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Chapter Text

❖ Official Line of Succession of the Darkborn Aristocracy ❖

Following the Reigning Sovereign Pair:

Seo Dalya (Omega) & Jeon Taehwan (Alpha)

— of the ancestral House Gwanryeo

1st Rank – Jeon Jungkook of House Gwanryeo (Alpha)

2nd Rank – Jeon Minhyun of House Gwanryeo (Alpha)

3rd Rank – Min Yoongi of House Gwanryeo (Alpha)

4th Rank – Han Isayeon of House Namsaeng (Beta)

5th Rank – Seo Jisoo of House Hwanbyeok (Beta)

6th Rank – Jung Hoseok of House Seoryeon (Alpha)

7th Rank – Kim Namjoon of House Baekho (Alpha)

*******

❖ Excerpts from the Crimson Codex ❖

Compiled Laws of Bloodline, Reproduction, and Magical Regulation

Issued and enforced under the High Authority of the Sovereign Blood Court

⸻

§3 — Of Thirdborn Omegas and the Sovereign Claim

“Should a Noble Bloodline be blessed with a thirdborn child bearing the Omega designation, that family is bound by law to present said Omega to the Sovereign House of their lineage upon the child’s eighteenth nameday. This offering is intended for the purpose of official union and heir production.”

1. The Alpha Sovereign may lay claim to the thirdborn Omega either for themselves or for a designated heir.

2. If the reigning Alpha chooses to claim the Omega personally, it is within their legal right to annul any existing mating bond with their current consort, without penalty.

3. Any refusal to comply by the family of the thirdborn Omega shall be considered High Treason and punished in accordance with §14 of the Crimson Codex.

“The fertility of a thirdborn Omega is deemed a national resource, and the preservation of such wombs is the duty of the kingdom.”

⸻

§5 — Prohibition of Blood Union Between Light and Dark

“As of 17 November 1771, any mating or carnal union between a Lightborn and a Darkborn is forbidden by edict of the Sovereign Court. The combination of opposing forces within a single womb results in the fatal rejection of mother and child.”

1. Discovery of such unions is grounds for immediate separation, nullification of bond, and sterilization of the offending parties.

2. Should a Darkborn be found guilty of impregnating a Lightborn, execution is to be carried out within twenty-four hours of confirmation, should identity be proven.

3. Offspring born of such unlawful unions, should they survive, are to be taken into Sovereign custody and raised in sterile magical containment.

“The sanctity of magic must never be compromised by hybridization. The blood must remain pure, lest it rot from within.”

⸻

§12 — On the Manifestation and Peril of Magical Subtypes

“The life-giving power of the Lightborn and the death-touch of the Darkborn awaken between the onset of puberty and the eighteenth year. Should this emergence be delayed, the host’s body may reject the trait violently.”

1. The rejection syndrome, known as Magical Collapse , presents with convulsions, internal hemorrhaging, and cardiac arrest.

2. Without intervention, 33% of delayed manifestors perish before formal assessment.

3. All children displaying early symptoms of either Light or Dark affinity must be registered with the Noble Registry Office and monitored by certified Arcanic Physicians.

⸻

§17 — Preservation of Noble Heirlines and Procreation Mandate

“The continuation of noble bloodlines is the cornerstone of national stability and magical heritage. Therefore, all childless unions within the Blood Aristocracy, regardless of designation (Alpha, Beta, Omega), are obligated to seek reproductive consultation before their third bonding year.”

1. Failure to conceive by the third year of bonding triggers mandatory enrollment in an Heir Production Facility.

2. Should couples meet the outlined criteria under §30, they shall be eligible for full funding under the High Sovereign Fertility Act.

⸻

§21 — Regulation of Magical Abilities: The Use of Life and Death

“The application of Light-giving or Dark-touch magic must adhere strictly to regulation. As these abilities affect the entirety of a living organism, improper use poses catastrophic risk to the bloodline and the public.”

1. Any use of the Light or Dark gift must be documented through the House of Magical Oversight.

2. Use of the life-gift (Light) is sanctioned only for medical revival, sanctioned heir-conception rituals, or Sovereign blessing ceremonies.

3. Use of the death-gift (Dark) is limited to sanctioned executions, battlefield mercy, or duel of honor—any deviation is considered Magical Treason.

4. Abilities used for selfish purposes, personal vengeance, or unapproved execution shall be punishable by incarceration, sensory suppression, torture, or death by Red Guard decree.

********

Sovereign Blood Court of Gwanryeo

Office of Lineage Enforcement — Crimson-Sealed

To Lord Kim Jaemin & Lady Yun Harin of House Baekho 

Under §3 (Thirdborn Omega Mandate) of the Crimson Codex, you are ordered to return to the capital within one lunar cycle.

Your thirdborn child, Kim Taehyung — Omega, Darkborn, age 17 yrs 6 mos , will reach legal maturity in six months . On that nameday he must stand before the Black Court for Bonding Selection :

• Primary Claimants — Jeon Taehwan (Alpha Sovereign) or Jeon Jungkook (Alpha First Heir).

Taehyung’s unmanifested Dark subtype and uniquely fertile thirdborn status are now classified “state-critical.” He is to begin immediate obedience and heat conditioning. A black-onyx collar, warded for pheromone lock, accompanies this notice; it must be fitted upon your arrival.

Non-compliance constitutes High Treason (§14) and will result in asset seizure, title erasure, and forcible reclamation of the Omega womb.

Prepare your Omega. Present him willingly.

The bloodline will be served.

By proxy of the Sovereign Pair,

Jeon Taehwan (Alpha) & Seo Dalya (Omega)

Seal: Black lotus veined in silver, bleeding into crimson

********

Taehyung

The estate smelled like blood. Not fresh, not spilled; older than memory, steeped into the stone, hanging beneath the velvet of imported drapes like something breathing, watching. Waiting.

Taehyung stood at the base of the grand staircase, duffel at his feet, coat still on, the carved mahogany banister beneath his gloved hand cold and uninviting. He hated it already. This place. This life. This fate that had been coiling around his throat since the moment someone had whispered, thirdborn… omega… fertile.

“Stop loitering,” Namjoon’s voice came sharp from the landing above, clipped in that usual Baekho-honed Alpha timbre, all cold steel and clean-cut command. “The staff will bring your things to your wing.”

Taehyung didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe.

Not until Jimin glided into view beside Namjoon, an eerie mirror of court perfection in his soft navy coat and freshly perfumed skin, looking more like an ornament than a brother. Omega by designation. Political by nature.

“Well,” Jimin murmured, tilting his head, voice honeyed. “It’s not entirely a prison.”

“Only if you forget why we’re here,” Taehyung bit out, finally stepping forward. The parquet creaked under his boots. 

Namjoon exhaled like someone trying very hard not to commit a capital crime. “Don’t be dramatic. You turn eighteen in six months. The Sovereign Court expects proper submission and magical readiness. You’re lucky you’ve been summoned before the collapse sets in. Do you want to die coughing up your own lungs because you were too weak to manifest?”

Taehyung didn’t answer. The truth burned. He hadn’t manifested. Not yet. And his time was running out.

In the world of the Blood Aristocracy, magic was inheritance. Magic was worth. Magic was survival. The Lightborn gave life. The Darkborn took it. But only a sliver of the population had either gift, and fewer still had the purity of blood to make it stable.

Taehyung was born into one of the oldest.

House Baekho.

Darkborn. Elite. Diplomatic blood with ancient power—at least, in theory.

Jimin had manifested his subtype early, at thirteen. A rare, calm-touch omega with Darkblood, his fingers able to coax the breath from lungs as gently as he coaxed secrets in court. Namjoon had been even younger. Twelve.

And Taehyung?

Seventeen. No signs. No death-touch. No spells woven into his skin or black lightning in his veins. Just the scent of a thirdborn omega’s ripening cycle becoming more noticeable with every full moon, and the heavy whisper of duty wrapped in velvet and laws.

He was late. And everyone knew what that could mean.

“You should’ve stayed abroad,” Taehyung muttered, trudging up the steps past them. “Why ruin your lives for a defective little brother?”

Namjoon didn’t blink. “Because if you collapse, it reflects on the entire House. And if you survive, you’re going to be fucked by either the Alpha Sovereign or his son. That’s not something to leave unsupervised.”

“Such poetry,” Taehyung sneered, heart hammering against the rising stench of old dark magic that clung to the upper halls. “You could’ve been a romantic, hyung.”

Jimin reached out, lightly brushing his fingers to Taehyung’s jaw. “Just remember… no matter how much you fight it, your heat will come. And the Court will send him.” He smiled. “Jeon Jungkook.”

Taehyung froze. The name made his stomach flip.

Jeon Jungkook. The first heir. Alpha. Darkborn. Just 19 years old and trained since birth to be everything the Sovereign Pair desired. Efficient. Dangerous. And worst of all… likely to claim him.

“Stop,” Taehyung snapped, jerking back. “I’d rather die in collapse than let that monster knot me for the sake of his bloodline.”

Namjoon’s jaw tensed. “That monster is the only reason our bloodline hasn’t been extinguished by war or infertility.”

“Then let it die!” Taehyung shouted, his voice cracking with fury. “Let the whole rotten system burn! ”

Silence.

Somewhere beneath them, the estate groaned with age. Or magic. Or memory.

Jimin’s smile didn’t falter. “Careful, Tae. You sound like a revolutionary. That’s a traitor’s tongue.”

“And traitors die,” Namjoon added, voice like ice.

“Maybe I will,” Taehyung whispered. “At least then I won’t end up bred like livestock. ”

But the truth was, he wouldn’t die. Not unless his magic failed to manifest. And the odds were stacked against him now. Statistically, Darkborn magic in thirdborn Omegas awakened under extreme duress. Which meant…

The Court would give him exactly that.

Later, as he sat in the East Wing chamber assigned to him, its high gothic windows curtained against the rising moon, Taehyung unwrapped the last of his imported clothes, his scent suppressants, the ceremonial collar that had already been mailed ahead in polished onyx.

Property of House Gwanryeo.

His fingers curled around the collar’s cold clasp.

He was seventeen. Nearly legal. And by law, on his nameday, the Sovereign Pair would be allowed to summon him before the Black Court and inspect his readiness. If his magic came in—if the touch of death bloomed across his fingertips as it had for his brothers—he would be bound, married, and knotted before the next spring equinox.

Likely by Jungkook. Possibly by Taehwan, the Sovereign himself— an Alpha older than his father.

Taehyung swallowed bile.

There were rules for magical bonding. Laws. Rituals. And yet none of it felt like choice. Not for an Omega. Not for a thirdborn.

Outside, wolves howled past the hills. Inside, something in him stirred, painfully, like a muscle waking from years of sleep.

He didn’t know if it was his magic.

Or his rage.

But something had been touched. And it would not sleep again.

*******

The mornings were the worst. Cold light poured through the tall arched windows like judgment, slicing across the lacquered floors of the Eastern Wing. Each day began the same: silence, stale tea, and the private tutor who insisted on calling him “Taehyung-ssi” with clipped Beta politeness, like that formality could veil the fact that every lesson was a prelude to bondage.

This morning, it was etiquette. Again. The dance of subservience. The right way to bow. The correct tilt of the neck to offer one’s pulse to an Alpha without seeming eager for the bite.

He wanted to spit on the floor.

“If an Alpha of the Sovereign House invites you to a Red Court ball, what do you do?” Mr. Yoon, his grey-haired instructor, asked tightly, folding his fingers together. “Assume he is ranked above you in blood.”

Taehyung leaned back in the ornate chair, arms crossed over his chest, expression blank as a noose. “I offer my neck, pray he doesn’t test his magic, and thank him for the honor of possibly dying before dessert?”

The tutor exhaled slowly, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Let’s move on. Geography, then. Unless you’d prefer we revisit Highcourt dialects?”

“I’d prefer to revisit my flight out of this hellhole, but since that’s off the curriculum, geography is fine,” Taehyung drawled, lifting a single brow.

Before Yoon could respond, the doorbell echoed through the estate.

Taehyung flinched.

From the floor below, hushed French filtered up through the stairwell—his eldest brother, Namjoon, murmuring into the phone from Father’s study. Something about emissaries. Highblood interference. A breeding summons being “premature.” His voice cut off abruptly, followed by the sound of a door closing with unnatural force.

A moment later, a servant entered the study with a black-wrapped package, a deep crimson ribbon tied perfectly around its middle.

“For Taehyung of House Baekho,” she read aloud, eyes wide, voice hushed.

His blood went cold.

“Would you do me the honor of wearing this to the Red Audience? I’d like to see how brave you are.” Min Yoongi of House Gwanryeo.

The Sovereign’s nephew. Third in line.

He dropped the card like it burned.

Min Yoongi. He had a reputation for silence and strategy, not courtship. And certainly not attention toward thirdborn Omegas.

Yoon cleared his throat. “Your… ah. Reputation appears to be spreading.”

Taehyung’s stomach roiled.

“They smell the magic, don’t they?” he asked bitterly, still staring at the box. “Even if it hasn’t shown yet. They can sense the heat building. They know I’ll manifest or collapse. And they want to be the first to stake a claim before either happens.”

Yoon hesitated. “Thirdborn Omegas have always drawn attention. You’re… extremely rare. And your bloodline—”

His fingers shook as he pushed the box aside. “The Sovereign still gets first claim. Right? No matter how many vultures send pretty dresses and promises.”

“Technically, yes,” Yoon said, quietly. “Though, rumors suggest the succession may be in flux. That… House Gwanryeo is maneuvering.”

That stopped Taehyung cold.

Not just Jungkook, then. Not just one Alpha of blood and magic: multiple.

Jungkook. Yoongi. Maybe even Jung Hoseok. All trained from birth to claim what the laws of scarcity demanded: heirs. Lineage. Thirdborn fertility.

And Taehyung, unmanifested, unbonded, and legal in six months, was the last untouched piece on the board.

Suddenly the room felt too small.

His scent suppressants weren’t strong enough anymore. He could feel the pull in his gut, low and heavy like a tide rolling in from beneath his skin. Heat was weeks away at best, maybe sooner if he got near an Alpha with strong magic.

Or worse, if one of them touched him.

He remembered Jimin’s fingers at his jaw. The way his brother had spoken Jungkook’s name like it was prophecy.

Like it was fate. But Taehyung didn’t believe in fate. He believed in escape.

As Yoon began reciting river systems of the Eastern Kingdoms, Taehyung tuned out. His mind spun with questions. And suddenly, a memory surfaced—something Namjoon had said in a low voice the night they arrived:

“If the others catch wind that you’re unclaimed… they’ll make their moves before Jungkook can seal the deal.”

The royal line was desperate. Fertile Omegas were vanishing. Collapsing. Unstable magic. Failed bonds. Infertility sweeping the Light- and Darkborn families like a curse.

Taehyung clenched his fist so tightly the edge of the invitation cut into his skin.

Would you do me the honor…?

Taehyung’s lips curled.

“Sure,” he muttered under his breath, dark eyes narrowing as a whisper of cold flickered through his bones.

“But if I wear it… you better run.”

*******

Taehyung exhaled sharply as he entered his chambers and caught sight of the neatly stacked towers of black and ash-grey gift boxes beside his bed. Most were bound with blood-red ribbons—silken, glossy, and obscene in their implication.

Thirdborn.

He hated that word.

He hated what it made him. What they saw when they looked at him. Not a son. Not a soul. Just an Omega with a womb they could lay claim to: ripe, untouched, and damnably fertile.

He collapsed onto the bed, eyes fixed on a wilting bouquet of dark red roses laid out on the glass table near the door. The petals were curling, brittle with death, yet they still reeked of ceremonial perfume and expectation.

How was he supposed to survive the next few weeks like this? Let alone the Red Audience, where the alphas would circle like wolves in velvet.

The Sovereign House had the lawful right to his bond. And House Baekho, his House, would never challenge that claim. Never dare defy the will of the Darkborn Sovereign.

Which meant one thing: he was going to be given away like fine silver.

Married off. Owned.

His fingers curled into the sheets as a chill licked down his spine. He forced himself upright, pacing across the room like a caged creature. His bare feet pressed against the cold marble tiles as if to anchor himself, but it did nothing to stop the flare of magic inside his chest—dark, unformed, dangerous.

A knock broke through his thoughts. Low. Reserved. And unwanted.

Taehyung grimaced, stepped away from the withering bouquet, and forced the word out through gritted teeth. “Yes.”

The door creaked open, and in swept his mother. She was dressed, as always, in austere dark—pressed slacks, tailored blazer, hair tied back so tight it looked like it might snap her spine.

“You’ve yet to open your gifts,” she noted.

“I don’t want to,” Taehyung replied coolly, settling back onto the bed.

Her heels clicked sharply as she moved to the desk, withdrawing a stack of crimson-embossed cards. “Regardless. You will write thank-you notes. That is custom.”

He didn’t respond. Just stared at the curve of her mouth, unyielding as always. They never asked him what he wanted. Not once.

“Can’t we just send them back?” he muttered, gaze drifting to the boxes. “I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want their silk or their sapphires or their intentions.”

His mother turned to him slowly, her expression chilling in its stillness. “Returning them would be offensive. The families have spent lavishly. To refuse them is to dishonor your role.”

“I didn’t choose this role,” he hissed.

“You are a thirdborn Omega,” she answered, and that—apparently—was supposed to end the argument.

He said nothing. There was nothing else to say. Nothing that would matter.

“I assume you’ve been instructed about the mourning rites?” she asked, tone brisk. “The ceremony will be your formal introduction to the surviving Darkborn families. The tutor said your progress is… acceptable.”

Taehyung rolled his shoulders back, pulse heavy in his throat. “It’s a funeral,” he said flatly. “For a Darkborn who could kill with a touch. What kind of introduction is that?”

“One that will define your future.”

He clenched his jaw.

His mother’s gaze flicked over the black boxes again, then to the bouquet. The petals were nearly dust, but their death was elegant—dignified. Fitting, in a way.

“If you choose to wear one of the gifted ensembles to the ceremony,” she said quietly, “they’ll take it as a sign. A signal of favor. Of preference.”

“I don’t know them,” he snapped. “I don’t even know most of their names.”

“But they know yours.”

The silence after that hung heavy, charged with magic, blood, and lineage. Taehyung could almost feel the bond threads in the distance; alphas sharpening their teeth, betas planning alliances, even the Lightborn eyeing him.

He stood and walked slowly to the gift pile, lips curled in disdain. Then, deliberately, he grabbed the nearest parcel and ripped it open without care, shredding the black velvet and letting a silver cuff clatter to the floor.

“There,” he said, voice dark as his bloodline. “Happy?”

His mother didn’t flinch. “You’ll wear the outfit I selected. Our staff will bring it to you before the ceremony.”

Taehyung gave a curt nod. “Fine.”

But in his mind, the cold was spreading again. Slowly, steadily—down his arms, into his spine. He had felt that sensation before. The darkness waking. The power in his veins remembering what it was bred for.

Not to be touched. But to end.

********

Taehyung sat on the wide velvet bench beside the window, the afternoon sunlight gilding the curls at the nape of his neck, trying very hard not to scowl. But the pile of unopened packages stacked high by his bedroom door made it impossible.

He huffed and picked up the top parcel. The envelope bore the wax seal of House Seoryeon: an elegant crane bathed in ink. Jung Hoseok. He tore the parchment open and unfolded a linen-bound bundle inside—lavender silk gloves, laced with scent-neutralizing threads, tailored for an Omega’s more “sensitive wrists.” There was also a hand-written note tucked beneath the gloves:

“To the future jewel of the court. I heard you’re delicate. Keep your hands safe until an Alpha can hold them properly.” Jung Hoseok

Taehyung gagged.

He reached for the next box. This one heavier. Denser. Colder.

House Gwanryeo seal.

He froze. But then saw the name on the corner: Min Yoongi. It wasn’t him. Thank the moon.

He opened Min Yoongi’s second gift carefully.

Inside lay a leather-bound tome—ancient and weathered. “On the Nature of Thirdborn Omegas: Ritual, Rites, and Resistance .” He stared, silent for a long beat. That… wasn’t entirely a bad gift. There was no perfume, no pretense of flirtation. Just… brutal honesty.

Of course, it had to come from Min Yoongi. Still, the moment of appreciation died fast.

Because the next package was slim. Wrapped in expensive grey paper, no seal visible. Curious, he opened it.

Inside, nestled in dark silk, lay a strip of translucent black lace—delicate, whisper-thin, and unmistakably tailored for an Omega. It shimmered like night water, sheer and intimate. The scent that curled from the fabric hit him hard, like the first thunder before a storm, like rain on stone and shadow in heat. Cold and burning.

Dark rain.

His breath stuttered. Knees weakened under the weight of it. It was the scent of a Darkborn Alpha. More than that, it was sovereign.

Taehyung barely registered his own movement as he pulled out the small card tucked underneath.

Black vellum, thin as breath, the writing in silver ink:

“You’ll recognize me when it matters. I never chase—only claim.”

—JJK

His vision swam. The bastard hadn’t even signed his name. Just initials. But the scent told him enough. His body, bound by ancient instinct, knew it.

“Fuck,” he whispered, hands shaking as he dropped the card like it stung.

Of course it was him. Jeon Jungkook. First Heir to House Gwanryeo. The alpha every court whispered about and no one dared to deny.

Taehyung’s inner Omega—traitorous bastard that it was—shivered involuntarily. Preening under the attention of such a powerful bloodline.

“Pathetic,” he whispered to himself. “You’re pathetic.”

“Talking to yourself, little brother?” came Jimin’s voice from the door, all sugar and sharp teeth.

Taehyung whipped around, eyes wide.

Jimin waltzed in with a lopsided grin, his silver robe trailing behind him like royalty. He moved directly to the discarded black slip, holding it up between two fingers and raising a perfectly plucked brow.

“Oh, this is spicy,” he smirked. “Your taste is bolder than I thought.”

“I didn’t ask for it,” Taehyung growled.

“But are you sending it back?” Jimin asked, voice dripping with mockery. “Or are you saving it for your first night , huh?”

“Get out.”

“I’m just asking if you’re excited to meet your future Alpha.” He dropped his voice into a sultry mimic of court gossip: “The First Heir. The Darkborn Sovereign’s Prodigal Son. The one with hands that kill and eyes that claim. ”

“I swear to the moon, Jimin, I will poison your tea.”

“You won’t. You need me too much.”

Taehyung seethed, but the heat curling in his gut was hard to deny. Even now, just thinking of the possibility—being seen by that monster—was enough to make his skin prickle.

Nature was a cruel mistress. He hated it. Hated that his inner Omega responded to any of it. That his body could react when his mind wanted to retch.

“I don’t want to see any Alpha,” he spat. “Especially not him.”

Jimin only tilted his head, smile fading into something eerily serious. “You’ve got a few months left, Tae. When your magic shows, when you turn eighteen… it won’t matter what you want. The Sovereign will claim you. Or he’ll hand you off to his son. Either way—”

“Stop.”

“—you’ll belong to Gwanryeo,” Jimin finished, quiet now. “You think you can outrun that? You think gloves or books or your attitude change that?”

Taehyung looked down at the floor, where Jungkook’s gift still lay, a dark stain against the sunlight.

“I’d rather die,” he said.

But the truth was.

Taehyung wouldn’t just be a thirdborn Omega. He’d be a Darkborn thirdborn Omega. And that meant the Sovereign or Jungkook wouldn’t just claim him. They’d never, ever let him go.

*******

The silk sleeves clung too tight at the wrist.

Taehyung tugged at them for the third time, eyes fixed on the tall mirror set into the mahogany frame across his bedroom. His mother had chosen the outfit— Regal. Refined. Ridiculously revealing. The collar plunged low enough to expose the faint birthmark at his collarbone. The sash at his waist was a whisper away from sin.

It was mourning attire, technically. Traditional. But make no mistake, this wasn’t about grief.

This was about showcasing him.

Taehyung’s jaw clenched as he adjusted the sash again, hating how it framed his hips. The fabric shimmered like dusk, cool and soft, mocking him with every fold.

He could already hear them whispering. The other Houses. The Sovereign Court. All of them watching, waiting for his eighteenth nameday like vultures circling a still-warm kill.

He looked older now. He knew that. Taller, sharper at the jaw. His mouth fuller. His scent, though not fully bloomed, already pulled curious glances. But his magic had yet to manifest. And without it, he was vulnerable. Unready.

But not for long.

He brushed a hand down his chest, where beneath the surface, something ancient stirred. Still dormant. Still sleeping. But it was there. He felt it more lately—a cold ache behind his ribs, a flicker in his fingertips when he was angry or along.

The death-gift. The Darkborn curse.

“Taehyung! We’re leaving in five.”

Namjoon’s voice cut through the heavy silence like a whip.

Taehyung didn’t answer at first. He stared at his reflection. The mirror didn’t lie. He looked exactly like what the court wanted him to be: desirable. Breedable. Claimed.

He wanted to break the glass.

By the time he descended the staircase, Namjoon was already at the door; towering, armored in formal blacks with the faint shimmer of Dark sigils etched into his cuffs.

Jimin lounged beside him, dressed in velvet storm-blue, lips tinted wine-red, and wearing grief like a fashion statement. “You clean up nicely, baby brother,” he purred. “They’ll be foaming at the mouth to bend you over an altar.”

“Choke,” Taehyung muttered, breezing past him.

Their mother stepped into the hall, regal and sharp in mourning golds, father just behind her in layered robes marked with Baekho’s crest. “Enough,” he said. “Let us not arrive squabbling like lowborn mutts. We are Baekho. The blood answers differently in us.”

“Even if it hasn’t answered yet?” Taehyung murmured before he could stop himself.

His fathers eyes flicked to him. “It will.”

The car ride was silent for a while. Even the air inside the vehicle felt tense, as if the mourning itself had weight.

Outside the windows, the capital passed in muted grays—sharp spires, black-veined marble, flags at half-mast. A Sovereign cousin had died. And that meant the entire elite had gathered to honor him.

It would be Taehyung’s first time among them.

His first step into the blood-soaked halls where marriages were arranged, deals forged, and Omegas like him were auctioned off with smiles.

“Back straight,” his mother said, glancing at him. “And do not lower your eyes. When the Sovereign pair passes, you bow—but you never kneel unless ordered.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Your scent barrier is still in place?”

Taehyung nodded.

“And your pills?”

“I took them.”

“Good.” She turned forward again. “This is the last time you’ll be seen as a child. Make sure you aren’t remembered as one.”

Beside him, Jimin was humming under his breath, head tilted toward the window. “Do you think they’ll test him for the death-gift at the reception?”

“They can’t,” Namjoon said. “Not before the nameday.”

“They’ve bent laws for less,” their father muttered.

Taehyung’s hands clenched in his lap.

When they reached the Palace, the guards bowed low as the Baekho car pulled in.

The moment Taehyung stepped out, heads turned. A hush rippled down the path. Whispers sparked like static.

“That’s him—”

“Seventeen and unclaimed—”

“Darkborn, thirdborn Omega. They’ll collar him before winter’s end—”

His back stiffened. The scent of warded incense barely masked the perfume of interest in the air. Alpha signatures flared like hot iron against his skin.

He didn’t look at them. He looked straight ahead.

But just as they passed beneath the arched gate, a gust of wind rolled through the courtyard—and with it, something that nearly brought him to his knees.

It hit like a storm.

Rain. Cold stone. Thunder still bleeding in the distance.

The scent struck Taehyung like a curse. He stumbled. His grip on Jimin’s sleeve tightened for a second too long.

“What’s wrong?” Jimin whispered, eyes flicking toward the Sovereign guard lines.

Taehyung didn’t answer.

Because the scent had already vanished, like a promise made only to vanish on arrival.

But even as it faded, Taehyung swore he could feel it—

That pressure in the air.

A gaze.

Watching. Waiting.

And somewhere behind the obsidian doors of the palace, Jeon Jungkook smirked.

Chapter Text

❖ Excerpts from the Crimson Codex ❖

Compiled Laws of Bloodline, Reproduction, and Magical Regulation

Issued and enforced under the High Authority of the Sovereign Blood Court

⸻

§24 — Of Dominant-Hand Binding: Regulation of Manifested Darkborn

“To preserve peace and signal restraint, all Darkborn whose death-gift has manifested must wear the Binding Glove on their dominant hand—typically the right—during official state events, Sovereign ceremonies, and any public gathering wherein non-Darkborn are present.”

1. The Binding Glove must be made of Sovereign-sanctioned fabric and imbued with nullifying thread to prevent unintended magical discharge.

2. Refusal to don the Glove in regulated spaces shall be seen as a statement of magical hostility and punished accordingly.

3. Customizations to the Glove must be submitted to the House of Magical Oversight for approval, with fines imposed for any deviation.

⸻

Subsection A — Emergency Procedure for Accidental Discharge of the Death-Gift

In the rare case of unintended activation of the death-gift (also known as the Final Touch), the affected party must contact a registered Lightborn Reversal Consort within three hours of exposure.

1. Reversal of the death-gift is only possible within this time frame. After the third hour, no rebirth may be guaranteed and the victim is to be considered permanently dead.

2. All Lightborn Consorts must be sanctioned by the Sovereign Ministry of Restoration and equipped for regulated revival.

3. The incident must be reported to the Office of Magical Oversight within twenty-four hours.

********

The Baekho family stepped into the mouth of the Palace.

The great mourning hall was vast—black glass floors, veined with crimson. High arches loomed overhead like the ribs of some ancient beast. Candles floated midair, flickering with blue fire, each one lit for the dead cousin whose name no one would dare say without the Sovereign’s blessing.

Around them, the Darkborn elite waited.

The scent blockers helped, but they didn’t stop it. The air was thick with pheromones, magic, the sharp tang of old bloodlines and warded collars. Dominant Alpha signatures thrummed low like growling thunder. Betas wore grim faces and sharp tailoring. Omegas stood demurely in silks, necks exposed to show ownership or lack thereof.

And every Dark-gifted noble had one thing in common: their dominant hands were gloved. Some bore embroidered seals. Others wore simple leather. But the glove was law, the glove was warning.

Taehyung’s fingers twitched unconsciously.

He walked behind his parents, between his brothers, one Alpha, one Omega, both already manifested. Both already part of them.

But it wasn’t them the nobles stared at. It was him.

Whispers fluttered like moths.

“That’s the Baekho Omega—”

“Thirdborn. Haven’t seen one in generations—”

“They say the Sovereign might choose him himself—”

“He looks young.”

“He looks ripe.”

He moved closer to his brothers, but even their proximity couldn’t shield him from the attention. Not here. Even behind his pheromone barrier, they sniffed. Alpha after Alpha , heads tilting subtly as he passed. Like they were cataloging him. Like they wanted to taste.

Taehyung didn’t break his stride. Not even when he passed a cluster of nobles from House Namsaeng—Han Isayeon among them, white-haired and cruel-eyed, her gloved hand resting on a cane made of bone. Her gaze sliced down his body and lingered on his throat.

He forced his chin higher.

Among the crowd, he recognized faces from the bloodline registers he’d been forced to study.

Min Yoongi stood like shadow incarnate, clothed in deepest midnight, sleeves trailing just slightly past his fingers. His gloved right hand was tucked into his coat. His face was unreadable. Those obsidian eyes didn’t blink as Taehyung passed.

And yet something in him shivered.

Taehyung remembered reading that Yoongi had been the youngest to pass the Death Ritual in nearly eighty years.

Near him stood Jung Hoseok, surrounded by members from House Seoryeon. His posture was loose, casual. But his eyes… lingered. Flicked to Taehyung’s hands. His wrists.

Bare.

There was the faintest shift in his shoulders, a disappointment too subtle for words. As if he’d expected his gift to be worn.

Taehyung turned away just as the hall darkened.

The doors to the main chamber shuddered open. Every noble bowed their head instantly. The Sovereign Pair had arrived. Taehyung mimicked his family, dropping his chin, pulse stuttering like a blade being dragged across stone.

He didn’t look. Not until the air shifted again;colder, heavier, kissed with something like blood and fire and thunder.

When he raised his head—

He stopped breathing.

The Sovereign Pair entered like a prophecy.

The Sovereign, Jeon Taehwan, walked with the calm of a man who had ended kings. His robes were jet-black, lined with silver sigils that bled light, his shoulders broad, his jaw dusted with silver-streaked stubble. His glove was scaled: dragon hide, forged in the old years, stained with truth and death and ritual. The weight of him filled the room. His gaze cut like an execution.

Beside him, Seo Dalya floated.

Omega. And not merely one by designation. Her presence was divine. Pale as bone, lips blood red, dressed in mourning white trimmed with sorrow-blue silk.

The second son stepped beside Dalya.

Jeon Minhyun. Taller. Dressed in white-on-black with obsidian jewelry looped tight around his throat like a leash. His expression was blank, but there was something feral beneath it. Something caged.

His gaze slid over Taehyung like a blade dipped in frost.

And then came—

Him. Jeon Jungkook. Sovereign First Heir.

Taehyung had seen paintings. Statues. None of it had prepared him.

Jungkook’s beauty was vicious. A wolf wearing the skin of an angel. He moved like a blade unsheathed, each step deliberate, every inch of him honed to perfection. His mourning robes were cut in obsidian and ash-grey, the royal insignia stitched across his chest.

The glove on his right hand was thinner. Sleeker. A dueling style glove. Freshly used, if the lingering shimmer was anything to go by.

And he was staring.

Both Alphas were. From the other side of the hall, Sovereign Jeon Taehwan and Jeon Jungkook looked directly at him.

Taehyung’s breath caught. He tried to look away. Couldn’t.

Jungkook’s gaze dragged over him from head to toe, slow as oil, unhurried, thorough. Not a glance. A claim. Like he was already imagining what Taehyung would look like on his knees.

Behind him, Namjoon shifted slightly, protective. Jimin tilted his head, a sly smile forming.

For a moment, just one long, clawed beat of silence, Taehyung couldn’t move.

And then the Sovereign opened his mouth.

His voice was like gravel wrapped in velvet, every word carved with the authority of a thousand blood-pacts.

“Noble Houses of the Dark,” he began, his tone both reverent and lethal, “we gather tonight in mourning, and in tribute. My cousin, Lord Seo Jaeran of House Gwanryeo, has returned to the night. His body lies still. His blood now flows in legacy only.”

A pause. Not a breath stirred. Not a whisper dared follow.

“We gather not merely to weep, but to remember ,” he continued, “and to honor . Those with the Dark in their blood—those born not only of noble seed, but with the gift that cleaves life from bone—we offer our tribute through it. For what greater honor than to return death to death itself?”

A flick of his eyes, and Taehyung felt it like a lash.

“We are grateful for every House that has answered this call—”

The pause after the word was deliberate. A cruel mockery.

“—and especially,” he said, voice softening to something darker, deeper, “House Baekho. May the others show their due respect.”

Murmurs rose. Shallow bows followed. But the message was clear. The Sovereign had summoned the Baekho House; and more importantly, he had summoned Taehyung.

Taehyung bit the inside of his cheek, hard. Everyone knew it had been an order. One stamped with threat and sealed with blood. The scent blockers in his collar flared slightly, reacting to his pulse.

He held still.

Across the marble floor, Jungkook’s eyes hadn’t left him. And when their gazes met—

The bastard licked his bottom lip. Slowly. Deliberately.

As if he knew. As if he could feel the tremor that shot down Taehyung’s spine. The jolt of something ancient and traitorous in his chest. Jungkook smiled faintly. Like he was tasting the victory before the war.

The Sovereign turned his attention back to the front of the hall.

“Baekho House,” he said, “will you join me now, and begin the Offering?”

The chamber stilled. The first act of Death. The greatest honor of the evening.

