throat tightened.

“If you ever need anything,” he continued, voice softer, “you call me. Leaving the job does not mean you stop being mine.”

That was when you cried. Not with the violence of Haven. Not the first-break kind of crying that left you on the floor with V outside the room pretending not to hear. This was quieter. Worse, in some ways. The kind of crying that came from being loved by someone who could not follow you where you were going. You thanked him for everything. Then you left the last clean room of your old life. V was waiting at Haven when you returned. He was at a central terminal, sleeves rolled to his elbows, eyes on three different screens. Around him, operators moved through dim light, talking in low voices, drinking bad coffee, pulling information from places where information did not want to be found. You stood near the entrance for a long moment, watching him work. Then you said, “Train me.” V did not turn around immediately.

“No,” he said.

“You have not heard what I am asking.”

“I have.”

“You do not even know—”

“You want to become like him.” The words landed too close to the truth. You swallowed. “I want to find him.”

“No,” V said again, finally turning. “You want to become something that can survive finding him.”

The room around you kept working, but several people had gone quiet in that careful way people did when they were pretending not to listen. V stood. He was not as tall as Jungkook. Not as silent. Not as dangerous in the same way. But he had survived in the same world long enough to understand its prices, and the expression on his face held no gentleness.

“This is not a skill you learn and stay clean,” he said.

You lifted your chin. He stepped closer. “You think you want tools. Access. Systems. Infiltration. Surveillance. Recovery. You think you want to learn how to pull a thread from the dark and follow it until it bleeds. But that is not all this is. This changes how you think. It changes what lines look movable. It teaches you that laws are locks, and every lock can be opened by someone willing to stop asking permission.”

“I stopped asking permission when permission failed him.” V’s face tightened. Good, you thought, and the cruelty of it did not frighten you as much as it should have.

“He did this to keep you out,” V said.

“He left me outside with the door open.”

“No. Jin left the door open.”

“And Jungkook walked through it.”

For a moment, neither of you spoke. Then V looked away first. That was how you knew you had won. Or how you knew you had both lost. Training began at six the next morning. V was not kind about it. You were grateful for that.

Kindness would have made you softer, and softness had become a thing you did not trust in yourself. V gave you basics first. Systems. Infrastructure. How networks were built. How they failed. How people failed faster. How to trace without touching too hard. How to watch cameras without announcing yourself to the system watching the watchers. How to recover what had been deleted. How to understand the difference between absence and concealment. You hated being slow. You hated being corrected. You hated that Jungkook had made everything look like breathing when in reality it was a language built on patience, obsession, pattern recognition, and a willingness to sit with a locked door for hours until the door forgot why it had ever closed.

“You are rushing,” V said during the third week, leaning over your shoulder while you stared at a screen full of errors.

“I am learning.”

“You are bleeding on the keyboard.” You looked at him.

“Metaphorically,” he said. “Do not be dramatic.”

“I was not being dramatic.”

“You were about to.”

You almost smiled. Almost. That was how the months passed. Not in healing, exactly. In conversion. Grief became discipline because grief without movement was going to kill you. Anger became study because anger alone made mistakes. Longing became pattern because Jungkook had left traces in the way he thought, not deliberately, never carelessly, but in habits you had lived beside long enough to recognize now that V taught you how to look. Jungkook favoured routes with redundancies hidden inside redundancies. He anticipated emotional mistakes better than logistical ones because he had spent months anticipating yours. He never trusted a single source of truth. He built exits before entrances. He touched systems as lightly as possible when he wanted to remain unseen and violently when he wanted someone to know a ghost had entered the room.

You learned him through absence. That was the cruelest education of all. Some nights, after twelve hours at a terminal, you would see a line of code bend in a way that reminded you of him and have to stand up before you broke the machine with your bare hands. Other nights, you would dream of the workroom: maps, screens, his mouth on yours, the red rope around your wrists, his voice telling you that kissing him was a vow. You would wake in Haven with your throat raw and your hands empty, then go back to training because sleep had nothing useful left to offer you. The first rule you broke was small. So small it barely felt like a rule at all.

