Youth Lover 1997 @youthguk - Tumblr Blog

royal armor | jjk(m) | one shot

You’re being married off for politics, so you do the one thing you’ve never been allowed to do: you choose Jungkook—your knight—for one last night before they take you away.

warnings: smut, political/arranged marriage (forced), explicit sexual content, unprotected sex, fingering, oral sex (receiving), praise/worship vibes, possessive language

a/n: his is a work of fiction: the characters and scenarios are entirely fictionalized and written for entertainment purposes only, with no intent to offend anyone

The palace breathes heat.

It lives in the stone itself, sun baked and honeyed, in curtains that never stop billowing, in courtyards where oranges split open on the branches like they cannot bear to hold their sweetness in. Even the air tastes golden. Warm bread, watered roses, the faint sharpness of oil on polished wood.

And still, everything feels as if it is being packed away.

Servants move softer than they used to. They do not laugh with their whole mouths anymore. Their voices fold into each other like cloth, hands always busy, eyes always lowered, as if sound could summon a blade. When you pass, they bow too quickly. When they rise, they do not meet you.

The guards change shifts more often.

It should be ordinary. It should be a routine, a machine that keeps the kingdom turning. Instead it is constant motion, boots in the corridors at hours that belong to sleep, new faces at the doors, older ones sent away with tight jaws and hands that keep drifting to their sword hilts. They look past you, through you, toward the north facing windows.

The North is not here, yet it is everywhere.

Your father is the clearest sign.

He used to look at you like you were a certainty. A jewel already set into the crown. Now, when you enter a room, his gaze skates around you and lands on a map, a messenger, a cup gone cold. He asks after your lessons, your prayers, your posture. Never your thoughts.

You catch him once in the hall outside the council chamber. The doors are half closed, light spilling out in a narrow blade. He pauses like he is going to say your name.

But he only says, “You should not wander alone.”

You smile because it is easier than admitting that alone is the one thing you have not been in years.

Jungkook is behind you, as he always is.

Not close enough for anyone to call it indulgent, but never far enough for you to forget him. The quiet weight of him follows like a second shadow. He does not speak unless spoken to, and even then his words are measured, as if language itself is a weapon he refuses to draw without need.

When the servants murmur his eyes sharpen, when the guards shift he counts, and when your father looks away Jungkook watches him.

It should make you feel safe. It does, in the way a locked door does.

You find the linen wrapped bundle in your chamber where you left it, tucked beneath a cushion like a secret. Simple dress. Plain scarf. Shoes that have tasted dust before. You dress quickly, hair pinned low, jewelry abandoned. You rub a smudge of charcoal along your brow, a freckle that is not yours.

When you turn, Jungkook is already there. He stands by the doorway, armor catching the light in hard edges. It makes him look carved from something unyielding.

His gaze drops to the scarf, then to your hands, then to the absence of a crown.

“No,” he says. The word is not loud. It does not need to be. It fills the room like a closing gate.

You lift your chin. “I was not asking.”

“It is not safe.” His voice stays even, but his jaw sets as if the sentence hurts.

“Nothing is safe,” you say, and tie the scarf tighter. “At least let me choose what kind of danger gets my name.”

His eyes flicker, the smallest betrayal. Something tired, something haunted.

“Your father will notice,” he says.

“He has been avoiding my face for days. I doubt he will discover it today.”

A breath passes through him, controlled, practiced. Like a blade sliding back into its sheath.

“Then I go with you,” he says.

“You always do,” you answer, softer than you mean.

The palace tries to hold you when you leave.

Corridors long as prayers. Tapestries heavy with wars you did not fight. Marble cool underfoot, even in the southern heat, even as your skin burns with the want of something unruled. The doors open, and for a moment the light outside is so bright it makes the world look clean.

You do not take the main gate.

You slip through a side passage that smells of herbs and old stone. Jungkook moves first, silent, listening. He has shed the gleam of his armor, replaced by plain clothes that do not know what to do with him. The shirt clings wrong to his shoulders. The belt sits too simple on his waist. His hair is loose, a shade darker in the sun, and it makes him look younger, more dangerous, as if the palace was the only thing keeping him civilized.

He still carries himself like a knight. It is in his spine, in the exactness of every step. In the way his eyes never stop moving. Outside, the market hits like a hymn.

Noise, first. Real noise. It does not whisper, it sings. Voices calling out prices, arguments spilling over like wine, children darting between stalls with sticky hands. The air is thick with spice and sweat and fruit, with hot oil popping in pans, with smoke curling from skewers, with a hundred lives pressing close.

Color spills everywhere you look. Cloth dyed in reds and blues that the palace would call vulgar. Baskets of pomegranates split open, seeds glistening like jewels that do not belong to any crown. Pots of honey catching light and turning it into something edible.

Your lungs fill, and your body remembers it belongs to you. You move without being announced, and the world does not rearrange itself around you.

No one bows, and no one drops their eyes. A woman brushes past your shoulder without apology, laughing as she bargains. A man hands his lover a ribbon with a grin that feels like sunlight. You want to drink it all.

You stop at a stall of carved trinkets, fingers hovering over a small wooden bird.

“If you touch it, you will buy it,” Jungkook murmurs behind you.

You glance back. “Does that sound like advice, or an order?”

His gaze is on the crowd, not you. “It sounds like the truth.”

“The truth is boring,” you say, and pick up the bird anyway.

The merchant beams. “For your sweetheart?”

You laugh before you can stop yourself. It bursts out of you, bright and startled, like a bell that has been silent too long. Jungkook goes still.

You see it in the corner of your eye. The way his hand tightens on the strap of the pouch at his side. The way his shoulders square as if he expects a threat to step out of your laughter.

“Not my sweetheart,” you say, still smiling. “Just a friend who hates joy.”

The merchant chuckles, and you hand over coins with a casualness you have never been allowed. You walk deeper into the market.

You try dried figs and pretend you cannot taste the palace on your tongue. You let a braid vendor press colorful thread into your palm. You stop to watch a performer spinning fire in the street, heat blooming against your cheeks, and you clap until your hands sting.

Jungkook stays close, careful in the way he always is.

He does not touch you, not once, not even by accident. Still, every time someone steps too near, he shifts without thinking and places his body between you and the world with the same instinct that draws breath.

“You are scowling,” you tell him.

“I am watching,” he replies.

“You could try watching with less judgment.”

His eyes cut to you then, sharp and dark. “You could try not making yourself a target.”

“I am not a target,” you say. “I am a person.”

He exhales, slow. “In here, you are both.”

You tilt your head. “Does it frighten you?”

“Yes,” he says, and the honesty lands like a hand around your wrist.

You blink at him. He looks away first, as if even that small confession is too much to hold. You stop near a stall selling citrus. The vendor slices an orange and offers a piece. You take it, juice running down your fingers, and you laugh again at the mess of it.

The sound turns heads. Then it turns back into the market, swallowed by a hundred other lives.

You lick the juice from your thumb and look over your shoulder, and you find Jungkook watching you.

His expression is controlled, like everything about him, but his eyes give him away. They hold something quiet and fatal, like a vow. Like your laughter is the only fragile thing in the world, and he was made with two hands solely to keep it from breaking.

“What?” you ask, still smiling.

His voice comes out low. “Nothing.”

With him, it is never nothing, not really. Still, for a moment under the bright chaos of the market, with your fingers sticky and your heart loud, you let yourself believe that it could be.

The summons finds you in your chamber. The words arrive carried on a servant’s breath, thin as thread and just as easy to strangle. There is no flourish, no explanation, only a bowed head and a hand held out with the seal pressed into wax as if proof could make it kinder.

Jungkook’s presence shifts at the threshold, a quiet rearranging of space. He does not ask why. He never does. He only falls into step when you move, the same way a shadow keeps faith with a body.

The palace corridors feel different on the way back from the market. The sun is still there, pooled in the stones, but it cannot find you. Light spills through arched windows and stops short of your skin, as if the air itself has decided you no longer deserve warmth.

Your father’s doors are open.

Inside, the council chamber is all high ceilings and polished table, a room built to swallow voices. The map on the far wall has new pins, bright as wounds. A brazier smolders in the corner, but the heat does not travel. It curls upward and dies under the vault like a prayer refused.

Your father does not rise when you enter.

He stands by the table, hands braced on either side of a parchment, looking down as if the ink might change its mind. When he lifts his gaze, it is not to you, not really. It is the gaze he gives messengers and ledgers, the things that arrive too late and still demand to be counted.