Not given to Gwanryeo, not to Seoryeon, not even to the Sovereign’s own Beta kin.

But Baekho. Because of him.

His father, Lord Jaemin, stepped forward, voice low and respectful. “We are honored, Sovereign. And humbled to pay our respect.”

So they moved.

Through the hall, past the velvet ropes and bone-carved pillars, to the black coffin at the heart of the mourning dais. It was sealed, gleaming like polished obsidian. But the flowers upon it were the true spectacle: dark roses. Petals nearly black but glowing faintly with a crimson sheen.

Whispers followed. Even the walls seemed to hush.

The Sovereign reached forward. His binding glove slid off with ceremony, exposing his dominant right hand—long fingers, stained faintly with ancient sigils.

And then he touched the rose. Instantly, the bloom withered. Petal to ash. Stem to dust. Magic lanced through the room, like ice cracking down a spine.

Taehyung’s breath caught. His own magic—unmanifested, volatile—shuddered in his veins. His limbs tensed. His scent spiked faintly behind the collar’s hold.

Behind the Sovereign, the Omega consort stepped forward, Seo Dalya. Her touch was ceremonial.

And then followed Jeon Jungkook.

The First Heir moved like a predator with a crown. Every line of him was carved and cruel and beautiful. His body was tall, built like something hand-forged in war.

The glove slid from his right slowly. It wasn’t just removal. It was exposure. A performance. His skin was unmarred except for the tattoo ink curling at the wrist—a symbol Taehyung had memorized from his studies. Still, seeing it etched there, right above the Sovereign Mark, was something else entirely.

Jungkook plucked a rose between long fingers. Looked at it like it was prey.

His thumb brushed the petal. Instant decay. Collapse. The flower shriveled into itself, blackened veins twisting like worms.

Jungkook’s mouth curved. Taehyung stared. He couldn’t help it.

Jungkook turned, slowly, eyes catching his as he tossed the flower onto the coffin. A languid, obscene flick of the wrist. 

Taeyhungs father and mother followed. Then Namjoon stepped forward, his glove off before the court even expected it. His rose withered swiftly. His posture was military. Efficient. Jimin followed. Elegant. Slow. He bowed before lifting his hand. His death magic crackled faintly, unusual. Beautiful. But lethal all the same.

Taehyung stood still. His turn never came. Because the Dark had not answered his blood yet.

And everyone knew it.

The rest of the nobles came forward.

One by one.

Han Isayeon of House Namsaeng stepped first, her cane of bone echoing like a drumbeat against the floor. Her glove was embroidered with runes so old, the fabric glowed faintly. Her flower crumbled at a mere touch, and she tilted her head as if offering a challenge to the rest.

Min Yoongi followed, silent and devastating. His glove came off slowly. His wrist bore only one marking: a single black ring. He didn’t even touch the flower. Just reached near it—and it withered on its own.

Yoongi turned, expression unreadable. His eyes lingered on Taehyung for half a second. Then moved on.

Jung Hoseok was last among the inner circle. Graceful. Languid. Deadly. Spoke something to it in a foreign tongue. Then touched it with two fingers, lovingly.

After the Offering, the hall had changed.

Gone were the silence and sacred dread of the Death Offering. In its place: strings that wept with haunting precision, low piano chords that pulsed like veins under marble, the kind of music made for shadows to waltz in. 

The nobles of the Darkborn Aristocracy moved in a slow orbit beneath the blood-crystal chandeliers. Gowns whispered. Shoes slid. Alpha hands wrapped around Omega waists, and Binding Gloves brushed the soft fabric of submissive throats.

Every Darkborn noble whose magic had withered roses now wore their law-mandated restraint once more. Together they made a silent statement: we could kill you, but we won’t—not yet.

Taehyung stood just outside the dance floor, spine a perfect line of obedience, framed between his parents and Namjoon. Jimin had already been swept away—dancing with a Seoryeon Alpha, flushed and laughing softly behind his fan. He fit. Of course he did. Jimin always knew how to smile when others watched.

Taehyung… did not.

He didn’t like dancing.

He didn’t like the idea of being that close to another body, most likely an Alpha, most likely one already imagining the weight of him in their bed. The thought alone made his pheromones spike behind the collar again, a brief flash of sour tension the blockers struggled to contain.

Namjoon glanced at him. A warning, quiet but clear.

Control yourself.

Taehyung straightened further. He could feel the stares. But no one dared approach. Not directly. Not with the Sovereign present. Not with Jeon Jungkook somewhere nearby.

Except—

One did.

The scent came before the presence. The faintest note of black tea. Taehyung knew it before he even turned.

Min Yoongi.

He was still in mourning black, his hair slightly disheveled like he hadn’t cared to perfect his appearance, but he didn’t need to. He didn’t need jewels or silk to command the room. His silence did the work for him. His eyes finished the rest.

Yoongi didn’t bow. He didn’t smile. He simply looked at Taehyung and said, quietly:

“Would you be available for a dance?”

Taehyung froze.

He glanced at his parents, but his fathers eyes were hard and expectant. His mother nodded almost imperceptibly. Namjoon didn’t speak, but his gaze was clear: You are not allowed to say no.

So he dipped his head, the barest incline.

“Yes, my lord.”

Yoongi extended his left hand. His right, his dominant, remained behind his back, bound in black. 

They stepped onto the dance floor.

The moment they moved, the whispers began again. Not loud, not obvious. But enough to prickle against Taehyung’s skin like needles.

Yoongi placed his hand at Taehyung’s waist, guiding with precision. He wasn’t rough. But he didn’t ask, either. There was no hesitation in the way he moved. No question about who was leading.

Taehyung knew the steps. He’d been drilled in them since childhood. Yet somehow, under Yoongi’s hand, every one of them felt unfamiliar.

Yoongi was watching him. That same unreadable expression. Eyes black as pitch. But he seemed… amused.

“How does it feel?” he asked suddenly. “Having every eye in this room on you.”

Taehyung’s spine tensed. But he kept his tone neutral, if a bit clipped.

“I would rather not have them. The eyes.”

Yoongi’s lips twitched.

“Ah,” he murmured. “I wasn’t sure what to expect when I heard of you. A thirdborn Omega with unmanifested Darkborn blood. Rarer than sapphire veins.”

Taehyung blinked. “And what… were you expecting?”

Yoongi tilted his head slightly. “Not this,” he said. “Not someone so… tightly wound. So still. But with fire underneath.”

Taehyung’s mouth opened slightly. He didn’t know what to say to that.

“It’s nice to see,” Yoongi added. “You’re not pleased to be here. Not at all. That’s rare itself.”

Taehyung swallowed.He didn’t mean to be so obvious.

“I didn’t think I was that transparent.”

“You weren’t,” Yoongi said. “But I’m good at reading people.”

Then he spun them. The shift in momentum was sudden, dizzying, and when Taehyung came back around, Yoongi’s face was close. Voice low, nearly touching his throat.

“So,” Yoongi murmured, “am I right?”

Taehyung didn’t speak. But something in his eyes must have answered for him.

Yoongi smirked. Dark. Delighted.

“You should know,” he said, almost gently, “it won’t matter.”

“What?”

“The fire. The fight. It won’t stop the Sovereign. And it definitely won’t stop his heir.”

Yoongi’s tone dropped to a murmur.

“Jungkook prefers Omegas who bite.”

Taehyung’s chest went cold.

If Yoongi hadn’t been guiding him, his feet would’ve stopped completely. His breath stuttered. The collar at his neck felt suddenly too tight, like it was closing in.

Of course.

Of course Jeon Jungkook was the kind of Alpha who liked it when his prey screamed.

Yoongi was watching him carefully now. Studying.

“Did you receive my gift?” he asked, lightly.

Taehyung blinked. Then remembered. The book.

“Yes. Thank you.”

It sounded forced, even to his own ears.

Yoongi raised an eyebrow.

“Have you read it?”

“No. I haven’t had time.”

“You should,” Yoongi said. “There may be something useful in there. For the fight.”

Taehyung’s eyes snapped up.

“What—”

But he didn’t finish the question. Because another Alpha had approached them.

Tall. Impeccably dressed. Face smooth and forgettable. One of the minor noble sons, no doubt—nothing of real blood, but enough power to feel entitled.

“May I?”

He didn’t even ask Taehyung. He asked Yoongi.

Yoongi hesitated for a breath. Then stepped back.

“Of course.”

Taehyung barely kept the sigh from slipping out as he was passed into another set of arms. This Alpha was different. Overeager. Smiling too much. His words cloying.

“You’re even more beautiful up close,” he said. “That face was carved by the gods. And your scent, gods, even behind that collar—”

Taehyung stopped listening.

The compliments bled together like poison in his ears. He forced his face into the shape of obedience, but his skin crawled.

And then he saw him. Namjoon. Pushing through the crowd. Eyes sharp and unsmiling.

“May I cut in?” he said, no question in his voice.

The Alpha disappeared with a bow. Relief flooded Taehyung’s limbs. But it didn’t last.

Namjoon’s expression was cold. Careful. When he leaned in, his voice was a blade.

“The Sovereign Pair has summoned you.”

The music didn’t stop. But the world tilted anyway.

Chapter Text

❖ Excerpts from the Crimson Codex ❖

Compiled Laws of Bloodline, Reproduction, and Magical Regulation

Issued and enforced under the High Authority of the Sovereign Blood Court

⸻

§4 — On the Sovereign Summons and the Initiation of Negotiation

“When a thirdborn Omega of noble descent is summoned by the Sovereign Court for Claim, all preceding household obligations are legally suspended, and formal negotiations between the Sovereign House and the offering family shall commence within thirty days of summons.”

1. The purpose of negotiation is to determine the terms of transition, compensation, lineage alignment, and fertility assurance prior to bond sanctification.

2. Compensation may include territorial favor, elevation of House status, inheritance shares, or the restoration of ancestral holdings, as deemed appropriate by the Sovereign Negotiation Council.

3. Should either party fail to reach accord within three lunar cycles, the Omega shall be placed under Sovereign Custody until final decree.

4. All negotiations are to be overseen by an appointed Arbitrator of Blood, and any attempt at private renegotiation or bribery will be considered an act of treason under §14.

5. If the thirdborn Omega’s body has not yet manifested full fertility or magical designation, negotiations may be temporarily paused, but Sovereign custody shall remain active.

“The Summoning binds not only blood, but the will of Houses. Once called, no name may be withdrawn without blood price.”

********

The hall fell behind them with every step. Gilded shadows stretched long across the velvet-lined corridor, swallowing Taehyung’s reflection in the polished floors. Namjoon’s hand was firm on his lower back, a silent command cloaked in familial closeness.

Taehyung’s heart wasn’t beating anymore; it was stuttering, flickering like a moth too close to a flame.

The guards at the threshold didn’t speak. They didn’t have to. One glance, one nod, and the massive ebony doors opened on creaking hinges.

The chamber beyond was not grand like the ballroom. It was colder. Quieter. A room reserved for old bloodlines and older decisions.

He stepped in.

Inside the chamber, dimly lit with bloodglass sconces, the Sovereign Pair sat on a raised dais clad in mourning black. Seo Dalya’s eyes were veiled, but her scent—sharp iris—coiled around the room like a net. Beside her, Jeon Taehwan sat like judgment incarnate: tall, broad, shoulders a military line beneath his ceremonial mantle. His Alpha signature suffused the space with crushing dominance.

And opposite them…his parents. Lady Yun Harin’s eyes were lowered, knuckles white around her fan. Lord Kim Jaemin didn’t so much as flinch.

Jeon Jungkook or his brother was nowhere to be seen.

Taehyung stepped forward, each movement practiced, spine straight, head bowed low.

“Your Majesties,” he said, voice level. “I am honored to stand in your presence.”

He hated how easily the words came.

Taehyung kept his head bowed until the Sovereign Alpha’s voice—low, resonant, final—broke the silence.

“You may sit, young omega.”

Taehyung obeyed, silently folding himself onto the cushion laid out beside his mother. His skin prickled under the weight of their eyes. His inner Omega—traitorous, pathetic thing—shivered in recognition of a dominant so high above him in the hierarchy it bordered on divinity.

He could feel the Sovereign’s pheromones, Alpha-rich and threaded with magical command. They sank into the marrow of his bones, pulled on instincts buried deep: submit. obey. yield.

Taehyung hated that part of himself, the one that trembled in reverence, that wanted to bare its neck and beg for praise. He is not your Alpha. You are not his.

But still, he kept his posture correct. Still, he said nothing. Offending the Sovereign would not only doom him, it would drag his house into ruin.

Small talk began. Empty courtesies soaked in poison. The Sovereign inquired after the weather in the Baekho lands. Commented on the elegance of Lady Harin’s ceremonial robes. Lord Jaemin responded with smooth deference, his voice an oil-slick over the truth: they had been summoned, not invited.

And then, inevitably, the conversation turned.

“Your thirdborn,” the Sovereign said, eyes unmoving from Lord Jaemin, “has not yet manifested.”

A flicker. Just enough hesitation to betray the lie before it was even spoken.

“No, Sovereign,” his father replied. “But we have every reason to believe the Dark will surface within the next three months. The signs are aligning as expected.”

Taehyung swallowed hard. Of course his father would say that. A thirdborn Omega who failed to manifest would be useless to the Court. And should he collapse, die from magical rejection, it would be inconvenient.

All that infamous fertility of a thirdborn Omega, wasted.

“We shall proceed with negotiations regardless,” the Sovereign said, tone final. “So the arrangement is ready upon his manifestation. Time waits for no bloodline.”

Taehyung didn’t blink. Arrangement. He didn’t need them to say it aloud. This is the bargaining table. I am the currency.

The Sovereign Alpha leaned back slightly.

“It would be wise,” he said slowly, “for Taehyung and my heir to begin becoming acquainted.”

Taehyung’s stomach dropped.

Jeon Jungkook. So he was the intended claimant. Not the Sovereign himself.

The relief, if it could be called that, lasted precisely one heartbeat.

Because then the Sovereign turned to him. And looked. Not a passing glance. Not a polite flicker of attention.

No.

Jeon Taehwan fixed his gaze on Taehyung like a predator studying a creature already caught in its jaws.

Taehyung could barely breathe.

The Sovereign tilted his head. His gaze traveled slowly over Taehyung’s face. Down his neck. Lingering at the collar, its black sheen dull in the low candlelight. He was studying him. Not as a man. But as an Omega body—soon to be bred. Owned.

His Omega howled in silence. It wanted to crawl across the floor, lay itself at this Alpha’s boots and bare its neck. To be seen, chosen, marked.

Taehyung hated himself for it. He fought it.

Held the Sovereign’s gaze. Did not look away.

“You are beautiful,” the Sovereign said finally. The words were soft, but they held weight. “You will serve the bloodline well, should the Dark claim you.”

Taehyung bowed his head, hands folded in his lap so tightly his knuckles cracked.

“I live to serve,” he whispered.

He meant: I want to be free.

But the Sovereign only nodded once. No approval. No affection. Just acknowledgment. As if he had examined the quality of a horse’s gait and found it suitable.

With that, the meeting dissolved. A flick of the hand, and the audience was ended.

“You may rejoin the festivities,” the Sovereign said, turning his attention away. “Your presence has been noted.”

His mother rose first, her hand light on Taehyung’s shoulder. His father bowed again, as if the whole affair had gone exactly as expected.

Taehyung rose to follow, but he felt it again—that gaze, buried somewhere in the room. Watching. Measuring.

Jungkook hadn’t been present. But Taehyung knew with certainty: that Alpha had been told.

And somewhere—maybe even in the very next room—the first heir of Gwanryeo was already learning what would soon belong to him.

*******

The car was silent but for the rhythmic sound of wheels against cobblestone and the low whine of magic-laced enchantments humming through the structure—warded, cloaked, and utterly suffocating.

Taehyung sat pressed against the far corner of the seat, the chill of the window seeping into his skin. His reflection stared back: collar gleaming black-onyx against the fragile sun-kissed skin of his throat.

The pressure in his gut hadn’t eased since the Sovereign chamber. Since the Sovereign Alpha’s words.

You will serve the bloodline well.

As if he were nothing more than a caged heat-cycle and a breeding schedule waiting to happen.

His parents sat opposite, silhouettes cut from marble. Lord Jaemin stared straight ahead, unmoving. Lady Harin sat with her fan open across her lap. Namjoon sat to his right, a shadow within a shadow, hands steepled, chin high. Only Jimin broke the illusion of mourning—lips wine-flushed, eyes bright with mischief and secrets, collarbone exposed like a dare beneath loosened brocade.

His mother’s voice was calm, as if this were nothing but the weather.

“You were perfect tonight,” Lady Yun Harin said. “The Sovereign Pair was pleased. The private meeting with the heir is set—three days from now.”

Taehyung’s stomach clenched so violently he thought he might vomit.

Three days.

Alone. In a room with him.

“Gods above, little brother,” Jimin drawled, leaning forward, voice all velvet and teasing teeth. “You should’ve seen the way the other guests looked at you. Could’ve sworn half of them forgot they had dates. You shut that room down just by standing still.”

Taehyung didn’t respond. He was too busy swallowing back bile.

After he’d met the Sovereign Pair no Alpha had dared approach him. Not one. Their claims were already in motion. Their leash already chosen.

And it wrapped around his throat like a phantom now. Tightening.

“Oh, let him talk,” Namjoon muttered, eyes forward. “He’s had four glasses of sovereign wine and half a dozen Alphas clinging to his scent all night. He’s riding high.”

“Four?” Jimin laughed. “Try seven. And yes, they were clinging. You would’ve thought I had heat-slick dripping down my legs. Every single one wanted to know about him.” He jerked a thumb toward Taehyung. “The mysterious Baekho thirdborn. So fertile. So… unclaimed.”

“That’s enough,” Lord Jaemin snapped.

But Jimin didn’t stop.

“I’m just saying what everyone already knows. That little ceremony tonight wasn’t about some dead cousin—it was for him. It was a presentation. And all those Alphas? They got a real good look at the Sovereign’s new property.“

Jimin leaned closer to Taehyung, until the space between them buzzed with heat and anger and something almost tender. „You want to know what the others said, Tae? They all wanted to know what your scent is like beneath the suppressant. They wanted to know if the rumors were true—about the way your skin heats up, about your birthmark. One even asked if your heat had started. Said he could smell something sweet in the air.”

Namjoon scoffed. “Idiots. Let them dream. None of them matter now.”

“Sure,” Jimin said airily. “But you know how Alphas are.” He looked directly at Taehyung, head tilted. “They see a ripe Omega and all they can think about is heat. Knotting. Making little heirs.”

Taehyung clenched his jaw so hard his teeth hurt. He wasn’t sure when his hands had started shaking.

When they arrived at the estate, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t wait for the footman. He bolted up the marble stairs and slammed his chamber door shut behind him.

He stripped viciously—ripping the embroidered fabric, not caring. The silk tunic, the tight ceremonial pants, the golden jewelry. He dragged the ringed collar off his neck and threw it across the room. It clanged against the wall and fell limp onto the floor.

His skin felt contaminated.

He collapsed into bed trembling.

The darkness pressed around him, but he didn’t light a candle. He didn’t want to see anything.  Not the bruising ache low in his belly where his suppressed heat was beginning to rebel.

Three days.

He pressed his hand against his abdomen, where the heat sat like a curse.

He would take double the suppressants tomorrow. Triple, if he had to. He would burn the receptors out of his body if it kept him from reacting like this again. No Alpha would see him break.

Not even him. And gods, especially not him.

Outside, a storm was breaking. Inside him, something was already broken.

He curled into the sheets, pressing his cheek into the pillow, eyes wide in the dark. And as sleep clawed at the edges of his mind, one thought repeated like a curse:

He’s going to claim me.

Not if. When.

********

The tutor arrived before dawn.

The Baekho estate hadn’t even stirred yet; only the garden spirits and the crows noticed his entry. He didn’t knock. The staff knew better than to delay him. They parted like mist, leaving the Eastern corridor cold behind them, the old stones mourning with every step of his boots.

When Taehyung entered the study, the man was already there, seated with his gloved hands folded neatly atop a ledger marked with the Sovereign seal.

“Close the door,” Yoon said without looking up. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

Taehyung obeyed.

He stood in silence, the black-onyx collar around his neck humming gently, warding off his scent—his heat, his longing, his disgust. Whatever else the Sovereign heir might decide was his.

“Your performance before the Sovereign was acceptable,” the tutor continued, watching him slowly. “But passable is not enough. You will be seen by the heir next. Do you understand what that means?”

Taeyhung did. He wished he didn’t.

“You will not speak unless addressed. You will not look him in the eyes—unless he invites it. You will not emit scent unless requested, and never in a display of need. You are not to beg, whimper, or tremble in any way that implies desperation. Do you understand?”

Taehyung nodded. He wished he didn’t.

His tutor stepped closer. The cane he carried tapped once, hard, against the marble. “Repeat it.”

“I will not speak unless spoken to. I will not initiate eye contact. I will not offer scent unless invited. I will not display weakness.”

“And what will you do?”

“I will please him. Impress him. Tempt, but never yield.”

Yoon smiled. “Good. The Sovereign doesn’t want a pet. He wants a prize. Jungkook—” he paused, as if tasting the name “—has been groomed since birth to take what he desires. He is the apex Alpha, first heir to Gwanryeo, and he will test you like a possession to be broken in.”

Taehyung’s stomach turned.

Yoon stepped closer. His breath was ice on Taehyung’s cheek. “He has a right to you, Taehyung-ssi. That is law. That is blood. But what he doesn’t yet know—is how badly he will want you. That’s your only power. Use it.”

Taehyung didn’t flinch. But his jaw ached from how tightly he clenched it.

His Omega coiled low in his belly, that part of him, the one tied to scent and heat and instinct—it wanted more. To be seen. To be chosen. To know the curve of Jungkook’s voice, the press of his scent, the hunger behind his eyes.

It made Taehyung sick.

“He was raised to dominate,” the beta continued, circling again, voice sharp. “The Sovereign heir has never known a denied urge. What he wants, he takes. And you—you are next.”

There it was. The poison in the honey.

“You should know a few things about him,” Yoon said, gaze hardening. “He favors obedience—but not blandness. He is drawn to Omega elegance, but despises anything he deems fragile. And he will smell a lie on your skin.”

“Then I’ll lie better,” Taehyung said coldly.

Yoon paused. A flicker of something—approval, perhaps—passed through his face. “Good. Your worth lies in what you withhold, not what you offer.”

So I am to dance on the knife’s edge, Taehyung thought. Bare him teeth and silken words in the same breath.

The tutor moved toward the desk, pulling a scroll from his satchel and unrolling it. “The negotiations have begun. The Gwanryeo court is calculating your dowry in bloodlines and land—Baekho must benefit from your performance. We need you radiant. Captivating. But never conquered.”

Captivating, but not conquered.

Touched, but not tasted.

Seen, but never owned… not yet.

Taehyung wanted to scream. To rip the collar from his neck and burn the scroll in his tutors hand. But he couldn’t.

And then, carefully, he asked the question he hadn’t dared until now.

“So… does that mean it will be Jungkook who takes the claim?” His voice was too soft. Barely there. “Not the Sovereign?”

The tutor paused.

Just long enough. Something flickered behind his eyes.

“It is… implied,” he said slowly.

“But it’s not sealed.”

“No,” Yoon admitted. “Until the Bonding Ceremony, the decision may still fall to the Sovereign himself. Should he change his mind… no law binds him from taking you.”

The blood drained from Taehyung’s face.

Jeon Taehwan.

The one whose gaze had felt like a blade. Who had smiled when he said, You are beautiful. You will serve the bloodline well.

Taehyung wanted to throw up.

“But for now,” Yoon said briskly, as if to wave the shadow away, “you will concentrate on the heir. Make him want you enough to stake the claim fully. Anchor his interest. Knot it so deep into his pride that no one, not even the Sovereign, would dare revoke it.”

When the tutor finally left, the room felt colder.

His back was damp with sweat. His palms had half-moons carved into them from the way he’d clenched them tight. His Omega instincts were spiraling, frayed at the edges. Part of him hungered for the Alpha scent that would follow soon. Jungkook’s. Sovereign-wrought. Heavy. Absolute.

The rest of him?

He wanted to rip his own skin off to escape it.

He pressed his palm to his throat, right over the collar, and closed his eyes.

Not yours.

Not yet. But soon. Too soon.

*******

The mirror did not blink.

Taehyung wished it would.

It stared back at him—merciless, still—showing every inch of him as he was. No veil of perfume. No courtly candlelight to blur the edges. Just flesh, spine, and skin. The scentless, submissive body of a thirdborn Omega: rare, rich, regulated.

He stood shirtless in the center of the Baekho dressing chamber, bathed in the cold gray light of the window. The tailored robes hung beside him, still untouched. He hadn’t put them on yet. Couldn’t. Not while his skin still felt like a crime scene.

Black, slightly wavy hair framed his face, curling at the ends from the weight of the steam bath they’d forced him into. Each strand had been cut with intention, not artistry; short at the nape to expose his neck, longer around the jaw to soften his angles. His skin glowed gold, a burnished bronze beneath the glowstone lanterns. Too golden, in fact: oiled and powdered by staff whose fingers had moved across his body like butchers on auction day.

His collarbone was visible. That had been deliberate. The tailor, a hollow-eyed Beta with ink-stained cuffs, had muttered something about his “delicate clavicular tension” as he circled, clicking his tongue, hands darting too close to places they had no right to be.

“Show the throat,” he’d said. “Not the voice. A tease. Not a threat.”

As if Taehyung were already owned. As if Jungkook had already laid a hand across that throat and marked it.

“His hips are narrow but angled enough for projection. Accentuate that—cut the coat long but slit the sides. We want grace in motion, not submission in stillness—”

Taehyung had tuned out after that.

But the words haunted him now, clinging to the mirror-glass like breath-fog.

He turned slowly, inspecting the faint hollows of his lower back, the curve of his waist. Every inch had been calculated, polished, judged for its mating value. His ribs were visible, his shoulders sharp.

He pressed his fingers to his abdomen, right below his navel, where the heat coiled and curled like a sleeping animal. It didn’t stir yet. Not fully. But something… wanted. Deep down. He’d taken triple the dose of suppressants this morning, enough to make his ears ring and his balance falter, but it still lingered.

The ghost of this Alpha.
Of Jeon Jungkook.

That scent—he remembered it from the mourning ceremony. Brief, but all-consuming.

Like storm-washed cedar, dark amber, and burning air. Summer rain on marble. Thunder behind velvet. It had wrapped around Taehyung’s senses like smoke and dragged a whimper from his throat before he’d managed to bite it back.

He cannot know, Taehyung thought now, panic scraping up his spine. He must not see it. Not hear it. Not feel it on my skin.

His inner Omega was shivering.

And it disgusted him.

Jungkook was a predator in princeling’s clothing. The firstborn of House Gwanryeo, Sovereign-favored and dynasty-bound. Groomed to breed. Bred to rule. His claim on Taehyung wasn’t just expected; it was legislated.

And worse— it might not even be his to make. The Sovereign himself still had the right to override.

The dressing screen creaked behind him. Taehyung didn’t flinch, but every muscle locked.

“Still not dressed?”

His mother’s voice. Cold and steady.

Lady Yun Harin swept into the chamber, her skirts barely whispering over the marble. The scent of cooling lilies clung to her robes.

She came to stand beside him, gaze fixed on the mirror, not his body. Her lips were drawn tight. When she reached up and brushed a single lock of hair from his brow, it was not affection she offered—it was alignment.

“You will make the family proud today,” she said softly. “I know you will.”

Taehyung didn’t reply.

She studied him. Her voice deepened.

“Do not forget who you are.”

He swallowed, throat dry.

“Thirdborn Omega of House Baekho,” she continued. “Darkborn. Gifted. The Sovereign’s court would cull a dozen noble lines just to have what you carry.”

“How long until—?”

“The car is already waiting,” she said. “They’ve sent the Sovereign crest. You’ll be driven to the Sovereign estate under escort.”

Taehyung’s heart gave a hard, nauseating thump.

He looked down. Then back at his reflection.

Slowly, he dressed.

The robes were high-collared and black, lined with deep silver. They flowed like poured ink, slit at the sides to show glimpses of leg when he walked. The fabric clung to his hips, flared just slightly at the hem, and the back was split open enough to expose the carved spine of his.

Everything, everything was meant to display without revealing.

To tempt without offering.

To bind without bond.

And at his throat, above the collar of his robes, the onyx neck-shackle pulsed faintly. Pheromone-lock. Obedience-seal. Heat-block.

Jungkook would not smell anything unless allowed.

Unless desired. He hoped it stayed that way.

Because if Jeon Jungkook truly scented what was buried beneath all this silk and silence—he would never let Taehyung go.

Chapter Text

❖ Excerpts from the Crimson Codex ❖

Compiled Laws of Bloodline, Reproduction, and Magical Regulation

Issued and enforced under the High Authority of the Sovereign Blood Court

⸻

§29 — On the Deployment of Alpha Command

“In accordance with sovereign protocol and ancestral bloodright, all Alphas bearing Noble Designation are permitted the use of Alpha Command to ensure the obedience, cooperation, and emotional stabilization of bonded or court-designated Omegas.”

1. Alpha Command is a sanctioned neurological override executed through voice and pheromone trigger, allowing the Alpha to compel immediate behavioral compliance from an Omega.

2. This measure is deemed essential for the containment of Omega hormonal fluctuations, dissociative bond resistance, or episodes of willful defiance.

3. Use of Alpha Command does not require Omega consent and is considered an expression of the Alpha’s legal guardianship within sovereign law.

*******

The car door opened with a soft click.

Rain misted against the black umbrella the driver held. The beta bowed low, but Taehyung didn’t move; not yet. Rain clung to the edges of the doorframe, fat drops sliding down like tears, and the misty gray outside seemed to beckon him like a specter. Somewhere deep in his chest, his heart thudded. Once. Twice.

Taehyung stepped out.

The scent of petrichor hit first, rich and earthy. The ground slick with memory. The Sovereign estate rose before him like something carved from night.

He could feel eyes on him already.

Guards. Most were Betas, cloaked in black and silver, posted discreetly along the gravel walk. But a few—taller, broader, more restrained—were Alphas. Their presence was subdued, yes. Professional. But Taehyung was trained to read between the lines.

The way their gaze followed the sway of his robes. The subtle dilation of pupils. The way their hands twitched once at their sides; whether from instinct or desire, he could not say.

He hated it.

The part of him that noticed. The part that could catalogue their interest: pleased, intrigued, barely-there arousal tempered by discipline and the knowledge of their place in the blood hierarchy. But they noticed him. Saw him. Not just as a guest, but as a thing. A precious thing. A potent, state-critical, thirdborn Omega.

Taehyung’s body knew the performance. He moved like taught glass; grace in motion, never submission in stillness. Each step toward the entry doors was poised, measured. But inside, his bones rattled.

Because the mourning ceremony had been enough.

One breath of Jeon Jungkook had been enough.

The room he was led into was not what he expected. Not a throne room. Not a ceremonial hall of mirrors. But a library.

Dark-walled. Heavy with the scent of leather-bound books and centuries-old ink. There was a low fire hissing in the hearth, its light licking over the spines of the Sovereign’s ancient archives. The shelves climbed so high that ladder rails curled into the ceiling beams like ribs.

In the center of the room, a sunken floor space. Padded with dark crimson cushions, a coffee table set low, lacquered black, adorned with porcelain teacups that steamed into the air like ghosts.

The servant pointed wordlessly at the cushion closest to the window, positioned so he would face the door they’d just come through.

Deliberate.

So the heir can look at you the moment he enters.

Taehyung lowered himself slowly. Gracefully. Every movement designed. Not submissive. Never clumsy. But not provocative either.

Tempt, but never yield.

He folded his legs beneath himself with silent precision. Back straight. Chin lifted.

The servant bowed and left. Only the rain remained. Growing louder. A low hum beneath his skin.

He studied the room. Slowly. Nothing in here was left to accident.

A painting caught his eye. The Sovereign family: rendered in oil, proud and still. The Alpha Sovereign stood central, power bleeding from every brushstroke. Jeon Taehwan’s painted gaze was merciless, eyes black as oil under pressure. At his side stood Seo Dalya, delicate, oval-faced Omega consort, serene and terrifying in her calm.

And in front of them—

Jungkook.

Even in paint, his presence dominated. Younger. Stoic. But not unreadable.

There was calculation in his jaw. Iron in the way his hand was half-curled behind his back, even as he stood without armor. A predator’s patience.

And now he would meet that presence in flesh

Outside, the clouds broke and curled like bruises blooming through the sky. The rain tapped steadily now, faster. Calming him. Taehyung let himself listen.

Let himself feel.

The scent was earth and ozone. The sensation of soaked velvet and cedar bark. He could almost feel the water on his skin—summer rain pouring down his back, soaking through his robes. He could almost taste it—sharp and cold on his tongue, with a metallic edge like thunder waiting to split the sky.

He closed his eyes.

A mistake. Because now his body remembered. That scent.

His core tightened. Heat flared low in his belly, coiling like molten silk, and his throat caught on a sound he didn’t let escape.

And then the voice came. Low. Dark. Amused.

“Did the rain make you lonely, little Baekho?”

Taehyung’s eyes flew open.

Jeon Jungkook stood in the doorway, one hand on the carved wood frame.

And he was beautiful.

But not in the way the court poets might write. Not in the way that could be tamed by ink and stanza.

He was tall, dressed in ceremonial black softened by silk layers that clung to the muscle underneath. His shoulders cut sharp beneath his overcoat, which had been left unfastened at the chest, revealing the embroidered seal of House Gwanryeo against his collarbone. His hair was damp from rain, slicked back enough to expose his forehead, the strong angle of his cheekbones, the line of his jaw sharp enough to make flesh bleed.

He didn’t wear gloves. Of course he didn’t.

Why would a predator need to dull his claws?

Jungkook moved slowly, every step deliberate, like a lion circling a delicate new scent. His eyes were obsidian ringed in sunfire, rimmed with long lashes too pretty for what they hid. Hunger. Calculation. A flicker of curiosity laced with the dark thrill of power.

And Taehyung—

He could feel it. The way Jungkook was reading him. Devouring him. Not just his body—no, that would be too base.

His obedience. His poise. His restraint.

His gaze trailed from the parted hem of Taehyung’s robes, where the line of his thigh was visible, all the way up his spine. Past the exposed dip between shoulder blades. The collar. The throat.

The mouth.

And Taehyung was kneeling on the silk cushion like some goddamn shrine offering. Obedient. Scent-blocked. Stripped of pride and voice.

“You look smaller than I remember,” Jungkook said idly, voice low, “But perhaps that’s just the collar talking.”

He stepped forward, slow. Deliberate. The way predators did when prey was cornered.

His eyes dropped — and Taehyung could feel the gaze.

“Tell me, omega…”

The voice dipped lower. Velvet. Poison.

“Do you always kneel so prettily, or is this just for me?”

Taehyung didn’t react. Not outwardly. Inside? His rage was coiled so tight he could barely breathe.

“Your Highness,” he replied quietly, too perfect, voice sheathed in practiced grace. “I was instructed to remain seated.”

“Ah.” Jungkook’s mouth curved ;not a smile. A warning. “And what else were you instructed?”

He sat down beside him. Not across. Not at a respectful distance. No, Jungkook sat close enough that Taehyung could feel the warmth of his thigh.

He reached for the tea. The heir to the entire Court. Pouring for him like they were equals — but every movement said the opposite. It wasn’t kindness. It was control.

He handed Taehyung the cup.