A closed municipal camera archive tied to an old Black Loom route had been sealed under investigation access. V told you to wait because the pathway was noisy and the account attached to it could lead back to one of the few honest people still inside the system. You waited six hours. Then you found another way in. V found you at the terminal just before dawn, three windows open, camera footage downloading into a protected drive. He said your name once. You did not look away from the screen. “I found the van.”

“That was not the instruction.”

“I found the van.”

“You also created a trail.”

“I killed it.”

“You think you killed it.” That made you look at him. V leaned down, closed one of the windows, reopened another, and showed you the footprint you had missed. Tiny. Nearly invisible. Enough. Shame and rage burned through you at once.

“If this had been Jin’s system,” he said, “you would have told him you were coming.”

Your fingers curled. He was not gentle when he removed your access for two days. You hated him for it. Then you learned. By the first-year mark, small rules had stopped satisfying you. You did not become reckless. That would have been easier for V to stop. You became deliberate.

You learned how to enter systems you had once submitted warrants to access. You learned how to move through CCTV networks the way Jungkook had once moved around your life, camera by camera, route by route, not to watch the innocent, but to find the guilty before they found you. You learned how to recover accounts, crack careless archives, map shell ownership, identify decoy structures, and pull on Black Loom threads that had been left behind by people who believed money made them invisible. You also learned what V had meant. This was not a skill you learned and stayed clean. The first time you breached a private server without permission and found proof tied to three missing women, you did not feel triumph. You felt the ground shift.

Not because you regretted finding it. Because you did not regret the breach. That was the burn. Not the crime itself. The justification that came after. The clean, cold voice inside you that said, I would do it again. And you did. Again. And again. You crossed lines that would have ended your legal career if you still had one. You moved through systems that could have put you in prison if someone caught the shape of you. You lied to institutions you had once respected. You stole information from criminals, officials, and men whose public reputations still shone beneath plaques and donations. You broke into cameras, doors, archives, accounts. You learned where Black Loom had hidden old money and newer bodies. You learned how much of the world stayed clean only because dirt was stored elsewhere. V watched you become dangerous with the grim resignation of a man who had predicted the wound and still hated seeing it scar.

“You are getting better,” he said one night.

You were sitting in the dark, face lit blue by the terminal, dressed in black cargo trousers and a fitted black top beneath an open jacket. Your hair was tied back. Your old jewellery was gone except for one small piece you still wore because it belonged to a version of you Jungkook had known.

“Is that a compliment?” you asked.

“It is a warning.” You looked at him. V leaned against the desk beside you. “You are starting to enjoy being good at it.” You turned back to the screen. “Good. I need to be.”

“That is not what I said.”

“No. But it is what matters.”

For a while, he said nothing. Then, quietly, “He would hate this.” Your hands stilled. Not because it was untrue. Because it was. Jungkook would hate the black clothes, the sleeplessness, the illegal access, the way your moral lines had blurred not because you stopped caring, but because you cared so much that clean hands began to feel useless. He would hate the calm with which you breached a camera feed. He would hate how well you had learned to think around corners. He would hate that you had learned it from his absence.

“He chose,” you said. V’s face softened with pity you did not want.

“Yes,” he said. “He did.”

You went back to work. You did not ask whether Jungkook was alive. Not often. V did not have answers he trusted. Sometimes a Black Loom operation failed in a way that felt too elegant to be coincidence. Sometimes a route connected to you went cold before Veni Vidi Vici touched it. Sometimes a threat you had not yet identified disappeared from the board as if someone had erased it from the other side. V never said Jungkook’s name when those things happened. He did not have to. You felt him anyway.