Jungkook steps behind you, just to the side. Close enough to hear. Close enough to be reminded of where he belongs.

“Sit,” your father says.

You do not. The chair is carved like a throne’s smaller sibling, its arms cold with old authority. You keep your hands at your sides instead, fingers curled into your skirt so you do not reach for anything you cannot have.

Your father’s eyes flick to the empty seat anyway, as if your refusal is a childish inconvenience.

“The Western king has agreed,” he says, and the sentence lands with the dull finality of a stone dropped into water. No ripple of negotiation. No space for question.

For a heartbeat, you only hear the faint crackle of the brazier and the soft drag of a quill somewhere beyond the chamber doors. The palace has a way of continuing even when it takes something from you.

“Agreed to what?” you ask, because your voice is trained to be useful, and usefulness is a kind of armor.

Your father’s mouth tightens, impatience pressed into the corners. “To you. To the marriage.”

Your lungs do not move right at first.

The word marriage is not new. It has been hovering over you since you learned to walk in embroidered shoes. It has been a whisper in lessons, a quiet threat tucked behind compliments. But to hear it said like this, plain and complete, makes the chamber tilt. As if the floor has remembered it was built over something hollow.

“The Western king is…” You stop before you can say old. Before you can say widowed. Before you can say anything that sounds like disgust instead of diplomacy.

“Older,” your father supplies without looking away from the parchment, as if reading from a list. “Experienced. Powerful. He has ships. He has coins. He has men who are not exhausted from watching the north horizon like frightened animals.”

He finally meets your eyes.

“And he is useful.”

Useful. The room feels colder for it, as if the word itself has pulled the warmth from the stone. You swallow. It scrapes.

“When?” you ask.

Your father’s gaze shifts past you, already reaching for the next step. “Soon. There is no reason to wait.”

Your throat tightens around the air you take in. You try to keep your face still. You have had years of practice at being still.

“I am your daughter,” you say, and the sentence is meant to sound like a reminder, not a plea. You are almost proud of how even it comes out.

Your father’s expression does not change. “And you are the South.”

It is spoken like a conclusion.

Something in your chest makes a small, ugly sound. Not a sob. Not yet. Just the first crack in a glass that has been held too carefully.

You look at Jungkook. He is standing exactly where he should be, hands clasped behind his back, posture perfect, face unreadable. His gaze is fixed somewhere over your father’s shoulder, on the map perhaps, on the pins, on anything that is not you. The line of his mouth does not shift. The dark of his lashes does not lift.

He does not look back. It hurts in a way you have no name for. You turn your eyes forward again before your father can catch what passed between you and nothing.

“Will I be allowed to speak with him?” you ask, because you cannot ask if you are allowed to breathe.

“You will meet when he arrives,” your father says. “You will be gracious. You will understand what is required.”

Required. Useful. Soon.

Each word is another layer of ice laid neatly over your skin.

Your voice tries to keep its shape. “And if I refuse?”

Your father’s brows draw together slightly, the way they do when a servant spills wine. “You will not,” he says.

The certainty is terrifying because it is a procedure.

Your mouth opens anyway, instinctive and stupid. “Father, I,”

The crack in your voice betrays you on the last breath, a faint break, like the edge of paper tearing where it was not meant to.

Your father’s eyes sharpen, not with sympathy, but with warning.

“Do not make this harder than it is,” he says. “I have done what must be done.”

Must. You feel it in your teeth.

There is nothing left to say that would not become a scene, and you were taught from childhood that scenes belong to peasants and poets, not princesses.

You nod once, slow, as if agreeing could keep you upright. Jungkook remains silent.

You do not trust yourself to look at him again.

Your feet carry you backward before you realize you have moved. The air in the chamber tastes of old smoke and ink, and you are suddenly afraid that if you breathe too deeply, you will start crying and never stop.

You dip your head to your father because your body knows how to obey even when your heart refuses.

Then you turn. The doors feel heavier on the way out. The corridor beyond is dimmer, cooler, as if the chamber has shut the sun out with you.

You walk, spine straight, hands calm at your sides, the picture of a daughter who has heard good news.

Behind you, Jungkook’s steps follow in steady rhythm.

He keeps just enough distance that no one could call it tenderness, and still stays near enough that you cannot forget him.

Night comes the way mercy never does, quietly, without asking permission, slipping cool fingers through the lattice windows and drawing the day’s heat out of the stones until the palace feels less like a hearth and more like a cage that has finally remembered to close.

Torches bloom along the corridors, their smoke sweet with resin, their light catching on gilded edges and painted saints and the polished mouths of statues that have watched generations of daughters learn how to smile when they are bleeding.

You cannot do it.

You cannot sit with the word useful on your tongue and pretend it tastes like duty.

You walk until your slippers scuff, until the hems of your gown carry dust from corners where no one thinks to look for a princess, and you keep your breath small because the moment it grows, the sound might become a sob and you refuse to give the palace that much of you.

Jungkook is on his post by the northern gallery, where the arched windows face the dark line of horizon like a wound that never closes, standing so still he could be mistaken for one of the carved guards along the walls, armor dark in the torchlight, hands folded behind his back, gaze forward, the picture of composure drawn in iron.

You hate him for it.

You hate the way he can look like this while your ribs are full of glass.

He does not turn when you approach, not at first, but you see the shift in him anyway, that subtle tightening in the shoulders, the minute adjustment of stance, the way his body recognizes you before his mind allows it, as if he has been trained to keep you alive even against his own will.

“My lady,” he says at last, the words low and correct, offered like the edge of a blade held safely toward himself.

You stop too close, close enough that the heat of him bleeds through the air between you, close enough that you can smell leather and steel and the faint trace of soap that never quite hides the human beneath the duty.

“Do not call me that,” you say, and your voice does not shake because something in you has gone past shaking, past pleading, into a kind of bright, terrible clarity.

His eyes flick to you, then away again, as if looking directly at you would be a mistake he cannot afford.

“Princess,” he tries instead, careful, dutiful, and you almost laugh because even the title feels like a shackle now.

“I am being sold,” you say, the words pressed out of you like a confession forced against your teeth, and you watch his throat move as he swallows, the only sign that the sentence struck home.

His jaw tightens. “Your father has arranged a marriage.”

“As if it is a trade agreement, as if I am a treaty with a pulse,” you say, and you hear your breath turn sharp, hear the scrape of it, and you step closer again because you want him to feel how little space you have left to lose.

He does not retreat, but his hands flex behind his back, fingers curling as if they are gripping an invisible hilt.

“It is not my place to speak of your father’s decisions,” he says.

“You always know how to find a place to stand when it keeps you away from me,” you answer, and the cruelty tastes foreign and sweet on your tongue, like stolen wine, and you hate yourself for it even as you keep drinking.

His gaze returns, quick and warning. “Do not.”

You tilt your head, watching the torchlight catch in his eyes, turning them almost molten for a heartbeat before the discipline settles back over them like frost. “Do not what, Jungkook.”

He breathes out, controlled, the sound measured like counting. “Do not say things you will regret.”

“I regret every day I have been obedient,” you say, and the words come faster now, because if you pause, you might feel the hurt properly and you might not survive it. “I regret smiling when men twice my age looked at me like a prize. I regret learning to dance when all I wanted was to run. I regret thinking, even for a moment, that I could be something other than what they need.”

He holds himself rigid, but there is a tremor in his restraint, a fine crack in stone.

You lift your chin, forcing him to look at you, forcing him to see the thing you are before the crown and after it. “I want one thing,” you say, softer, because softness can cut too, sometimes more cleanly than anger. “Just one thing that is mine.”

Silence gathers.

Somewhere far below, a door closes, a servant murmurs, the palace exhales, but up here the world narrows until it is only the two of you and the space between your mouths.

He speaks like someone reciting scripture. “You are a princess.”

“And you are my knight,” you whisper, and you watch his eyes flinch as if your words are a hand reaching for him.

His voice turns harder, like he is trying to forge it into a shield. “I am sworn to you.”

“Not for me,” you say, and you let the bitterness show because he deserves to see it, because you have carried it alone too long, “I know. I have heard it in every bowed head, in every ‘as you wish,’ in every step you take behind me that never becomes a step beside.”

He shifts, finally, one foot moving just enough to betray that he is human, that he is not made of armor, and his eyes lift to the windows beyond, to the darkness outside, to anything that is not your face.