Taeyhung curled his fingers around the cup, trying to stop the tremor.

“You’re very quiet,” Jungkook said. “Is it the rain? Or me?”

Taehyung didn’t look up.

“Do I frighten you?” the heir asked. His tone was thoughtful, but the glint in his eye said he already knew the answer.

“I was told not to speak unless spoken to,” Taehyung murmured.

“So obedient,” Jungkook hummed. He sipped his own tea slowly, never breaking eye contact. “Do you enjoy it? Being told what to do?”

Taehyung’s smile was practiced. Sweet. Fake.

“Whatever pleases the Court.”

Jungkook tilted his head. His eyes dropped again, slow and obscene. He leaned back just slightly, licking his inner cheek, tongue pushing against it as his gaze swept over Taehyung.

A predator surveying his prey with full intention of stripping it bare.

Then, without speaking, Jungkook reached for the porcelain teacup again. His right hand, the ungloved one.

Taehyung couldn’t stop himself.

His eyes flicked down. The bare skin of Jungkook’s dominant hand. The hand he’d used. The hand that killed.

Even now, faint sigils swirled like ink beneath the surface of his skin; sleeping, but deadly. Unleashed only with contact.

One touch to the neck. And the world would end.

Jungkook caught him staring. He licked the rim of his cup, slow.

“So,” Jungkook said, tone light. “Tell me. Have the physicians detected the stir of your gift yet? Or are you still… silent?”

Taehyung inhaled. Carefully. Controlled.

“No signs yet, Your Highness.”

“Mm.” Jungkook’s gaze burned through him. “And the court physicians? Are they worried?”

Taehyung swallowed.

“They are monitoring. But they’ve reassured my House I remain viable.”

Viable. As if he were cattle. A womb on legs. The phrase caught in his throat like poison.

Jungkook watched him drink the tea. Watched the tremor in his wrist he tried to hide.

“And if you collapse before your gift manifests?” he asked. “If your body rejects the power like some do? That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?”

Taehyung’s spine stiffened. “I trust it won’t come to that.”

A part of him hoped it would. He fought to smile, to offer politeness.

But Jungkook wasn’t fooled. Something sharp crept into the air.

“You’re lying,” Jungkook said softly. “I can smell it.”

Taehyung’s lips parted, but nothing came out.

“I hate disobedience, little Baekho,” Jungkook whispered, voice low. “But what I hate more—what I detest—is dishonesty.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“Tell me what you really think.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a Alpha-command.

And Taehyung—

He felt it.

Felt it like claws against his spine, invisible and burning. Like a pressure behind his ribs, uncoiling. It pressed into the base of his neck, deep in the gland under the collar, igniting something primal; obedience, ancient and inescapable.

His father had used Alpha-command before. When his sons had lied about who shattered the scrying glass, or who ran into the old temple ruins. A parental leash.

His limbs trembled, breath stuttering as he fought it, but the command burrowed deeper, latching behind his heart, dragging words from his mouth before he could silence them.

“I hate it,” Taehyung gasped, eyes wide. “I hate being here. I hate being offered. I don’t want to be a fucking breeding tool for your cursed —”

Taeyhung managed to cut off.

Silence fell. Taeyhung didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

Jungkook’s expression didn’t change—at least not at first.

Then slowly… so slowly… his mouth curved. Not in anger. Not in disappointment. But in a wicked, amused smile.

“Finally,” he said, voice husky with delight. “There you are.”

Taehyung blinked, confused.

Jungkook chuckled under his breath, rolling his shoulders like a predator who’d just flushed out the prey.

“I don’t mind a little fight, Taehyung,” he said. “In fact… I enjoy it.”

His fingers brushed the hem of Taehyung’s sleeve. Not enough to touch skin. Just enough to remind.

“Prey always think they can outrun me. That they can hide what they are. Their fear. Their thoughts. Their heat.”

He leaned in again, nose brushing the side of Taehyung’s jaw, inhaling.

“And they always learn, eventually…”

His voice dropped to a whisper.

“…I don’t like being outrun.”

Taehyung’s skin prickled with heat. His throat locked.

His body wanted to flinch.

But he didn’t.

He just stayed there, tense and silent, the tea cooling between his fingers, his pulse thundering loud enough to summon gods.

Jungkook finally leaned back.

His smile, when it came, was cruel. Delighted. Possessive.

“I’ll allow it this time,” he said. “You’ve earned that much. I’ll let you lie to the Court. I’ll let you wear the silks and smile for your House. But when we’re alone?” Jungkook voice turned low. Lethal.

“You will never lie to me. Because next time you do…”

He said it low. Dark. Intimate.

“…you won’t use your words to tell me the truth. I’ll take it from your body instead.”

Taehyung swallowed hard. His heart hammered in his chest. His thighs clenched tight. The collar squeezed again—scent suppression on the verge of failure.

And still—

his omega whimpered yes.

“Have you been prepared for the Red Audience next week?”

Taehyung blinked, surprised by the shift in topic. The coiled threat of the conversation before loosened slightly, and for the first time in minutes, he dared breathe without tasting danger on his tongue. He straightened where he sat, the movement small but precise.

“Yes,” he said.

He wasn’t lying.

The Red Audience was no ordinary gathering. It was the blood-ribboned summit of Lightborn and Darkborn nobles, a ceremonial crucible where alliances sharpened and offenders bled. Every quarter, they assembled beneath the crimson banners and black sun sigils carved into the obsidian dais of Sovereign Hall. Every quarter, a new execution was named. A marriage sealed. A betrayal punished. The air itself thick with incense and judgment.

“I’ve read the briefing scrolls,” Taehyung added. “I’ve reviewed the attendees. I’ll be ready.”

“Good,” Jungkook murmured. “Then make sure to wear something pretty.”

Taehyung glanced up, surprised again. Jungkook was watching him over the rim of his cup, eyes molten amber in the firelight.

“You should look the part,” Jungkook went on. “So when they look at you—those Lightborn aristocrats in their holier-than-shit robes, the Darkborn Alphas all desperate for a taste of you—they’ll know exactly what they can’t have.”

Taehyung’s breath caught.

“I heard them, you know,” Jungkook continued, tone deceptively casual. “At the mourning ceremony. Whispering behind their fans, sniffing the air like animals in heat.”

His gaze sharpened. “ How desperate they were for a glimpse of you. To sense your scent.”

Taehyung didn’t move. But his heart began to drum again, uneasy.

Then the heir’s voice softened. “A pity it’s blocked under that collar.”

And Jungkook was staring at it now, the onyx band at Taehyung’s throat, slick with warding sigils and humming quietly with suppression magic. The scent-lock was flawless. No hint of Taehyung’s true self touched the air.

But Jungkook?

Jungkook looked like he wanted to shatter it with his teeth.

“Have you been scented before?” he asked suddenly, voice low.

Taehyung’s eyes widened. His mouth parted—but no words came out.

Yes.

When he was very small. Namjoon. In moments of fear or pain. A brother’s scent laid gently over his, to calm the panic. Safe. Comforting.

But this—this was nothing like that. If Jungkook scented him now, it would not be comfort.

The heir leaned in.

“I said,” Jungkook murmured, voice dark with intent, “have you been scented, omega?”

Taehyung’s heart thundered. The word omega rolled off Jungkook’s tongue like sin, like ownership.

He swallowed. “Not—since I was a child.”

Jungkook’s smile curved. Slow. Lethal.

“So no Alpha’s ever marked you?” His eyes glinted. “No one’s ever rubbed their scent into your neck, into your wrists, into your core?”

“No,” Taehyung said, breathless.

Jungkook licked his lips.

“Then let me.”

Taehyung’s eyes went wide.

The words didn’t drop into the room. They slammed into it. Hard enough to knock the wind out of Taehyung’s chest.

“Let me scent you,” Jungkook said again. He was closer now. Too close. His legs straddled the cushion. His scent crashed against Taehyung’s shielded body. Even under the collar, his inner Omega shivered violently.

Jungkook’s hand reached out. Fingers brushed the edge of the collar. Not yanking it off. Just touching. Claiming.

“Let me show those other Alpha bastards what’s mine,“ he whispered.

Mine.

Taehyung’s stomach turned. He hated that word. Hated the way Jungkook said it like a vow, a sentence, a cage.

And yet—

His body betrayed him.

Because deep in his glands, locked behind sovereign-forged sigils, his scent stirred. Like the very idea of being scented was enough to ignite him.

“No,” Taehyung whispered.

Instead of being pushed away, Jungkook leaned in further, voice curling around Taehyung like a net.

“I’ll be gentle,” he said, but he was lying. His touch wasn’t gentle. His dominance pulsed off him like heat from black coals.

“Your scent,” Jungkook murmured, “will belong only to me.”

His fingers hooked under the edge of the collar. Magic flared, hissing. But he didn’t break the seal—not yet. He only pressed, firm and possessive, until Taehyung’s breath hitched.

The collar clicked.

The scent-lock released.

Taehyung gasped.

The moment the suppression broke, the room shifted. The air was no longer neutral. It filled—flooded—with Jungkook’s Alpha scent: black petrichor and storm-ripped ozone. It hit Taehyung like a slap to the spine. His entire body lit up.

His own scent, shy, half-buried, uncoiled beneath his skin. Hot and golden. Rich. Fresh pine trees soaked in sunlight. It bled from his glands like golden oil, slick and natural, his body desperate to be recognized.

To be claimed.

Jungkook’s eyes darkened.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Fuck.”

He buried his nose in the hollow of Taehyung’s throat.

And rubbed.

Taehyung choked.

Flesh to flesh. Gland to gland. The bondless mimicry of mating. An Alpha rubbing their scent into the gland of an unclaimed Omega—marking them with invisible ink the whole world could smell.

Jungkook’s hand slid behind his neck, cupping the base of his head. He dragged their bodies together, pressing his scent glands beneath his jaw against Taehyung’s throat. Grinding.

A low growl rumbled from Jungkook’s chest.

Taehyung arched. His hands curled into the cushions. His legs trembled.

Because it was too much.

Heat flooded his body. Every nerve alight with sensation. His thighs clenched as his slick glands bloomed instinctively beneath the skin, even if his heat hadn’t arrived yet.

“Fuck, you smell—” Jungkook inhaled, ragged. “Like sun-warmed pine and a forbidden fruit.”

He slid along the line of Taehyung’s throat again, jaw pressing into the sensitive skin beneath his ear.

Taehyung whimpered.

His core twisted, tightening. His body betrayed him completely—hips shifting instinctively, seeking friction. Pleasure built behind his ribs, low and terrible.

He wanted to moan.

But he wouldn’t.

“Hold still,” Jungkook whispered. “Let me finish.”

His hands slid down. Gripped Taehyung’s hips. Pulled him closer. Then, to make it worse, Jungkook’s thigh slipped between Taehyung’s.

Taehyung gasped. His whole body arched. Shame curled behind his ribs. His scent spiked with need.

Jungkook groaned.

“You’re going to smell like me for days,” he said, low. “They’re going to know. All of them. Lightborn. Darkborn. The whole fucking Court.”

He kissed the scent gland behind Taehyung’s jaw. Open-mouthed. Slow. Possessive.

“You’re mine now, little Baekho.”

Taehyung’s skin burned. His lungs refused to fill. His fingers trembled as he tried to push Jungkook back, but the Alpha only grabbed his wrist and licked the inner curve of it, where the secondary gland throbbed just beneath the skin.

He rubbed there, too.

And Taehyung whimpered. His scent spiked again, fresh pine gone molten.

Jungkook inhaled, hard. His pupils dilated. His grip tightened.

But he didn’t lose control.

“Look at you,” he said. “You hate me, don’t you?”

Taehyung panted. His lips parted. “Yes.”

“But your omega loves me.” Jungkook’s eyes glittered. “It sings for me.”

He tilted Taehyung’s chin.

“Next time,” he whispered, “I won’t stop at scenting.”

Taehyung’s breath stuttered.

Jungkook stood, slowly.

The scent of him was everywhere. Wrapped around Taehyung like chains. Like a noose. Like an invisible leash that the whole world could see.

He stepped back. But his gaze stayed locked on Taehyung.

And Taehyung, curled on the cushion like prey that had been caught and marked and branded, could do nothing.

Because the air reeked of him now.

Of pine. Of petrichor. Of heat.

And Jungkook’s scent was written on his skin like blood.

Chapter Text

❖ Excerpts from the Crimson Codex ❖

Compiled Laws of Bloodline, Reproduction, and Magical Regulation

Issued and enforced under the High Authority of the Sovereign Blood Court

⸻

§26 — Of the Red Audience and Quarterly Judgment

“To preserve the Balance of Blood and sustain the Covenant of Opposites, the Red Audience shall convene once per quarter under Sovereign Summons. This tribunal consists of the reigning Alpha and Omega of both the Lightborn and Darkborn Courts. It is through their unified judgment that blood crimes are tried and lineage offenses punished.”

1. Attendance is mandatory for all Noble Houses summoned, regardless of rank or designation. Failure to present oneself before the Red Audience constitutes Contempt of Blood and shall result in automatic penal assignment.

2. The Red Audience holds unilateral authority to interpret breaches of covenant, including unlawful bonds, unauthorized fertility tampering, magical violations, and defiance of sovereign pairing law.

3. Verdicts rendered by the Red Audience are final. No appeal shall be granted, save by unanimous request of both reigning Sovereigns—a circumstance yet to occur in recorded history.

4. In cases where Lightborn and Darkborn law contradict, the decision shall favor the path that preserves dependency between the two lineages.

“The Red Audience is not a court of mercy, but a crucible of survival. Let those judged bleed with grace.”

******* 

The moment the car doors sealed shut behind him, silence fell; cold, total, unrelenting.

Taehyung didn’t speak. Didn’t breathe properly either. His lungs still tasted of storm and rain, of ozone-bitten hunger and Alpha-musk. His body sat upright, porcelain-still, but inside—

Inside, his omega was howling.

Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to claw the voice out of his skull, dig it from his glands with bare hands and burn it. But it throbbed inside him like a sickness, curling behind his tongue and shivering down his spine.

He could still feel Jungkook.

Not beside him.

Inside him.

It wasn’t carnal, not yet. No claim was carved into his heat-slicked core. No mating knot had been forced into his trembling womb.

But the scent was there.

Fuck, the scent was everywhere.

Laced into his pulse. Pressed beneath his skin like ink. Shoved into his scent glands so thoroughly, that even the onyx collar clamped back around his throat now could not cage it. It sang past the wards. Leaked into the air in rippling, invisible ribbons.

And every inch of his body knew it.  Even if no mark glowed at the nape of his neck. Jungkook had scented him in full heat mimicry; Alpha to Omega. The bloodline would smell it. The nobles would whisper.

And no other Alpha would dare touch him now.

They wouldn’t need a scroll. They wouldn’t need a decree. Jungkook had spoken with his scent, his body, and that meant more than any law.

This one is mine.

The ride back to House Baekho estate passed like a tomb procession. Gilt-etched windows. Marble colonnades streaked with shadow. His mother stood in the inner courtyard as he stepped out, her gown ink-black and silver-veined, humming with fresh enchantment.

She turned at the scent. Her nostrils flared.

And she smiled.

A pleased little curl of the mouth. No questions. No scolding.

She looked at him like a prize ribbon had been pinned to his chest.

The heir was satisfied, her gaze seemed to say. Good for the Negotiations. Good for the House.

Taehyung’s stomach twisted.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t bow. He walked past her—fast, stiff, silent. His boots slammed the stone. His fingers trembled at his sides.

And when he stepped inside—

They smelled it.

The staff’s eyes didn’t meet his directly, but they didn’t need to. A moment. A pause in their movements. The quickening of breath. The almost imperceptible flicker of their pupils toward his neck.

He didn’t need a mirror. He knew what they saw. A glimmer of bruised skin beneath the collar. A rub that wasn’t a bond. A scent so strong it felt like a leash.

He reached his wing. Threw open the lacquered door.

And locked it behind him.

He didn’t cry.

He wanted to. He wanted to howl. To fall to the floor and dig his claws into the stone and scream until his magic bled out from his palms and split the heavens. But his body—traitorous, Omega-stupid body, was still humming, still purring, drunk off the Alpha’s attention.

He collapsed onto the cushions.

The collar tightened. The suppression sigils flickered as his glands fought back. He pressed his palms against his face and groaned.

Because his thighs still ached. His neck was hot and raw. His skin felt bruised where Jungkook had rubbed his scent in, like the heir had pressed himself so hard against Taehyung’s body that something sacred had been burned open.

Not physically. Not visibly.

But inward. Down in the marrow. Like Jungkook had left fingerprints inside his bones.

The door clicked.

Taehyung shot up, snarling without sound.

But it wasn’t a servant. It was Jimin.

The Secondborn Baekho Omega. The example carved into every scroll about what an Omega should be: docile, pliant, obedient. A bloom waiting to be plucked.

The door closed behind him. He wore a deep plum robe, hair artfully tousled, face gleaming with soft cosmetics and that ever-present smirk.

“Well, well,” he drawled. “Look who came home.”

Taehyung said nothing.

Jimin strolled closer, eyes flicking over his brother’s body like a cat sniffing at blood.

“You were gone less than two hours,” he purred. “Either the Heir works fast, or you’re just easy.”

Taehyung’s head snapped up, teeth bared.

“Don’t—”

But Jimin paused.

Mid-step. Mid-smirk.

His eyes narrowed. The smirk vanished. The air shifted. Just slightly.

He stepped closer. Inhaled. And the change in his expression was immediate. All the venom drained from his mouth. The flirt dropped from his tongue.

“Oh…” Jimin whispered. His voice didn’t rise. But it changed. “Oh, Tae…”

Taehyung flinched.

Jimin crouched in front of him.

“What did he do?”

Taehyung clenched his jaw.

Jimin reached out—fingers brushing Taehyung’s jaw, tilting it. His thumb stopped just short of the gland beneath his ear.

“He scented you,” Jimin said quietly. “Not lightly. Not a tease. Full imprint.”

Taehyung looked away.

“He didn’t knot me,” he muttered. “Didn’t fuck me.”

Jimin’s jaw clenched. “That doesn’t matter.”

And it didn’t.

Because scenting like this—rubbing your Alpha-scent into an unbonded Omega—wasn’t just improper. It was binding. Not legally, but biologically. Psychologically.

Politically.

If anyone else dared touch him now, Jungkook would smell it. And it wouldn’t just be a slight.

It would be insult.

Jimin sighed. Leaned back. Ran a hand through his hair.

“Typical sovereign-bred Alpha,” he spat. “Thinks dominance means ownership. You’re not his. Not yet. And he knows that. He just wanted to mark you anyway. Like a toy.”

He looked up again.

“You okay?”

Taehyung laughed. Bitter. Shaky.

“I don’t know.”

Jimin didn’t reply.

Taehyung’s voice turned quieter. “It won’t come off.”

“What won’t?”

“His scent. It’s in me.”

He gritted his teeth. “It’s singing through me, Jimin. My glands are still swollen. My skin’s still hot. My Omega—” His voice cracked. “My Omega likes it.”

Jimin said nothing for a long moment.

Then—

“There are ways,” he said slowly.

Taehyung looked up.

“Ways to drown it out. Not erase it. But smother it enough that the screaming stops.”

“Tell me.”

“Showers. Cold ones. Long ones. Until your core stops echoing his presence. Then sport. Combat. Running. Anything that forces your adrenaline to override the heat response.”

“That’s it?”

Jimin hesitated.

“There’s one other option.”

“What.”

“Alpha scent. Applied deliberately. Directly to your glands. To confuse the signal.”

Taehyung blinked. “You mean—”

“I mean,” Jimin said quietly, “if Namjoon were to scent you—our brother—it might be enough to mute Jungkook’s imprint.”

Taehyung stiffened.

“But…”

“But Jungkook will smell it,” Jimin finished. “And he will not be pleased.”

Taehyung exhaled, slow and shaky.

His stomach roiled. His chest ached. The collar hummed against his throat like a leash tugging tighter. The scent of petrichor and sunlight and something wrong still clung to his skin.

He looked at Jimin.

“Is there a way to make him stop?”

Jimin’s gaze sharpened.

“No,” he said. “Not unless you kill him. And Darkborn or not, that’ll take more than a touch.”

Taehyung’s fingers curled.

Because deep inside his chest—beneath the fear, the fury, the aching Omega-slick longing—his Dark stirred.

Cold fire simmered in his palm. It tickled the skin near his throat. Whispered against his pulse.

Jimin saw it. Felt it.

He didn’t flinch. He just nodded.

“Good,” he murmured. “Let it rise.”

Taehyung looked up.

“I don’t want to be owned,” he whispered.

Jimin leaned forward. Pressed his forehead to his brother’s.

“Then make them fear you, little brother.”

Taehyung closed his eyes.

********

The first morning after, Taehyung sat in silence.

He scrubbed until his fingers blistered, until the steam scalded his shoulders red. It wasn’t enough.

Because no matter how deep he scraped, how long he stood naked under ice-cold jets until his lips turned blue—

Jeon Jungkook’s scent was still there.

In the sheets.
In the air.
In him.

His glands throbbed, delirious, swollen beneath the collar. The suppression sigils hissed and sparked, struggling to hold the fury of his biology at bay, but nothing could choke the bloom of mine that curled hot and heady beneath his ribs.

Like petrichor cut with lightning. Clean, searing, inevitable.

And Taehyung’s omega was drunk on it.

He ran.

Until his legs gave out, until he collapsed in the courtyard, chest heaving and knees skinned from the gravel path.

He took cold baths at dawn and dusk. Sat in them until his teeth rattled and his lips turned purple.

But the nights—

The nights were the worst.

The scent was quieter then, like a whisper through fog, like the hush before a storm. But it was there. Lingering like a threat. A promise.

Mine, it said.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

His Omega shivered under the weight of it.

And when the moon arched high and the mansion fell silent and the only sound left was the groaning of his glands under the strain of suppression, Taehyung broke.

He’d wake slick with sweat, thighs parted, sheets twisted around his ankles, and his scent, frustrated and fevered, would spiral up in waves from his body.

Jungkook. Jungkook. Jungkook.

Every fucking breath tasted like him.

His heat wasn’t due for another cycle. Three weeks, maybe four. But the collar could only do so much when his Alpha had imprinted so deep it reached his marrow.

He’d never been knotted.

But the idea—

The idea haunted him.

Because some part of him—deep, soft, cursed Omega-core—wanted.

Not just to be touched.
To be taken.
To be claimed.

His fists balled against the sheets. His breath hitched. And there were moments where he imagined it:

Jungkook above him. Mouth to gland. Teeth at his throat. Magic thick and pulsing through his spine. Knot buried deep inside, marking him from the inside out.

The thought made him want to vomit.

The thought made him moan.

And every time he came to his senses—heart pounding, scent bleeding from him like spilled ink—he felt it.

The shame. The rage.

But day by day, the scent faded. Just a little.

By the third morning, he could stand in his room without shaking.
By the fourth, he could sleep again, fitfully, but sleep.
By the fifth, the voice in his head—his Omega, his betrayer—had gone quiet. Not gone. Never gone. But watching. Waiting.

It wouldn’t last.

Because the Red Audience was now two days away. And Jeon Jungkook would be there.

So would the Sovereign. The full Court. And every noble house with a pulse and a thirst for bloodline power.

The event where Light and Dark mingled in sanctioned truce, cloaked in gowns and lies. Where the rarest of subtypes were paraded like cattle.

And where Taehyung would be on display again.

*******

He wasn’t part of the negotiations. Of course not. Omegas weren’t involved in their own futures. Especially not Thirdborn ones.

His parents spoke in hushed tones behind gilded doors. Namjoon, his eldest brother, sometimes joined them; his voice sharp, resolute. The air around them crackled with conjured contracts and warded scrolls.

When Taehyung passed them in the halls, they didn’t speak. Didn’t pause.

But he saw the smiles. Heard the pleased hush in his mother’s tone. The calculating gleam in his father’s eyes.

Things were going well.

Good for the House.
Good for the bloodline.
Good for the Sovereign.

Never good for Taehyung.

Dawn rose on the day of the Red Audience slow and golden.

Taehyung stood on the high balcony, body wrapped in pale ceremonial robes that shimmered with every breath of wind.

The onyx still circled his throat.

The morning was cool. But not cold. Autumn’s teeth had not yet sunk into the land.

The wind stirred the trees, sent birds wheeling across the pale-bright sky. They soared high, free, untethered.

And Taehyung—caged in gold-threaded silk, bound by law and collar and blood—watched them fly.

*******

The iron gates of the Sovereign Citadel groaned open like the jaws of some ancient god—wide enough for all the bloodlines of the realm to pass through, and cruel enough to remember the scent of each soul that dared step inside.

Taehyung did not tremble.

But something inside him flinched.

He walked between his brothers; Namjoon on the left, his shoulders a fortress of calm power, Jimin on the right, smile sharper than steel. Their robes shimmered with enchantment, the sigils of House Baekho embroidered down their spines like veined magic.

Behind them, their parents followed. Lord Kim Jaemin’s eyes glinted like polished obsidian, while Lady Yun Harin moved with all the grace of a mother offering her child to the slaughter—elegant, regal, unshaken.

Inside, the Court opened before them like a cathedral of punishment.

The ceilings arched high above, ribbed with black-gold vaults, each seam inscribed with verses from the Crimson Codex. Rows upon rows of nobles sat split like a bleeding wound down the center; Lightborn on one side, Darkborn on the other.

On the left sat the Lightborn nobles.

Their robes shimmered: white silks, sun-threaded gold, veils glowing with captured dawn. Their faces were soft, radiant with life-magic. The air around them pulsed with vitality, the scent of healing and fruit-laced pheromones clinging like perfume. To look at them was to see something too bright to be real, gilded cages wrapped in beauty.

On the right—

Darkborn.

Their robes were darker than night: obsidian, oxblood, black-velvet etched with crimson runes. The air was colder here. Thicker. Alphas dominated this half of the hall—tall, broad, gloved and glowering. The Omegas among them sat subdued, silenced by collar or shadow.

They did not look at the Lightborn.

They stared through them.

The hatred was not loud, but it thrummed beneath the floor. It dripped from each glance, each curl of the lip. Bonding between Light and Dark was not just taboo.

It was treason.

And yet, despite the crackling tension, they had gathered.

As they always did.

The Red Audience. Four times a year, the noble bloodlines gathered here—where law ruled, and magic was watched.

Because both sides needed each other.
Because without life, death was pointless.
And without death, life was meaningless.

Taehyung’s lips parted, breath barely drawn.

He could feel it already. The eyes. Dozens of them. More. Both Lightborn and Darkborn turned as they entered. Some subtly, with flickering glances. Others… not.

He still reeked of Alpha.

Of Jungkook.

No matter how many showers, how many days he’d run his lungs raw and soaked his body in freezing water, his glands betrayed him. The scent wasn’t overwhelming anymore, not obvious.

But it was there. A thread beneath the perfume. A whisper under his own scentprint. And the court could smell it. He could hear it in the silence.

Still, Taehyung walked forward. His jaw sharp. His spine a line of defiance cloaked in gold-threaded silk.

They reached their seats near the front, positioned just behind the line of the minor sovereign houses. Close enough to see everything. To be seen.

They bowed as one. To the Sovereigns.

At the center of the room stood the Pedestal of Sovereignty: twin thrones sculpted from a single stone; divided, but inseparable.

Right: the Darkborn. House Gwanryeo.

Jeon Taehwan. Clad in robes like bleeding night. His binding glove was black dragonhide, clawed at the fingertips. His other hand rested on the arm of the throne like it belonged to no one but him. His mate beside him, Seo Dalya, an Omega of impossible poise, sat silent. Beautiful.

Their sons—Jeon Minhyun, and Jeon Jungkook—flanked them.

Minhyun: the lesser threat. Still dangerous.

And Jungkook. The first heir.

His hair was pulled back, exposing the sharp cut of his jaw, the proud line of his throat. His robe was deep burgundy, cut close to the body, embroidered with phoenix talons and binding seals.

He sat like he was bored. Like the whole chamber belonged to him. One hand gloved, the other free, resting against his mouth.

He didn’t look at anyone. Except Taehyung. From the moment the Baekho family entered, Jungkook’s gaze didn’t waver.

Heat prickled up Taehyung’s spine. He didn’t look. He wouldn’t.

He turned his head sharply—looked at the other Sovereign Pair instead. At Light.

Not Jungkook.

Not Jungkook.

But House Ilyang. The Lightborn. The opposite.

Sovereign Kim Haesoo: radiant, tall, cloaked in living silk that shimmered like fireflies trapped in glass. His presence was gentler—his power pulsed warm, holy, humming softly like the breath of spring. Beside him, his Consort: Lady Yun Areum, elegant and warm.

And before them, seated in grace: Kim Seokjin. The Lightborn heir.

Seokjin was…

Divine.

There was no other word for it. His hair was ink-black and flawless, pinned in a circlet of white opals. His robe clung like light itself, diaphanous and shining, and his skin glowed faintly with a healing aura; raw, natural Light magic. His eyes were shaped like secrets. His mouth soft as a prayer. He looked untouched. Unscented. And yet—

There were whispers. Talks of negotiations. Mating contracts. Sovereign bargains.

For the preservation of bloodline.

The Sovereign Pairs stood. The room bowed as one.

“In the name of the old blood, and the new bond,” the four monarchs spoke in unison, “we greet the gathered Houses.”

“Light watch you,” murmured House Ilyang.

“Dark guide you,” intoned House Gwanryeo.

The court began. The first defendant was brought forward.

A Darkborn. Feral. His eyes wide and unseeing. Magic shivered around him like rot and grave-dust. He was foaming at the mouth.

“Shin Myungwoo,” the herald read. “Of House Noryang. Charged with unauthorized use of Death-Gift. Victim: one Lightborn servant. Confirmed trace signature. Guilt absolute.”

Gasps rippled across the Lightborn section. Even among the Darkborn, unease stirred.

Because you couldn’t kill with the death-touch without leaving proof. The signature on the neck—like a fingerprint burned into the skin. Unique. Irrefutable.

The servant had died with Shin’s mark etched into their flesh. No trial. Only sentencing.

The Sovereign Pairs stood.

Sovereign Taehwan spoke first. “Darkborn law demands consequence. Use of the death-gift against unapproved targets constitutes Magical Treason. The sentence is death.”

Sovereign Haesoo followed. “And Lightborn law does not forgive the destruction of our kind. The sentence stands. By both courts.”

The Red Guard moved. Shin Myungwoo screamed once, high and animal. Then nothing. The scent of death was thick. Cold. Ripe.

But the court did not pause. One after another, the charges were read.

An Omega accused of faking Light-Gift. A Beta found to be hoarding scent suppressants for unsanctioned heat dens.

Judgements were passed. Punishments delivered. Some screamed. Others wept. Most remained silent.

At first, the nobles stayed focused. But as the crimes dulled—more infractions of protocol, more punishments for lesser treason—their attention shifted.

From the cases. To him.

Taehyung felt it. The shift. Eyes turning. Murmurs stirring. Speculation clinging to his skin like ash.

Because even if Taehyung wasn’t on trial: He might as well have been.

Unmanifested Darkborn Omega. Thirdborn. Sovereign-Claimed. Jungkook’s scent still lingered—subtle, but alive.

And still—

Taeyhung didn’t look at Jungkook.

Until he did.
Until his eyes betrayed him.
Until instinct curled like a wire through his gut, tugged his gaze to his direction, across the dais—

And found him.

Jeon Jungkook. Smiling.

Jungkook didn’t blink. Didn’t pretend to look away. He watched him. A stare so sharp, it carved down Taehyung’s skin like a claw.

Mine, that look said.

You can scrub me off your skin a thousand fucking times.

I’ll still be in your blood.

Chapter Text

The court had fed.

Now it would dance.

After the last sentence was passed and the Red Guard dragged away what was left of the accused, the air shifted. The audience thinned. The hunger, however, remained. This time not for justice, but for spectacle.

The second part began. The mingle.

It was the Sovereign Court’s twisted idea of diplomacy: once the blood had been spilled and the law reinforced, they would feast together. Smile together. Pretend that the hatred didn’t run marrow-deep.

Lightborn and Darkborn drifted from their ordered seating like rivers bleeding into each other, carefully, warily, bound by etiquette and centuries of hatred. This was the only sanctioned mingling allowed outside the rigid diplomatic rites—only during Red Audiences. The reversal contacts met. Hands brushed in calculated gestures, smiles never reaching eyes. Every word was laced with the weight of political survival.

The great hall was rearranged without a word. Servants moved like ghosts, pushing in tall candelabras so their flames painted molten gold on black stone. In the distance, under a balcony lit by crystal-lantern magic, the long banquet table was being prepared.

Taehyung stood still.

He did not move toward the chatter. He did not seek a conversation. He had been brought here to be seen, not heard, and he knew the part the Sovereign Claim had cast him in.

A prize.
A rarity.
And as such, untouchable.

It was the silent perimeter he felt every time someone’s gaze brushed over him; a warning in the air that anyone who tried to approach him without permission would risk an Alpha heir’s wrath. Jungkook’s scent, faint but undeniable, clung to him like a sovereign seal. And above that, the heavier, colder pressure of the Claim itself.

He let his eyes roam instead. Namjoon stood in the near distance, speaking to Kim Seokjin; two figures of perfect posture and mirrored calm, Darkborn and Lightborn bound by sanctioned reversal pairing.

Further off, Jimin was surrounded by admirers. Their laughter curled around him like silk, hands hovering near his arms but never daring to touch without his leave. Jimin thrived here, soaking in attention as easily as breathing.

And Taehyung… stood alone. A piece on display.

It was almost a relief when a voice cut through the haze. Low. Dry. Familiar.

“Still don’t like the eyes, huh?”

Taehyung turned his head sharply.

Min Yoongi.

Cousin to Jungkook. Third in the line of succession. He had spoken to Taehyung once before—at the mourning ceremony. That had been unusual enough. Most Alphas kept their distance from someone wearing the Sovereigns invisible brand, but Yoongi had stepped closer then. Just as he did now.

Not too close—still within the measure of proper manners—but enough for the air between them to feel… altered.

His expression was unreadable, but his gaze… dragged. Not like most alphas’—not leeching, not dripping with the unspoken weight of fantasy.

No. Yoongi’s eyes moved over him like he was gathering data. Cataloguing. Filing away observations for later use.

And then Yoongi’s nostrils flared. He inhaled. The faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth told Taehyung he’d caught it. Jungkook’s petrichor scent—ghosting along Taehyung’s skin, trapped in the weave of his robe.

Yoongi’s mouth tilted. “So. The rumors aren’t rumors.”

There was no accusation in his voice—just quiet fact.

Taehyung’s pulse ticked faster, though he kept his expression still.

“Did you read the book I told you about?”

Taehyung blinked. “What book—” Then memory struck. Yoongi’s hint. That there was something inside the book that might be… useful. For the fight.

He grimaced. “I didn’t have time.”

Yoongi’s gaze was steady. “Pity.”

Taehyung’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to help me?”

Because nothing in this world came without price. Especially not from an Alpha. Especially not one of them.

Yoongi’s shoulders shifted in a minimal shrug. “Maybe we have the same ambitions. Maybe it’s time for a change.”

A change.

The word slid into Taehyung’s mind like a knife into water.

Yoongi leaned just enough to breach the edges of polite distance, close enough that Taehyung caught the faint, cool spice of his scent. “Maybe this is it,” he murmured.

Taehyung’s inner omega froze; not in fear, but in the electric awareness of an alpha’s proximity. Yet… there was no flirtation in Yoongi’s stance. No predator’s lean. No heat-strung edge to his voice.