Jin’s deal had been too clever and too cruel. No messages. No calls. No ghost appearing on your screen with proof that he still existed somewhere beyond reach. Contact would cancel the agreement that kept you off Jin’s target list, and Jungkook, who loved like self-destruction was a language, would obey that term if it killed him slowly. So you learned to read absence as evidence. A route cleared before you touched it. A Black Loom account collapsing from the inside. A camera feed going dark at exactly the moment you needed it to. Jungkook was out there, working under Jin, wearing loyalty like a mask and hiding sabotage beneath obedience. He was protecting you without knowing what you had become to protect him. That was the tragedy’s symmetry. He haunted Jin’s world from inside. You haunted it from outside.

And neither of you could touch. By the end of the second year, people in the underground stopped looking at you like a lawyer who had wandered too far from court. They moved when you spoke. Not the way they moved for Jungkook. Jungkook was still a ghost story with a pulse, an absence large enough to command rooms he no longer entered. But you had become something else. A woman with a legal mind and hacker hands. Someone who understood which evidence could survive court and which truth had to be dragged through the dark before the court would ever see it. Someone who could read a contract, breach a shell company, dismantle a false timeline, and disappear from a camera grid before breakfast. You were not clean. You were not evil.

You were what remained when a lawful woman learned that law alone could not save the man she loved. Your public face had faded. Your name still meant something in legal circles, but less as a person and more as a cautionary silence. Some thought you had burned out. Some thought Black Loom had scared you off. Some thought grief had made you fragile. Let them. The less they understood, the longer you lived. Jin understood more than most. That was why, two years after Jungkook disappeared, the invitation came again. Not red wax this time. No need for theatre. A message through a broker who thought he was careful enough to survive both sides. A private contract request. Cyber/legal expertise. High-level advisory work. International exposure. Discretion required. Payment obscene. V read it over your shoulder.

“No,” he said.

You did not answer. He swore under his breath. “Absolutely not.” You read the message again. It was not signed by Jin. Of course not. But his fingerprints were everywhere: the wording, the layered route, the arrogance of assuming bait looked different when wrapped in professionalism.

“He knows,” you said.

“He suspects.”

“He knows enough.” V stepped in front of you. “This is not finding Jungkook. This is walking into Jin’s hand.” You looked up at him. Two years ago, that might have frightened you more. Now, it clarified things.

“Then we make sure he closes it around a blade.” V stared at you for a long moment.

“You sound like him,” he said. The words should have hurt. They did. They also made you lift your chin.

“No,” you said. “I sound like what he left behind.” V looked away. Neither of you spoke for a while. Then he said, “If you go in, you may not come back out the same.” You almost laughed. “V,” you said softly, “I did not come back out the same two years ago.”

The meeting was arranged in a private room high above the city. Not the same hotel. Not the same ballroom. Jin did not repeat stages unless repetition served him. This place was colder, sleeker, glass-walled on one side with Seoul spread beneath it like something owned. No chandeliers. No champagne. No old women in pearls. Just polished stone, black chairs, a long table, and security that looked visible enough to distract from the invisible kind. You wore black.

Not mourning exactly. Mourning had been what happened before you learned how to weaponize absence. This black was practical. Heavy boots. Loose dark trousers. A fitted top beneath a black jacket padded enough to hide shape and equipment. Your hair was tucked back. Your face calm. Your phone sat in your hand like a mirror, like anonymity, like every image of the woman you had become since Jungkook left. V waited three streets away with five operators and more systems than the building knew it had. Your boss did not know where you were. That was kinder. Security checked you badly. You let them.

The mistakes people made around women had become useful over the years. They checked for obvious weapons. They did not check properly for access. They looked at your face and saw calm, not threat. They looked at your history and saw lawyer, not ghost. They looked at your black clothes and saw grief, not training. The door opened. Jin stood by the window. He looked almost the same. That offended you. Some men should have had the decency to wear their rot visibly after time passed. Jin looked polished, handsome, composed, the kind of man who could step from custody into private power because custody had only ever been another room to negotiate from. His smile arrived slowly when he saw you.