“There are lines,” he says.

You laugh then, a small sound that is not joy and not quite hysteria, more like a crack in a bell. “Lines,” you repeat, tasting the word. “You have drawn them so neatly, haven’t you, like you are afraid the world will collapse if you let yourself move an inch toward me.”

He looks back, and the torchlight trembles, and for a heartbeat you see what lives under his composure, raw and starving.

“Stop,” he says, and the plea hides inside the order.

You do not.

You step into his space until the metal of his breastplate is almost brushing your bodice, until you can feel the heat trapped beneath the armor, until you can see the tiny scar at the edge of his lip that you once traced in your mind with a kind of reverence that felt like sin.

“Do you care,” you ask, and you keep your voice calm because calm is crueler, because calm suggests you already know the answer, “or am I only something you guard because you were told to.”

His nostrils flare.

The hallway seems to hold its breath.

“You know I care,” he says, and it comes out rougher than he intends, like something torn loose.

“I know nothing,” you say. “I know what you show me, and you show me steel.”

His laugh is a sound of pain, short and disbelieving. “Steel is what keeps you alive.”

“Steel is what keeps you away,” you whisper.

He goes still, so still the torchlight looks wrong on him, as if the flames have forgotten how to move.

When he speaks again, the words are quieter, and that is how you know something has changed, because his quiet is not composure anymore, it is surrender on the verge of breaking. “You do not understand what you are asking.”

“I understand enough,” you say. “I understand that in a matter of days I will belong to a man who does not know my favorite fruit, who will not recognize my voice in the dark, who will put his hands on me because the world says he is allowed.”

Jungkook’s jaw clenches so hard you hear the faint click of teeth.

You lean closer, and your breath ghosts over the edge of his armor, over the skin he keeps hidden. “I want one night,” you say. “One night that is mine. One night where I am not the South, not a treaty, not a jewel in a crown, just a person who gets to choose.”

His eyes shut for a second, as if the sentence is too bright to look at.

When he opens them, they are dark with something that is not duty.

“No,” he says, and the word shakes, and it is the first time you have ever heard him sound afraid of himself.

You take the opening like a thief. “Why,” you ask, and you let your fingers brush the edge of his gauntlet, a touch so small it could be dismissed as accident, except neither of you moves away from it.

He inhales, sharp. “Because it would ruin you.”

“Because it would ruin you,” you correct, and your voice is almost gentle now, like you are coaxing a wounded animal closer.

His gaze snaps to yours, furious. “You think I fear gossip.”

“I think you fear wanting,” you say.

For a long moment, he says nothing, and the silence between you becomes a third body, heavy and intimate.

Then, like a man who has been holding his breath underwater and finally has no choice, he speaks.

“You are the only thing,” he says, and the words come slow, unwilling, as if each one is dragged up from some deep place he swore to bury, “the only thing I have ever wanted.”

Your heart stutters, the sound of it louder than the torches.

He does not stop, as if stopping would kill him. “And you are the one thing I cannot have.”

The confession hangs there, shining and terrible.

You do not move.

You do not blink.

You let the tension sit where it belongs, between your mouths, between his oath and your ache, between the life you were promised and the life you would burn for.

When you finally speak, your voice is a whisper made of broken pride. “Then take it,” you say. “Take this night from the world that thinks it owns me, and let it be ours, even if only once.”

You watch his throat work, the hard swallow that always comes when he is choosing between obedience and you.

The torchlight trembles against the curve of his breastplate, turning him into a statue that learned how to breathe.

“You should not ask,” he says, and the words come out controlled, too smooth, like he has polished them for years.

“I am done being good,” you answer. Your palm finds the edge of his gauntlet. Leather. Metal. Warmth trapped beneath it. “Do you remember what you were when I found you.”

His eyes sharpen, then soften in the same blink, as if his body has already remembered while his mind tries to refuse.

“My lady.”

“Do not.” You lean closer until the air between you thins. “You were shaking. You tried to stand for my father anyway.”

His jaw flexes. A muscle jumps there, betraying him.

“You were a child,” he says.

“I was stubborn,” you murmur. “I told him you would die if he turned you out. I told him you would be loyal. I begged until my throat hurt.”

Silence pools at your feet.

Jungkook’s gaze slips to your fingers on his gauntlet, then to your face, then away again, like the act of looking is a sin he can feel in his bones.

“I did not deserve it,” he says.

“You did.” Your voice turns softer without your permission. “You knelt in the courtyard with blood on your mouth and dirt under your nails, and you swore you would protect me. You said it like it was the only thing keeping you alive.”

His breath catches, barely there.

“I meant it,” he says.

“I know.” Your thumb strokes the seam where metal meets leather. He does not pull back. He does not lean in. He simply goes very still, like a man waiting for the arrow he chose to stand in front of.

You lift your eyes. “You have protected me so well that you have never once let me have you.”

His gaze snaps to yours, dark and furious. “Do not twist it.”

“I am not twisting anything,” you whisper. “I am finally saying it straight.”

The torch pops. A distant door shuts. The palace breathes, heavy and watchful, but up here it cannot reach the small, trembling space between your mouths.

“I cannot run,” you say. The words scrape. “I cannot take you and vanish into a life where no one knows my name.”

His expression breaks for a heartbeat, something raw slipping through the cracks of discipline.

“You think I have not wanted to,” he says, low. “You think I have not stood on these same stones and imagined your hand in mine, sunlight on your hair, no crowns, no maps, no men deciding where you belong.”

Your eyes burn.

“Then stop deciding against me,” you say. “Just for tonight.”

His hand comes up, slow, and for a second you think he is going to stop you. Instead he cups your wrist, thumb pressing to your pulse, feeling the proof of you there.

“You are going to hate me tomorrow,” he whispers.

“I hate the world already,” you reply. “Do not ask me to hate you too.”

His lashes fall. When he lifts them again, the restraint in him looks like pain held in place by sheer will.

“This is the way things are,” he says.

“Then let me have one thing that is mine,” you say, and your voice shakes only once, like a single crack in glass. “I want you to be mine for a night. Not my knight. Not my shadow. Just you.”

He stares at you as if he is trying to memorize the shape of your face before he loses it.

“You are asking me to ruin you,” he says.

“I am asking you to let me live,” you answer.

His grip loosens, and then his hand slides to the buckle at his collar.

The sound is small, almost nothing. Leather giving way. A quiet surrender.

You watch his fingers work, precise and practiced, the same hands that tighten straps and fasten armor and hold swords steady. Tonight they undo him.

He draws the clasp free. He unthreads the strap. The breastplate shifts, heavy, reluctant.

When it comes away, he exhales like a man who has been trapped inside a prayer too long.

Torchlight spills over his throat, over the faint, angry lines where the armor has rubbed him raw. Skin you have never been allowed to see. A pulse beating there, unarmored.

He sets the breastplate against the wall with care, like laying down a part of himself.

“You should look away,” he murmurs.

“I will not,” you say.

His eyes lift, and there is something in them that makes your stomach turn, not with fear, but with want that has nowhere to go.

“You will tell me to stop,” he says.

“I will not,” you whisper.

His hand rises. It hovers near your cheek like he is waiting for permission from the air itself, then it settles against your skin.

Rough palm. Gentle pressure. A touch so careful it feels like he is handling a crown made of glass.

You lean into it, just enough to make him inhale.

His thumb drags along your jaw, and the movement is unbearably intimate, as if he is learning you in a way he will never be allowed to confess.

“Say it again,” he murmurs.

“I want this night,” you say. “I want you.”

Something in his face gives. He does not kiss you, not yet. Instead he rests his forehead against yours, a bare inch of contact that feels like falling.

“I have been good for you,” he whispers.

“And I have been good for everyone else,” you reply.

His breath warms your lips. “Tonight.”

“Tonight,” you echo.

He takes your hand, and you follow him away from the northern windows, away from the horizon that has been swallowing your life.

His armor stays behind, mute against the stone, and for the first time in years, Jungkook feels like a man you could touch.

The city does not sleep so much as it changes its mask.

Jungkook leads you through the servants’ passageways first, then out into alleys where the stones hold the day’s heat like a secret pressed against the tongue, and the air is thick with roasted nuts and crushed herbs underfoot, with laughter that belongs to people who have never been taught to swallow it, and you keep your scarf high over your mouth, not because you fear being seen but because you fear that if you breathe too freely the night will pour into you and there will be no room left for obedience.