Instead, Yoongi looked at him like he was a player worth inviting to the board.

Taehyung tried to deflect. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

Yoongi studied him for a beat longer, then said quietly, “I have a plan. But I can’t get into detail—not yet. Not if Jungkook or the Sovereign use the alpha command against you.”

The words landed heavy.

Taehyung’s mind flashed—unbidden—to that first encounter with Jungkook. The way the command had hit him: iron in his veins, the truth tearing out of his throat before he could stop it.

His stomach tightened.

Of course Yoongi caught the subtle shift. He scoffed under his breath. “So he’s already used it on you.”

He didn’t ask. He stated it.

Then Yoongi extended a hand. “Dance with me.”

It was not a request.

And in this room, it would be less conspicuous than standing apart, speaking in low voices. Nobles were already glancing in their direction, their whispers curling like smoke.

Taehyung hesitated, but choice was a fiction here. He let Yoongi guide him into the center of the room.

His pulse thudded once in his throat, hard. He swallowed it down. He placed his hand in Yoongi’s.

Yoongi’s palm was cool, steady. His grip uncompromising. Not cruel, not possessive in the Alpha way he’d been conditioned to brace for, but a guiding pressure that made it clear Taehyung’s pace was now tied to his.

The court’s musicians, sensing opportunity, shifted their tempo to match the new focus. Slow strings curled upward, threading over the hum of candlelight and fermentwine.

Yoongi drew him close—not indecent, but enough that Taehyung could feel the steady weight of an Alpha’s frame in front of him, enough that the court would whisper about the proximity all the same. Their joined hands moved, and the floor turned beneath Taehyung’s feet.

“You know,” Yoongi began, voice as even as if they were discussing the weather, “there’s a way to resist the alpha command. Or… at least, to blunt it.”

Taehyung looked up at him, startled. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“Of course you haven’t,” Yoongi said dryly. “You’ve been taught how to bow, how to smile, how to spread your knees and open your throat. Not how to disobey.”

Yoongi leaned closer, enough for his breath to ghost against Taehyung’s ear. “If your Darkborn gift is already manifested, you can learn to stop the command. Freeze it in your veins before it reaches your mind. Takes willpower. Focus. But it can be done.”

Taehyung’s mouth twisted. “Too bad mine isn’t manifested yet.”

“Then hope it comes soon,” Yoongi said.

“Why? So the Sovereign Claim can be sealed?”

Yoongi’s gaze didn’t waver. “Would you rather die than manifest?”

Everything in Taehyung’s inner omega whispered no. Whispered that he wanted Jungkook, wanted to obey, wanted to be the perfect omega and heir-bearer. But he nodded. Slowly.

Yoongi’s mouth curved, barely there. “Good. Makes my plan easier if you’re willing to do anything.”

“Why should I help you?” Taehyung asked. “For all I know, you’re just another alpha trying to put a leash around my throat.”

“What do you need,” Yoongi asked, “to trust me?”

Taehyung’s steps slowed, so slightly that only the precision of Yoongi’s lead kept it from being noticed. He thought. Sifted through the bone-deep caution that had kept him alive this long.

“I want to know more about the Darkborn Sovereign family,” he said finally. “About their secrets. I only know what my tutor feeds me, and that’s the polished version meant for display.”

Yoongi’s smirk sharpened. “I’ve heard your brother Jimin is perfectly aware of court gossip.”

“If Jimin knows it,” Taehyung cut in, “then the whole court knows it within a day. I want something… private. Something only someone who breathes the same air could know. Someone who can read people. Read between the lines.”

The smallest ghost of amusement flickered over Yoongi’s features. “Flattery,” he murmured. “Fine. If that’s what you want…”

They turned again—Yoongi’s voice lowering so the words stayed between them.

“The Sovereign and his Omega consort, Dalya,” he began. “You’ve been told she keeps to her own wing by choice, haven’t you? That it’s tradition. Dignity.”

Taehyung nodded once.

“The truth,” Yoongi said, “is that she tried to escape. Right before Jungkook was born. They found her at the western wall, her reversal bond half-broken from the strain. She made it two miles into the shadow fields before the Red Guard caught her. She’s been a bird in a cage ever since. Guards at every door. Windows sealed with wards.”

Yoongi’s gaze flicked sideways, assessing the impact before continuing.

“The second heir, Jeon Minhyun… he’s quieter. The kind of quiet that makes people overlook him. Always in Jungkook’s shadow. Always second. But shadows are where monsters grow, Taehyung. He plays harmless. I’m not sure anyone’s seen the truth yet.”

Against his own will, curiosity edged in. His voice came softer. “And Jungkook?”

Yoongi’s gaze held his. “My cousin was raised to believe his word is law. Before he could walk, he knew the court would bow to him. Before he could speak, he knew his legacy was his birthright. The Blood Court doesn’t make kind men, Taehyung.”

The image was vivid; a child in gilded halls, eyes dark with the first shape of the man he’d become.

“He’s not cruel in the way you think,” Yoongi continued. “Cruelty is deliberate. Jungkook doesn’t always mean to break what he holds… but he has never learned how not to. But he has always been possessive of his toys, even as a boy.”

Taehyung swallowed, his throat tight, his skin prickling with a mixture of defiance and something far more dangerous.

Yoongi’s voice softened, but it was the softness of a blade sliding from its sheath. “They are not gods, Taehyung. They bleed. They rot. And when they fall, it is never the way the court expects.”

The sharp, resonant peal of the great bell rolled through the Citadel, shaking the crystal chandeliers and rippling the silks of the gathered nobles.

The summons to dinner.

Yoongi released his hand slowly, his palm warm against Taehyung’s for one last beat before it was gone.

“Eat well,” he murmured, his gaze locking on Taehyung’s. “You’ll need your strength.”

And then he melted into the crowd, leaving Taehyung standing alone, the echoes of his words clinging like shadows to his skin.

*******

The air in the banquet hall was air thick with incense and the kind of heat that came from too many bodies pressed into too little space, each one wound tight with centuries of hatred. Black marble walls swallowed the candlelight whole, reflecting it back in fragments through the obsidian veins in the floor.

The table stretched the length of the hall, a glittering spine of silverware and cut crystal. Nobles took their places in precise choreography, Alphas claiming the head of each cluster, Betas slotting in with mechanical obedience, and Omegas, delicate ornaments in silk and gems, placed like centerpieces where their presence flattered the most important eyes.

Taehyung slid into his seat. His family, House Baekho, was positioned directly opposite the Sovereign family, as if the seating chart had been designed to pin him in a crossfire.

Across from him—Jeon Jungkook.

Of course.

To Jungkook’s right, the second heir Minhyun and their mother, Seo Dalya, sat like a painted scene from a book, her pale throat bowed in quiet elegance, his posture taut with the confidence of an Alpha bred to rule. On Jungkook’s left sat the Sovereign himself, Jeon Taehwan—shoulders squared, eyes sharp as the ceremonial blade at his hip. Beside him, the Lightborn sovereign Kim Haesoo, all sunlit poise, then the Lightborn heir Seokjin, then his mother in ivory lace.

Taehyung’s side mirrored theirs: to his left, his mother Yun Harin, then Jimin; to his right, his father Jaemin, then Namjoon, the shadow of his presence coiled like a kept wolf.

The first course arrived in silence: a pale consommé, glistening gold in crystal bowls. The scent was rich, marrow bone and saffron, but Taehyung’s stomach felt sealed shut.

Because Jungkook hadn’t looked away from him once.

Not to glance at his food. Not to acknowledge his father’s opening words. Not even to nod at the courtiers greeting him down the table.

His gaze was an unbroken tether; cool, unblinking, anchored in the sharp line of Taehyung’s face. There was no warmth in it, not yet, but no cruelty either.

The Omegas at the table smiled faintly at whatever their Alphas said, nodding in approval like gilded dolls. They didn’t enter the conversation; they didn’t need to. They were meant to listen, to glow softly in the background like expensive glass.

Taehyung kept his hands loose in his lap, pretending interest in the Sovereign’s discussion of border patrol treaties, in Namjoon’s low reply, in the Lightborn sovereign’s measured interjections about the harvest tithes. He let the steam from the consommé curl against his face, inhaling as if the scent alone could distract him.

It didn’t.

Because from across the table, Jungkook’s hand had shifted—his thumb dragging idly along the rim of his wine glass, slow, deliberate. His mouth curved, not quite a smile, but the bare suggestion of one.

When Taehyung’s eyes flicked down in instinctive retreat, Jungkook tilted his head.

As if to say: Look at me when I look at you.

The second course arrived—roasted river fish in a black sesame glaze. The smell was heavy, sharp, and Taehyung forced himself to taste it, even though his appetite was nothing but a hollow space.

Dalya did not speak. She kept her eyes down, her spoon moving with measured grace. Yoongi’s words from earlier rattled like stones in Taehyung’s head. Two miles into the shadow fields before they caught her. Windows sealed with wards.

Would that be him, in a year? A bird in a prettier cage? Guards on every door?

He made the mistake of looking up,  and met Jungkook’s eyes again.

Only now, the heir’s gaze was warmer, more molten. His tongue brushed briefly over his bottom lip, a movement so subtle it could have been nothing. But the way it was paired with the slight flare of his nostrils told Taehyung it wasn’t nothing at all.

Taehyung fixed his eyes on the Sovereign instead. Jeon Taehwan’s voice was deep, measured, and carried the weight of command even when speaking of mundane matters. He gestured to a map carved into the table’s inlaid gold, discussing troop rotations.

The Lightborn sovereign added some mild objection. The Alphas’ conversation swelled, layered with political language, unspoken barbs hiding in courtesy.

The Omegas smiled.

The third course was served. Taehyung cut his portion with meticulous care, his mind elsewhere.

But then Jungkook’s leg brushed his under the table.

Not a mistake. Not a ghosted touch. A slow press, the faintest shift forward until his knee anchored against Taehyung’s. Not enough for the others to notice, but enough to send a pulse of heat through the Omega’s body, instinct screaming submit while his mind clawed for distance.

Taehyung held himself utterly still.

Jungkook’s eyes dipped briefly to Taehyung’s mouth, then back up, unhurried. The sovereign heir didn’t smirk now. He simply watched , the way a snake watches the faintest twitch of prey muscle.

The conversation swelled again; Alphas dissecting supply chain disruptions, Lightborn and Darkborn voicing controlled disagreement. The clink of cutlery was the only sound from the Omegas’ side.

Taehyung tried to focus on the venison, the sweetness of pomegranate, the iron tang of meat. But Jungkook’s scent, petrichor after a storm, was curling into his lungs, his body answering in ways he didn’t want.

And Jungkook knew.

He didn’t need a command to strip Taehyung bare; his stare did it just as well.

Then the Sovereign’s voice sliced through the air. “Kim Taehyung.”

The Omega’s head snapped up before he could think.

The Sovereign wasn’t looking at him, of course. He was looking at Jungkook, as if Taehyung were an object to be evaluated between them.

“I think,” Jeon Taehwan said, “it would be wise for you two to continue seeing each other. To grow familiar.” His smile was faint, but the eyes beneath it were calculating. “My son spoke well of your first meeting.”

Across the table, Jungkook’s eyes never left Taehyung’s. Under the table, the pressure of his knee increased—an almost imperceptible shift, but it felt like an unbreakable weight against him.

At that, the Sovereign’s eyes drifted over Taehyung in a slow, assessing sweep. As if he were already imagining the ways his son might enjoy him.

Heat prickled at the back of Taehyung’s neck, but not the kind the court wished from an Omega.

Across the table, Jungkook’s gaze sharpened—not in protest, but in confirmation.

The arrangement was made before Taehyung could even breathe in.

“Five days from now,” the Sovereign concluded, “you will have dinner together.”

And just like that, it was settled.

*******

The banquet was winding down.

The air in the Sovereign Hall had grown warmer as the wine burned through veins, as conversations deepened into slurred promises and sharpened into veiled threats.

One by one, the nobility began drifting toward the heavy double doors, their silks and brocades rustling like the wings of restless birds.

Taehyung counted each departure like a silent blessing. If the Sovereign family would just leave, if the heir would just leave, the night could dissolve without further spectacle.

But fate never favored him in such small mercies.

The first real sound of Jeon Jungkook’s voice that evening carved through the hum of the hall like the cold edge of a sword.

“Would it be acceptable,” he said, his words curved into polite formality but sharpened by intent, “for Taehyung and I to step out for a moment?”

The words were shaped as a question. They were nothing of the sort.

“The stars,” Jungkook added, his gaze never leaving Taehyung’s face, “are particularly beautiful tonight. I’d like to show them to him.”

Taehyung’s parents agreed before the air between them could even shift.

Who were they to deny the first heir of the Darkborn throne?
Who were they to step between a predator and what he had decided was his?

Jungkook rose in one smooth motion, the obsidian of his coat rippling like a shadow uncoiling. He did not look to see if Taehyung followed, only expected it.

And because choice was a fragile fiction here, Taehyung stood.

The garden swallowed them quickly.

It was cooler beyond the banquet hall, the air threaded with the scent of early autumn earth and the faintest bite of night frost. High walls guarded the edges of the grounds, their black stone veined with protective wards that glimmered faintly under moonlight.

Lanterns hung from wrought-iron arches, but Jungkook led them past the light, down gravel paths bordered with hedges, until the murmuring of the court faded into silence.

Above them, the stars were mercilessly clear; thousands scattered across the ink-dark sky, their light cold and ancient.

Jungkook’s presence ahead of him was a living weight, a scent-marker in the night: petrichor, sharp and grounding, the kind that clung to the bones after rain. His frame was broad enough that he seemed to pull the path with him, his shadow long and steady against the ground.

They reached the darker stretch of the garden before he stopped.

Jungkook turned then, slow, his gaze dragging deliberately over Taehyung as if measuring him against some private ledger.

“I don’t like,” he said at last, his voice unhurried but laced with something cold, “when my Omega smells of another Alpha.”

The words landed heavy, settling against Taehyung’s chest like an iron collar.

Confusion sparked first — how could that be? The only scent in his lungs, on his skin, was Jungkook’s. That rain-drenched petrichor had wound itself into him since their first meeting, a sovereign brand on every breath he took.

And then the truth slid into place.

Min Yoongi.

They had danced. Close enough for proximity to leave its faint, residual mark — not intimate enough for scenting, but enough for a thread of Yoongi’s cool, spiced scent to cling in the weave of Taehyung’s sleeve.

He said nothing.

Jungkook’s gaze sharpened. “What did you two talk about?”

The pull of the alpha command wasn’t there yet, but Taehyung could feel the edge of it, waiting — a blade that could drop without warning. He knew lying would be useless. Jungkook would smell it. See it. Feel it in the shift of his heartbeat.

So he reached for the safest half-truth he could find.

“We have something in common.”

One dark brow arched. “What’s that?”

Something in Taehyung’s chest twisted then — a small, stubborn spark against the constant weight of submission. He was tired. Tired of curving his spine into shapes the court found pleasing. Tired of swallowing words until his tongue tasted of blood.

If Jungkook wanted honesty, then let him choke on it.

“That we both despise,” Taehyung said, voice low but steady, “the way you mark your toys.”

For a moment, the garden stilled. The air between them was taut, strung between the risk of the words and the certainty of the consequences.

Then Jungkook laughed.

It wasn’t a polite sound. It was rich, deep, and threaded with something almost amused, the kind of laugh that told Taehyung he’d just entertained a predator, not escaped one.

“Oh, yeah?” Jungkook stepped closer, the gravel under his boots crunching in slow, measured rhythm. “Don’t let my cousin’s commentary blind you, Taehyung. At the end of the day, Alpha is Alpha. We all want. We all take. Some of us just use a different approach.”

His eyes gleamed faintly in the starlight. “Don’t think his leash is longer than mine. Yoongi’s always been power-drunk and greedy.”

Sarcasm slipped, unbidden, from Taehyung’s tongue. “Of course. And you’re far from those traits yourself.”

The corner of Jungkook’s mouth curved ;not in anger, but in something worse. Interest.

He closed the last steps between them until Taehyung could feel the heat of his body through the chill night air. The scent of him, rain over stone, threaded now with the sharper edge of possessive Alpha intent, pressed in on all sides.

“My legacy,” Jungkook said quietly, his gaze locked on Taehyung’s, “is not greed. It’s my birthright. And I will take what’s mine.”

His face was carved from shadow and starlight; the strong lines of his jaw catching pale silver, the obsidian fall of his hair just brushing his brows. His eyes were dark pools, reflecting a glint of the heavens above, sharp enough to cut.

Taehyung’s pulse stuttered under that gaze. His Omega instincts twisted — half recoiling, half thrumming with dangerous recognition. His Darkborn blood hummed faintly, unmanifested but restless under his skin, as though something in Jungkook’s proximity was stirring it toward the surface.

Jungkook’s hand lifted — not to touch, but to hover just shy of Taehyung’s neck, the heat of his palm a ghost over skin. A silent reminder: if he wanted to scent him again, mark him again, nothing would stop him.

“I’m looking forward to our meeting,” Jungkook murmured. The weight of the words was more than ceremonial; it was promise. Oath. Threat.

A glint of something unreadable sparked in his eyes.

“I’ll send you something to wear.”

The night seemed to lean closer around them, the stars colder, sharper.

And though Jungkook stepped back a moment later, the imprint of his nearness, of his claim, stayed pressed into Taehyung’s skin long after the path back to the banquet came into view.

Chapter Text

❖ Excerpts from the Crimson Codex ❖

Compiled Laws of Bloodline, Reproduction, and Magical Regulation

Issued and enforced under the High Authority of the Sovereign Blood Court

⸻

§3 — Of Thirdborn Omegas and the Sovereign Claim

“Should a Noble Bloodline be blessed with a thirdborn child bearing the Omega designation, that family is bound by law to present said Omega to the Sovereign House of their lineage upon the child’s eighteenth nameday. This offering is intended for the purpose of official union and heir production.”

1. The Alpha Sovereign may lay claim to the thirdborn Omega either for themselves or for a designated heir.

2. If the reigning Alpha chooses to claim the Omega personally, it is within their legal right to annul any existing mating bond with their current consort, without penalty.

3. Any refusal to comply by the family of the thirdborn Omega shall be considered High Treason and punished in accordance with §14 of the Crimson Codex.

3a. Should the Sovereign Himself lay claim, the Omega is henceforth considered Crown Property, body and blood bound to the Throne.

  a1. Any offspring born of Sovereign-claimed Omegas are deemed Crown Heirs, their guardianship resting solely with the Sovereign. Neither House of origin nor maternal kin may petition for rights of visitation or inheritance.

  a2. Should a Sovereign-claimed Omega resist, disobey, or attempt defiance of Crown Will, the punishment shall be Silencing. Their voice will be ritually bound, permitted to speak only at the Sovereign’s command. The training of obedience shall follow, where gesture, gaze, and flesh must answer before words are restored.

  a3. The Sovereign’s claim is irrevocable, lasting until the Omega’s death. No annulment, exchange, or inheritance of claim may be permitted. The collar, once clasped, is binding until the grave.

  a4. Should the Sovereign already possess a consort at the time of claim, the former shall be relegated to the Royal Harem, retaining title and residence yet stripped of primacy. The thirdborn Omega assumes the mantle of Crown Consort, bearing the exclusive duty of producing heirs and standing beside the Throne. The former consort may not contest, object, or depart; their presence continues only at the Sovereign’s indulgence.

*******

The limousine purred too softly for how violently Taehyung’s thoughts churned.

He sat rigid in the back seat, every turn of the wheels another reminder that he was being delivered—to him.

The Sovereign’s word was final. Five days had not changed that. They had only sharpened the inevitability.

The tunic the heir sent was indecent—black, neckline too low, tight enough to remind Taehyung with every movement that he wasn’t free. It was meant to highlight his features, expose his throat, his wrists. An omega’s body, packaged and perfumed for display.

When the limousine pulled up the long, winding driveway toward the Sovereign’s secondary estate, Taehyung stiffened. Moonlight drenched the black stone façade, all cold lines and sharp towers, a castle pulled from the ruins of old Darkblood wars. Iron gates yawned open for them like a beast unhinging its jaw.

The driver didn’t open the door.

Jungkook did. He offered Taehyung a hand like he was something fragile.

Taehyung ignored it. He climbed out without help, spine high, jaw clenched. The night air hit him like a slap.

He followed Jungkook in silence across the cobblestone path. Guards lined the walk like statues, weapons gleaming under torchlight. None looked at him directly, but he could feel their eyes. Could hear their thoughts.

Inside, the grand vestibule was dimly lit and quiet, all obsidian glass and velvet drapery. A butler bowed, another offered to take Taehyung’s coat. He handed it off like a threat.

Jungkook didn’t slow his pace. “You’ll be escorted to the Solar Room,” he said without looking back. “I have business. You’ll wait.”

“I’m not a lapdog,” Taehyung snapped.

Jungkook halted, just for a second. Then, slowly, he turned.

The light caught his face—chiseled, beautiful, merciless. “Then don’t sit,” he said. “Stand there. Pace. Rip the drapes if it makes you feel powerful. But when I return…” He stepped close enough for Taehyung to feel the heat of him again. “You will be ready.”

“For what?”

Jungkook’s smile was a blade. “You will see.”

Then he was gone.

Alone, Taehyung crossed the quiet room, hands trembling as he gripped the back of a carved chair. He let the burn of his breathing slow. He counted the seconds until his body stopped aching from that insidious pull—alpha, alpha, alpha—until he could think again.

Control, he reminded himself. You have control.

He smoothed his tunic. Checked the streak of liner under his eyes. There would be no cracks. No softness.

And when he sat by the window—one leg crossed, expression neutral, spine straight as a blade—he looked nothing like a trembling omega.

Jungkook entered the room several minutes late, tension clinging to him like smoke. His black shirt clung to his broad chest, unbuttoned just enough to tease, his dark eyes scanning the space until they landed on the one figure seated by the tall arched window.

“Apologies,” he said curtly, voice smooth but edged with something deeper, darker. “I had an important conversation. But now…” He stepped closer, a slow, deliberate prowl. “…I belong entirely to you.”

Taehyung, seated with perfect poise, refused to meet his eyes. The omega part of him was already on edge, his scent spiced with unease and something far more dangerous—interest. But he masked it behind a tight-lipped smile and reached for his glass of water, ignoring the untouched wine in front of him.

“You’re not drinking wine?” Jungkook’s tone sharpened, as though it were a personal affront.

“No, thank you.” Taehyung’s voice was quiet but firm.

Jungkook sat down across from him with a flick of his wrist, like a king descending from his throne. “Maybe it would do you good. You look pale.”

“I’ll stick to water,” Taehyung said, his voice clipped.

“So you don’t lose control?” Jungkook’s smirk was razor sharp. His implication clear.

“The negotiations aren’t finished yet.”

“They could be… if you let them.” Jungkook leaned back, eyes fixed on Taehyung like a predator savoring the stillness before the pounce.

Jungkook didn’t touch his food. His hunger, clearly, lay elsewhere.

“Let’s stop dancing and go upstairs,” Jungkook said, voice dropping lower, darker.

Taehyung’s eyes flared, his posture tightening. “I’m not going anywhere with you. Until the contracts are sealed, I owe you nothing.”

Jungkook stood, walked around the table, and placed one hand flat against the polished wood. The flickering candlelight made the shadows under his cheekbones seem deeper. “Don’t pretend you don’t feel it too. Your scent is spiked. You’ve been suppressing your heat, haven’t you? I can smell the effort it takes.”

Taehyung rose from his seat, the air between them heating like storm-lit clouds. “You’re mistaken.”

Jungkook’s smile curled, wicked and slow. “No, I’m not.”

He stepped closer, his scent a wave of intoxicating rain and thunder.

Taehyung’s instincts screamed—flee, fight, submit. A chaotic triad. But his mind stayed sharp.

“We need symbols of unity,” Jungkook murmured, “Do you understand what that means?”

Taehyung said nothing.

“It means we can’t afford weakness. And you, beautiful little thirdborn,” Jungkook said, voice like sin, “you’re exactly the strength we need.”

He stepped in, close enough to touch, and reached out—fingers brushing under Taehyung’s chin, down the curve of his throat. Light flickered in the room. Taehyung flinched but didn’t move away. A touch on the neck—from one born of the Dark—was enough to take life with a whisper of will.

“You’re trembling,” Jungkook said.

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re burning for it,” he whispered, inching closer until his lips nearly touched Taehyung’s. “You’re denying your nature, and that’s adorable. But it won’t last.”

When he reached for the hem of Taehyung’s tunic, fingers trailing up the bare skin of his thigh, Taehyung sucked in a breath. His omega body betrayed him—nipples tightening, breath shortening, heat flaring low and urgent.

“Stop it,” he hissed, pushing Jungkook’s hand away and stepping back. “Don’t touch me.”

Jungkook raised a brow. “Because you don’t want me to? Or because you do and it terrifies you?”

“Because you think you own me just because of a fated classification,” Taehyung growled. 

Like a switch flipping, Jungkook pulled him in. One arm snaked around his waist, the other fisting into the soft fabric at Taehyung’s side. Their mouths were barely apart, breath mingling.

“There’s no use fighting this,” Jungkook whispered,“It will happen. One way or another.”

“Not tonight,” Taehyung said, but it came out too soft, too unsure.

Jungkook didn’t answer. His mouth crashed into Taehyung’s.

The kiss wasn’t gentle. There was no tenderness, only claim. Possession. His teeth caught Taehyung’s lower lip, tugged until he gasped. And then Jungkook’s tongue invaded, deep and demanding.

Taehyung hated how his knees nearly gave out. How hot his skin felt.

He didn’t kiss back. Not truly. He let it happen. Because he knew Jungkook was right—he didn’t have a choice. Not really.

And because something deep and traitorous inside him wanted it.

Jungkook bit his lower lip, hard, just to watch Taehyung’s eyes flutter and his jaw slacken. The sharp edge of teeth tore skin. A smear of red bloomed.

Taehyung gasped.

Jungkook licked the blood from his mouth like it was dessert.

His omega was singing, preening, heat blooming in his abdomen at the presence of a potent alpha. His thighs ached. His skin burned. His womb throbbed.

Jungkook felt it. He pulled back just enough to breathe, lips slick and curved in a satisfied smirk. “There it is,” he whispered. “Your omega knows where it belongs.”

Taehyung’s lips were red. Swollen. Shame warred with the fire in his blood.

“You think I’ll spread my legs for you just because the law says I must?”

Jungkook stepped closer again, pressing a hand to Taehyung’s chest.

“Not yet,” he said darkly, a command. “But you can get on your knees.”

Then he pushed. Not hard. Just enough.

Taehyung knelt.

Not because he wanted to. Not because he surrendered.

But because his omega had stopped listening to his mind. It moved on instinct now, clawing its way to the surface, humming with obscene pleasure at the dominance bleeding off Jungkook in waves.

He could feel the cool stone under his knees, grounding him, but nothing about this felt steady. The room spun with the intensity of the moment, of the scent—dark rain, Alpha musk and something darker, older, something laced with that Dark magic Jungkook inherited through bloodline alone. The kind of magic that could take a life with a touch.

And Jungkook was touching him.

Thumb under his jaw. Fingers in his hair. Firm. Possessive.

Jungkook chuckled low. “That’s a good look on you, Omega,” he rasped, tipping Taehyung’s head back so he could stare down into those storm-dark eyes. “On your knees, pretty lips parted, your scent dripping for me.”

Taehyung gritted his teeth, jaw locked even though his body trembled with anticipation. “I’m not doing this for you.”

Jungkook smirked. “No, baby, you’re doing it for your heat. That greedy little omega of yours? It’s louder than you. Much louder.”

He leaned down, lips brushing over Taehyung’s ear, voice a sinful promise.

“Your omega wants to be filled.”

A whimper slipped out of Taehyung’s throat before he could bite it back. Shame rushed up hot in his cheeks, but it didn’t stop the throb between his thighs, the wet slick gathering no matter how tightly he clenched. His body was reacting, needful and aching and furious.

And Jungkook knew it.

His fingers tangled in Taehyung’s soft hair, tugging gently but insistently, dragging Taehyung’s gaze up toward him. “You want to keep pretending you don’t want this?” he asked, licking his bottom lip slowly. “You want to pretend you’re still fighting me, huh?”

“I am,” Taehyung hissed.

Jungkook gave a mocking, dangerous laugh. “You’re on your knees.”

He dropped to a crouch in front of him, eyes locked on Taehyung’s. “You know what happens next, little Baekho?” His breath fanned across Taehyung’s face, thick with heat. “I mark you. I knot you. I breed you until you forget what it’s like not to be full of me.”

Taehyung’s breath hitched again. Every word throbbed in his veins like poison. And still, his body responded.

His traitorous, desperate body.

“You’ll carry strong heirs,” Jungkook went on, his palm pressing low over Taehyung’s abdomen like he could already see the swell. “Because that’s what you were made for. A thirdborn Omega. You are engineered for this. To give life.”

He leaned in, nose brushing against the shell of Taehyung’s ear. “And I was made to fucking take it.”

Taehyung’s head dropped slightly, body shaking, breaths shallow. He wanted to scream, to punch Jungkook in his smug mouth, to shove him away and run — but gods, the way that voice soaked into his skin, the way the heat pulsed between his legs — his omega was practically singing now.

“Get used to kneeling,” Jungkook whispered, his grip tightening in Taehyung’s hair. “Because by the time I’m done with you, it won’t be out of obedience. It’ll be because your legs won’t fucking work without me.”

Then he kissed him again.

Harder this time.

More claiming than before — less seduction, more promise. Teeth dragged over Taehyung’s lower lip, and Jungkook growled into his mouth like he wanted to devour him whole. Taehyung moaned into the kiss despite himself, his hands bracing on Jungkook’ thighs, trembling.

He hated him.
He wanted him.
He needed—

No. No, he didn’t.

But his omega did.

The moment Jungkook pulled away from the kiss, Taehyung’s lips still burning from the bite, he knew something was wrong.

Terribly, dreadfully wrong.

The heat from Jungkook’s touch evaporated far too quickly, replaced with something cold—no, frozen. Ice crept along Taehyung’s spine, his veins twisting into something foreign and unnatural. He gasped, the air slicing down his throat like frost, burning and sharp. His limbs felt heavy, like stone. His heart thudded once—twice—then clenched painfully in his chest, like it was being gripped by unseen claws.

Taehyung stumbled backward, one hand clutching his ribs. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Everything was too much—the flickering candles were like strobe lights, Jungkook’s rainy scent was overwhelming, intoxicating, loud. The pressure in the room thickened, like the walls themselves were closing in.

“Taehyung,” Jungkook’s voice cracked through the haze. Rough. Alert. Different.

His teasing arrogance had vanished in an instant. “What the fuck—what’s happening?” His hands were on Taehyung in seconds, gripping his shoulders. “Breathe. Hey—look at me.”

Taehyung opened his mouth, but no sound came. His throat closed like a fist. His chest felt like it was full of broken glass.

Jungkook swore under his breath. “Shit. Fuck—fuck.” And then he was yanking at the ties of Taehyung’s black tunic, pulling it open with a brutal urgency that made fabric tear.

“Don’t t-touch me—” Taehyung tried, voice hoarse, but his body betrayed him again. He was shaking now, teeth chattering, every muscle drawn taut.

Then Jungkook stilled.

His eyes locked on Taehyung’s chest, and Taehyung followed his gaze.

And froze completely. His skin. His veins.

They were dark. A deep, shimmering black, like ink kissed by stars, glowing faintly as if lit from beneath. The patterns spiraled outward from his heart like a living sigil, ancient and blooming.

The mark of the Darkblood.

No. No no no no—

The air left Taehyung’s lungs all at once.

And in that moment, something snapped. Not pain. Realization.

He was manifesting.

He wasn’t going to die from magical collapse. He wasn’t going to fade quietly into the shadows. His magic had answered. It had chosen life.

And with it… came the Sovereign Claim.

He stared, shaking, watching the shimmering ink pulsing under his skin like molten oil. The black veins danced with iridescent hues—dark blues, violent purples, glimmers of something not quite silver. He knew that pattern. Had watched it bloom across Jimin’s collarbones when he came of age. Had seen it coil around Namjoon’s ribcage like a serpent when his Dark gift manifested.

He couldn’t breathe.

Jungkook’s voice was quieter this time. But not softer. Reverent.

“Holy fuck.”

Taehyung blinked up at him. The alpha wasn’t moving. Just staring—wide-eyed, mouth slightly open, jaw slack in a way Taehyung had never seen.

Jungkook didn’t speak. Not for a long time. He crouched again, like a beast kneeling before something sacred. His hand hovered over Taehyung’s bare chest, then lowered, one finger tracing a vein from collarbone to sternum.

“Look at you,” he murmured, voice nearly hoarse. “Darkborn.”

The pad of Jungkook’s finger dragged across Taehyung’s skin, following the pulse of black. Taehyung shivered.

But Jungkook didn’t stop.

His thumb dragged across one of the veins just under Taehyung’s collarbone, the heat of his touch searing through the frost that still gripped Taehyung’s body. A hum echoed low in Jungkook’s throat, a sound so visceral, it made Taehyung shiver even harder.

Jungkook traced lower, toward Taehyung’s navel, then back up again, following a branching vein over the delicate skin of his ribs. His breath caught.

“So fucking beautiful,” he murmured. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

Taehyung didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

Jungkook’s hand splayed over his chest, fingers spread wide as though claiming him. His thumb brushed over a patch of glowing ink just above Taehyung’s heart.

“You’re so rare,” he whispered. “A thirdborn Omega. With Dark magic.” His eyes burned.

Taehyung let out a sound—half sob, half whimper. He tried to pull away, but Jungkook grabbed his wrist.

“No,” he growled. “Don’t you dare run from this. From me.”

“You don’t understand—” Taehyung gasped, his voice cracked and raw. “It means I can’t escape anymore.”

Jungkook’s gaze flicked up. It was the first time Taehyung saw something close to confusion cross his face. Then realization. And he smiled.

“Oh, little Baekho,” he breathed. “You never could.”

Jungkook stood in a single motion, firelight casting violent shadows across his jaw. Then he turned to the heavy oak door, his voice sharp as steel.

“Guards!” he barked.

The doors flung open instantly. Red-uniformed alphas entered, tense.

“Get the Sovereign. Now. And summon the Lord and Lady of House Baekho. It’s happening.”

“Y-Yes, your grace!” they scrambled, disappearing down the hall.

Taehyung’s breath hitched.

The walls felt like they were closing in. His hands trembled where they clutched at the edge of the table. He looked down again—his chest still alive with that glowing dark ink. His body was alight and wrong and overwhelmed. Magic crackled in his bones like static. His omega instincts spun wildly.

He should run. He should scream.

But all he could do was feel.

And Jungkook’s eyes never left him.

“You don’t know it yet,” the alpha said, voice low and reverent, “but this is the moment everything changes. You belong to the Dark now. You belong to me.”

Taehyung flinched.

Because deep down—somewhere his mind couldn’t reach but his blood understood—this was fate.

Dark fate. And it had finally come for him.

The door opened with a gust of pressure—not wind, but power. A force that prickled over Taehyung’s skin like smoke from a dying pyre.

The Sovereign had arrived.

Jeon Taehwan, Alpha Sovereign of the Darkblood throne, stepped into the room like a blade unsheathed. Tall, draped in obsidian robes trimmed with Sovereign steel-thread sigils, his presence eclipsed the flickering candlelight. The very air shifted around him, thickening with dominance so potent it scraped against the walls. His eyes—coal black, rimmed in iridescent umber—swept over the scene with surgical clarity. Beside him, serene and silent, walked his Omega—Seo Dalya.