“Welcome back” he said softly. You did not react to the phrase. You only looked at him.

“Jin.”

“Not Seokjin anymore?”

“No.”

His smile widened. “Fair.” You stepped inside. There were three other people in the room. A woman you did not know. Two men near the side wall. Security, but not only that. Operators, maybe. Or witnesses. People Jin wanted present for the shape of the moment. Then you saw the fourth. Jungkook stood half in shadow near the far end of the room. For one second, your body forgot the two years between you.

He was still dressed in black, but differently now. Cleaner. Colder. Less like the man in the warm old house and more like the ghost people had feared before you taught him how to be touched. His hair was longer at the front, falling slightly into his eyes. His face was thinner. Beautiful still. Painfully. But hollowed by restraint, by obedience worn like wire beneath the skin, by two years of surviving inside the life he had returned to so yours could remain untouched. Untouched. The word nearly made you smile. Jungkook looked at you. No one said your name. He knew you anyway.

You saw the recognition move through him like a wound reopening. Not in the dramatic way of widened eyes or a step forward. Jungkook was too controlled for that. It happened in the stillness. In the way his hand flexed once at his side. In the slight shift of his breathing. In the way his gaze moved over your black jacket, your boots, the equipment-hidden lines of your silhouette, your calm face, the woman standing where the lawyer he left behind should have been. He understood before Jin spoke. Of course he did. He had always been the first to see the danger. Jin turned slightly, watching Jungkook watch you. There was the reason. The real reason you had been invited. Not only your skills. Not only your legal mind. Not only cyber expertise bought through a private contract. Punishment. Jin wanted Jungkook to see the consequence of his sacrifice. He wanted him to understand that leaving had not preserved you in sunlight. It had not sent you back to courtrooms, coffee shops, silk blouses, polished arguments, and legal routes clean enough to sleep beside. It had not saved you from the dark. It had given you directions.

“Our new cyber/legal specialist,” Jin said, voice smooth with satisfaction. “I believe you two have overlapping interests.”

Jungkook did not look at him. He looked only at you. For two years, you had imagined this moment in too many forms. You had thought you might cry. You had thought you might hate him. You had thought you might run to him, strike him, forgive him, break him, beg him, save him. You had thought your heart would make the decision before your mind could stop it. But when the moment came, you did none of those things. You stood in the room Jin owned, wearing the darkness Jungkook had tried to keep from your skin, and held his gaze with a calm face.

You let him see you. All of you. The lawyer. The ghost. The wound. The consequence. The vow that had not died just because he had tried to bury it under protection. Jungkook’s mouth parted slightly, but no sound came. Maybe your name lived there. Maybe an apology. Maybe every word that had been forbidden for two years by a deal he had made with a monster who smiled at love like leverage. You did not make him choose one yet. You looked at Jin.

“I understand you need someone who knows the law well enough to break around it.”

Jin’s eyes lit with pleasure. Jungkook closed his. Just once. As if the sentence had gone through him. Jin gestured toward the table. “Please. Sit.” You walked forward. Not toward Jungkook. Not away from him either. Past him, close enough that the air changed, close enough that you caught the faintest trace of him beneath the colder room, beneath Jin, beneath two years of distance and silence and deals made in the dark. Summer. Still.

Your hand brushed the back of a chair. Jungkook’s gaze dropped to it.

For a moment, you thought of red rope around your wrists. His mouth on each mark after. The workroom. The vow. I have been staying for months, Jungkook. That was my vow to you. He had left anyway. So you had learned how to stay in a different shape. You sat at Jin’s table. You opened the black folder V had prepared. You smiled without warmth. And across the room, Jungkook finally understood the cruel arithmetic of what he had done. He had not saved the woman he loved from the dark. He had made the dark learn her name. Jungkook had left to save her from the dark. So she learned how to walk through it.

taglist: @rkive994 , @muniing , @lilyliu02 , @knhlotus, @thefireintheshadow

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