He does not touch you in the open, not with hands that have been trained to be careful, but he stays close enough that the brush of his sleeve finds your wrist whenever the crowd narrows, and each accidental graze feels deliberate, like he is learning a new language and refuses to mispronounce you.

“Where are we going,” you ask, and you try to make it sound light, like a game, like the word going is not the same as leaving.

He glances back, eyes dark under the hood he has pulled low, and the torchlight catches on the angle of his cheek like a blade kissed by fire. “Somewhere you will not be addressed,” he says, and then, softer, as if he is ashamed of how much he wants to give you what you asked for, “Somewhere you will be looked at like a person and not a promise.”

You swallow, and the sound is small, but he hears it anyway.

The door to the club is hidden behind a spice merchant’s stall, tucked between sacks of saffron and dried citrus, and when the keeper sees Jungkook’s coin he bows not with reverence but with complicity, which feels worse and better at once, and you are ushered through a curtain so heavy with perfume it makes your head swim, into a corridor lit by lanterns covered in red silk, where the shadows turn everyone’s faces into guesses.

A woman appears with a tray of masks, carved and lacquered, some gilded, some painted with saints that no longer look holy, and Jungkook chooses for you with the same steadiness he chooses where you step, lifting a pale one that curves over your eyes like a second skin, its surface smooth as bone.

“For you,” he murmurs.

“And for you,” you say, and you take a black mask shaped like a raven’s beak, not because it suits him but because it makes him look like someone who could steal a princess and not apologize.

His fingers pause when you tie it behind his head, your knuckles brushing the warm line of his neck, and for a moment the corridor is too narrow to hold the way his breath changes.

“You are reckless,” he says, but it comes out like admiration dressed as warning.

“I am free,” you correct, and the word tastes like forbidden fruit.

Inside, the room is all velvet and smoke, a low ceiling painted with constellations that do not match the real sky, chandeliers dripping wax like slow tears, and bodies pressed close in silk and brocade, laughing behind masks as if anonymity has turned sin into sport; noblemen with rings heavy enough to bruise, ladies with pearls threaded into their hair, merchants pretending they are lords, lords pretending they are men without names, and the music is a soft, relentless pulse of drums and plucked strings that makes your heartbeat feel like it has been choreographed.

No one bows to you. The relief is sharp enough to hurt.

Jungkook’s hand finds the small of your back, not flat, not possessive, only the lightest pressure, guiding you through the crowd, and you feel every inch of the space he does not cross, every rule he has broken and every rule he still keeps, and it makes you want to laugh and cry and bite at the same time.

“Is this what you meant,” you ask, leaning close so your words slip under the edge of his mask, “When you said somewhere I would not be addressed.”

His thumb shifts, a slow stroke along the seam of your dress, and you go still because the touch is so intimate it might as well be a kiss. “No one will call you princess here,” he says. “They will call you beautiful, if they are bold, and they will call you cruel, if they are foolish.”

“And what will you call me,” you whisper.

His silence is an answer he is afraid to say out loud.

He leads you to a private alcove screened by gauze, where cushions are piled like offerings and a small table holds a decanter of dark wine that smells of cherries and something bitter, and when you sit, the fabric sighs around you, and Jungkook sits only after you do, only after he has scanned the room the way he always does, counting exits, measuring threats, as if even this night you begged for has to be guarded.

You tip your head, watching him from behind your mask. “Do you know how strange it is,” you say, “To see you dressed like this.”

He looks down at himself, at the plain black tunic, at the absence of armor, at the way the mask makes him less a knight and more a man with dangerous intentions. “Strange,” he repeats, and there is a roughness in his voice now, like he is fighting a smile. “I feel undressed.”

“You are,” you say, and you let the words linger, let them mean more than cloth.

The show begins without announcement.

The lanterns dim, and the platform at the center of the room blooms with candlelight, and the performers appear as if conjured, bodies draped in translucent veils, bellies adorned with chains of coins that sing with every movement, wrists circled with bangles that flash like captured suns, and they dance not like court ladies taught to be modest but like storms taught to be worshipped, hips rolling in slow crescents, shoulders undulating like water, veils slipping to reveal skin painted with gold leaf that catches the light and makes flesh look like treasure.

Men lean forward. Women lean forward too. The air fills with the sound of wanting.

You watch, fascinated, not because the dancers are obscene but because they are fearless, because they take up space like they were born entitled to it, because they do not apologize for being seen.

You feel Jungkook shift beside you.

You turn, expecting him to be watching the stage, expecting discipline, expecting the old rules to return like a hand around your throat.

He is looking at you. The weight of his gaze is a touch you cannot hide from.

“What are you doing,” you ask, and your voice is light on the surface because you are terrified of how heavy it is underneath.

His eyes do not move. “I am watching,” he says.

“You said you were watching earlier,” you whisper. “In the market.”

His mouth tightens, and you can see the shape of it even under the mask, the way he tries to hold back something that would ruin both of you. “That was duty,” he says, and the words sound like an accusation he makes against himself.

“And now,” you press, because you have been starving for truth your whole life.

His breath comes in slow, as if he is counting it. “Now I am trying to remember,” he says.

“Remember what.”

“How you look when you are not being taken from,” he answers, and the sentence slips out before he can stop it, raw and exposed.

Your throat tightens.

On the stage, a dancer arches backward, veil falling away like surrender, and the room hums with approval, but you can barely hear it over the sound of your own pulse.

Jungkook leans closer, close enough that you feel his heat through the thin layers of borrowed cloth, and he speaks into the space between you like a confession. “Is it not good,” he murmurs, “How we wear this and we can be anyone.”

You laugh, quiet and sharp, and it is not because it is funny, it is because the ache in your chest has no other way out. “Anyone,” you echo. “Do you believe that.”

His gaze flickers for the first time, a crack in his composure, and you see how tired he is of believing in anything. “For a few hours,” he says, and the honesty makes your eyes burn, “I want to.”

You lift your hand to his mask, fingertips tracing the edge of it, the curve over his cheekbone, and he goes very still, like your touch is a blade pressed under his ribs.

“I wish it was that easy,” you whisper.

His voice drops lower. “Tell me what would make it easier.”

You could say a kingdom without war, a father without a map for a heart, a wedding that is not a sentence, but you are too close to him, too close to tonight, and the only truth that matters is the one trembling between your fingers.

“You,” you say.

He exhales like he has been struck.

Your hand lowers, and you pretend you did not say it, because you do not know how to survive the look he gives you in response, the way his eyes darken with something possessive and doomed, something that wants to step over every line he has ever drawn and drag you into a life where masks are unnecessary.

On the stage, the dancers spin, coins singing, veils flaring like wings, and the noblemen cheer, hungry and careless, but you sit in the shadowed alcove and realize the show is happening somewhere else entirely.

Jungkook’s knee brushes yours under the table.

Not an accident.

A promise made in the only language he has ever been allowed to speak.

A masked lord across the room laughs loudly at a joke you cannot hear, his hand sliding over the waist of a lady who does not pull away, and the normalness of it is obscene, how easy it is for them to touch without consequence, how the world was built to forgive their appetites.

Your fingers curl around your cup, wine staining your lips like sin.

Jungkook watches you drink as if it is sacrament.

“You are not looking,” you accuse, nodding toward the stage, and you try to sound teasing, as if you are not shaking inside.

His answer is immediate. “I cannot.”

“Because it is improper,” you murmur, and you already know that is not it.

“Because if I look at them,” he says, and his voice turns rough, “I will remember that men can watch a woman and think she is theirs for the price of a ticket, and I will want to kill everyone who has ever looked at you that way.”

Your breath catches.

“You sound jealous,” you say, and you hate yourself for how much you want him to be.

His laugh is quiet, broken. “I sound honest.”

The words settle over you like a cloak.

Outside this room, you are a treaty, a crown, a bargaining chip wrapped in silk, but here, under masks and candlelight, with music vibrating through your bones, he looks at you like you are something that could be chosen, something that could be wanted for no other reason than the fact of you.

You lean closer, your knee pressing against his now, and you let your voice turn soft. “Then choose me,” you whisper. “Just for tonight.”

His hand slides under the table, slow as prayer, and his fingers close around yours, warm and rough, the grasp of a man who has held a sword his whole life and is learning, finally, how to hold something delicate.

“Tonight,” he says, and it is not a promise, it is a surrender.