Jungkook’s mother.

Regal. Pale. Claimed long ago.

But it was the Sovereign’s gaze that gutted Taehyung.

It landed—no, latched—onto his exposed chest, still bared from where Jungkook had torn open the black silk tunic. The glowing, writhing veins of Dark magic illuminated his upper body like a map drawn in blood and prophecy.

The Sovereign’s nostrils flared.

Taehyung felt it like claws against his skin—interest.

Not from Jungkook. From his father.

Taehyung’s entire body recoiled. He gritted his teeth, trying to regulate his scent, trying to breathe, but the realization struck deeper than any blade could:

The way the Sovereign looked at him…

That wasn’t strategy. That wasn’t duty.

That was want.

Possession.

“…So it has begun,” the Sovereign said, voice low, silken with awe. “The dark has answered his blood.”

Seo Dalya’s eyes widened. Her lips pressed together.

The Sovereign stepped closer, slow and deliberate. His eyes never left the illuminated map across Taehyung’s skin.

Taehyung could feel his gaze, could smell his rising scent.

His stomach churned.

They said it would be Jungkook. That was the implication through all the negotiations, all the veiled threats, all the ritual posturing.

But the way the Sovereign’s eyes crawled across his body now—the way his jaw clenched ever so slightly, his pupils dilating—he was considering it.

And by law… he could.

He could strip Jungkook’s claim.
He could annul his bond to Dalya.
He could take Taehyung for himself.

And there was nothing Taehyung could do to stop it.

The shift in Taehyung’s scent was instantaneous—bitter panic layered with horror. And something in Jungkook seemed to snap.

His storm-dark musk flared with a sudden, territorial spike—sharp and furious. His scent filled the room like a deluge, a downpour crashing down on every Alpha instinct present.

Then, Jungkook moved.

He stepped in front of Taehyung with purpose—back straight, shoulders squared, his broad frame cutting a jagged line between the Sovereign and the Omega behind him. His voice was low, but thunderous with restraint.

“You’ve seen enough.”

Taehyung gasped.

Even the Sovereign stilled. It was the first time Jungkook had ever challenged his father. And Taehyung could feel the tremble in the air—tension pulled tight like a drawn bow.

The Sovereign arched a brow. “Do you presume to dictate what I may or may not—”

“Don’t pretend,” Jungkook snapped, “that this isn’t already decided.”

His voice held none of the flirtation, none of the mockery from before. It was possessive, dark and final. “He’s mine.”

The Sovereign’s eyes narrowed. But he didn’t push further.

Instead, he stepped back slightly and adjusted the cuffs of his robe. His expression cooled—but the tension didn’t ease.

“Very well,” he said slowly. “Then it’s time we bring the negotiations to an end.”

He turned toward the guards stationed at the chamber door. “Have the Baekho Lords arrived?”

Jungkook didn’t turn. His voice was cold, clipped. “They’ve been summoned. They’ll be here shortly.”

“Then begin preparations for the bonding ceremony,” the Sovereign said. “It will be announced before the Court before sunrise.”

Taehyung’s head spun.

So fast.

It was happening so fast.

His heart pounded beneath the glimmering web of darkened veins, each beat echoing the finality of those words. His magic wasn’t just awakened. It was claimed. His fate was now sealed.

Taehyung’s hands curled into fists. Cold still raced through his limbs, the awakening magic still burning under his skin like a fever.

And somewhere deep in that ice, in that crawling dread…

A spark flared.

If the Dark lived in his blood now…

He would learn how to use it.
Even if it killed him. Even if he burned the whole Court to ash.

Chapter Text

The world had narrowed.

Not to the room—no, that was gone. No chandeliers, no velvet drapery, no flickering candlelight. Just the sound of his pulse thudding like a war drum in his ears, the bitter iron taste of dread on his tongue, and the creeping cold clawing through his veins like a curse.

Taehyung was still trembling when the doors groaned open behind him, too slow, too loud. He didn’t turn. He didn’t have to.

He could feel them.

His parents.

His mother’s voice was the first to slice through the quiet, light as perfume and just as poisonous.

“Praise be to the blood,” Lady Yun Harin said, her voice alight with delight. “He’s manifested.”

Taehyung’s knees nearly buckled.

His father said nothing.

Lord Kim Jaemin’s expression, when Taehyung finally dared to glance, was carved from stone. Like he wasn’t even looking at his son—but beyond him. Straight to the Sovereign, as if awaiting judgment from a god.

As if his son were already a transaction complete.

The Sovereign’s lips curved, slow and satisfied. “A blessed event indeed,” he said, voice the smooth murmur of shifting obsidian. “We will inform the Court after the negotiation conclave concludes tomorrow.”

Then his gaze cut to Taehyung like a blade. “He will be moved into the second estate. For observation. And for stabilization.”

The words struck like icewater.

Taehyung’s mouth parted. “What—?”

“Standard protocol,” the Sovereign said without sparing him a glance. “Dark magic at this stage can be… volatile. We will stabilize him properly. Begin conditioning. The Crown requires absolute mastery over all assets, particularly those as precious as him.”

Precious.

Taehyung flinched. 

“First,” said the Sovereign, lifting one hand, “he must be tested. We must determine the dominant hand.”

Taehyung’s stomach twisted. He could barely breathe, let alone think, and now—

He was to use it?

Now?

The servant approached, bearing no weapon—only a flower. Simple. Pale blue. A soft-petaled iris resting gently in the center of a velvet-lined tray.

Jungkook hadn’t moved from Taehyung’s side, but his scent had deepened. Thunderclouds. Storms before they broke. His posture was tense, protective—one step behind Taehyung, just close enough that his heat brushed against his back.

Like he expected someone to try and take Taehyung from him. Like he was ready to kill if they did.

“Left hand first,” the Sovereign commanded.

Protocol. Always the left hand first. The dominant hand—if it was the right—would react more violently. They tested the weaker side first.

Taehyung’s hand was shaking.

He lifted it slowly. Each finger trembled, the tendons in his wrist taut and screaming. The flower waited—soft and stupid and alive.

He touched it.

The petals bent slightly under his fingertips.

He felt a thrum inside him, faint and pulsing. His skin prickled. His fingertips buzzed with a strange, unnatural current—not cold, not hot, but something worse. Like frost and fire twisted together. Like poison, electric and bright, laced into the very blood pumping through his veins.

It rushed through him in pulses, like a second heartbeat. Not yet shaped. Not yet formed. But there.

His magic.

It was alive. And it was trying to answer.

It surged toward his palm—but jaggedly. Unwilling. Recoiling, not from the flower, but from the intention.

Nothing happened.

A long silence.

Taehyung drew his hand back slowly, his heart in his throat. His palm still tingled—wrong, unfinished.

A flicker of something colder tightened in the Sovereign’s gaze. But he merely nodded. “Now. The right.”

The world narrowed again. A heartbeat. Two.

Taehyung reached out.

His right hand brushed the flower.

The effect was instantaneous. It was not death—it was obliteration.

The petals collapsed inward in a single breath, shriveling to dust. Black veins spread like cracks through the delicate structure, and in less than a second, it turned to ash and crumbled into the tray.

The scent of decay filled the air. Not rot—but magic. Cold magic. Void magic.

Darkborn.

Taehyung jerked his hand back. He stared at his fingers, the faint glow still pulsing there. A whisper of black mist curled from his palm.

His heart pounded—so loud it echoed in his ears.

He could kill. With a touch to the neck, a single brush of skin—he could snuff out life like a candle.

He didn’t hear the sharp inhale from his mother. Nor the murmurs from the guards outside. What he felt—what he sensed—was Jungkook behind him. Still. Watching.

And beside the servant, the Sovereign exhaled like he had just been given the world.

“His dominant hand,” he said, “is the right.”

Taehyung couldn’t breathe.

He stared at his fingers, as if they belonged to someone else. They felt foreign—too long, too light, trembling with a cold he couldn’t name. But the sensation…

The sensation was electric.

The magic still pulsed there—like frozen lightning beneath the skin, humming through his nerves, slithering along his spine. It was cold. But not dead.

Alive in its wrongness. Hungry.

He swayed.

The Sovereign gestured, and another servant stepped forward with a box. “Get a temporary Binding Glove,” he ordered. “The gift is unstable at first. The magic will try to leak.”

The servant nodded and fled.

The Sovereign turned back to Taehyung. “A proper glove will be fitted tomorrow. Warded silk. Nullthread embroidery. Tailored for an Omega.”

Taehyung flinched at the word.

Omega.

As if he could forget.
As if the law would ever let him.

The Sovereign’s eyes raked down his body. “You’ll be assigned a trainer,” he said, eyes flicking back to Taehyung. “Someone who masters the death gift.”

Taehyung’s stomach dropped.

“Min Yoongi.”

The air shifted again. Taehyung’s eyes widened.

Min Yoongi.

He remembered his voice, low and sharp at the Red Audience only days ago:

“If your Darkborn gift is already manifested, you can learn to stop the command. Freeze it in your veins before it reaches your mind. Takes willpower. Focus. But it can be done.”

But before he could answer, Jungkook’s voice shattered the stillness.

“No.”

All eyes turned.

The heir stepped forward, scent flaring in a storm. “You don’t need to assign anyone,” Jungkook said, voice hard. “I can train him myself.”

The Sovereign raised a brow. “Can you?”

Jungkook stepped closer to his father, jaw tight. “I’m more than capable. And more than willing.”

“Indeed,” the Sovereign said coolly. “Too willing, I fear.”

The implication was razor-sharp.

Taehyung flushed violently.

“You’d spend the sessions rutting into your Omega, not refining his control,” the Sovereign continued, voice silk-dipped venom. “And we need his magic honed, not his thighs spread. Not yet, at least.”

A silence.

Taehyung’s cheeks burned, his magic flaring like a slap against his ribs.

Jungkook growled low. “That’s not what this is about.”

The Sovereign turned from him, dismissive. “Your lust doesn’t concern me, Jungkook. The stability of the court does.”

He looked at Taehyung again. “And until the omega can touch without unintended killing, his hands will remain bound.”

A servant returned, offering the temporary Binding Glove. It was plain black, stitched with silver thread. Thin. Functional. A stopgap before the real one arrived.

Taehyung slipped it on with shaking fingers. The leather clung like a second skin, sealing over his wrist with a whisper of magic.

His palm still tingled with residual power—restless. Coiling.

The Sovereign stepped forward once more, slow.

Too close.

His voice dropped to a murmur. “You’re valuable now, omega,” he said. “And value must be protected. Controlled.”

He leaned in, his breath ghosting over Taehyung’s temple. “Don’t forget who your magic belongs to.”

Taehyung shivered.

But before the Sovereign could say more, Jungkook was there. His hand on Taehyung’s shoulder, possessive.

The Sovereign’s mouth curled slightly. Then he turned, robes whispering against the marble as he stepped away.

“Prepare everything,” he told the guards. “Bring the Omega to his new chambers.”

Taehyung said nothing.

He couldn’t.

He could still feel the dead flower in his hand.
Still feel the Sovereign’s eyes on his body.
Still feel Jungkook’s warmth against his back—protective, furious, his.

His fingers flexed beneath the glove. The cold had sunk deeper now, threading itself into his bones.

If he was truly Darkborn now—

Then he would become everything they feared.

And worse.

*******

They took the long corridor through the Second Estate.

Lamps burned low in crystal cages, their flames drawn thin by wards that glimmered like frost on glass. The floor was polished to a black-lit mirror, every bootprint swallowed and wiped away by invisible attendants. The scent was unfamiliar and beneath it all, the faintest trace of storm: Jungkook’s scent lingering on Taehyung’s sleeve from when the heir had touched him.

A Guard walked half a pace ahead, spear couched and eyes forward. He was a Beta, scent bleached flat by discipline and the incensed air. The other presence at Taehyung’s side was not so easily pared down.

His mother’s hand settled on his shoulder. A pressure that steered rather than soothed, as if he were a carriage to be guided into position.

“Chin up,” Lady Yun Harin murmured, voice precise as a needle. “The halls see everything.”

Taehyung lifted his chin. The Binding Glove on his right hand hummed faintly at the wrist, ward-threads tasting the air like a tongue.

They reached a pair of onyx doors inlaid with gold leaf—twin cranes rendered in filigree. The doors sighed open.

Taehyung’s first breath of the chamber made his stomach threaten to fold.

Luxurious was too thin a word. The room was an act of theater.

Walls in a deep imperial green, silk-tasseled drapes pooling like liquid shadow. A hearth black as a well, its flame blue-white and noiseless beneath a carved mantle of obsidian.

A screen of lacquered wood painted with a hunt scene: hounds and riders forever caught mid-bay, the prey a stag with eyes of inlaid pearl.

And the bed.

It rose from the center dais like an altar: four pillars of blackwood bound with golden rings, canopy overhead—sheer veils suspended to puddle in soft haze. Pillows, many of them, in pale silks and sable velvet, arranged not quite tidily—as if someone had fluffed them by hand a moment before he arrived.

Golden cage, Taehyung thought. The bars just happened to be made of silk and glass.

The Guard bowed, stepped backward, and was gone. The doors closed with that same sigh.

His mother kept her hand on his shoulder a moment longer. He could feel the pressure of her palm through the layers of his tunic, the press of familiar bones and tendons. Once, when he’d been small and feverish and drowning in the scent of his first pre-heats, those hands had held him upright and combed his hair back from his damp brow while she murmured old stories. Tonight the touch felt like the adjustment of a mantle before court.

She released him and moved deeper into the room with a critical eye. A decanter—crystal cut with the sigil of House Gwanryeo—waited on a low table beside a porcelain cup.

“At last,” she said. “You manifested.” Underneath the polish of her tone, something flickered—relief, yes, but edged in calculation. “Do you know how many omegas collapse before the eighteenth year? How many families vanish from succession, blood diluted and scattered? The Dark answered you. It has given you a place.”

“A place,” Taehyung said bitterly. “Here.”

“For now.” She smoothed her palm down the front of his tunic, then stilled when her fingers reached the lip of the Binding Glove. Her eyes dipped to the silvered stitching, thoughtful. “Until the conditioning is done, yes. Until stabilization. Until the Bond.”

That word landed with such weight he nearly swayed.

“Mother,” he said. His voice betrayed him; it was too young, too hoarse. He straightened it. “Must I stay here tonight?”

She looked up. A pause. The room, even with its many fires and scented flames and hidden brass lungs, felt airless.

“You know the answer,” she said.

“May I not—just for one night—return to the Baekho estate? To—” His throat tightened around the word. Brothers. “To say goodbye. Properly.”

His mother stepped closer and brushed a strand of hair from his forehead. To anyone watching, it would have looked tender.

To Taehyung it felt like she was straightening a crown that wasn’t his.

“You’ve always had such a beautiful face,” she said. “The court will favor you for it.” Her fingers lingered, then withdrew. “You will move into the First Heir’s wing after the bond is signed. It is protocol. We do not upset protocol in the final phase of negotiation. Not now.”

Across the room, the hunt scene gleamed under the lamplight. Hounds forever running. Stag forever poised with a blade of pearl for an eye.

“It could be the Sovereign’s instead,” he said, voice thin with a long-shot cruelty he didn’t mean. “The Crimson Codex allows—”

“The Sovereign will do as he chooses,” she said, and every syllable carried winter. “If he wishes to annul, he will annul. If he wishes to assign you downward to the First Heir, he will. You will—” She stopped, the line of her mouth easing. “You will be brave. And quiet.”

When she turned toward the door, the silks of her sleeves whispered. She paused with her hand on the crane-inlaid panel, as if remembering something. Without looking back, she said, “Your father is negotiating the breadth of your dowry—estate rights and allowances appropriate to a thirdborn Omega of Baekho. The Sovereign is amenable. Do not sour his mood.”

“Will you tell my brothers—”

“That you will see them at the Bonding Ceremony.” She inclined her head. “Sleep, my son. You will be safe here.”

Safe. In a room that watched him breathe.

She left. The locks performed their quiet arithmetic. One, two, three.

Taehyung stood where she had left him until the muscles in his calves fluttered and released. His exhaustion woke up all at once, like a beast that had been holding itself still for hours and now sprawled across him with its full weight.

He could feel the Dark in him as a new organ: not heart, not lungs—something coiled along the length of his spine with the chill of an icicle and the hum of a wire under current.

He raised his right hand. The glove drank the lamplight. The silver thread around the knuckles flickered faintly, catching and dulling the glow. The memory came unbidden—the flower collapsing to ash, the way the air had tasted, a penny held on the tongue.

This hand could stop a throat. A palm to the nape and the song of a body would end.

A large dressing mirror stood to the right of the bed.

The dark tunic hung heavy and fine, stitched to his measure and yet wrong in its ease. He unhooked the collar and slid the fabric from his shoulders. Cool air found warm skin. He did not rush, but the slight tremor in his fingers made each buckle, each tie more intimate. The glove he left on.

The Mark wasn’t a sigil. It was a map written in the body—a luminous shadow along his veins starting at the wrist of his dominant hand and spooling upward beneath the skin in fine dark tracings. The lines were vivid, as if inked fresh.

Taehyung folded the tunic and placed it over the chair beside the mirror. He should have shivered, being stripped to fine linen and skin beneath the estate’s indifferent air, but the Dark had crossed some private threshold inside him; his temperature felt recalibrated, comfort now a few degrees below what it had been yesterday.

The night-robe laid out for him was silk the color of pale smoke and cut indecently short. When he slipped it over his shoulders, it kissed his skin with a temperature that matched the air.

He told himself he would not nest. He was not a child, not a Omega driven by instinct to burrow. He would sleep on top of the pillows and let the thought of them pass through him like weather.

The mattress destroyed that plan in a single step. He sank and then kept sinking, the bed returning him to himself with a sigh that sounded obscene. A groan clawed up his throat, surprised and almost grateful, and he stuffed it into his sleeve.

On his stomach, face turned to one side, he let every muscle give. The glove kept him from splaying his fingers the way he liked. He tucked his right hand under the pillow instead. His left arm he flung wide. He breathed.

When the thoughts came back, they came like crows.

Min Yoongi’s name, cool as a blade in water. The way Jungkook had said No and meant mine in a language court etiquette pretended did not exist. The Sovereign’s voice close to his ear: Don’t forget who your magic belongs to.

He turned on his back, trying to breathe again—

And stopped.

Above him, carved into the ceiling, was a mirror.

His own eyes doubled and returned, pupils blown wide in the dim.

A full-length sheet of polished crystal, angled to reflect the entirety of the bed beneath it.

His heart stuttered.

Why—

The realization hit him low in the stomach, hot and crawling.

Why was it angled like that? Why placed there? What purpose could a Sovereign mirror serve above the bed of a Omega—

He swallowed.

The answer throbbed like shame.

To watch.
To inspect.
To study reactions, obedience, submission.

His skin prickled. His inner Omega flared hot, curling in his core, as if already rehearsing for the fantasy.

He turned on his side, jaw tight, thighs pressed together against the swell of emotion that rose up unbidden.

No.

He would not give them this.

But even so, the thoughts came.

The bond wasn’t even sealed yet, and still his body reacted. Still, the phantom scent of Jungkook behind him crept through his mind—thunderclouds and command, warmth and danger. Still, the image of that mirror reflected in his mind.

Would he watch me like that?

He buried his face in the pillow, furious at himself.

He turned on his side and wrenched his attention elsewhere. The weight of the glove. He breathed the way Jimin had told him to breathe in that too-short, too-bright conversation: in through the nose for four, hold for four, out through the mouth for six.

Something unclenched. The Dark settled. The fantasies dimmed to the pallor of old chalk and then scuffed away. His Omega lay down, not happy, but quiet enough not to claw.

In the thin curtain of time just before dreaming, something else drifted close. Not a voice. Not quite. A sense of presence, cool and exact, the way the air feels before glass breaks.

*******

The cold came first.

Not a temperature so much as an architecture. Angles of frost unfolding behind his eyelids—rooms of ice with no furniture, corridors of breath-white geometry that inhaled and exhaled without lungs. A hum threaded the walls, as if the palace itself had been dipped in winter and plucked like a string.

Then sound. Not thunder, not yet—something subtler—the hairline crack of lake ice, a thousand fractures speaking at once.

In the dream he could not see his own hands, only the dragging veil of breath before his mouth, the way it hung in the air and crystallized into glittering spores that sank and vanished through the floor.

Clouds arrived like an army.

He was outside without moving.

Gardens took form around him by degrees—hedges blackened and glossy with wet, statuary banded with lichened collars, water running from stone throats like old blood.

He stood bare-headed, the robe he did not remember putting on plastered to his skin. Hair soaked, it dragged its ends along his nape like cold silk. Water beaded on his lashes and made the world into a smear of light and dark. He shivered, but it was a dream-shiver—the kind that came not from cold but from recognition. As if the body knew what came next and the mind hadn’t caught up.

A voice fell from the clouds.

Not in words, not at first. A cadence that felt like command poured through mesh until meaning tore loose. He strained toward it, jaws aching with the effort to catch and swallow syllables.

The garden swallowed its own borders; hedges blurred into sky; the palace receded as if pulled on invisible lines. The clouds lowered again. The smell of ozone sharpened until he could taste metal at the back of his tongue. The voice returned, closer, as if speaking into the small of his neck.

“—omega.”

Everything in him flared.

Alpha, acknowledged his inner self, senseless and bright, though he hadn’t taught it that word.

The rain doubled. He could not see. The world was water and scent—

He gasped awake and choked on air that tasted like clouds broken open.

His skin remembered wet; his body said soaked while his fingers touched dry. The sensation of water ran away from his surface in slow, stubborn rivulets. His hair clung to his neck as if it actually were damp.

He was not alone.

A figure stood at the edge of the bed with his hands in his pockets and a familiar weather printed into the air around him.

Jungkook.

The First Heir did not bother to smile at first; he watched. The lamplight knifed its way under his cheekbones and made a geometry of his face that did not soften even when he finally let his lips curve.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said, voice pitched to the register that climbed the spine rather than the ear. “You looked so—” his gaze dropped, and stayed— “delicate.”

Taehyung stared, throat working. The robe—indecently cut when he’d first put it on—had hitched high while he thrashed in sleep. One knee was bared to the cool air; the line of his thigh prolonged the reveal to scandal. He dragged the fabric down, heat coming to his face too late to hide.

Jungkook’s gaze tracked the movement like a hawk marking a hare. His pupils swallowed the ring of iris until only a dark was left that looked like night pressed into a human shape.

A slow, dangerous smirk took his mouth. “How do you like your new chambers?” he asked, lazily, like a cat toying with a glass left too near the table’s edge. 

He did not wait for the answer before sinking onto the mattress. The bed took his weight with a sigh. He leaned back on one hand and let the other trail, unhurried, over the coverlet. Fingers dragged through woven nap. He found the edge of the duvet and rubbed it between forefinger and thumb, then flattened his palm and pressed.

Taehyung swallowed. “What are you doing here?”

Jungkook’s gaze slid up. “Checking on you,” he said, as if this were obvious. “After your manifestation.”

The shape of his eyes said more. The room understood him perfectly, having been built to.

He tilted his head, studying. “Have you missed me, omega?”

Taehyung shook his head. But the rest of his body answered for him—inside the cage of his ribs, inside the nerves that webbed his hips, a separate yes uncurled, reluctant and helpless as a flower opening at night.

Jungkook’s smirk widened, all teeth. He moved—no wasted motion, no kindness in the efficiency—and then he was above Taehyung, the mirror above them catching his broad shadow and dropping it back onto the bed like a second body.

The heir’s hand found the small of Taehyung’s waist, fingers spanning easy. He held him there. “I’m very content,” Jungkook murmured, the words almost sweet. “That my omega manifested. That you are finally—” he paused to breathe him in, “—mine.”

“But it was a pity we were interrupted yesterday,” he added, too soft to be polite. “There’s so much more I want to do to you.”

Taehyung set his left palm to Jungkook’s chest to push—the chest under his hand was a wall of heat. Jungkook’s hand at his waist tightened, increasing the angle of Taehyung’s hips until the line of his spine wrote a different sentence across the sheets.

“Careful.” Jungkook’s voice dipped. “You’ll crack the mirror if you arch like that.”

He laughed quietly when Taehyung’s eyes cut up and caught the reflection: broad-shouldered Alpha pitched over Omega in silk, hair mussed, a gloved right hand tucked defensively under a pillow as if even in dreams the law could not be evaded.

“That,” Jungkook said as if sharing a private joke, “is exactly why I had it installed. So I could watch you when I take you. Every inch of you. Every reaction.”

Heat crawled up Taehyung’s throat in a way that had nothing to do with shame and everything to do with exposure. Then a cooler heat followed: Jungkook’s mouth as it opened against the long line of his throat. The slow rake of tongue over the pulse-point was worse.

Taehyung watched it happen to himself in the mirror. Felt it, saw it—two senses knotted together until his nerves misfired.

Jungkook made an approving sound low in his chest. With his free hand he caught Taehyung’s jaw, fingers tilting his face up, thumb brushing his lower lip before squeezing his cheeks just enough to part his mouth. The firm pressure sent clean streaks of helplessness through him that he wanted and hated in equal measure.

The kiss was a claim. Not soft. Tongue and teeth and fire. Taehyung gasped, panting. His legs trembled.

Then Jungkook pulled back, pupils blown wide, lips slick.

“Let me see too,” he murmured, and then the world changed direction.

It was a single smooth translation, body to body. Jungkook rolled and the bed rocked, the ceiling’s mirror catching the motion and doubling it so it looked like they were falling.

Taehyung found himself straddling the heir’s hips, knees to either side of a heat he pretended not to notice.

The thin robe with its short hem felt obscene; he could feel the imprint of the duvet’s weave against the undersides of his thighs. Jungkook lay back on his elbows and looked up as if what was above him were Sacrament. He licked his lips, felt the shine of them from the kiss and let it stay.

“Fuck, you look good like this,” he said, voice hoarse with want.

Jungkook’s gaze glanced the mirror, then returned to Taehyung. His fingers branded themselves into Taehyung’s hips and pulled him an inch closer, then another, reshaping him to fit a map only Jungkook could see.

Taehyung closed his eyes.

It wasn’t surrender—not exactly—but it wasn’t not. He was drowning in closeness, in scent, in the print of hands. The rain came back in his ears—thrum, hiss, thrum. Jungkook leaned up, breath stroking the fine shell-curve of Taehyung’s ear. He said something—low, close, his mouth almost touching the words into the skin there—but meaning broke apart on impact. The storm rose, loud enough to rattle the long bones of his arms.

The sound swallowed everything.

Taehyung’s body jerked as if a current had found him.

He sat upright in bed, alone.

Light punched through the room from the east windows in clean blades. His own breath dragged in, raw-edged, too much in some places and not enough in others.

“—what—”

His fingers wandered to his mouth without permission. The lower lip was tender, slick where a tooth must have worried at it; when he touched, the ache answered, used. His hips remembered fingers. The silk over his thighs was crooked and creased in a way that suggested the weight of someone else. The air held a shade of thunder that could be scent or could be imagination.

Had he dreamed it?

Before his breath has fully evened, the door opened with a practiced knock—soft, respectful, already in—and a young servant in Gwanryeo livery entered with a silver tray.

Taehyung realized he was still breathing too fast. He pulled the robe closed with one hand. The servant did not look long enough to be accused of looking. He crossed the carpet, set the tray upon the low table, and stood with his hands folded.

“My lord,” he said, bow crisping at the edges, “your morning meal.”

Taehyung nodded because speech would not line up for a second. The servant lifted the lids and practiced steam into the room—rice porridge faint with ginger, honeyed pear, soft-cooked eggs lacquered in soy. The scents complicated the rain, made it human again.

“You are expected in the training room on the first ground,” the servant continued, still looking somewhere appropriate—at the line where carpet met table leg. “In one hour.”

The words struck like a bell struck under water. The training room.

“If you require assistance with breakfast or your dressing,” the servant added, “you need only ring. I will attend you at once.”

He bowed again, hands precise, body shaped to respect. Then he retreated, doors undoing and doing their quiet arithmetic, and was gone.

Silence returned like the tide, leaving behind the things it had chosen not to carry away—steam rising from a dark teapot, the legal weight of a glove around a lethal hand, the high gleam of a mirror meant to teach an Omega what was expected of him.

Taehyung sat very still and listened to the last of the rain inside him die.

*******

The door shut with a metallic groan, and the lock slid into place.

From the inside.

Taehyung stood motionless, the silence of the training chamber weighing down like ash. The room was nothing like the gilded room he’d been forced into yesterday evening. No perfume-soaked curtains, no polished mirrors to admire his new collar. Just a chamber cut of stone and old spells—high, circular, and bare. A single slit of enchanted light bled from the ceiling. Dust hung motionless in the air, frozen in a shaft of pale magic.

Yoongi stepped into the light, already waiting.

“Good morning,” he said. “You look pale.”

Taehyung opened his mouth to deny, closed it. He was not sure the denial would be for Yoongi or for himself. “Bad dream,” he said, going for the least dangerous truth.

“Dreams are the mirror of the soul,” Yoongi said, and his gaze slided for exactly one beat to Taehyung’s lower lip before moving on as if it never strayed.

His voice broke the quiet. “Let’s start. The control of the death gift. You felt it, didn’t you.”

Not a question.

Taehyung’s fingers curled under the edge of his Binding Glove. He didn’t answer.

Yoongi tilted his head slightly. “The cold. The hunger. The death coiling inside you.”

Taehyung looked down. “It won’t stop.”

“It won’t,” Yoongi said, stepping closer. “But you can tame it.”

Taehyung looked up sharply.

Yoongi’s expression remained unreadable, carved from the same stone as the walls. “Control isn’t about silencing it. It’s about commanding it. And to command it, you need to listen first.”

He turned, gesturing toward the other side of the room.

A single table stood in the center—black wood, scuffed from use. Atop it, a spread of living things: cut stems and blooming flowers. Roses, orchids, small branches of evergreen. Life. Weak. Vulnerable.

“Come.”

Taehyung moved.

“The death gift won’t respond properly unless it senses intention,” Yoongi said. “It’s not just about contact. It’s about what you mean to do.”

Taehyung looked up at him. “You want me to kill it?”

“I want you to try. Then stop it. Then shape it. It isn’t just a weapon. It’s a force. ” Yoongi’s voice dropped. “You don’t stab with fire. You burn with it. This is the same.”

Taehyung nodded, hesitating—then reached for a soft white rose with his right hand, the glove removed now, fingers bare.

He braced himself.

The moment his skin brushed the bloom, magic surged. It answered too fast, too sharp—black veins leapt through the petals, and the flower shriveled, curling inwards like it was screaming.

Taehyung flinched back. “I didn’t even think anything—”

Yoongi stepped beside him. “That’s the problem. Right now, the magic thinks for you.”

Taehyung’s pulse raced. “How do I—”

“Again.”

This time, he tried to brace. Breathe. He focused his mind—on the living, on the roots, on the fragile strength of a stem holding itself upright. His fingers touched a blue iris.

The magic surged again—but slower. Contained.

He drew back.

The flower trembled. Browning at the edges, but not entirely dead.

Yoongi’s eyes darkened. “Good. Again.”

They did it again.

And again.

And again.

Over the course of an hour, Taehyung moved from flowers to thicker stems. From petals to roots. He learned to control his breath, then his pulse, then the specific channeling of thought: death, life, stillness. It was like learning a new language—one spoken through blood, nerve, and skin.

The room smelled of wilted blossoms and faint decay by the end. A few living stems remained—others turned to ash.

But Yoongi didn’t comment on the mess.

Instead, he stepped closer. Close enough that Taehyung could feel the heat of him, could hear the sudden shift in his tone.

“Now,” Yoongi said quietly, “we try the harder lesson.”

Taehyung’s shoulders tensed.

“The Sovereign wants your death gift honed,” Yoongi murmured, “but he doesn’t know what else it’s good for.”

Yoongi’s eyes met his. “You know what else it’s good for.”

Taehyung’s breath caught.

“The command?”

Yoongi nodded. “The Alpha Command is a override. But it’s also… a drug. The more you obey, the easier it gets. Soon you won’t even hear the words—you’ll just drop.”

Taehyung swallowed hard.

“You said it can be resisted.”

“It can,” Yoongi confirmed. “Not always. Not easily. You’ll fail. Probably more than once. But if your Darkborn gift is stable… the mind can learn to stall the compulsion. For a few seconds. Long enough to fake compliance. Long enough to escape.”

Taehyung’s blood ran colder than magic ever had.

Yoongi stepped back slightly, but his voice turned hard. Edged.

“On your knees.”

It hit like a blow.

The command slammed into him, a punch of pheromonal dominance laced with the full weight of Alpha Authority. The sound of it sank into his skin, down his spine, into the bones of him.

He gasped, a single broken sound. His knees buckled, his head screaming no —but the rest of him obeyed.

Down.

Down.

He hit the stone floor with a dull thud.

The command still echoed in his skull, louder than his own thoughts. He tasted it in his throat. Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

He tried to rise.

He couldn’t.

Yoongi knelt in front of him.

“I didn’t expect you to resist it. Not yet.” His tone was clinical, but not unkind. “But I want you to remember what it felt like. Where it landed in your body. Where your thoughts left. ”

Taehyung panted, sweat beading at his temples. His voice was hoarse. “It’s like… being locked out of your own mind.”

“Yes.” Yoongi studied him carefully. “That’s exactly what it is.”

A beat.

Then another command.

“Open your mouth.”

Taehyung tensed. He bit down hard on nothing—his jaw clenched so tight it throbbed. He knew what this looked like. He hated what it looked like. But the words broke him.

His lips parted. A second too late.

Yoongi’s eyes didn’t soften.

“Present.”

“No—”

It wasn’t a full protest. Just a whisper. But his body didn’t care. The scent hit harder this time, seeping into his lungs. Arousal wasn’t the trigger—but the Omega instincts tied to that position were. His muscles twitched. His spine curved forward. Slowly, shamefully—

He obeyed.

Yoongi didn’t move. Didn’t touch him.

But the silence after was sharp enough to bleed in.

Taehyung stayed bowed, humiliated. His voice was a thread. “I’m trying.”

“I know.” Yoongi knelt again, softer now. “But this isn’t about trying. It’s about rewiring. When the command hits, it tunnels into your instincts. The death magic can block it. Not by rage. Not by fear. But by stillness.”

Taehyung turned his head, just enough to meet his gaze.

“Stillness?”

Yoongi nodded. “You have to find the part of you that the magic lives in. Not the part that obeys. The cold. The steady cold. If you root your mind there, it’s harder for the command to stick.”

Taehyung swallowed.

“Let’s try again.”

Yoongi rose to his feet.

“Answer truthfully,” he said next—but his tone shifted. Command laced through the words again. Sharp. Piercing. “Do you dream of killing the Sovereign?”

Taehyung’s spine arched. His throat clenched.

Lie. Lie.

But the command twisted inside him. His voice caught, struggling.

He shook his head—reflexive.

“Yes,” his mouth said.

His eyes widened in horror.

Yoongi’s stare sharpened. “Do you want to run?”

“No.”

His hands shook.

“Yes.”

It kept happening. Yoongi asked, and the answers tumbled out like broken glass—cutting, irreversible. The magic inside him thrashed, confused, trying to rise. But the Alpha command wrapped around his ribs like chains.

When Yoongi finally stopped, Taehyung collapsed forward on trembling hands. His breath came in shallow gulps.

Yoongi stepped close, voice low.

“That’s enough for today.”

Taehyung didn’t rise.

“You did better than I expected.”