When the dancers finish, the room erupts into applause, coins tossed like blessings, the noble crowd roaring behind their masks, but you do not clap, you do not move, you only sit with Jungkook’s fingers threaded through yours and the dangerous knowledge that he has not watched the stage even once, not really, because the only performance he has ever cared about is the way you breathe when you remember you are alive.

The walk back tastes like consequence.

The streets thin out as if the city itself is sobering up, laughter muffled behind doors, lanternlight turning quieter, and Jungkook keeps you in the pocket of his body where shadows cling, one step ahead when the alley narrows, one step behind when the road opens, never quite beside, as if standing equal would be the most dangerous sin of all.

Your mask scratches at the bridge of your nose, the ribbon damp with sweat and perfume, and when you lift a hand to untie it he catches your wrist, not hard, not commanding, just sudden, like instinct.

“Not yet,” he murmurs.

You tilt your head. “Afraid I will disappear the moment you see me.”

His breath hitches, and you feel it before you hear it, warm against the scarf at your mouth. “Afraid I will forget why I should let you go.”

The words follow you all the way to the servants’ passage, where stone swallows sound and the palace smells like polished wood and cooled incense, where every step you take is a step back into a life that was never yours, and still, your fingers are threaded with his under the cover of darkness, the only thing in the world that does not belong to your father’s maps.

He stops you at a bend in the corridor, where a narrow window cuts the night into a thin strip of moonlight, and for a moment you are both only silhouettes, two people with borrowed faces, breathing too loudly for a place built on obedience.

“You should go to your chambers,” he says, the sentence shaped like duty, but his thumb keeps moving over your knuckles in slow, absent circles, betraying him with every pass.

“And you should escort me,” you reply, and your voice is steady even as your pulse climbs, even as you lean in just enough to make his shoulders go rigid.

His gaze lifts to the ceiling, as if the saints painted there might offer him mercy. “Do not make me choose.”

“I did not,” you whisper. “They did. I am only asking you to stop pretending you are not already drowning.”

His jaw tightens, the same hard line you have watched for years, except tonight it fractures at the edge, and when he looks back at you there is no raven’s beak to hide behind anymore, only a man who has been holding his own heart at sword point.

“I can walk you to the door,” he says.

You smile behind your scarf. “How generous.”

He exhales, sharp, and guides you through the last passageway, past sleeping kitchens and linen closets that smell like soap and sun, until the hallway outside your chamber opens around you, rich with tapestry and quiet, the kind of quiet that listens.

Your door is there, an ordinary thing that has never once meant privacy.

Jungkook’s hand drops from yours as if it burns.

“You will regret this,” he says.

You step closer anyway, close enough that the moonlight finds the curve of his mouth, close enough that you can see the faint line where the mask had pressed into his skin, proof that he had let himself be someone else for a few hours.

“I regret nothing that was mine,” you answer.

His eyes lower to your lips, then snap away like the motion pains him. “You will belong to him.”

“Tomorrow,” you say, and you make it sound like a lie. “Not tonight.”

He stays silent, and the silence is his last defense.

So you reach up, slow, and untie your mask ribbon with your own fingers, letting it slip free and fall into your palm, and when you look at him with your full face bared he looks like he has been struck, like seeing you without lacquer and disguise is worse than any blade.

“Look at me,” you say softly.

He does.

It is not the way men look at jewels, at crowns, at treaties; it is the way a starving man looks at bread with blood on his hands, reverent and furious that it exists at all.

“Please,” you add, and you hate that the word is small, that it is human, that it is the only thing you have left.

His throat works. “I cannot.”

“You can,” you whisper. “You already did, the moment you took my hand under that table.”

For a heartbeat, he does not move.

Then he steps forward, so close the air changes, so close your breath catches on the hard plane of his chest, and his hand rises, hovering, hesitating, like a prayer that cannot decide whether to be spoken.

“This is wrong,” he says, and his voice is rough enough to scrape.

You lift your chin. “So is selling daughters to buy peace.”

The words land, and something in him shudders.

He presses his palm to the wall beside your head instead of to you, the stone catching the weight of him, and he leans in until his forehead nearly brushes yours, until you can feel how tightly he is holding himself together.

“If I cross that line,” he whispers, “there is no going back.”

You let your fingers find his wrist, the pulse there frantic and alive. “Then do not go back,” you whisper. “Just stay here with me, in this moment, where you are only a man and I am only a girl who wants to be touched like she is not about to be taken.”

His breath breaks.

He turns his face slightly, and his mouth brushes the corner of your jaw, barely there, the softest theft, and your whole body reacts like it has been waiting years for a single permission.

“Say stop,” he murmurs against your skin.

You pull him closer by the sleeve. “If you ask me to stop, I will lie.”

A sound leaves him that is almost a laugh and almost a groan, and then his mouth finds yours properly, finally, not careful now, not polite, and you taste wine and cherries and the salt of the night, and the kiss is not gentle so much as desperate, two people grabbing at the last unruined piece of themselves.

His hands are everywhere and nowhere, stopping short of what he thinks will condemn you, trembling at your waist, at your neck, at the ribbon of your scarf, and you guide them, patient and merciless, placing him where you need him until his restraint frays into something raw.

He pulls back only to breathe, lips swollen, eyes dark like a storm gathered behind the palace windows. “You should be,”

“Do not,” you cut in, pressing a finger to his mouth. “Do not speak of husbands when you are kissing me like this.”

His lashes fall, and when they lift again there is pain in them, sharp and bright. He whispers your name like it hurts. You open the door.

The chamber welcomes you with familiar scents, warm linen, rosewater, the faint metallic trace of the palace that clings to everything, and you expect him to stop at the threshold because that is where a knight belongs, guarding, denying, surviving.

Instead he follows you in. The door closes with a sound too soft to be forgiveness.

For a moment you simply stand, the silence thick, your breath loud in your ears, and Jungkook looks as if he is hearing it too, as if every inhale is another nail driven into the coffin of his oath.

He does not touch you first. He goes to the chair by the wall and sits as if he is bracing for battle, hands clenched, gaze fixed on the floor, the tension in him almost violent.

“You do not have to,” he says, and the words are meant to be noble, meant to be a door he holds open for you.

You walk to him anyway, slow, letting your skirt whisper against the rugs.

“I do,” you reply. “Because they will take everything else from me, and I refuse to let them take this too.”

His eyes lift, and in them you see the war you have never been allowed to fight, the war that has been living behind his ribs since he was a starving boy kneeling in your father’s courtyard.

“Come here,” you whisper.

He does not move.

So you sink to your knees in front of him, the gesture shocking in its intimacy, in its absence of rank, and his hands twitch as if to pull you up, as if to stop you from making yourself smaller.

“I am not kneeling for a knight,” you tell him softly, tilting your head until he has no choice but to meet your eyes. “I am kneeling for you.”

His breath turns uneven, a ragged hitch that betrays the storm raging within him. His dark eyes, usually so steady and watchful, flicker with a mix of longing and torment.

“You do not know what you are doing,” he says, his voice low and gravelly, laced with the rough edge of restraint.

“I know exactly what I am doing,” you answer, and your fingers slide to the buckles at his collar, the same ones you watched him undo under torchlight on nights when duty kept him close to your side. He flinches as if each touch is a strike, his body responding before his mind can catch up.

He catches your wrists, his calloused palms warm and firm against your skin. Not to stop you, not really. Just to hold on, as if anchoring himself to this moment before it slips away.

“If I ruin you,” he whispers, his words brushing against your ear like a confession in the confessional alcove of the chapel, “I will never forgive myself.”

You lean in until your lips brush his knuckles, tasting the salt of his skin from hours spent training in the courtyard. “If you do not,” you whisper back, your voice steady despite the fire building in your core, “I will never forgive you.”

The sentence breaks him. His grip loosens, slow as surrender, and you undo him piece by piece. Leather straps fall away like the rules he has lived inside for years, clinking softly against the rushes on the floor. You lift his tunic over his head with careful hands, the fabric catching briefly on his muscled frame, revealing the hard planes of his chest dusted with dark hair.

When your fingers graze the scars on his ribs, thin pale lines like old lightning from battles fought in your name, he inhales sharply. You see in that breath every night he stood between you and danger without ever asking to be healed, his body a map of sacrifices made in silence.

You press a kiss to one scar, your lips lingering on the raised tissue, feeling the heat of him beneath. Then another, tracing the path with your mouth, your tongue flicking out to taste the faint bitterness of old wounds.

His hand comes to the back of your neck, trembling slightly, fingers threading into your hair as he pulls you up into his lap. He settles you astride him on the edge of the bed, his thighs solid and unyielding beneath you, as if he cannot stand the distance anymore, as if he needs you close enough to prove you are real and not some fevered dream from lonely vigils.

“Tell me,” he says, voice broken against your mouth, his lips hovering just inches from yours, “tell me this is what you want.”

You reach for the laces of your gown, fingers clumsy with urgency, the silk ties slipping through your grasp. He catches them, doing it for you with a precision that is almost cruel, untying knots as if he has been imagining this for years and hating himself for it. The fabric falls away from your shoulders, pooling at your waist, exposing the swell of your breasts to the cool air of the chamber. His gaze turns fierce, protective, devastated, drinking in the sight of your bare skin glowing in the candlelight.

“You,” you whisper, and you guide his hand to your skin, to the warmth of you, to the place where your heart is trying to escape through your chest. “This is what I want.”

His palm spreads over your chest, careful and reverent, cupping one breast fully, his thumb circling your nipple until it hardens under his touch. He closes his eyes like he cannot bear how much he is taking, his breath coming in shallow bursts against your collarbone.

“Look at me,” you say, your voice a soft command that carries the weight of your royal blood.

He does, and the moment he does you know he is lost. His eyes lock onto yours, dark and intense, filled with a hunger that mirrors your own.

He lifts you effortlessly, his arms wrapping around your waist as he carries you to the bed, the four,poster frame draped in heavy velvet curtains that sway gently. He sets you down like you are sacred, the feather mattress dipping under your weight, and then he hovers above you, breath shaking, hands planted beside your head on the linens. The picture of restraint turned into agony, his muscles taut, veins standing out on his forearms.

“You should hate me,” he whispers, his forehead nearly touching yours, the scent of leather and sweat clinging to him.

“I will hate everyone but you,” you reply, and you pull him down, your hands fisting in his hair to bring his mouth to yours.

Your lips meet in a kiss that starts soft, exploratory, his tongue tracing the seam of your mouth until you part for him. He deepens it slowly, tasting you with a thoroughness that makes your toes curl into the sheets, his body pressing down to cover yours. The night unfolds slow and urgent at once, a forbidden dance in the heart of the castle, every touch laced with the devotion of a man who has guarded your life with his own.

His mouth leaves yours to trail kisses along your jaw, down the column of your throat, nipping gently at the pulse point that flutters wildly. “My lady,” he murmurs against your skin, voice thick with need, “I have dreamed of this, of worshiping you as you deserve.” You arch into him, your hands roaming over his back, feeling the ridges of scars and the flex of muscles honed by sword and shield. He moves lower, his lips closing around one nipple, sucking with a gentle pull that sends sparks straight to your core. You gasp, fingers tightening in his hair, urging him on as he lavishes attention on your breasts, licking and sucking until they glisten in the low light, his tongue swirling over the sensitive peaks with fervent care.

“Jungkook,” you breathe, the sound of his name a prayer on your lips, pulling him closer as emotion swells in your chest, a fierce love that defies the chains of rank and duty.

He lifts his head, eyes burning into yours, and whispers, “I am yours, always yours, even if it damns me.” His hand slides down your side, tracing the curve of your hip, pushing the remnants of your gown aside until you lie bare before him. His fingers find the heat between your thighs, parting them with care, and he strokes your folds slowly, discovering the slickness there. You moan softly, hips lifting to meet his touch, and he circles your clit with his thumb, pressing just enough to make you tremble, his gaze never wavering, filled with a devotion that makes your heart ache.

“Please,” you breathe, the word slipping out like a plea from the royal lips that command armies, your body yearning for the union that will bind you eternally.

He watches your face as he slides one finger inside you, then two, curling them to stroke that sensitive spot deep within. Your walls clench around him, pulling him deeper, and he pumps them steadily, his thumb continuing its rhythm on your clit. “You feel like heaven,” he confesses, voice rough with passion, leaning down to capture your lips again in a searing kiss that speaks of years of unspoken longing. The sensation builds gradually, a warm coil tightening in your belly, your breaths coming faster as he works you with patient precision, his free hand cradling your face, thumb brushing away a tear of overwhelming emotion.

“I need you inside me,” you whisper against his mouth, your voice trembling with the depth of your desire, the love that has grown in stolen glances and silent vows.

When you are on the edge, he withdraws his fingers, and you whimper at the loss. He shifts, shedding the last of his breeches, his cock springing free, thick and hard, the tip already weeping with need. He positions himself between your legs, rubbing the head along your slit, coating himself in your arousal before pressing forward. “I love you,” he says, the words a sacred oath as he enters you inch by inch, stretching you with a fullness that borders on ache, his eyes never leaving yours, brimming with fierce protectiveness and unyielding devotion.

You wrap your legs around his waist, pulling him closer, and he bottoms out with a low groan, burying himself to the hilt. For a moment, he stills, letting you adjust, his forehead resting against yours, breaths mingling in the intimate space. “You are my everything,” he murmurs, voice laced with raw emotion, his hands framing your face as if you are the most precious treasure in the realm.

Then he begins to move, slow thrusts that drag against your inner walls, building friction with each slide. You meet him halfway, hips rolling up to take him deeper, your nails digging into his shoulders. “I love you too,” you reply, the confession spilling from you like a river breaking free, your bodies moving in perfect harmony, passion igniting every nerve.

His pace quickens gradually, urgent now, the bed creaking softly under the rhythm of your bodies. It is whispered names and bitten back sounds, his mouth learning every place you have never been allowed to be kissed. He suckles at your neck, leaving faint marks that will hide under high collars, his hips snapping forward as he drives into you, cock filling your pussy completely with each powerful stroke. “Mine,” he growls softly, the word vibrating through you, a declaration of possession born from devotion rather than dominance.

Your fingers tangle in his hair, tugging until he lets out a sound that does not belong to a knight, a raw growl that vibrates through his chest into yours, his thrusts growing more fervent, each one a testament to the love he has harbored in silence. The sting of tears you refuse to shed anywhere but into his shoulder builds as pleasure mounts, your body coiling tighter, emotion crashing over you like waves on the shore.

“Jungkook, yes,” you cry out, your voice breaking with the intensity of it all, the devotion in his eyes mirroring the fire in your soul as he shifts his angle, hitting that spot inside you with each thrust.

He reaches between you, fingers finding your clit again, rubbing in firm circles as he fucks you harder, deeper, his breath ragged against your ear. “Come for me, my love,” he urges, voice thick with passion and adoration, his body trembling with the effort to hold back his own release until you find yours.

The dual sensations push you over, your orgasm crashing through you in waves, your pussy clenching around his cock, milking him as you shatter beneath him, tears slipping free to wet his skin. It is not delicate. It is not courtly, but raw and radiant, and wholly, fiercely yours, a union sealed in sweat and sighs and unbreakable vows.

Your release triggers his, and he follows with a guttural moan, thrusting erratically as he spills inside you, hot pulses filling you completely, his body shuddering with the force of his climax.

“Forever,” he gasps, collapsing onto you, careful not to crush, his weight a comforting shield, his lips pressing fervent kisses to your temple.

After, the chamber smells like heat and skin and ruined perfume, the candles burned low, casting long shadows across the bed.

Jungkook lies beside you as if he is afraid to move, one arm around your waist, his forehead pressed to your temple, breathing you in like he is trying to store you somewhere the world cannot reach. You turn into him, tracing lazy patterns on his chest, the aftershocks of pleasure still humming through your veins, your heart full with the depth of your shared devotion.

In the quiet, with the first hints of dawn creeping through the arrow,slit windows, he presses a kiss to your hair.

“My princess,” he murmurs, voice thick with emotion, his hand stroking your back in soothing circles, a silent promise to cherish this bond above all else.

You smile against his skin, content in this stolen moment, knowing the castle will awaken soon, but for now, you are his, and he is yours, bound in ways no oath or crown can sever.

Outside the chamber, the palace shifts in its sleep, and the sounds carry through the stone as if the walls themselves are listening, with distant footsteps pacing the corridors, a low murmur of guards changing posts, and the steady heartbeat of duty returning to claim what it has always claimed.

“I have to go,” he says eventually, and the words are so quiet they feel like a confession spoken into linen.