Taehyung looked up, half-dazed. “I failed. ”

Yoongi crouched, his voice nearly a whisper now.

“You obeyed slower.”

Taehyung blinked.

“And that,” Yoongi said, “is how it begins.”

A long silence stretched between them.

Then Yoongi rose. “Come back tomorrow. The Sovereign thinks we’re only refining your death gift. But we’re doing more.”

He glanced back.

“We’re teaching it to protect you.”

Taehyung staggered to his feet. His legs ached. His throat burned. The glove sat abandoned on the table, still pulsing faintly with magic residue.

Yoongi moved to the door, lifting the locking rune with a flick of his wrist.

Before he opened it, he added, “Eventually… the death inside you will learn to kill more than just flowers.”

Taehyung stared at the ash on his fingertips.

Good, he thought.

Let it.

Let it learn to kill commands.

Let it learn to kill kings.

Chapter Text

He left the training chamber with his lungs scraped clean and his veins full of winter.

On the stair, a pair of Red Guards passed him with their eyes fixed over his shoulder, the way soldiers were taught to look past people in order to see orders instead.

Yoongi had said as much without saying it. You obeyed slower. It was the smallest victory, a pinprick of light under a locked door, but it existed. The thought bubbled inside him like a forbidden spring: If he could stall the command—if he could fake it long enough—if he could build a stillness dense enough to bear weight—

He could choose.

The rest of the day blurred like scenery seen through rain. Doors opened and closed with the obedience of servants. Footsteps approached, retreated. A bell chimed somewhere deep in the estate, counting hours like coins. He stood at the window and watched the high courtyards sweep themselves with wind. He was not sure what he was expected to do with “free time” except wear it like new shackles, walk the perimeter of his own thoughts, and pretend that the floor did not tilt toward a future already being negotiated behind carved doors.

He did not leave his rooms. The corridors belonged to the Sovereign House the way veins belong to a heart; to wander them was to risk brushing past the pulse. What if he turned a corner and met Jungkook again? What if the heir’s scent caught him unready, and his body that had answered in sleep answered again?

Taeyhung lifted his left hand and touched his mouth where the dream had bruised him. If it even was a dream. His body remembered it too well to dismiss: bite-sore lower lip, linen creased where a thigh had been guided. He could blush remembering and he did, shame flaring hot and useless along his neck.

Perhaps he was going insane. Perhaps you have to go insane to stay sane here.

The thought made a terrible kind of sense.

By tea time, his door opened and a tray came in—steam, porcelain cups, a tarte—along with a message spoken without looking at him: “You are expected at the sovereign table at nineteen bells.”

The syllables stacked one on another with clockwork finality. Taehyung swallowed around a throat turned suddenly dry. He ate mechanically, and did not taste a thing.

When he was alone again, he went to the closet.

Closet was too gentle a word for the carved cavern of it—an antechamber lined in cedar, shelves like altars, a gallery of textiles that made the eye drunk. Robes shone like water in different weather; belts coiled in their boxes like sleeping serpents. Here a hanbok jacket with a collar stitched in storm-silk; there a long over-robe in soot velvet, heavy enough to anchor a body in wind.

Beautiful, all of it.
Disguises, all of it.

He ran his fingers along a rail and stopped on a garment that catched his eye.

Pale blue silk, the muted blue of morning before the sun commits. A cross-wrapped under-robe cut on the bias so it would cling and then fall, the collar edged with whisper-thin embroidery—tiny cranes and reeds done in thread only a shade lighter than the silk so the pattern spoke in breath, not voice. Side slits for movement, a sash of slightly darker blue to cinch the waist. Over it, a translucent outer layer like mist caught and sewn—sheer enough to show shape, opaque enough to scold imagination into paying attention.

He slid into it. The silk cooled his overheated skin and then warmed with him, taking his temperature like hands. The robe drew a line along his clavicle and left his throat too visible for comfort. The sleeves were long enough to skim his knuckles; when he lifted his right arm the binding glove made a break in the grace like a scar.

He stood before the mirror and for a second—one second—let the unkind voice go quiet. The person in the glass was beautiful. He could have liked the feeling, if the room he walked into at seven were not full of eyes.

Let them look, he told the reflection, and tied the sash. Don’t dress for their hunger.

A knock like the flat of a blade against wood. A Red Guard at his door. “My lord,” the guard said, clipped. “Escort to dinner.”

Escort felt untrue. Guarding felt true. Taehyung’s spine knew the difference.

The walk took them through the old wing, where the wood remembered fingers and the corridor lanterns burned low. The Sovereign wing had been built to make people feel small.

The scent reached him before the room did.

Not rain. Not the charged weather that clung to Jungkook, storm-sweet and electric. This was colder. Resin and iron. A thread of something metallic that made the back of his tongue taste like a bitten cheek. The scent tugged at the animal architecture of him and insisted: Alpha, Sovereign, bow.

He did not bow. He made his body clean with stillness and let the guard open the door.

The room was dark wood and hush.

Walls paneled in aged timber so polished they held a dull reflection of anyone who dared stand too near. The panels were carved with ornament—knotted waves and cranes, chrysanthemums and tangles of antler—worked so intricately the patterns seemed to move if you did. Lanterns hung at eye level, shades of oiled paper painted with ink-black branches. Their light fell like a blessing on some things and a threat on others.

In the middle: a low table built from single-plank walnut, flat and wide, its surface a mirror of grain. A ring of floor cushions around it in deep indigo and sable, embroidered with the Gwanryeo crest. Place settings for eight—lacquered trays, porcelain bowls, chopsticks laid in precisely parallel pairs across rests shaped like sleeping foxes. Enough silver for a family.

But only one person sat there.

The Sovereign wore black that wasn’t really black—layers of darkness that, when the lantern light kissed them, revealed blues and wines. His hair was threaded with grey at the temples in a way that did not diminish him. His eyes were a colder version of his son’s: less storm, more steel. When he turned them on Taehyung, Taehyung felt seen as if the gaze itself had teeth.

The Sovereign’s stare went first to Taehyung’s throat, then down the pale line of silk. It lingered. The small pleased smile that followed made Taehyung wish he were wearing armor and not morning’s color.

He felt the heat in his cheeks rise before he could smother it. The scent in the room thickened in response, Alpha satisfaction seasoned with amusement.

“Come,” Jeon Taehwan said, and the syllable held the weight of a law spoken on a parchment day. “Sit. The rest of the family will join us shortly.”

Taehyung moved without hurry. He lowered himself to the cushion opposite, keeping the table between them like it could be a wall. He placed his gloved hand on his thigh and his bare hand on the lacquer tray, palm down, fingers still. He made his breath boring.

The Sovereign did not bother with small talk. “I wanted a word before the others arrive,” he said, as if they were equals in scheduling and not a king and his new property.

Taehyung held his face in the neutral shape he had practiced in mirrors that did not belong to him.

He could feel the Sovereign’s gaze like a thumb pressed to his nape. The habit of nerves sent his tongue to wet his lower lip; he stopped halfway through the motion, too late. The Sovereign’s eyes tracked it the way a hawk tracks a vole—without hurry, without heat, with interest measured in use.

“Very pretty,” the Sovereign said, and made the compliment sound like a receipt.

Taehyung’s stomach tightened. The death inside him made a cool circle under his sternum and sat. Stillness. Find the stillness.

“The negotiations have concluded,” Taehwan said next, as if mentioning the weather. “Your manifestation accelerated certain considerations in favor of the court.” He picked up his cup, lifted it in a ceremonial inch, and drank. “An efficient outcome.”

Negotiations. The word meant his life parceled and priced. It meant the House Baekho signing where they were told to sign. It meant the Sovereign Court clipping a red ribbon around his future like a throat.

“The bonding ceremony will be held as soon as possible,” the Sovereign continued. The lantern light caught the ring on his right middle finger—an old thing in iron and garnet, carved with the same crest that wove itself through the cushions. “Expedience is in the interest of national stability, as §17 reminds us.”

The Codex’s chapter on heirlines crawled up the back of Taehyung’s mind like a spider.

He wet lips that had not forgotten a dream. “As soon as possible,” he echoed, because he had nothing else to put in the air that would not choke him.

The Sovereign paused in an elegant way, as if tasting what came next. He studied Taehyung the way a cartographer studies a coast he intends to redraw. “When is your next heat, omega?”

The question detonated in Taehyung’s spine. He felt heat begin in the wrong place—the cheeks, the back of the neck—and his scent wanted to rise in confusion around it.

“Soon,” he said, choosing a word that told nothing and everything.

Jeon Taehwan’s mouth twitched. “No need for shyness.” He moved a plate half an inch, aligning it so precisely the motion looked like critique. “Your parents ensured you received proper education.” The implication lay between them like a blade.

Education.

The word dragged up memories like teeth scraping bone—cold, clinical rooms, strangers’ voices detailing his purpose , the diagrams, the lectures. The lessons that reduced him to function.

His stomach clenched, nausea sharp as a blade under his ribs.

The Sovereign tilted his head slightly when Taehyung didn’t answer.

“If there is need for remediation,” the Sovereign went on, perfectly serene, “I am certain my son will be… diligent.” The pause was a careful thing. “He does not fail the tasks set to him.”

Jungkook’s name did not pass his mouth. It did not need to. The room had the shape of Jungkook even when he was not in it—sharp, humid, thunder stored in the rafters. Taehyung’s body wanted to remember the mirror and refused.

“My first heir,” Jeon Taehwan said, “is an Alpha of exemplary discipline. He belongs to his anger and not the other way round. He knows when to be feared and when to be adored, and he has the good sense to prefer the first.” There was a note under the words, like pride played on a darker instrument. “He will make a Sovereign this kingdom does not dare defy.”

The air thinned. Taehyung focused on keeping his hands quiet.

The Sovereign lifted his cup again, then set it down without drinking. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think about the heirs you and I could produce.”

He said it without heat. That made it worse.

Taehyung’s body did a small impossible thing and went colder and hotter at once. For a second he forgot what language was. His heart stumbled. The death in his hand woke and pressed sudden and eager against the glove.

A thirdborn Omega, Jeon Taehwan did not need to say. The rarity of him weaponized again. The Codex wrote it plainly—how the Alpha Sovereign may lay claim to the thirdborn Omega for themselves, and how any existing bond could be annulled like a contract deemed unprofitable. The law called it an option.

His throat tried to close. He opened it by force. “Your Majesty,” he said, and the title cut his tongue. “Is it—” He stopped. He could not make himself say Is it still Jungkook.

The Sovereign tipped his head, as though he himself were undecided. “The state is owed the strongest outcome. You understand.”

He did. That was the problem.

The Sovereign’s scent had reached a heavier concentration—a pressure system settling. It gnawed at Taehyung’s instincts, tugging at the old, ingrained desire to please that the Codex had tried very hard to convince him was nature.

“Do not look so stricken,” Jeon Taehwan said, amused. “You were raised for this.”

Raised. Offered. Presented.

Taehyung set his cup down so gently it could not be called a refusal. His gloved hand prickled so sharply he had to make a fist to contain it. For a moment—only a moment—he saw himself as if from above: a body flipping the cuff, unbuttoning the closures with steady, unforgivable care. He saw the glove peeled off like a sin, saw his bare right hand set upon the Sovereign’s throat just below the nape, where the skin was thinner and the pulse lived close to air. He felt the cold spike and bloom, a black flower opening with petals of stillness that were also razors.

He wondered if the Red Guard outside would be fast enough, if the law’s dogs would break down the door in time to keep a kingdom from losing its king.

Alphas were fast. Their bodies were built with rights written into the muscle. Taeyhung would not make it. He knew this, and the knowledge did not move the thought an inch.

It was a satisfying thought though.

He closed his hand until the leather creaked. The null-thread bit him back, dulling the dangerous throb. Across the table, the Sovereign smiled like a man listening to music only he could hear.

Taehyung lowered his gaze to the pretty blue silk he had chosen on purpose.

Let them look, he’d told himself in the mirror.

Let them starve.

The doors opened on a hush that felt rehearsed—a velvet unseaming—and the room shifted its spine to receive its masters.

First came the household’s shadow: attendants in dove-grey with sleeves tied back, sandalwood oil glimmering on their wrists, faces scrubbed to a neutral shine.

Then the family crossed the threshold.

Seo Dalya came first. She was dressed to be looked at: silk the color of sunset, layered as if warmth could be achieved by imitation. Her hair was a black waterfall braided with a chain of moonstone teardrops. She sat where the Sovereign guided her, and she did it perfectly—palms together, shoulders soft, lips parted a little to suggest breathless devotion. 

But her eyes.

They were not dead—dead eyes are an ending, and hers were an ongoing thing, the absence that remembers when it used to be presence. The pupils were too wide for the light. The irises had the glassy sheen of lacquer, as if a final coat had been brushed over once she was finished. When her gaze lifted and slid past Taehyung, the hair along his nape prickled.

A half step behind came the Sovereign’s brother-in-law—Lord Min in winter-black. His face was a map of restraint: high cheekbones, the knife-line draw of a mouth that seldom spoke unless the words had already been weighed. His hair had gone iron-grey; grief and proximity do that, Taehyung thought.

Min Yoongi followed in his father’s wake without belonging to it.

He wore a suit cut like a statement that refused to speak—charcoal softened to smoke, collar plain, no crest on his breast. The lamplight caught in his eyes and made compasses of them, ink-black needles that turned to whatever in the room required measuring. His hair was a dark, careless fringe; his mouth carried a habit of almost-smiling with no joy in it. He glanced once at Taehyung’s binding glove and then away, the look both acknowledgment and promise.

The overlooked one arrived as if he had been here all along.

Jeon Minhyun, second heir, the shadow-crown. Alpha by blood and law, yet the room did not lean toward him the way rooms lean toward Alphas; perhaps that was his first gift—how to subtract the world’s attention from himself.

He was dusk to Jungkook’s storm: hair the brown of walnut, eyes a smoky amber that did not quite catch. Even Minhyun’s scent was a study in absence—river-reed and cold linen, barely-there, deliberate. The only thing that betrayed him was the way he took in every occupant of the table and left no ripple on the surface.

And then Jungkook.

His hair was glossy black, parted in a severity broken only by the errant wave that curled at his temple. His jaw was etched like the edge of a coin; a vein flickered there when the muscle worked.

His scent uncoiled the instant he saw Taehyung: ozone braided with warm resin, first-rain over hot stone. Some part of Taehyung sat straighter, preened, hated itself for doing both.

Jungkook’s eyes moved the way a falcon’s do when it weighs sky and quarry.

From the Sovereign to Taehyung.

Back to the Sovereign.

Back to Taehyung.

His tongue pressed his inner cheek, a small push of muscle that did not belong to patience so much as to bridled impulse.

The low courtesies lapped around the table—bowed heads, murmured honorifics, the formal exchange of weather and health that cloaked teeth. A servant knelt beside each cushion and poured hot water over fingers into shallow black bowls, the ceremonial washing before shared food.

“Family,” said Jeon Taehwan, and the word did not mean comfort. “Let us eat.”

The procession of dishes began like a court case—evidence brought forward in glittering succession.

Between courses, the staff moved like seasons crossing a calendar, efficient and unstoppable. Red Guards bracketed the doors as punctuation, armor lacquered to match the wood so the eye forgot them until it tried to leave.

Taehyung chewed, swallowed, and barely tasted anything. Hunger was something that had gone to live in other parts of him, and those parts had nothing to do with his mouth.

“Lord Min,” the Sovereign said between the fourth and fifth course, “how fares the Archive?”

Lord Min’s answer was steady and gave nothing away. “Catalogued, complete, and prepared for audit, Your Majesty.”

“Efficient as ever,” Jeon Taehwan murmured, and the praise landed like a weight where it fell.

Minhyun was asked nothing. Minhyun volunteered nothing. He ate as if eating were a form of vanishing.

A silence that was not empty followed, and into that silence the Sovereign slid his next knife.

“Yoongi,” he said, the syllables mild, “how went your first lesson with the thirdborn omega?”

Yoongi did not look at Taehyung when he answered; he looked at the Sovereign and at no one else.

“As expected,” he said, voice level as a line drawn with a straightedge. “The manifestation is strong.” A necessary pause, purely clinical. “He is… teachable. We will begin with restraint, then refine to deliberate application. Stabilization will require disciplined repetition.”

Deliberate application. The phrase lay there innocently and lifted its eyes to Taehyung alone.

Yoongi’s lashes were still, but Taehyung felt the ghost of a glance on his skin anyway, the way one feels a hand hovering a hair above the flesh. Instantly, his body remembered the morning: the way he had taught Taehyung to flood his mind with the sound of his own pulse until the command couldn’t find purchase. Find the stillness dense enough to bear weight. Make a room inside your head with no door.

Heat and pins pricked beneath Taehyung’s skin. The omega under his ribs lifted its head, confused by the word lesson when the remembered pressure at his throat had felt like a different kind of curriculum entirely. His shoulders tried to shift minutely on the cushion to shake the sensation off, a twitch half-swallowed by training.

Across the table, Jungkook saw the micro-movement the way predators see the first tremor in brush. Nothing in his face changed but Taehyung watched the heir’s attention sharpen, a lens focusing.

He looked back at his bowl and regretted it when he felt the future arrive under the table.

A hand found his knee.

The touch was neither rough nor gentle—it was an assertion. Warm palm through blue silk, fingers curving until the threat of nail met fabric. Jungkook’s other hand lifted a cup to his mouth with perfect casualness; the profile he offered the room was the picture of dutiful heir, listening. The hand beneath the table climbed, a slow reconnaissance along the slope of Taehyung’s thigh, stopping exactly where courtesy would claim it should have stopped two inches ago.

Taehyung did not flinch. His scent tried to tip; he caught it. He smoothed it flat, flattened it again when the instinct under his skin arched like a cat into a hand it hated.

He flexed his gloved hand under the table until the null-thread bit the pads of his fingers. The edge of a breath escaped him anyway, quieter than the click of chopsticks—yet Jungkook heard it, because the heir’s mouth curved not into a smile exactly, but into knowledge. He toyed with the fabric of the blue silk at Taehyung’s knee.

Yoongi’s chopsticks paused in midair for a fraction of a second too brief to be noticed by anyone who did not pay attention. Taehyung noticed. Minhyun did not move at all, which meant he had seen everything.

Course after course arrived, a slow siege.

There were pickled fernbrakes coiled like calligraphy; a custard of sea urchin that trembled at the spoon, buttery and obscene; thin-sliced beef from a beast fattened on chestnuts; a salad of greens and pear blossoms dressed in vinegar that tasted like the memory of summer. Tea was poured between the heavier plates—smoky oolong that made the mouth a kiln and then cooled it. Wine followed, rice-clear and dangerous in its restraint.

Taehyung ate. He existed. 

The Sovereign waited until the final savory was cleared and the first sweet set down—a lacquer box of small sugared persimmons—and only then did he take up the conversation again, the way a hunter takes up a thread of blood in snow.

“As of this afternoon,” Jeon Taehwan said, voice mild the way cold is mild—only until it kills, “the negotiations have concluded.”

Dalya’s fingers tightened on the Sovereign’s sleeve by a hair’s breadth and then relaxed. Lord Min’s gaze did not shift. Minhyun’s eyelids lowered so minimally it looked like a trick of the lantern.

Taehyung kept breathing. He did not look at Jungkook’s hand, which had stilled on his thigh as if listening.

“The court will announce the bonding ceremony tomorrow after breakfast,” the Sovereign said, and lifted his cup to his mouth as if to drink to it. He did not drink. He only tasted the rim and smiled. “For the stability of the nation.”

Tomorrow, Taehyung thought, and the syllables were a cliff.

*******

The last course dissolved on his tongue without taste.

Conversation died the way a fire becomes ash—quietly, with the kind of finality that leaves the room humming. Chairs whispered back from the table. Servants flowed in to clear lacquer and porcelain.

Taehyung rose too fast and felt the room tilt. The persimmon-sweet on his tongue soured to iron. The Sovereign’s gaze skimmed him like a nailhead—one cool glint—and then moved on, as if he were an item already inventoried, placed on the correct shelf. The urge to get away wasn’t a thought; it was a body-need, as desperate and simple as breath.

A Red Guard detached from the doorframe and took position at his right shoulder, red lacquer catching lantern-light like fresh blood.

Taehyung’s pulse didn’t settle until the doors closed behind them and the sovereign scent thinned to memory. The corridor breathed cool over his cheeks. Wine heat crawled back up his throat the moment he inhaled air that wasn’t owned.

“Escort to chambers,” the guard said, tone flat with training.

For once, Taehyung was willing to be escorted. Every muscle wanted distance. He kept his gaze ahead, not on the lacquered walls with their eaves of carved cranes, not on the painted screens, not on the places where the palace’s old bones showed through the renovations like scars refusing to smooth.

They had barely taken three steps when a hand wrapped his wrist.

The guard’s spine snapped straight. “My lord—”

“I’ll take it from here,” Jungkook said without raising his voice.

The Red Guard bowed low enough for the helmet to kiss the floor, and withdrew so completely he might as well have been erased. Jungkook let go of Taehyung’s wrist as if it cost him effort, then laced his hands behind his back. 

They walked.

Jungkook said nothing for the length of two turns and a shadowed gallery. His scent unspooled regardless: petrichor and warmed resin, the smell of rain rinsing a street until stone shines.

Taehyung’s traitor body answered: pupils widening, breath finding a hungrier rhythm, throat working around saliva he did not remember making. The wine he had taken with dessert—clear, deceptively gentle—lifted heat into his cheeks; he could feel it like a lantern under skin.

They stopped at Taehyung’s door. No lantern here had been dimmed; the glow struck the pale blue of his robe and made him look, infuriatingly, exactly as soft as the court wanted him to be.

The Guard would have left him here.

Jungkook did not.
He stopped within the circle of the door’s halo of lamplight.

Taehyung heard the smart thing leave his mouth without consulting him: “Is this a failed attempt at chivalry, Highness? Leaving me at my door so the wolves can’t get me the last five steps?”

Jungkook’s mouth tilted, not quite a smile, not quite a warning. “If this were for chivalry’s sake,” he said, “I’d have sent a poem.” His eyes dropped, leisurely, and did not pretend to be ashamed. The look traveled like a hand: collarbone, the pale V the cross-wrap of silk made when it laid against his chest; the loose fall of the sleeves over his wrists; how the binding glove turned elegance into a statement.

“This is for safety,” Jungkook said finally, and the word had teeth. “Yours. The corridor is a hungry place. Especially with you dressed like that.”

Heat rose fresh under the wine, an honest flush that infuriated him. “Like what?”

“Like rain made into cloth,” Jungkook said simply. “Like you listened for my scent and stitched it.” His fingers were at Taehyung’s hip before Taehyung saw them go, finding the hem of the translucent over-layer and teasing it between thumb and forefinger the way one might toy with a ribbon on a gift and consider what lay beneath.  

“Pale blue, wet light—petrichor on silk.” He leaned in as if to inspect a seam. “Did you choose this for me?”

Taehyung laughed without humor. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, and his voice did the treacherous thing of dipping where it should have sharpened. Something inside him shifted in its sleep and blinked slow and hungry eyes. For you, Alpha, the omega under his ribs breathed, shaking itself awake. He clamped down so hard on the thought his molars ached.

“You look like my scent,” Jungkook went on softly. His gaze slid down and back up, and something completed behind his face. “You’d look better dressed in nothing but it.”

The line landed low in Taehyung’s belly and detonated. Heat ran out along the nerves that anchor the hips, down the thighs, up the spine. His cheeks were already warm from the wine; now they burned.

Jungkook’s tongue touched his lower lip like he could taste what he’d just imagined. Then he stepped forward and erased the air that had pretended to stand between them. The door took Taehyung’s back; Jungkook took his front.

“I am used to control,” he said. He bent, breath hot at Taehyung’s throat, and for one thudding second the omega in Taehyung tried to tilt his head back on instinct alone.

“I am used to rooms remembering I entered. To mouths saying yes and bodies meaning it. Control belongs to me.”

Jungkook turned his head and let his lips skate along the hinge of Taehyung’s jaw, closer to the pulse but not to the sacred place of the neck. “But you— I don’t know what you have done to me.”

His tongue found the path from the corner of Taehyung’s mouth to the ridge of his throat and traced it, starving. The sound it pulled from Taehyung was not a sound he had taught himself to make.

“It’s like you are a drug,” Jungkook went on, almost conversational, which made it worse. “The way you look—” A inhalation as if scent were flavor. “—the way you taste. The sound of your swallowed moans. It makes me want to chase not only my pleasure, but yours.”

Jungkook took Taehyung’s jaw in one hand, thumb pressing into the soft where cheek meets mouth, fingers splayed along the hinge as if measuring the mechanism.

“Open,” Jungkook said, not in Sovereign protocol—Alpha Command roaring down a spine to change a brain into an obedient instrument—but in an iron-quiet habit of being obeyed. Control, not compulsion. Taehyung obeyed anyway.

Jungkooks mouth was rice-wine and smoke, rain and something sweeter beneath. He sucked Taehyung’s tongue into his own heat with a focus that felt indecent, deepening until the tidy architecture of Taehyung’s breath gave up entirely. The moan that escaped him was ungovernable. Jungkook swallowed it and gave one back, lower, rougher.

Jungkook’s slid the length of Taehyung’s ribs as if cataloguing each rung, palms broad. He caught on the sash-knot and toyed with it, not pulling, not yet, only letting the threat of it hum across Taehyung’s skin. Then he set his body to Taehyung’s, chest to chest, thigh angling between Taehyung’s knees, pressure patient and obscene. The door was a cold witness against Taehyung’s shoulder blades; Jungkook was a hot one everywhere else.

When he ground in, slow, all that patience pretending to be restraint, the sound Jungkook made vibrated in Taehyung’s bones—a low, filthy praise that said mine in a language older than law.

“What did he say to you?”

There it was, slit-pupilled in the dark. “In there,” he said, chin toward the dining room without taking his mouth from Taehyung’s skin. “My father. What did he tell you.”

Taehyung remembered the small efficient smile; the way the Sovereign’s eyes had toured his collarbones as if he were reading where to sign his name. “That the negotiations concluded,” he said. “That the bonding will be announced tomorrow after breakfast. For the stability of the realm.”

“And?” Jungkook’s voice had gone thick and quiet. His scent densified until Taehyung’s knees thought about treason again.

“That he thinks about the heirs he and I could make.”

Everything in Jungkook went calm. It was terrifying. Jungkook’s thumb pressed hard enough into the soft of Taehyung’s waist to bruise and then stopped, measuring the difference between wanting to leave a mark and wanting to break something that did not deserve breaking.

“Look at me,” he said.

Taehyung did.

Jungkook’s pupils had gone wide around a ring of storm-dark iris. “He will not touch you. Not while I breathe.”

Jungkook’s jaw worked once. “You are mine,” he said, and kissed him like punctuation—hard, quick, punishing himself with the restraint of it. “I don’t share. Not with a father. Not with a kingdom.”

The corridor tilted again. The possessiveness should have repulsed him. It should have called up every lesson on ownership and the thousand ways a body is turned into national resource. Instead, dizzying, wrong, it threaded into the part of him that wanted and tied a knot.

He didn’t trust his senses. He didn’t trust the omega inside him, shivering with please like a fever. He tore his mouth free, panting, chest heaving against silk.

Jungkook’s eyes flashed with uncomprehending startle, the Sovereign’s son unused to being interrupted once he’d set his hands on a thing.

You should stop him, whatever that means.

You should invite him in, whatever that means.

“We are still outside. And there are six servants in the alcove around the bend pretending to dust the ancestral masks because they are waiting to hear whether you leave smelling like victory.,” Taehyung said, turning his face, giving the heir the line of his cheek instead of his mouth.

He put disdain into it and triumph, hating how the latter trembled. “You should go.”

He meant it. A part of him did. That part was quieter than it had ever been, and it scared him.

Jungkook’s smile stepped out, slow and mean as a cat that has cornered a bird. “Or,” he said softly, “you could invite me in.”

Taehyung shook his head, the movement small because the door stopped him. Jungkook inhaled, eyes gone very black, nostrils flaring like he had caught a scent worth hunting through snow. “Your heat is close,” he said, not a taunt but a diagnosis, voice rough with how right he knew he was. “You can’t hide from me how your body answers.”

“Good night, Your Highness,” Taehyung said, shaping each syllable precise as surgery. 

Jungkook pressed him harder into the wood, a brief, bruising press that reset Taehyung’s sense of where his body began. And then, very simply, Jungkook turned the knob.

The latch surrendered with a little click. Jungkook’s arm cinched around Taehyung’s waist in the same motion—a clean, practiced carriage of a precious and struggling thing—and the world swung. The door opened on darkness  and the faint hush of his own rooms. 

His back hit the door again—this time from the other side. Jungkook’s body caged him a second time, heat and weather and law.

A small part of Taehyung panicked.

An even larger part came awake all at once—keen, trembling, waiting for more.

Chapter Text

❖ Excerpts from the Crimson Codex ❖

Compiled Laws of Bloodline, Reproduction, and Magical Regulation

Issued and enforced under the High Authority of the Sovereign Blood Court

⸻

§7 — Of Bond Execution and Ceremony Completion

“No bond may be sealed through knotting or irreversible union until the formal rites of the bonding ceremony have reached their lawful conclusion under witness of the Blood Court. Displays of dominance, scenting, or preliminary intimacy are permitted within the confines of ceremony, but the final act of bond execution remains forbidden until dismissal is declared.”

1. Should an Alpha attempt to seal the bond prior to ceremonial dismissal, the act shall be judged as Premature Union and punished in accordance with §8 of the Crimson Codex.
2. Any offspring conceived in violation of this law shall not be recognized as heirs of noble standing without Sovereign dispensation.
3. The officiant alone carries the authority to declare the moment of lawful bond execution; contesting such authority is considered Contempt of Sovereign Rite.
4. In the event that an Omega enters true heat prior to ceremonial dismissal, temporary exception may be granted for the purpose of safeguarding the Omega’s health. In such cases:

     a. The Alpha is permitted to provide relief through sanctioned intimacy, yet permanent sealing of the bond remain prohibited.

     b. Sovereign-approved inhibitors, containment spells, or arcanic wards must be applied to prevent accidental bond execution.

     c. Should conception occur before lawful sealing, lineage recognition rests solely upon Sovereign decree.

********

The door took his weight and held it like a hand at the nape, cool and inexorable. Jungkook’s body did the rest—heat rolling off him in waves, storm-heavy and clean, rain made into a scent. Even in the dark Taehyung could see the dilation of the heir’s eyes, pupils wide enough to drown in, a hunter’s gaze ruined only by hunger.

He tried to look anywhere but at that hunger and found the painted screen beyond Jungkook’s shoulder: lacquered wood, the hunt scene trapped in perpetual chase. Hounds mid-bay, riders with spears poised forever a breath from release. The stag’s eye was a blade of pearl—sharp, unblinking, as if it understood it had been chosen long before the horns crowned its skull.

Taehyung shivered.

No escape. No reprieve. Caught in eternal pursuit. The sight made something crawl down his spine, a recognition too sharp to name.

Jungkook’s groan came low, molten at the hinge of his ear. Taehyung’s breath broke and heat ran its rails along his spine. 

“Do you feel that?” Jungkook’s voice was ragged. His hips ground forward, and Taehyung gasped as the unmistakable hardness pressed against him through layers of silk. Jungkook’s hands slid from his ribs down to his hips, gripping hard enough to bruise, forcing their bodies flush.

“Look at me,” Jungkook said. The voice belonged to an Alpha taught by the law to take, by the court to lead, and by something older to hold himself still on the precipice of wanting until the ground came to meet him.

Taehyung looked up. The heir’s mouth was wrecked from kissing already, lower lip flushed, a smear of Taehyung’s taste shining there. He felt it low, in the place where his restraint was stitched too finely to bear strain for long.

Jungkook’s hands gripped his hips and dragged them closer, grinding harder until Taehyung shuddered. “Fuck—I could bend you over this door and take you raw. Right now. I should.”

„But the Codex,” he bit out, as if the title itself were a the of grit in his teeth, “is a stupid leash. After the bonding ceremony. Or when your heat breaks open proper. I hate that law for putting patience in my mouth.”

Taehyung’s body burned and buzzed, tingling down to his fingertips. His lungs felt too small. His blood rushed, leaving him weightless and heavy at once. Everything was too much—Jungkook’s heat, the musk of Alpha pheromones that curled inside his ribs, the ache of his Omega clawing awake beneath his skin.

Not used to this, Taehyung told himself, steady as a lie.
Not used to an Alpha pressed so close he re-learned his own outline.  
Not used to his own scent rising to meet someone else’s like a tide, soft and inexorable.
Not used to the Omega under his heartbeat waking with its teeth showing.

Jungkook’s focus dragged back to his face like he was being reeled in by it. Jungkook kissed like a man starving at a feast, like he wanted to swallow all the little sounds Taehyung didn’t know he made until they were coaxed out of him and caught with a greedy sort of gratitude. Taehyung opened for him on reflex—and Jungkook went deeper, the slow, obscene patience of it turning Taehyung’s knees liquid.

Somewhere between one breath and the next, the lacquered hunt melted out of focus and the door became the only thing holding him upright. Jungkook’s thigh had worked between his legs with terrible courtesy, just there and no further, a pressure that turned Taehyung’s balance into a negotiable treaty. He huffed against Jungkook’s mouth, mortified at the need threading his own.

Jungkook’s control frayed. It showed in the tremor that went through him, in the way his hand dragged up Taehyung’s side and stalled at the knot of the sash. He let out breath between his teeth that wasn’t quite a laugh. “The things I think of doing to you when there’s a bond between us,” he said, voice shaken silk. “When I can scent your heat ripen and not have to pretend virtue. When the Codex can go to hell and I can put you on your back and—” He broke off, jaw flexing, and pressed their foreheads together like a vow. “Not yet. Not yet.”

The words broke something. Taehyung’s knees buckled. Jungkook’s grip loosened—barely—but it was enough.

Taehyung didn’t realize he had started to slide until the world tilted and brought him to his knees in the most humiliatingly graceful way—like prayer, like surrender, like both at once. The door’s grain kissed his spine all the way down. Jungkook didn’t stop him. The heir’s palm settled on his shoulder with a pressure that wasn’t coercion but encouragement, weighing him into the moment.

He should have found shame. He found instead a clean-edged emptiness, a hollowness patterned exactly to Jungkook’s shape. It wasn’t the absence that frightened him; it was how eager his body was to be filled with anything Jungkook would give—scent, praise, the simple, ruinous relief of being told good boy in a tone that was a collar and a kiss. He didn’t even know if Jungkook had said the words aloud. His Omega heard them anyway, the promise of them, and leaned into the imagined weight.

He could feel his own pupils blown wide; could feel how his vision tunneled, blurring everything but the Alpha above him.

Taehyung had been taught what it meant to kneel.

Taught in whispers, in sharp-toned lectures, in the cruel precision of the Codex’s passages memorized until the ink was part of his blood. He knew what an Alpha was meant to do. He knew what his body, as Omega, was supposed to answer with.

He had hated all of it. 

But teaching was dry. Words on parchment, diagrams in hidden manuals. None of it had felt like this.

None of it had told him that the air would be so heavy, weighted with scent until his lungs were drowned in resin and storm. None of it had told him that his thighs would tremble with need so sharp it bordered on pain.

He had not been prepared for Jungkook.

Jungkook’s breath hitched. Power does something to a face; so does awe. The combination rearranged Jungkook’s features into something too beautiful to bear.