You do not answer him, because you know that if you let your voice exist in this moment, it will turn into a plea and you will not be able to stop it.

He leans down and kisses your shoulder with a tenderness that trembles, and you feel the salt of him there, not the salt of sweat or heat, but something closer to grief that has been held back until it finally finds a way out.

“Say something,” he whispers, as if any sound from you could make this feel less like a leaving.

You turn your face toward him, your eyes burning in the dark, and the question comes out steady only because you force it to. “Promise me you will still be alive tomorrow.”

His throat works as if the truth is lodged there, and you can hear the lie taking shape before he lets it go.

“I will,” he says, and the promise lands with a weight you cannot afford to measure.

You nod as if you believe him, because pretending is another kind of armor, and it is the only one you have left that does not draw blood.

He dresses in silence, and each strap is fastened with the same ruthless precision he uses for battle, with every buckle clicked into place like a door closing, until the breastplate settles over his chest again and you want to tear it away with your bare hands, because you have seen what is under it now and you cannot return to the lie that he is only steel.

At the threshold he pauses, and he does not look back right away, as if turning his head will break whatever fragile resolve is keeping him upright.

Then he finally does, and his eyes meet yours across the room with a pain so exposed it feels almost obscene, like a wound left uncovered in sunlight.

“Forgive me,” he whispers, and the words are jagged with everything he cannot say aloud.

For what, exactly, for choosing you, for condemning himself, and for giving you one night where you were wanted without permission and without apology?

You swallow the scream that rises in your throat and lift your chin, because you are still a princess even in the ashes of yourself, even when your heart is begging you to undo every lesson you have ever learned.

“Go,” you say softly, and you make it sound like an order because that is the only way you can survive it. “Before I stop you.”

He leaves, and the door clicks shut with a sound that is far too small to hold the size of what it ends.

You lie there in the wreck of warm sheets, listening to his footsteps fade back into corridors that belong to your father, to the kingdom, and to the war creeping closer with every hour, and you press your palm to the place on your waist where his hand had been, as if you can keep the imprint of him there long enough to survive the morning.

Morning does not arrive like a blessing, it arrives like a hand prying you open, pale light threading through the lattice and landing on your skin in thin, accusing stripes, and for a moment you lie still and let your body pretend it is only tired, let it pretend the warmth between your thighs is only leftover heat from sleep, let it pretend the shape of his mouth on your shoulder is just a dream you were allowed to keep.

Then the palace begins to wake, and the illusion fractures.

Somewhere beyond your door, footsteps pass with the unhurried rhythm of routine, the same rhythm that has always soothed you, except today it feels rehearsed, too even, as if everyone is careful not to disturb something they already know is broken, and you sit up and pull the sheet higher because the room suddenly feels too large for one person, because his absence is a second body on the bed, heavier than his weight ever was.

Jungkook should be outside.

He should be where he always is, a shadow shaped like devotion, the quiet certainty at your door that makes the world seem smaller and safer, and the thought settles in you with the sharpness of a pin, because he promised, and you hate yourself for believing a promise made in the dark.

You swing your legs over the side of the bed and stand, the stone cold under your feet, and you walk to the window with the kind of carefulness you reserve for things that can shatter, pushing the curtain aside just enough to look down into the corridor that leads to the northern gallery, to the place where he posts himself like penance.

The space is empty.

Not empty in the way rooms are empty when people are simply elsewhere, but empty in the way a shrine looks when someone has stolen the idol, and the torch brackets on the wall seem wrong without him near them, their soot marks like bruises, their iron mouths open as if they are waiting to speak his name.

Your breath catches, and you try again, you look farther down, you search for the familiar line of armor, the controlled stillness, the small, unconscious angle of his head when he is listening, and you find only stone and tapestry and a pair of younger guards pretending they are not watching your door.

You pull the curtain back, too fast, and the fabric snaps softly, a sound like a reprimand.

You tell yourself it is nothing, that he was called away, that a shift changed, that the palace is restless and he is only one man, and still your chest tightens until it hurts.

You open the door.

The corridor greets you with cool air that smells faintly of smoke and old flowers, and a servant freezes at the far end with a tray in their hands, eyes dropping instantly as if they have been trained to fear your gaze, and you step out anyway, because you cannot stay inside the room where his absence echoes off every wall.

The two guards you saw by the window straighten, their posture snapping into place, and neither of them meets your eyes.

“Where is he,” you ask, and you keep your voice level because you have spent your whole life learning how to sound calm while something inside you claws.

Silence answers first.

One guard swallows, throat working, and you notice how damp his hairline is, how his fingers keep flexing at his side as if he wants to reach for a sword that is not there.

“Princess,” he says, and the title feels wrong in his mouth, too careful, too clean.

You take a step closer, and the hem of your nightgown brushes the stone, and you hate that you are barefoot, hate that you are soft when you need to be sharp.

“Do not say my title as if it will protect you,” you say quietly, and the words are dangerous because they sound like your father, and you almost bite your tongue to keep from saying more.

The other guard looks away, gaze fixed on the tapestry behind you as if the threads might offer an escape, and something cold spreads through you, slow as ink in water.

“Where is Jungkook,” you repeat, and this time his name is not a question, it is an insistence.

The first guard’s eyes flick to the second, then back to the floor, and you understand without being told, you understand the way you always understand what the palace refuses to say, because you were raised inside its silences.

Your throat tightens until it feels like you are swallowing glass.

“You are not answering me,” you whisper, and the whisper makes it worse, because it is small, because it is human, because it is the voice you used with him last night when you begged.

A servant appears at the corner with a cloth bundle, pauses when they see you, then turns too quickly and disappears as if they have been ordered not to be seen near you, and the movement snaps something in you, because it is not just his absence now, it is the way everyone else has been instructed to pretend they do not know what you are asking.

Your heart begins to pound, hard enough that you feel it in your teeth.

“Answer me,” you say, and your voice rises without permission, scraping against the corridor stones, and the guards flinch as if you have struck them.

Still they say nothing.

The silence becomes unbearable, a weight pressing down on your ribs, and when it breaks it is with your own sound, sharp and sudden, not a sob, not quite, but something ripped out of you, something that does not belong to etiquette or diplomacy, something that belongs to a girl who found a starving boy and thought kindness could keep him safe.

“What did you do to him,” you hear yourself ask, and the words are wild, wrong, treasonous, and you do not care, because your body is already moving, feet slapping against the stone as you push past them, because you cannot stand in a hallway and be lied to by omission.

A hand reaches out, hesitant, stops short of touching you.

“Princess,” one of them says again, and the plea is softer now, and that softness terrifies you more than any threat.

You turn on them, hair loose, breath ragged, and your voice cracks with fury you have never been allowed to carry in public. “Do not speak to me like I am a child who misplaced a ribbon,” you say, and your hands tremble at your sides because if you lift them you might start tearing at something you cannot afford to destroy.

Their faces remain blank, but the fear in their eyes is real.

You run.

The palace corridors blur into gold and shadow, tapestries whipping past like the painted ghosts of former queens watching you break the rules they died obeying, and servants press themselves against walls to let you pass, heads bowed, bodies rigid, as if your grief is contagious.

You do not slow when you reach the council wing, even when the air changes there, colder, more formal, smelling of ink and sealing wax, because you know exactly who has the power to make a knight vanish from his post.

The doors to your father’s chamber are guarded, two men in polished armor, and they move to block you the moment they see you.

“My lady,” one begins.

You lift your chin. “Move,” you say, and you keep the word simple because if you make it pretty you will start crying.

They hesitate, the brief pause of men deciding how much they can risk, and you push into that hesitation, you shove the door before they can stop you, and it opens on a room bright with morning light and cruelty.

Your father is at the table, already dressed as if the day is ordinary, already holding court with parchment and plans, and he looks up with the expression of a man interrupted by something inconvenient, not by his daughter coming undone.

“What is this,” he says.

You walk straight toward him, the distance between you devoured by rage, by terror, by the memory of Jungkook’s hand on your wrist last night, thumb pressed to your pulse as if counting the seconds you were still allowed to be alive.

“Where is Jungkook,” you say, and the room holds its breath.

Your father’s eyes harden instantly, and something in you recognizes that hardening, the way a door shuts before you can cross it.

He stands, slow, deliberate, and the movement makes his robe whisper like a warning.

“You speak his name too easily,” he says.

Your mouth goes dry. “Answer me.”

His hand moves faster than you expect, faster than dignity, faster than any lesson you were ever taught about the restraint of kings, and the slap lands across your cheek with a crack that turns the world white at the edges, heat blooming under your skin, your head snapping to the side, your tongue tasting blood where your teeth cut it.

The sound echoes.

Your vision swims, and for a moment you simply stand there, stunned not by the pain but by how simple it was for him, how effortless, like swatting a fly.

“How dare you,” he says, and his voice is not loud, it does not need to be, because every man in the room listens as if their spine belongs to him, “How dare you humiliate yourself, and by extension humiliate this crown, by losing control over a common knight as if you are a foolish girl in a ballad.”

Your cheek throbs, and your hand lifts instinctively, fingertips hovering over the sting, and you hate that your body wants comfort when your mind wants war.

“He is not common,” you say, and the words come out shaken, and you hate yourself for giving him proof that he hit something tender.

Your father’s mouth curls slightly, a smile without warmth. “He is whatever I say he is,” he replies, and then he turns, not to you, but to the guards at the door, because you are no longer the audience he is performing for.

“Bring him,” he says.

The command drops into the room like a stone.

You stare at him, heart hammering, and you realize with sick clarity that he already knows exactly where Jungkook is, that he has known since before the sun rose, and the knowledge makes your stomach turn.

“Father,” you begin, and the word sounds wrong, too soft for what he is.

His gaze cuts back to you, sharp as drawn steel. “You will stand there,” he says, “and you will learn what happens when you forget what you are.”

They do not let you brace for it.

The council chamber is too bright, sunlight spilling across polished wood and the pins in your father’s map like it has the right to be beautiful today, and you are still tasting blood where your own teeth cut you, still holding your cheek as if your hand can keep his cruelty from settling into your bones, when the doors open and the sound arrives first, the heavy drag of boots, the wet hitch of breath that does not belong to anyone who has slept.

Then they bring him.

Not the Jungkook who stands behind you like a second spine, not the Jungkook who measures rooms and counts exits and never once lets his gaze soften in public, but a man hauled forward by two guards as if he is cargo, his wrists bound, his armor gone, his shirt torn open and dark with it, and there is so much red on him that for a moment your mind refuses to name it, your mind tries to call it wine, paint, a trick of morning light, anything but the evidence of hours spent breaking the same body that has spent years keeping yours unbroken.

Your throat makes a sound that does not belong to a princess.

It tears out of you, sharp and raw, and the chamber turns toward it the way a crowd turns toward a spill, curious and satisfied and pretending not to be.

“Stop,” you gasp, because it is the only word you have left that still feels like it could matter.

Jungkook’s head hangs at first, hair matted to his forehead, lashes stuck together, his breathing shallow like he is rationing it, like each inhale has to be earned, and when your voice hits him his shoulders jerk as if the sound is another strike, as if mercy hurts worse than fists.

He lifts his face.

Slowly, as if every muscle is refusing him, he looks up, and there is a moment where his gaze finds the floor, then the table, then your father’s ringed hands, and then, finally, you, and something in you gives way because his eyes are still him, still the same dark steadiness, only now it is splintered with pain he is trying to swallow down so you will not have to carry it.

You take a step without permission.

A guard shifts, steel whispering, and your father’s hand lifts, two fingers, a small gesture that means you may approach only as far as he allows, and the rage in you burns so hot you almost laugh because he thinks he can set limits on your grief.

“Look,” your father says, and his voice is calm, which makes it worse, makes it sound like he is discussing weather, like suffering is simply another tool laid neatly in a drawer. “This is what comes of carelessness.”

Your breath stutters. “He is not a lesson.”

Jungkook’s jaw tightens, a barely there movement, a refusal he cannot afford, and you see the bruising along his throat, the split at his lip, the darkening at his temple where someone’s ring must have landed, and the sight of it makes your stomach twist with an intimacy you do not want anyone here to witness, because you know the curve of his mouth, you know the sound of his voice when it is meant only for you, and now the chamber is looking at him like meat.

Your father’s gaze slides toward the north facing windows as if the horizon is speaking to him. “The North is close,” he says.

Jungkook flinches.

Not a dramatic reaction, nothing a stranger would notice, only the smallest tightening in his shoulders, the way his eyes flick, sharp, toward the window as if he can already hear distant horns, and you remember him counting the guards in the market, remember him saying he was afraid, and suddenly the air in the chamber feels too thin.

“So we will not wait,” your father continues, “for negotiations, for ceremonies, for your childish adjustment to necessity.”

You swallow hard. “What are you saying.”

“I am saying the wedding will be immediate,” he replies, and the words hit you like cold water, shocking, stealing breath, and you realize he is doing this now because speed is a weapon, because if he moves fast enough you cannot build an army out of your own despair.

Your gaze drops back to Jungkook.

His head is bowed again, not in submission, but in a terrible kind of control, as if he is holding himself together with the last thread of pride, and you see his hands, bound at the wrists, knuckles swollen, blood dried in the creases, the same hands that have held yours under tables and through corridors and in every moment you were not allowed to be afraid alone.

“No,” you whisper, and it is not about the wedding, it is about the space that is opening under your feet.

Your father smiles at the softness of it. “Yes.”

He steps around the table, slow, as if he wants you to watch him take your world apart piece by piece, and he stops close enough that you smell ink and spice on him, the scent of power and distance.

“And your knight,” he says, speaking the word like an insult, “will be executed.”

Your body reacts before your mind does.

A sound leaves you, strangled, and your vision blurs at the edges, and you feel yourself sway because the floor has suddenly decided it is not reliable.

Jungkook’s head snaps up.

His eyes flash, not with pleading, not with fear for himself, but with something feral and furious that makes the guards tighten their grip, and when he speaks it is a low, broken groan that sounds like a blade being forced out of a wound, and you understand with sick clarity that this is what they wanted, not his obedience, but his reaction, his humanity dragged into the light so they can punish him for daring to have it.

“Do not,” you breathe, and you do not know if you are speaking to him or to the king.

Your father’s gaze stays on you, delighted by your panic. “Before that,” he says, “he will be made to watch.”

Silence falls.

It is the kind of silence that makes the torches seem loud, that makes breath sound obscene.

You stare at him, not comprehending at first, because there are cruelties that still shock you even after a lifetime of being called useful, and then the meaning catches and your stomach turns so violently you think you might be sick on the council table.

“You will remember,” your father says to Jungkook, as if granting him a favor, “what you touched, and what you will never touch again.”

Jungkook’s shoulders strain against the guards, not to escape, but to lunge, and one of them wrenches his arms higher, forcing pain into his joints until his breath breaks, and the sound that comes from him is not a cry, it is something deeper, something hunted.

Your lungs lock.

The room narrows until it is only Jungkook and the king and the distance between them, the distance that has been your whole life, and you feel yourself shaking, hands curling into fists at your sides, nails biting into your palms hard enough to hurt, because you need something you can control and there is nothing.

“Father,” you say, and the word tastes like poison, “you cannot.”

Your father’s eyes are bright, almost bored. “I can.”

You step closer to Jungkook, and this time no one stops you, because they want the scene, because your horror is part of the punishment.

You stop just in front of him.

He looks at you as if the act of seeing you is both salvation and damnation, his gaze dragging over your face like he is checking for injury, like he still thinks his body is allowed to be a shield for you, and your throat tightens so hard you can barely speak.

“Do not look away,” your father says sharply.

Jungkook’s mouth tightens.

His eyes stay on you.

And in them, beneath the blood and the bruising and the agony he is trying to hide, there is a vow, quiet and catastrophic, as if he is promising that even if they kill him in front of you, even if they make him watch every cruelty they can invent, he will still find a way to keep your heart from turning into something like your father’s.

You should be thinking about the wedding, about the North.

But you are thinking only of the way his hands are bound, and of the way your own hands are empty.

“Please,” you whisper, and it is not a plea for mercy, it is a plea for time, for one more breath where he is still here.

His lips part, swollen and split, and he forces the smallest movement, a fraction of a nod, as if to say I am here, I am still here, and the guards jerk him forward.

Your father turns to the men at the door. “Take him,” he commands, “and make sure he understands what he has cost us.”

Jungkook’s gaze stays on you as they drag him away.

Not once does it drop.

It only holds you, steady and burning, until the doorway swallows him and you are left standing in a room full of men who think they have won.

. . . There is a part 2 to this story 🩵ིྀ

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