Fingers swept from Taehyung’s shoulder up into his hair, finding the weight of it, the silk drag at the nape, the place where it made him feel strangely fragile. Jungkook tugged—gentle at first, then truer when he heard the sound it shook loose from Taehyung’s throat.

Pleasure is a cousin to pain, and both are obedient to the right hands.

“Look at me,” Jungkook said again, and Taehyung did, heat and humiliation and a treacherous pride all warring in the same inhale.

The heir’s hand traced the architecture of Taehyung’s face as if revising a beloved map: the sweep of cheekbone, the straight line of the nose, the soft give of lower lip. He toyed with Taehyung’s mouth, thumb dragging until the wet caught and shone. Taehyung’s jaw went slack without permission. He felt both incredibly present and slightly outside himself, as if watching some exquisite crime he had agreed to in a language he had forgotten he spoke.

Jungkook pressed his thumb in, parting his lips, smearing wetness already gathered.

“Fuck—you look good like this,” the heir whispered, voice hoarse. “On your knees. Eyes blown wide. Begging without a word. The Codex says I can’t knot you yet, but it doesn’t forbid this.” His thumb pressed deeper, brushing his tongue. “If you let me. If you want to take me in your mouth.”

The room seemed to pull its breath in. The world distilled to the space between a question and an answer.

His Omega answered for him, bowing his head slightly, shy, desperate, trembling with need to please. A nod so small it barely counted, but it was enough.

The second Taehyung nodded, Jungkook’s hand left his face like it had a destination it had been longing for since birth. The other hand was already there—at his own waist—seeking the tidy closure of expensive tailoring with fingers that shook only once before they schooled themselves to efficiency.

Buttons answered him like obedient soldiers. The quiet sound of a placket giving way was impossibly loud in the hush.

Taehyung’s breath caught when Jungkook freed himself. His cock sprang heavy into the dim light, flushed dark, thick, veins ridging the shaft. The head was wet already, slick glistening, dripping down.

The word left Jungkook’s mouth like a vow.

“Open, Taehyung.”

It wasn’t Alpha Command but Taehyung’s lips parted anyway, slow and trembling. His heart raced in his chest, but his Omega rose inside him like a tide, drowning the edges of fear with something hotter, something that made his thighs clench where he knelt.

Jungkook’s thumb pressed into his cheek, guiding him, until the blunt, leaking head brushed over his mouth. Smearing pre-cum. Hot, salty, bitter-sweet. Jungkook groaned, low and feral, as Taehyung’s tongue flicked against him in startled instinct.

“Fuck—look at you,” Jungkook whispered, eyes fixed downward, gaze burning through him. “My pretty Thirdborn. On your knees like you were made for it. The Codex says you’re the realm’s resource, but right now—” His hips rolled forward, smearing himself over Taehyung’s mouth until his lips glistened. “—you’re mine.”

Heat flushed Taehyung’s skin, ears burning. He had never done this before—but his body seemed to know what his mind didn’t. His Omega knew, and it leaned into every stroke of Jungkook’s voice like it had been waiting for this moment since the day it was born.

The weight of Jungkook’s cock pressed against his lips, blunt and slick, and Taehyung shuddered. His breath hitched, pupils blown wide, the instinct to take rising like a hunger too deep to resist.

“Breathe through your nose,” Jungkook murmured, voice dark velvet. “That’s it. Let me in.”

The thick head slid past his lips, hot and salt-sharp against his tongue. Taehyung gasped, throat clenching around it, and the noise it drew from Jungkook was filthy, reverent.

Tears prickled at the corners of Taehyung’s eyes from the stretch, from the unfamiliarity, but his Omega purred under his skin, triumphant, thrilled. His mouth burned with fullness, but he wanted more. Wanted to give more. His tongue curled instinctively, tasting, cradling, and Jungkook moaned raggedly, hips twitching.

“Shit—First time, and you’re taking me like you were made for it.”

The words slid down Taehyung’s spine like oil, leaving him shivering.

He should have been afraid.
He should have been furious.

Instead, he was dizzy with the strange pleasure of it, the way Jungkook’s praise wrapped around him like silk, the way his Omega keened at every sound the Alpha made.

Taehyung’s vision blurred. His throat worked, swallowing instinctively, desperate to adjust. Each movement sent a shock of heat down his own spine, pooling low, sharp ache throbbing in his belly.

Jungkook found rhythm. Hips pressing forward, retreating, pressing again—slow at first, then harder, each thrust pulling wet sounds from Taehyung’s throat. His hand fisted in hair tighter, holding him in place, using him with rough reverence.

“Look at you kneeling, letting me fuck your mouth before the whole kingdom gets to know you’re mine. Do you know how pretty you look, Taehyung? Tears in your eyes, lips swollen around me—fuck, I could come just from the sight.”

Taehyung’s eyes did water, from the stretch, the force, from the sheer humiliation of want. And still, he looked up. Pupils wide, fixed only on Jungkook. The hunt scene behind him burned into his peripheral again—hounds baying, stag cornered, pearl-eye glinting like a cruel god watching.

But Jungkook’s eyes were worse. Hungry, unholy, pupils devouring the ring of iris until nothing but storm remained.

“Take me deeper.,” Jungkook groaned, pushing, the head nudging against the back of his throat. “Take me all the way.”

Taehyung gagged again, throat spasming, but Jungkook didn’t relent. He held him there a moment, savoring the choke, savoring the helpless tremble in his shoulders. Then he eased back, slick dragging from his lips with a wet pop. Taehyung gasped, drool stringing down his chin.

Jungkook’s thumb swept it up, smearing it back onto his lips. “Messy,” he rasped, voice shaking. “So fucking pretty like this.”

Before Taehyung could form a sound, Jungkook’s grip shoved, guiding him down until his shoulders pressed flat to the polished floor, the fall softened only by the spill of his robes. His knees bent awkwardly beneath him, but Jungkook was already on top of him, straddling his chest.

The heir leaned down, bracing on one forearm, the other hand dragging down Taehyung’s throat, thumb pressing into the hollow where his pulse stuttered wild. “You feel that?” he whispered, dangerous, possessive. “Your heart beating. That ache in your belly? That emptiness?” He moaned low, hips stuttering. “That’s where I belong. Filling you. Knotted in you. But until then—”

He shoved his length back against Taehyung’s lips. “—you’ll take me here.”

Taehyung whimpered, eyes wide, his body shaking as his lips parted. Jungkook slid back in, slower this time, savoring the drag of heat, the gag when he pressed too deep, the way Taehyung’s throat worked helplessly around him.

“Good,” Jungkook groaned, hips rolling, his voice filthy with praise. “That’s it. Fuck—the way your throat squeezes—I could lose myself here forever.”

His rhythm built again, sharper now, more ruthless. The slap of flesh against Taehyung’s lips filled the chamber, wet and obscene. Taehyung’s hands clawed at the silk pooling under him, trembling, eyes rolling back when Jungkook forced him deeper still. Tears spilled unchecked down his temples, hair sticking damp against his flushed skin.

Taehyung’s throat convulsed around him, swallowing, gagging, moaning all at once. His body betrayed him with every sound. His Omega purred, pleased, delirious with submission.

“F-fuck—Taehyung, I’m going to come—” Jungkook’s voice broke into a growl, hips thrusting erratic, savage. His cock swelled in Taehyung’s throat, hot and pulsing. 

The words were the only warning before Jungkook came, spilling hot and thick down his throat. Taehyung choked, gag reflex rebelling, but Jungkook held him steady, hand tight in hair. The taste flooded his tongue—salt, bitter, Alpha—and his Omega purred, shivering with satisfaction.

Jungkook groaned at the sight, dragging his hand through Taehyung’s hair, holding him there even as the omega gagged around the last of it. His hips trembled with the aftershocks, his jaw slack with wreckage, eyes blown wide as he looked down.

He didn’t release his grip on Taehyung’s hair even after he slid his cock wetly from his lips. The strands were tangled between his fingers, roots stinging from how tight he had held him. Taehyung’s lips were ruined, red and slick, his chin smeared with spit and seed, his throat raw from the use.

He gasped for air, chest heaving, but Jungkook leaned down, pressing close until their mouths brushed. His thumb smeared one last streak of mess across his lower lip, and then Jungkook kissed him.

His tongue slid deep, licking into the taste he’d left in Taehyung’s mouth. He groaned when he found it—his own release coating Taehyung’s tongue—and he sucked, hungry, pulling Taehyung’s tongue into his mouth like he would devour him whole.

The sound broke out of Taehyung without meaning to, half a moan, half a whimper. His body jolted, his cock throbbing painfully inside silk, untouched.

Jungkook groaned louder, swallowing the sound. His hand slipped from Taehyung’s hair to his jaw, fingers gripping, forcing his mouth open wider so he could lick deeper, kiss harder.

When he finally pulled back, his lips dragged swollen against Taehyung’s own. His eyes were black fire. “Taste that?” His voice was hoarse, dangerous. “That’s me. On your tongue. In your throat. Inside you.”

Taehyung shivered, unable to look away, chest rising sharp with every breath.

Jungkook’s mouth tilted into something darker than a smile. He kissed him again, gentler this time, sucking once more at his tongue as though he couldn’t resist.

“You don’t even know,” Jungkook rasped, lips wet against his jaw. “You don’t know how good you sound.”

He didn’t. He only knew that his voice cracked open without permission, spilling moans he’d never practiced, never even imagined making. He only knew that his body betrayed him, trembling, hips jerking when Jungkook’s hand finally slid into the loosened silk at his waist.

Hot fingers wrapped around him.

The shock was immediate, brutal. His whole body jolted, back arching against the door. His cock throbbed in Jungkook’s grip, slicking into his palm instantly, and a sound spilled from him—raw, broken, desperate.

Taehyung had never been touched like this. He had been warned it would be dangerous, messy, shameful. He had been told to expect heat, the ache of his body preparing for use. He had not been told that pleasure would feel like fire licking the inside of his skin.

Jungkook groaned at the noise, at the slick already coating his fingers. “Fuck—you’re dripping for me already. You must’ve been aching while I fucked your throat, weren’t you?” His grip tightened, stroking once, long and slow.

The sensation nearly broke him. Taehyung cried out, head thudding back against the door, throat exposed. His legs shook, his whole body trembling as though he couldn’t contain it.

“Gods.” Jungkook stroked harder now, faster, thumb brushing the wet tip and smearing slick over the flushed head. “Listen to you. My Omega, begging without knowing he’s begging.” He kissed him again, swallowing his next moan.

Taehyung felt like he was burning alive. Every stroke dragged fire through his veins. His thighs pressed together, trying to ground the sensation, but Jungkook’s hand was relentless, dragging him toward the edge.

He had never felt this. He had imagined it, tried to conjure the words of his teachings into something real, but nothing had prepared him for this—his own body betraying him, his Omega shrieking inside with delight, clawing for more, yes, yes, yes.

Jungkook groaned at every sound he made. “That’s it. Give me more. Don’t hold back.” He kissed him again, tongue sliding in, sucking another moan from his throat. 

Taehyung whimpered, hips jerking helplessly into Jungkook’s hand. He couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t hold still. His body was chasing something he’d never known, never been allowed.

And then—Jungkook slowed. His grip softened, strokes easing, teasing, denying. The sharp, almost-painful ache of his impending release was pulled back, leaving him gasping, desperate.

The noise he made was strangled, high, shameful.

“Shhh,” Jungkook whispered, lips brushing his ear, cruel and tender. “Not yet. You’ll come when I tell you.” His thumb toyed at the head, circling, never enough. 

Taehyung’s nails dug into Jungkook’s arm through fabric, frantic. His chest heaved, his hips tried to chase more friction, but Jungkook held him firm, denying him.

“You’ve read about this, haven’t you?” Jungkook murmured. “You’ve been taught how it’s supposed to feel. But they never told you this, did they? That your whole body would beg.”

A sob broke from Taehyung’s throat, desperate. His vision blurred with tears. “P-please—”

Jungkook groaned, scent spiking darker, head dropping to bite at the hinge of his jaw. “Fuck—there it is. Begging for me. That’s what I wanted.” His hand tightened again, stroking faster, harder, dragging him back to the edge.

Taehyung cried out, raw, voice cracking. His body burned, nerves on fire. His moans spilled uncontrollably now, louder, each one tearing from his throat.

“Good. That’s it. Let them hear you. Let the whole estate know how pretty you moan for me.”

“J-Jungkook—” His voice broke on the name, gasping, helpless.

“Say it again,” Jungkook demanded, stroking him mercilessly. “Say it when you come.”

The world collapsed. Taehyung’s release tore out of him in hot, violent spurts, spilling over Jungkook’s hand, streaking his silk, his chest. His cry ripped from his throat, Jungkook’s name shattered on his tongue like prayer. His body convulsed, trembling, Omega howling in ecstasy as the emptiness filled for one shuddering moment.

Jungkook groaned like he’d come again himself. He stroked him through it, milking every drop, every convulsion, every last sob.

Taehyung’s body was nothing but tremors. Every nerve in him buzzed like an overstrung instrument, plucked raw and left to ring. His release had left him boneless, his chest damp with silk clinging to skin, his throat wrecked from sounds he’d never meant to make.

The floor was still cold under him, the lacquer unforgiving against his knees, his spine, his palms where he’d clawed for grip. The mess between them was hot by contrast—smearing, soaking, evidence that he’d been undone here, at the door, beneath Jungkook’s hands.

He barely noticed when his head tilted sideways, falling to the floor like he was weightless. His vision tunneled—blurred woodgrain, the shimmer of paint, Jungkook’s shadow moving over him like a stormcloud refusing to pass.

“Fuck,” Jungkook muttered under his breath, voice hoarse and dark. His hand came down, heavy at Taehyung’s throat, not choking, just holding. Anchoring. As if to remind them both he was still here, still in control.

Taehyung made a faint noise—half whimper, half breath—when Jungkook’s other arm slid beneath him. His body lifted without his consent, without his strength. He was carried.

The world swayed. His head dropped against Jungkook’s shoulder, too heavy to hold up, his damp hair sticking to flushed skin. The Alpha carried him through the dark of his own chambers, steps measured, chest heaving under the weight of both of them.

The bed received him like water. Cool sheets caught against overheated skin, dragging across him with cruel clarity. Jungkook laid him down with care that contrasted violently with the way he had just used him—gentle, almost reverent, as if arranging something precious. He smoothed the robe around his thighs, pulled the coverlet halfway over him.

Taehyung blinked up through blurred lashes, vision filled with Jungkook’s outline. For one dizzy second, he thought the Alpha might crawl in beside him, finish what he had started, claim the space beside him as well as the body beneath him.

Instead, Jungkook leaned close, his mouth brushing the shell of Taehyung’s ear. “Rest,” he whispered, voice still raw, threaded with something dangerous. “You’ll need it.”

A rough thumb dragged once over his damp lower lip—soft, reverent, obscene. Jungkook’s scent still clung to him like smoke, heavy in his lungs, seared into his hair and skin.

Then the weight lifted.

The absence was shocking. Taehyung’s body curled faintly toward where Jungkook had been before he could stop it, his omega clawing for the heat that had left him. He caught the faintest trace of boots on lacquer, the whisper of a door opening, closing.

Silence dropped like a blade.

Taehyung lay wrecked among cool sheets, body trembling, lips still parted around words he didn’t know how to form. His throat ached, his chest burned, his omega purred and whimpered all at once, half-sated, half-starving.

Somewhere in the distance of the palace, he thought he heard steps echoing down another corridor—Jungkook’s stride, purposeful, heading back to his own chambers as if nothing had happened.

But Taehyung’s body still remembered.

The cold beneath him. The Alpha above him.
The weight of hands. The press of heat.
The taste of surrender on his tongue.

********

Morning came cruel.

Light bled thin across the lattice, pale as a blade, and Taehyung surfaced into it like a man dragged from deep water. Pain announced the borders of his body first—throat raw; jaw aching; knees stinging where lacquer had tattooed its hardness into them. His chest was tacky where silk clung and dried. The sheets were cool as judgment.

For a handful of heartbeats he didn’t move. If he didn’t move, the room might stay mercifully blank—just the hush of his chamber, the fold of the coverlet dragged to his hips.

But memory wasn’t interested in mercy. It came in fragments that cut.

A hand closing around his throat—not choking, anchoring. A voice saying rest and making the word into a threat. The drag of a thumb over his ruined lower lip. The way he had swallowed and swallowed and—gods.

Heat surged shame-bright under his skin. He stared at the seam of the canopy as if it were a line he could walk back over into a version of himself that hadn’t knelt.

His Omega did not help. It uncurled inside him with a low, pleased hum, arching like a cat in sun, reliving every filthy scrap of praise it had been fed. Good boy, even if Jungkook never said it aloud. The ghost of it still had teeth.

He turned his head and the pillow slid cool against his cheekbone. Jungkook’s scent lived there—storm-warm and resin-dense, threaded through the linen like smoke through hair. His mouth flooded in reflex, traitor glands waking on scent alone. He swallowed—and winced—for the taste that clung at the back of his tongue, salt-bitter and inescapably Alpha.

What has happened? He knew exactly what had happened. But why had he reacted that way?

Because when the First Heir of House Gwanryeo bracketed his hips and told him open in a voice that wasn’t Command but felt like it, his body had mistaken that voice for an answer.

Why had he liked it?

Taehyung sat up too fast. The room tilted and steadied. The coverlet slipped, baring the mess dried across his chest, the faint smear against his ribs where a slicked hand had dragged; the emptiness under his navel that pulsed like a bruise.

Bruises bloomed high on his hips—the outline of fingers that didn’t know gentle when they gripped. He should have hated the sight. He could not stop looking.

He dragged the sheet over himself as if modesty could be reattached by force. It didn’t stop his scent from rising—a mortifying ribbon of want threaded through it. He bit the inside of his cheek until copper bled across salt. Control has a taste. So does failure.

“Breathe,” he told himself, the way Jimin had taught him. In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight. Again. Again. He found the edges of the room: the lacquered screen with its forever-hunt; the kettle on the low table, cold; the robe he should have hung last night slumped like a shed skin.

Taehyung swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floor met his feet with the same cold that had bitten his knees. He stood, wavered, and went to the washstand. The pitcher was full. He poured with both hands, because his hands shook. Water struck porcelain, bright and indecent in the hush. He cupped some and swilled his mouth until the liquid ran tinged and clear again. It didn’t change the taste lodged at the back of his throat. He took the cloth, dipped it, and pressed it to his lips until the cool bled into the heat there.

In the mirror, a stranger watched him. Lips swollen; bruise budding where a mouth had latched at the hinge of his jaw; eyes rimmed pink from tears he hadn’t realized had fallen while he knelt. The mark on his throat was not a claiming bite—Codex law had kept those teeth off him for now—but it lived in the same language: I could. Not yet.

Not yet.

“Gods damn you,” he told the reflection, not certain whether he meant himself or Jungkook or the law that renamed want as duty and obedience as virtue. He should be angry. He was. It came tangled with something low and shamefully warm that anger couldn’t starve.

He crossed to the window. The courtyards below were washed clean—last night’s rain had rinsed the banners until they hung heavy and dark as wet silk. Somewhere in the hive of the estate, footsteps on lacquer would be measuring out the heir’s morning as if nothing of consequence had happened. Jeon Jungkook, First Rank, moving through rooms he owned by blood while Taehyung tried to remember where his body ended and the echo of the Alpha in it began.

He pressed his forehead to the cool lattice and counted again. In. Hold. Out.

Taehyung tried to built a box around the memory and put it inside. The lid wouldn’t stay shut. A syllable wedged in the seam and kept it from sealing.

Open, Taehyung.

He flinched like a struck thing. His body remembered that syllable in his mouth, how it had loosened him. His Omega purred. His throat tightened. Heat bloomed humiliatingly low.

“Stop.” He said it aloud, because a whisper felt equal to the fight. “Stop it. Enough.” His hands found the edge of the washstand again and held on.

He hated that. He hated how easy it had been to be remade by a voice and a touch. He hated that the word please had found his tongue without permission. He hated that the shame ran alongside a hotter, sneakier gratitude.

He tore the sash free, the robe gaping as he stalked to the screen where another hung. The cool slip of fresh silk over tender skin made him hiss. He wrenched the knot hard. He would bathe once the palace had finished sniffing its morning and returned to business. He would scrub scent until he could go three corridors without catching his own betrayal in the air.

He paused, fingers hooked in the collar. The mirror took him in again—Omega newly claimed by nothing yet, Darkborn newly dangerous, thirdborn of House Baekho waiting upon the pleasure of a court that would cheerfully drown him in it.

“You will not seek him,” he told his reflection. The vow tasted like iron. “You will not let him seek you.” His Omega whined, small and wounded. He ignored it. “You will remember what your hands can do to a neck.”

The last landed. His hands remembered. They went very still.

Slowly, he lifted the damp cloth and pressed it to his mouth one more time, as if he could erase the shape of what it had learned to do. Cool seeped in. The ache roared back anyway. He swallowed it. He looked at himself until his gaze steadied.

Then he turned from the mirror, from the bed’s folded evidence, from the window’s indifferent light, and began to rebuild the morning into something he could stand to live inside. The promise he’d heard in Jungkook’s voice—rest; you’ll need it—skulked under the floorboards like a fire that hadn’t gone out.

Taehyung crossed back to the painted screen. The stag’s pearl eye caught him again, bright as if it remembered. He set his palm flat against the lacquer, cool wood under his hand, the hounds and riders frozen in their endless chase.

“Chosen before the horns,” he whispered. “So was I.”

The light fractured across the pearl, splintering like prophecy. For an instant, the stag seemed to turn.

Hunts break, too.

Chapter Text

They came for Taehyung at first light.

The door opened on a hush of lacquer and wool, and a Red Guard stood there—lacquered cuirass, scarlet sash, a face that might as well have been cut from stone. Taehyung had hoped for a tray and silence, the mercy of being permitted to eat with only the four walls to witness him. He had hoped for the luxury of invisibility. But the world outside his chamber had a hunger for him now, a teeth-bare smile, and hunger never lets its chosen eat alone.

He slid the glove over his right hand with slow, precise care—leather, dark and soft, stitched so fine it disappeared against his wrist like a shadow deciding where to end. The fabric swallowed the deadly curve of his knuckles. He flexed his fingers once, then set his jaw and followed.

Corridors unspooled like ribbon, glossy black floors mirroring ceiling beams and the red flash of the guard’s sash. Beyond the paper screens, the second estate woke: water lifted and poured in stone basins; cranes cried out somewhere in the mist; the garden’s pines breathed resin into the autumn cold. This had been a retreat once, a place of summer exile for a court that required a different scenery for its boredom. Now it had become the axis of the sovereign world because Taehyung slept under its roof. A place becomes sacred when power decides to frequent it; people dressed in fear of God moved through its halls without any fear of god at all.

The breakfast room waited on the south wing, light spilling white and hard across patterned tatami. Tall windows gazed into terraces veined with gravel, moss islands, a black pond too still to be natural. Nothing moved there except a koi fin like a blade. The table was an oval of dark wood big enough to seat a negotiation and a war. Both had happened there before. They would again.

They were already arrayed when he entered, like a constellation that had drawn itself precisely and would be offended if any star wandered. The Sovereign Pair at the head, of course: Jeon Taehwan, Alpha, draped not in cloth so much as in edicts—power sat with him like a tame beast, broad-shouldered and bored, a patient cruelty; Seo Dalya beside him, Omega, ice-pale and unsmiling, serene as the blade of a sacrificial mirror.

To Taehwan’s right sat the Sovereign’s brother-in-law by a marriage that had been more treaty than love. The man wore a lacquered collar too tight across a throat that had swallowed countless elegant lies. His eyes were weight where they landed, not curiosity. Beside him, Min Yoongi himself: third in the line of succession, black-on-black as if mourning a future not yet dead. Yoongi’s hair was brushed back, exposing his forehead and a mind sharpened to a needle.

Opposite, Minhyun—the Second Heir—took up very little space in a way that forced the room to give him more. Younger than Jungkook and somehow older, his cheekbones knife-clean, his jaw a smooth promise. He had inherited their father’s mouth and none of his father’s bulk, appearing almost delicate until you noticed the way his hands rested on the table—loose, but prepared.

And Jungkook.

The First Heir lounged, which meant he had chosen to, which meant the chair had learned a lesson. He had dressed lightly—charcoal suit, soft black shirt, the top button undone. Jungkook’s mouth creased. It wasn’t quite a smile. It was yesterday remade into an expression. It said: I remember the heat of your breath against my hand. It said: don’t you?

Taehyung let his chin lift a fraction, the only defiance left that did not break a law. In the white slap of the morning he felt every gaze find him and sharpen. Instinct tugged like a leash at the back of his neck—bare your throat, kneel, let the room be pleased with how easy you are to arrange. His Omega’s spine bowed a little in his skin at the pressure of attention. He refused it. He stood exactly straight and let the glove on his dominant hand show in the light.

A footman guided him to a seat two places from the Sovereign—close enough to feel the gravity well, far enough to be denied warmth. A ceramic cup breathed jasmine fog by his wrist before he had finished sitting. Scent bled from the table in organized threads. Jungkook’s scent drifted toward him last— petrichor, something cloudy that stung the memory of his mouth. Taehyung forced air in. Four counts. Hold. Eight out.

The Sovereign did not waste time on softening.

“Today,” Jeon Taehwan said, and the syllable sounded like a door closing somewhere far down a dark stone hall, “we will inform the Court and the Darkblood houses. The bonding ceremony between the Thirdborn of Baekho and the First Heir of Gwanryeo will be announced publicly by nightfall.”

Blood rose so fast Taehyung heard it in his ears as surf—then again, and again, the second wave heavier. He looked down into his tea and saw a dark mirror that did not show him a face. 

Across the table, Jungkook’s grin tilted, unrepentant, as if replaying a private film behind his eyes. 

Taehwan turned his gaze to Yoongi without moving anything else. “Your lessons,” he said. “Continue today. He must hold the Dark without trembling. The demonstration will be expected during the vows.”

Demonstration. Taehyung kept his eyes on the tea so that he did not look up and say something that would bruise his mouth. The glove felt suddenly loud where it lay against his palm. His gift had only just arrived, a hound he had not yet named that came when it pleased and bared its teeth at the wrong shadows. To touch a neck and strip a life from it was a god’s privilege poorly distributed; they would make a pageant of it.

Yoongi’s gaze skated to him and away, narrow, assessing—the look of a craftsman measuring a fracture for where to set the first pin. He inclined his head almost imperceptibly. It was apology or promise or neither.

Servants moved like breeze. Food appeared that smelled of patience and autumn: congee with duck, seaweed sharp as clean knives, pears soaked in chrysanthemum and ice. Hands poured, refilled, cleared, placed, never intruded. Invisibility is a kind of magic the court teaches early.

Taehyung lifted the cup. His wrist did not tremble. The Red Guard posted by the door mirrored a statue of martial devotion.

Jungkook’s voice came lazy from two seats down, some nothing matter about the western garrisons and a supply road made impassable by a storm. Taehyung listened because it was safer than remembering how that mouth had felt against his ear saying rest.

“More tea, Your Highness?” A servant murmured to Minhyun. The pot was ironstone, heavy, steam fuming white from the spout.

Minhyun didn’t look up from his pear. “If you must.”

It was an ordinary answer given by a second son who had spent a lifetime measuring how much space he was allowed to take.

The servant reached, wrist tipping to pour.

He froze.

At first Taehyung thought he had chosen stillness, the way a deer chooses it when a bowstring is already half-drawn. Then the pot listed in his hand. A shine of black tea bent itself into a long bead and fell. The servant’s other hand twitched, twice, a puppet-string plucked. The twitch became a jerk. The jerk became a seize.

The body caught by an invisible hook.

His mouth found a shape and held it—not a word, not a name, just teeth and red. The sound scraped up from his chest like something dragged along stone. The ironstone pot hit the tatami. The servant juddered in the same graceless rhythm, as if some invisible hand had reached into his spine and plucked it like a bow.

Jungkook’s chair went back with an ungentle sound. He was on his feet before the pot finished rolling, a single line of movement that put his body between Taehyung and the world the way a wall becomes a choice. 

The Red Guard at the wall broke their statue discipline and moved, one to the convulsing servant, one to the door. Dalya didn’t startle. She didn’t move at all; only her eyes tracked the body’s last arc.

Yoongi’s gaze flickered across the servant’s neck—a precise survey, above the pulse, along the sternomastoid, to the angle where a Darkborn’s touch would kill. His mouth thinned. He looked, just once, to Taehyung’s gloved hand. 

The convulsions stuttered. Stopped. The silence afterward was the kind that throws the smallest sounds into gold leaf: the faint clink of Minhyun setting his spoon down; the whisper as a sleeve brushed a lacquered armrest; the slow intake of the Sovereign’s breath.

Taehyung stared past Jungkook’s shoulder because he could not not look. The servant on the floor looked like nothing now—just a body that had been taught once how to pour tea and would not be asked to do it again.

Taehwan did not rise. He did not have to. “Bring the court physician,” he said. “Now. Remove the omegas.”

Taehyung heard the plural as a slur and a statistic. Remove the omegas, as if they were glass ornaments placed foolishly near a table’s edge—as if they were too fragile to see death when death is a thing they are made to live inside. 

“I am not—” he began. He did not know what he was going to say. Not fragile. Not furniture. Not leaving. His throat rolled around the not and swallowed it as hands found his shoulder: precise, respectful, and unarguable. Another Red Guard.

He stood. The glove creaked faintly. Taehyung looked once, quickly, because he did not know when he would be allowed to see and not be seen again.

Dalya’s eyes—indifferent, a surface where nothing broke. Jungkook—coiled, ready to take a knife from someone else’s hand just to learn the weight of it. Taehwan—unshaken, annoyed, as if an inconvenient weather had arrived at his table without invitation. Yoongi—lost for half a breath in equations only he could see, gaze flicking from the servant’s throat to the cup to Minhyuns face and back again, as if the angles begged to be solved. And Minhyun—

Overlooked as always, gentle mouth softened around the ghost of a smile. Not delight. Not horror. Interest. The way city boys watched fires they did not intend to help put out. The expression sat on him like a rumor he had grown comfortable with—mildly entertained by the change to routine.

The Red Guard turned Taehyung toward the door. The room elongated—the way rooms do when you are being removed from them—so that each step felt like a decision the future would write down. Outside, the corridor carried cold like a second air. The garden beyond the windows was still pretending to be a painting.

They reached the threshold. He made himself look back. The scene had not moved in the handful of breaths since he stood: Jungkook still ready to be a wall, Yoongi still counting angles, Taehwan still law, the body still. Minhyun’s mouth still tipped with that small, almost-pleasant curve.

That was what followed him down the corridor, what rode in the elevator of his spine back to his chambers: not the thud of ironstone against floor, not the wet clack of air departing lungs, not the command that named him removable.

Just that smile, thin as a crack in a frozen river, and the dark water showing through.

*******

He paced a trench into the carpet before the hour turned twice, the same twelve steps between the window and the lacquered screen, the same pivot—the glove whispering against his palm as if even leather could taste impatience. In the glass, the gardens kept pretending to be serene: pines like dark calligraphy, a slit of water, gravel raked into mathematical calm. Inside his ribs, nothing was calm. Curiosity has teeth when you are an Omega taught to swallow questions. His had grown fangs.

Jimin’s curiosity had always been etiquette-proof—tea-steam and whisper, thrill of scandal wrapped in silk.

Taehyung’s curiosity wanted rooms with locked doors. It wanted the ledger no one was supposed to balance, the codes wreathed into the Sovereign’s dispatches, the way laws were made to be stabbed and not to stand. He wanted the bones under court silk. He wanted the motives. Omegas are made for wanting, they told him. They just meant a different kind.

He closed his eyes and saw the servant fall again. The ironstone pot, the arrested bead of tea, the convulsions snapping the body into ugly angles, and then the flatness after. The servant had been invisible when he entered and invisible now that he was gone.

Taehyung should have been there when the physician arrived. He should have watched the hands that prodded and dusted and drew conclusions.

He thought of the First Heir and pressed his molars together until they hurt. Jungkook’s scent lived in the room’s air like storm-wet stone; it should have faded by now, but it clung the way some songs do—the ones you wish you didn’t remember. His lower lip ached when he worried it with his teeth; he stopped when he realized what memory his body intended to call up. He refused the thought. He put it back into the box with other unhelpful truths: the way Jungkook had moved between him and danger without thinking.

Taehyung had wanted it to be simple: hatred clean as a blade. Instead it was a tangle.

He peeled his mind away. He found himself wishing for Yoongi with a surprise that was not pleasant. Not the man himself—no Omega with a sense of self-preservation wished for an Alpha by instinct. He wished for the precision of the training chamber.

The knock came as the light thinned toward afternoon. The door slid. A Red Guard filled the rectangle—scarlet sash, lacquered breastplate that turned his shoulders into angles. Same face, different man. The Guard inclined precisely. “Escort to training, my lord.”

They took the stairs that curled into the mountain’s throat. The door at the end accepted the Red Guard’s seal and rolled open with a baritone sigh, as if the room itself were tired of holding its breath.

Planters and low tables broke the space, each holding living things: trays of moss, bonsai pines wired into gravity-defying art, camellias heavy with bud, a bowl where lilies flexed pale in crystalline water. The air was wet and smelled of soil, chlorophyll, something faintly sweet—honeysuckle stored in wood.

A conservatory designed for precision and cruelty.

Yoongi stood with his back to the door, hands clasped at the small of his spine, studying a spray of orchids as if he were reading it. He wore black, of course—black that drank shadow and gave none back.

Yoongi turned then. His gaze swept Taehyung—down, up, unhurried. He did not look at Taehyung like an Alpha looks when he wants to see how you’ll fit around his hand. He looked like a man interrogating a puzzle with too much missing. The line of his mouth tightened a fraction when it caught on Taehyung’s lower lip.

The breath Yoongi let out was very small, a measure cut to a hair. When he spoke, it was like he had to push the words gently past something sharp inside his own chest.

He asked, very simply, “Did he force you?”

The question landed like a thrown nail—small, thin, meant to pin. It named without naming. The First Heir did not need to be named in a room inside the Sovereign’s perimeter.

Taehyung’s first impulse was to nod and be done with it—take the absolution offered, rewrite the record so that the part of him that had opened hadn’t, hadn’t, hadn’t.

He opened his mouth and closed it. He would not lie with his mouth when his body had already told so many truths.

“My Omega,” he said at last, steady, “has different wants than I do.” He lifted his chin a fraction, as if the words weighed less held an inch higher. “Yesterday, the Omega won.”

It was not the whole truth. The whole truth had a Jungkook-shaped heat at its core, a downward pull he did not want to name. But it was not a lie.

Yoongi’s eyes did not soften. They changed—narrowed at the edges, as if he were looking through glass at something further behind it. “The First Heir is used to winning,” he said. “Some Alphas confuse that with being right.” He let the words fall and did not pick them up again. “You are not broken because your body answered. Your body has been trained to answer since your first heat. That is a war.” A brief pause. “And you are not alone in being tired of fighting it.”

Taehyung swallowed before the gratitude could become visible. He pushed it away with the tool he trusted most: a change of subject before emotion implicated him.

“The servant,” he said, to the table full of plants instead of to Yoongi. “What happened to him?”

A muscle jumped in Yoongi’s jaw. He glanced toward the door as if to make certain it had closed properly, and the iron hinge obligingly muttered its assent. “Dead,” he said.

Taehyung huffed, a sound like a laugh that did not think much of the joke. “I guessed as much, even for an uneducated Omega.”

Yoongi’s mouth twitched—a winter version of a grin; there and gone. “The court physician has a puzzle he is pretending to enjoy.” He gestured with two fingers toward the neck, the path a Darkborn’s killing hand would take. “No touch blossoming into a death-print. If it had been one of us, the mark would be there. It wasn’t.”

“Heart failure?” Taehyung asked, though he knew the answer—the servant had been young, the seizure too violent, the silence after too abrupt.

“Ruled out,” Yoongi said. “Healthy prior. No congenital defect. There was—” He paused, selecting words with care. “A mark on his chest. Not external. The skin over the sternum was clear. But within, when they opened him, they found black veining, radiating around the heart like frost on glass.”

Taehyung pictured it and felt something cold tighten in him. “Poison,” he said.

“That is the working theory wearing court clothes.” Yoongi leaned against the table’s edge. “No known poison we keep in our books does this. The archivists are already scratching at their ledgers. The Lightborn healers were consulted.”

“And?”

Yoongi’s mouth flattened. “They found no residue to coax. No Light to push against the injury. Whatever it was left only its absence.”

Taehyung let the detail settle between them. “Then how did it get in?”

“That is the part making the Sovereign’s tea taste bad.” Yoongi tipped his chin toward the ceiling, toward the house above them. “There are six doors into a person: mouth, nostrils, eyes, ears, skin, the old wounds you think have closed. We have tasters for the first, physicians for the second. The kitchen knives are counted at dawn and dusk. The Red Guard has quiet ways of cleaning the air vents no one sees.” His gaze came back and sharpened. “We are certain of nothing.”

“It might not have been meant for him.” Taehyung’s voice was too soft to be reckless. “A servant pours what he does not own.”

Yoongi gave him a long look that held both patience and warning. “You are not wrong.” He did not say And you should not be saying it out loud. He left the warning to the room. “The Sovereign has increased the number of tasters. A show. Perhaps also a precaution. The kitchens are carved open right now like a carcass for inspection. Until someone gives my uncle a name, he will root through his wheat barrel like a peasant worried about rats.”

The picture of the Sovereign bending over sacks of grain with his heavy rings and careful fury made Taehyung’s mouth twitch in a grim, private way.

Yoongi pushed off the table. “Now,” he said, the single word re-threading the room into purpose, “we start.”

He crossed to a cedar workbench. A single vase sat there, black-lacquered, holding a long-stemmed rose so dark it drank the light. Yoongi lifted it with a care that was more about precision than tenderness and offered it out.

Taehyung took the stem in his left hand, feel of thorn and green, the faint tack of sap. The glove pulled at his right wrist when he flexed; he reached with his teeth to catch the seam and worked the leather free. The cool air inside the conservatory kissed his bare hand. The death gift in him rose through the network of tendon and nerve like winter wind filling a room when a door opens.

The sensation was obscenely pleasant if he let it be—clean and cold, a cut made by something that knew exactly where to put its edge. His skin prickled.

Taehyung curled his bare fingers as if to remind them they were his. The tips tingled. He looked at the rose.

“Maybe not this,” Yoongi said suddenly, and took the rose back, setting it carefully into the vase as if reversing harm before it occurred. “You strip small things without thinking,” he said without judgment. “That tells me your reflex arc is firing faster than your reasoning can catch up. We need a target with more stubbornness.”

He stopped at a low table where a camellia waited in a shallow dish—a miniature tree, glossy leaves dark as jade armor, buds the color of meat and milk. Its trunk twisted in sculpted artifice, patient, older than Taehyung’s disappointments. Yoongi slid his hand under the dish and lifted it. He set it on the central table, the one under the widest net of light.

“Here,” he said.

Taehyung stepped closer. He could taste the life in this one before he could smell it—dense, layered, a spiral ladder running down into root and up into the tight fists of bud. The room seemed to lean in with him, listening.

“Think of your gift as a knife,” Yoongi said. “A good one. The kind you can shave with and gut with.” He tipped his head. “But we are not training a sword. We are training a surgeon.”

He came to stand at Taehyung’s shoulder, near enough that Taehyung could feel the heat of him line his right side.

Taehyung nodded once. He set his left palm on the dish’s edge, grounding himself in cold ceramic. His right hand hovered a hairsbreadth above the bark. He let the leather glove hang from the back pocket of his trousers like an omen he intended to disobey.

He closed his eyes.

The garden of his mind went quiet—no court, no Red Guard, no Jungkook-shaped heat, no Minhyun smile like a crack in ice, no sovereign law dragging chains like a wedding train. Only the breath counting itself. Only the cold room inside the cold room. Only the gift, lifting its head, attentive.

He tunneled his thoughts—down the thread of sensation, past the wanting of his Omega, past the training that insisted every touch be a surrender. He found the place Yoongi meant: not rage, not fear. Stillness.

“Now,” Yoongi said, very softly, as if speaking to keep from waking the air, “take nothing you cannot give back.”

Taehyung exhaled and let the Dark lean down, a shadow of a shadow, the barest brush of winter against living bark—

—and concentrated on not turning the entire tree to ash.

*******

The conservatory’s wet green hush followed Taehyung back like a second skin. He rolled the binding glove back over his right hand; the leather’s seam found the line of his palm like an apology. The Dark inside him, which Yoongi had coaxed from a hurricane into a blade, settled along bone with the sulky, obedient calm of a leashed hound.

Dinner arrived as a sealed lacquer tray borne not by one servant but by three.

They came in a practiced triangle—two to carry, one to witness. Wax blushed sovereign red around the tray’s brass latch; the crest was pressed so hard the ridges glinted. The first servant broke the seal. The second read a slip tied to the cord aloud—date, hour, taster’s mark, the physician’s counter-mark. The third uncapped a small glass vial long enough for Taehyung to smell the bitter ghost of whatever the Lightborn healers used to test for common toxins, then stoppered it and slipped it back into his sash.

Security in ritual clothing. Security performing itself, because that is what power does when afraid.

“Set it there,” Taehyung said, nodding to the low table by the window. His voice came out even. The fatigue from training had sunk into his thighs and between his shoulder blades; it was a good ache—the kind that felt like progress and not punishment. 

Steam breathed up when the tray opened: short-grain rice glossed with sesame oil, grilled fish lacquered with soy, pickled fern shoot, a bowl of broth where shiitake caps swam like slow moons. Tea. Always tea, as if the day could be rinsed out and made again.

The three servants withdrew together, backs a single plane, the door sliding shut in a clean syllable. Their departure left a hush that made every small sound conspicuous—the tick of the brazier settling, the whisper of his glove when he flexed his fingers.

Between bites he let the morning return: the ironstone pot, the seizure, the way Yoongi’s gaze had clocked neck, cup, air like a hunter mapping wind. Poison—some absence masquerading as a substance. The Lightborn healers had found nothing to push against; his mind kept returning to that: injury by subtraction. 

If it was poison, then how. If not meant for the servant, then for whom. The Second Heir’s cup had been empty. The Omegas had been removed —like unlit candles blown out regardless, as if their being present at a death made the death an insult.

He pressed fingers to his brow and closed his eyes. The room went black-red. His thoughts lined up like suspects.

Who would want to poison a servant?

No one, which is to say: everyone, if a servant’s death bleeds fear into the right veins. Who would benefit from the court locking its doors from the inside? 

And if the target had not been the servant, had not been Minhyun, had not been anyone at all but the idea of inviolability—

He put the questions down before their edges turned inward. He lifted the tea. The cup warmed his left hand; the leather on his right stayed cool, a thin moon of safety.

Beyond the window, the garden was already sliding toward evening. Pines stooped like calligraphy dragged downward by ink too heavy to lift. Gravel shone faintly, combed into perfect ellipses no wind dared mar. Somewhere, far and small, a bell took six slow breaths and died.

What are the Alphas doing now? The thought broke through like a bruise touched. What does a house do when it cannot afford to look afraid? Alphas meet. They discuss. They plan. They assign blame letters, sharpen denials, raise the Red Guard like a wall.

The Omegas are removed. They are told to rest, to be still, to be beautiful, to be an idea that soothes.

Omega, be a room with flowers in it.
Omega, be silk.  
Omega, be grateful.

Taehyung’s mouth tilted in the empty room, a humorless private thing. He set the cup down. 

He crossed to the window and pressed his gloved knuckles to the cold glass, forehead to his own faint reflection. The Dark under his skin stroked the glove’s inside like a caged animal tracing bars. He caught himself imagining the opposite gift—the Light that gave breath back, coaxed blood into motion, knitted the ripped veil. He had never envied anyone that particular sanctity before; now he imagined the feeling of it.

A knock.

Two knuckles. Measured. Not servant’s rhythm, not Red Guard’s square knock. He turned, expectation a small practiced thing in his palm: trays again, the triangle of witness. 

But it was Jungkook.

Not the composed First Heir of breakfast, not the lounger who made chairs obey him by leaning into them. This was Jungkook with the collar of his black shirt unbuttoned one too far, glove on, hair not behaving because his hands had been in it, eyes bright and restless like a storm caught in glass. Benefit-of-incense clung to him—the ozone of a summer rain starting far away and rushing closer. The scent hit Taehyung and his body recognized him before the room did.

“Your Highness.” Taehyung’s voice did a small, traitorous shift on the second word. He stepped aside. “You—”

“I wanted to see,” Jungkook said, coming in without waiting for the invitation to complete itself. He moved like his thoughts were outrunning him, like he was arriving from a room with too many voices. “How you were.”

He stopped half a body-length away, then closed the distance by a handspan, as if a thought reached for him while another pulled back. “After this morning. It must have been—” His mouth cut to the side, as if unsure what word to commit to. “Shocking.”

The urge to laugh came up like a cough. Taehyung fought it into something gentler.  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” The scrape of irony in his chest wasn’t all for the dead servant. “Shocking.”

Jungkook’s gaze took a slow tour of him—hair, mouth, glove, the set of his shoulders—and came to rest on his eyes. The Omega inside Taehyung lifted its head like a creature scenting meat. He shut his ribs on it.

Taeyhung hesitated, then forced the question out. “Will you tell me what happened?”

“You shouldn’t worry your pretty head over this,” Jungkook said, and there—there was the court voice again, the heir’s, the one that let a phrase like pretty head stand unbruised between men. “We’re handling it. Everything that needs doing is being done.”

The scoff escaped Taehyung before he could bury it. He saw when Jungkook heard it—the slight tilt of his head, the way his mouth curved into something feral with amusement.

“Oh?” Jungkook stepped in, as intimate as a question asked in the dark. He reached up. The leather of his glove skimmed Taehyung’s temple; he brushed a strand of hair back from his face with slowness that felt deliberate and unwise. The glove’s seam grazed the top of Taehyung’s ear. “Are you not happy with my answer, omega?”

The word should have hit like a collar. Instead it burned along his nerves like a dare. Taehyung made his gaze hold, unflinching. “I am wondering,” he said, each syllable filed clean, “how it will be when we are bonded.”

Jungkook’s hand ghosted down, fingers playing idly with a lock of hair. The room narrowed to the movement. The Omega in Taehyung keened once, silent, more sensation than sound.

“If that will be my place,” Taehyung continued, feeling his own voice as if it belonged to someone braver. “Removed from the scene. Told not to worry my pretty head.” He let the phrase cut as it deserved.

The grin that showed Jungkook’s teeth this time had edges. He toyed with the lock of hair like it was a string he could tune a note on. The other hand lifted, and cupped the back of Taehyung’s neck—careful, careful, leather a boundary against the lethal skin beneath. His thumb found the short hairs at the nape, stroked there once, twice, the way a man might test how a bow answers a pluck.

“You,” he said, words slow, warmed by a satisfaction he didn’t bother to hide, “are truly something special.”

The pressure at Taehyung’s nape made his Omega arch; muscle wanted to curve, throat wanted to bare. 

“Most Omegas,” Jungkook went on, voice indulgent as a fine knife, “do not show much interest in politics.”

“Or maybe,” Taehyung said, dead calm, “Omegas are taught not to show interest in these kinds of things.”

He watched the words land. Jungkook’s chuckle started in his chest and rolled up low. “My father”—he said it like a fact of geography, like saying mountain or law—“is traditional. He will not change in his reign.” The thumb at Taehyung’s nape drew a small circle that had no right to feel as good as it did. “When I am Sovereign—” He didn’t say if. Of course he didn’t. “—things may be different. If you wish it, you can sit part next to me.”

Sit part. The phrase had several possible lives.

Sit prettily and listen while decisions happened.

Sit and be watched like an emblem, the Omega that proved the Sovereign loved order.

Sit and speak and be heard—he feared that was the least likely of all its possible meanings.

His mouth didn’t trust itself with any of the things it wanted to say. The glove at his nape made thinking in straight lines harder.

Jungkook’s face changed; some of the feral slant slid off, leaving something worn and restless. He dragged his teeth over his lower lip, not sensually but like a man who needed the small pain to remember to stay in his body. “But that is not why I came.”

Tension thinned and tightened in Taehyung at once. “Then why.”

Jungkook’s scent shifted—darker, rain sharper; the Alpha in him crowding the room by reflex. He stepped in, the fine black of his shirt brushing Taehyung’s chest. Heat rose between them like something with intent. The Omega inside Taehyung did an eager, humiliating little tilt; his thighs remembered last night with indecent clarity. Perhaps heat was nestling near. The thought made his ears burn.

“Because,” Jungkook said, jaw tight, “my father did not want me to tell you.” He took a breath that sounded like gravel. “And I am going to tell you anyway.”

A small flare of satisfaction lit in Taehyung’s ribs. If the heir defied the Sovereign, it would not be for triviality. “Tell me what?”

“We received a letter.” Jungkook spoke the word as if it had teeth. “Anonymous.”

“A letter?” Taehyung kept his voice mild and let his eyes do the frowning.

“A threat,” Jungkook said, and the word mixed oddly with the clench at his mouth, producing something like relish. “If we don’t cooperate, more people will die.” His gaze flicked once to the tray by the window as if remembering the new rituals around food. “And not servants.”

The room turned a degree colder. “What,” he said, breath even only because he forced it, “does cooperation mean.”

“In a few minutes there will be an encounter.” Jungkook’s eyes were distant for a heartbeat; he was already in that room, the table laden with maps and anger, his father’s hand flat beside a dispatch knife. “They’re deciding next steps.”

He seemed to remember who he was with and pressed closer without meaning to. The whole line of him aligned down Taehyung’s front: shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, heat to heat. He made a low sound—half groan, half laugh at himself. “God, I would rather take your mouth again right now,” he said frankly, voice gone rough. “But this matters. It is for your safety too.”

The words landed in two places at once—one high and cold, one low and greedy. Taehyung made himself anchor to the first. “What,” he asked, and hated that the word came out a little breathless, “do they want us to cooperate with?”

Jungkook’s gaze went blacker. Wild lit in it like foxfire. The fingers at Taehyung’s nape tightened with a possessiveness that made his pulse jump once, hard. His Omega’s instincts surged; his neck wanted to bare, spine to curve, scent to soften. He locked his knees. He did not move.

“They want,” Jungkook said, very softly, “the bonding ceremony cancelled.”

The air changed shape around the sentence, as if it had mass. For a second all Taehyung heard was the rush of blood in his ears. Then confusion shouldered in—stupid, inappropriate, honest.

Who in this kingdom would spend ink to spare him? Who would dare?

He realized he had made a sound—gasp, sharper than he would have allowed himself if thought had been present to govern breath.

Jungkook’s gloved hand left his nape and found his face instead; the leather was soft against his cheek. He turned Taehyung’s jaw with careful pressure and rained quick kisses there—cheekbone, corner of mouth, a press beneath the eye that felt almost gentle. “Do not worry,” he said between them, voice a promise sharpened on a whetstone. “I will do anything in my power to stop this. They have chosen the wrong enemy.”

His thumb skated across Taehyung’s lower lip; Taehyung inhaled on a hiss he did not consent to making. Jungkook’s mouth ghosted the place his thumb had been, speaking into his skin. “You will be mine. No threat will stop me.”

It should have curdled. It didn’t. Something in the dark want at the base of Taehyung’s throat bloomed and bared its small white teeth. He hated it and cherished it in the same breath.

The hate didn’t survive the kiss.

Jungkook didn’t ask. He didn’t need to, not with the way Taehyung’s breath had stuttered, not with the way his mouth had softened, not with the way his chin lifted the smallest degree as if to invite a blade. The first touch was the shock of warm metal—gloved fingers firm under the hinge of Taehyung’s jaw, mouth landing with a claim that felt like a seal pressed into wax. The second was heat: a press, then pressure, then more, the careful break of lips parting. Taehyung made a sound—soft, involuntary—and Jungkook answered with a low note that vibrated where their chests met.

Jungkook’s mouth opened against his and went deeper, slow at first, then with a hungry slide that stripped thought to the quick. Taehyung’s hand—untrustworthy—lifted of its own accord and caught Jungkook’s shoulder, glove squeaking faintly against broad muscle as he let himself be pushed back a half-step, then another.

Jungkook tilted his head, fitting their mouths tighter; his tongue stroked along the inside of Taehyung’s lower lip, teased the tender place there, retreated, returned. Heat pulsed low in Taehyung, treacherous and tidal. His Omega rose bright and shameless—an opening flower, a lit window. He breathed Jungkook in and felt the Alpha’s pheromones thicken the air, felt his own scent soften and sweeten in response, felt the part of him trained to be taken answer with wanting.

Jungkook chased Taehyung’s tongue with his own and caught it, stroked, let go. He pressed, then withdrew just enough to make Taehyung follow, then rewarded the pursuit with a low satisfied hum that Taehyung felt in the hinge of his jaw and the base of his spine. The world narrowed to heat and breath and the wet sound of mouths. The rest of the estate might have easily burned down without either of them noticing for a handful of heartbeats.

When Jungkook finally broke off, he did it like a man wrenching himself out of mud—slowly, with visible effort, a groan pressed into the small space between their mouths. He rested his forehead against Taehyung’s for a second that felt like a truce. His breath came rough. His hand stayed on Taehyung’s cheek, thumb stroking once more across his lower lip as if memorizing it for hunger later.

“I need to go,” he said, and the hoarseness in his voice made need sound like an injury. He closed his eyes, opened them, found discipline like a sword and sheathed himself in it. He stepped back one pace, then another, the air cooling between them in immediate protest. His gaze went to Taehyung’s throat, to the glove, to his mouth, back to his eyes. A hundred unsaids crowded behind his teeth.

“If there is anything,” Jungkook added, steadier now, heir again but no less wolf for it, “you call for me immediately.”

The door’s shadow fell across his shoulder. He reached for it without looking away. The scent of him hung in the room after the panel slid shut, as tangible as a promise.

Chapter Text

The next days bled into one another until time felt like watered ink, a gray wash dragged over the bones of living.

They kept him in the second estate’s east wing like a saint in a reliquary: seen by nobody, touched by procedure. The lacquered doors answered only to Red Guard seals. Meals arrived in formation—two to carry, one to witness, the new ritual marching with them. The seal on the latch was always sovereign red, the stamp pressed deep enough to gleam. One servant broke the wax, one read the slip while the third uncapped a vial long enough to let the bitter, medicinal ghost assay seep and vanish. Only then was anything set within reach. Only then did the Red Guard step back into the shadow of the wall and become furniture with weapons again.

Taehyung ate looking out at the garden that kept pretending it was a scroll painting: raked stripes of gravel, islands of moss like bruises, a pond that hoarded sky. The koi in the south pond spun their slow knives in the water; the pines wrote the same sentence in the wind and read it back to themselves; the cranes made their far white cries. He watched, and waited, and felt his hunger turn from food to knowledge until both felt the same shape inside him. He ate and pretended he could not taste fear steeped into the tea leaves from too many hands.

Jungkook did not come. It wasn’t absence; it was subtraction. The First Heir’s scent still lived in the corridors like a weather that might turn. The absence made Taehyung angry in a shape he disliked: not wanting the man, exactly—wanting the seat at the table where decisions were cooked and plated and carried past him. He wanted the map weights under his palms and the weight of listening that meant his words would be carried into the next hour as decisions and not simply laid down carefully to die. He wanted to say aloud the things his mind was already saying in the dark: if the poison left only absence, then perhaps it was not poison as we define it; if the servant was a message and not a target, then who stood to profit from the shape of our fear? He wanted to make the case that spectacle is admission, that cruelty performed for an audience invites playwrights to write a sequel. He wanted, which is to say he had been made a creature built to want and had finally given his wanting a name other than heat.

If he counted his breaths, they were measured by Yoongi.

Training came once each day, as inevitable as the turning of the brazier’s coal. The Red Guard walked him down the throat of the mountain to the conservatory with its patient green. There, Yoongi cut purpose from afternoon like a general cutting roads from forest. They worked the Dark into a blade, then filed that blade thinner until it could lift the life from a single leaf and set it back again without the rest of the tree noticing the theft.

“Not a sword,” Yoongi said, for the third day in a row, a mantra crossing the glasshouse air. “A scalpel.”

He made Taehyung hover his bare right hand—glove folded aside like a muzzle on a table—above the camellia’s knuckled trunk and breathe until the gift rose cool and clinical along the metacarpals. The death inside him was still awful and beautiful; it wanted to seize and hollow; it wanted to make stillness permanent. Yoongi taught him to pare that desire to a hair. The first day he blackened a leaf to paper and turned its twin ashy with it. The second day he learned to blacken one and leave the other shining. The third, he coaxed a tight bud into a bruise without making the branch scream. Yoongi’s mouth, that thin, winter version of approval, shifted at the corner. “Better,” he said, which in Yoongi’s language was almost praise.

The other lesson lived like contraband behind the main one.

Yoongi shut the door; the iron hinge gave that low note of privacy it had learned. He positioned Taehyung on the tatami and stood two strides away—not near enough to tap the gland where an Alpha command sank its hook deepest, but near enough that scent did its quiet mathematics between them.

“Listen,” Yoongi said, and when Taehyung looked up, the Alpha’s eyes were very dark and very steady. “This is a wall. Hear it. Feel it. Become it.” His voice flattened, the heat drained from it; the syllables became shapes of law. “Kneel.”

The word struck.

It didn’t need to be shouted. Alpha command isn’t volume; it is a tone that finds the nerve and runs it like a wire. Taehyung felt his joints unhinge to want the floor. His Omega inside him keened—a long, humiliating, instinctive music that wanted the fast relief of compliance. He stood in it. He let the wanting be a sound he chose not to dance to. His palms sweated. His mouth tasted of iron.

“Four,” Yoongi murmured, distant as a metronome. “Three. Two. One.”

On the first day, Taehyung had found himself kneeling before he could place the numbers Yoongi had given him on a clock face. His palms had landed on tatami too fast; shame had flamed up his throat like a rash.

On the second day, he had made it past two-and-a-half. He had bitten the inside of his cheek and felt the salt of blood when his body dropped. Yoongi had made no sound that could be mistaken for disappointment. “Again,” he said, and the room took the command like weather.

On the third day, something changed. He felt his Omega writhe, pleading. He felt the obedient muscles stutter. He held.

“Four,” Yoongi said, voice ghost-soft and iron-straight. “Three. Two.”

Taehyung’s thighs shook. His spine wanted to melt.

“One.”

He was still standing.

Not neat; not pretty; breathing like a man two steps from drowning. But standing.

Yoongi’s expression didn’t change much, but the silence after the count cracked and something warmer bled through. “Good,” he said. “Again.”

Yoongi sat him after and poured tea, the simple green kind that tasted unseasoned and clean.

“Some alpha,” Yoongi said, and this was when the contraband lesson broke its seal, “become quiet when poked. They blink. Their eyes grow smaller. They gather. They look like lakes in a mountain. You cannot tell if they are shallow or very deep.”

He lifted his gaze from the steam. The look was pointed enough to leave a mark without raising his voice. “My cousin,” he went on, and they both understood he meant Jeon Minhyun, Second in the line, “has made a religion of this quiet. The Sovereign instead—” a muscle worked along his jaw, “—likes fire. He is not patient. He will not be played with.”

Taehyung remembered the breakfast table, the ironstone pot, the body jerking like a puppet with its strings tangled, the Sovereign’s annoyance that a weather had arrived without invitation. He pictured the black veining Yoongi had described around the servant’s heart—frost spreading where no hand had touched. A poison that left an absence for the Lightborn to push against and find nothing.

“The investigation?” he asked, small because he was small in this palace and because the question had teeth if heard by the wrong ears.

“Slow,” Yoongi said. The word sounded like grinding. “The archivists are emptying their books onto tables and looking for a name to put under the injury. The Lightborn healers keep saying there is nothing to coax.” His mouth tugged down, impatient and intent. “I do not like puzzles that recline and wait to be admired. This one does. My uncle hates all puzzles. That is worse.”

Taehyung swallowed a huff that would have chippered too near laughter and not near enough humor. “You think it was meant for someone else.”

Yoongi nodded.

That night, Taehyung waited for footsteps that didn’t come. He told himself he didn’t. He told himself he didn’t listen to the corridor the way a starving man listens to a kitchen. He pressed his gloved hand to the window, watched mist write its slow script across the pond, and made himself write an alternate scene in his head: a door opening; a body crowding the room’s air with the ozone promise of rain; a hand he both hated and wanted finding the nape of his neck with leather. He burned that scene to gray ash and slept on it.

From the windows, the second estate pretended to be a calligrapher’s dream of order while the house inside it worried at itself like a tongue on a broken tooth.

On the fourth day the knock at his door was a different rhythm; a different shoulder squared within the rectangle of the opening panel. “Escort,” the Red Guard said, the word an instrument played without music.

“To breakfast,” the Guard added.

The breakfast room had not been allowed to change. It was the same south wing, the same oval of dark wood big enough to seat diplomacy and fate, the same pond beyond the windows holding itself as still as a threat. If rooms develop memory like scar tissue, this one was already knotting.

The places were set in the same constellation that had become a doctrine. The Sovereign Pair sat at the head of the table as if they had never risen since the day the pot fell. Jeon Taehwan, Alpha, wore black like an eclipse and rings like decisions.

To the Sovereign’s right: the brother-in-law with his lacquered collar and eyes that never asked; Yoongi, Third in the line, dressed like a blade sheathed in thinking; Minhyun, Second, wrists looking delicate and mouth almost smiling. Opposite: the First Heir arrived without fanfare, gravity walking on legs and wearing a charcoal suit that let two undone buttons tell a wealth of lies about ease.

Taehyung placed himself where a footman indicated: two places down from law and two places up from irrelevance. His cup breathed jasmine at his wrist. The new choreography around safety performed itself three times, then again: food tasted in the kitchen, tasted in the hall, tasted at the table while the sovereign watched, and then—because fear likes to stack itself—tasted by a fourth mouth when the first three nodded. The Red Guard stood like altars by the doors. Nothing moved that did not have a job.

Taehyung looked at faces.

Something had changed.

Not grief—this court does not grieve servants; it performs efficiency where grief should be. Not even fear in the true sense: fear that cracks mouths and widens eyes and makes people reach for each other without remembering to hide the reaching. No. The change was the way muscles had set around not knowing. The way power disliked the taste of being played with and held that flavor in its jaw. Annoyance had silted into anger and anger into something ceremonial.

Jungkook’s scent drifted over like a weather change. Taehyung breathed it in because his body had been trained by years to breathe it in. The Omega in him lifted its head at the stir. He forced it to lie down.

He felt Yoongi’s gaze brush his cheek. He kept looking forward.

When the sovereign finally spoke, the room stilled the way a pond stills when a dropped stone sinks out of sight and everything waits to see where the ripples go.

The breakfast had been in their mouths, and now it was not. The Sovereign took his time swallowing. He dabbed the corner of his mouth with a napkin as if he had eaten something disappointing; perhaps he had. His eyes were very clear.

“The tasters,” he said at last, conversational, which is a tone more frightening than thunder from a man like him, “enjoy their new prominence.”

A small effortful laugh smiled around the table and died appropriately. The Sovereign did not.

“We have,” Jeon Taehwan went on, and the we wore iron in its seam, “an insult in our house.” He set his cup down exactly where the napkin’s shadow ended. “We have a threat that refuses to use its name like a coward. We have a servant dead,” he lifted a hand as if brushing ash from an epaulet, “and we have my patience instructed to behave as if it were a virtue.”

Across from Taehyung, Dalya’s eyes did not change. The Sovereign’s brother-in-law held his mouth on the edge of a purse. Minhyun’s almost-smile held. Jungkook’s jaw set a fraction, and that was all he gave away: not a mask slipping, only a muscle choosing to be noticed.

“The physicians,” Taehwan said, and the word suffered a small indignity in his mouth, “have not earned their salt. The Lightborn have not earned their altars. I do not pay people to shrug beautifully.” His look slid down the table, counted ranks like beads. “We are being played with.”

He did not mean the play of children.

Yoongi’s gaze flickered to Taehyung and away like a warning candle in a high window: do not react.

The Sovereign lifted his hand.

“Two days from now,” he said, and the room’s light seemed to become more white and more hard in the saying, “there will be an unscheduled Red Audience.”

Chop. The word landed and stood upright with blood running down its sides. Even the Red Guard did not manage to become more still.

“Unscheduled” meant not waiting to align the moon to the ceremony. It meant this was anger, not strategy pretending to be law. Taehyung’s Omega shivered without his permission.

“We will take a prisoner,” the Sovereign said. He did not dress the noun in euphemism. “We will make a show of what happens when my house is insulted. We will demonstrate that red is not only a color we wear when we wed.” His mouth cut at that last word; Taehyung did not look up. “If they require theater to learn a lesson, then they will receive theater.”

Minhyun exhaled a very small breath through his nose. It was not laughter. It was an acknowledgment of something inevitable arriving.

“Two days,” the Sovereign repeated, and now even his softness had edges. “Let whoever wrote to us without signing himself draw breath through that. Let him practice his penmanship deeper in his skin.”

The room swallowed. The room obeyed. The room did not argue with the shape of a man who had built a country and expected to be obeyed as if the walls themselves were his lungs.

Taehyung pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth so he would not taste the word no.

This was not a solution; it was a spectacle. It would not answer a name; it would only frighten names into staying hidden longer.

He wanted to say this.

He wanted to say: there are other ways. He wanted to say: fear fattened in public gives a man an appetite he will indulge again. He wanted to say: if our enemies are patient, the show you plan to stage will feed them better than it starves them.

Instead he lifted his cup and contained his face. He was an Omega in a room that named him without naming him and placed him exactly where he could do the least harm to the people who loved their rituals.

*******

The promise of the Red Audience burned like a signal fire in a windless room.

Taehyung would not have chosen it—blood dressed up as law, theater pretending at truth—but appetite is a complicated animal. He was starved for a corridor that did not end in the same door, for faces he had not been rationed. Two kinds of hunger coiled in him as the day approached: the precise, sharp-edged one for movement, and the quieter ache for familiar voices—Namjoon’s patient baritone, Jimin’s laugh that could smuggle sunshine into a crypt. He had not seen either since the Dark rose in his hand and the world wrote a collar around his throat. The thought of his parents’ faces made another, older muscle tighten: the ledgers in their eyes where their thirdborn had a column and a price.

It was not his to decide what to wear to the crucible.

The wardrobe sent by the Sovereign’s attendants arrived arranged like a votive altar. The main garment lay on black lacquer: a formal robe cut to the ancient lines but engineered with new malice. The silk was the color of arterial red seen under ice, a deep lustre that absorbed light and returned it.

The underlayer was pale as bone, a gauze-fine shift that would blur but not hide skin. Over that, the robe fastened with a row of onyx toggles along the left breast, crossing his body like a vow. A belt—no, a yoke—waited beside it: wide, lacquered leather dyed a somber oxblood and inlaid with a thread-thin filigree of gold. When fitted low, it settled at the line where hip widens to pelvis, not at the waist where a warrior carries his strength. The leather’s gloss drew the eye to the breadth of bone like a frame draws the eye to the painting. Whoever had commissioned it understood exactly how to announce a womb.

Panels fell from the belt in perfect planes: two in front, two behind, two slashed high along the outer thighs. The slits were cut with wicked intelligence—modest when he stood still, scandal when he moved. They would hint the long muscle of thigh, the flex and release of stride. The sleeves were slim to the wrist, where a narrow cuff of glossy black matched the Binding Glove’s color and made it appear an intended ornament rather than an apology to the law.

His hair they smoothed back from his face; a few disobedient strands were left loose, carefully curated disarray that could suggest softness instead of strategy. Kohl darkened his eyes just enough to make a weapon of a glance.

He slid the glove on last. Leather embraced the Dark along his palm and made a treaty with it. He flexed his fingers once and the seams gave back a whisper.

The knock came as he was adjusting the belt’s final buckle. Two knuckles. The rhythm the room knew already.

Jungkook filled the doorway like weather arriving—a black suit cut to his body with a blade’s taste, shirt open at the throat. Dark hair fell over his forehead, not quite tamed, as if his hands had been impatient with it. The scent hit first: petrichor and the first drop of rain before a storm commits, the aftersmell of stone. It reached him and his body answered like a string plucked to pitch.

Jungkook shut the door behind him without looking back, his attention narrowed to a point. Hunger lived in his eyes in two contradictory shapes—wolf-lean and full-bellied both, a man starving on purpose and delighting in it.

“Look at you,” he said, and it was not a court compliment. The syllables stroked.

The gloved hand came out as if compelled; the leather slid over silk, found the edge of the belt, tested the pressure of its cinch with the same delicacy he used when measuring a bowstring. “They dress you to be an argument no one can win against,” he murmured, thumb dragging along the panel’s invisible grain until a shiver ran the silk like light down water. He toyed with the topmost onyx toggle, then released it, then let his fingers travel lower with unhurried curiosity. The belt creaked with a small sound that ought not to have sounded like assent and did.

He fisted the fabric lazily just above Taehyung’s hip and felt the answering shift of flesh under it. The slit on the outer panel revealed itself like a secret being pleased to be asked for; Jungkook found it without looking. Cool leather met the heat of bare skin where thigh began. Taehyung’s breath misstepped, a small, treacherous stumble of sound. The Omega inside him uncurled with mortifying speed, scent blooming to answer the touch.

Jungkook stepped into the small geography between them as if space were a theory he intended to disprove. His mouth approached the shell of Taehyung’s ear with ceremonial patience; breath touched first, then the brush of words like teeth not yet applied.

“Excited,” he confided with the intimacy of a blade slid into silk. “To let them see how good my omega looks.” The possessive landed soft and heavy. “To show them what is mine. Let whoever writes little frightened letters choke on the view. They can do nothing.” The leather traced a crescent along the inside of Taehyung’s thigh and paused, a claim written in pressure and absence both.

Taehyung’s inner animal preened shamelessly; he felt it show the apple of its throat, tilting into approval. He caged it with will. He caged it with anger. His exhale went ragged on the way out but his voice was the knife he had learned in the conservatory.

“Which prisoner,” he asked, the consonants clean, the question steady as a held pulse. “have you chosen for the spectacle?”

The pause after was delicious and ugly. Jungkook’s smile made a small, satisfied cut across his mouth. He chuckled—slow, appreciative, like a man entertained by being bitten. “You will see.” The hand at the slit drew another millimeter of air from his skin. “We have thought this through.”

“You mean the alphas,” Taehyung said, and he let the thinness line his mouth and voice both so that the meaning could not be mistaken. “What about me.”

Jungkook’s brows tilted a notch. “About you?”

“I want a chair at the table,” Taehyung said. He did not raise his voice; he lowered it until it carried like a secret passed perfectly. “Not a cushion on the floor. Not the hallway outside. I have spent days being useless in a room designed to make me beautiful at being useless. I hate it.” He cut the final words shorter than they were to keep them from spilling. “I will not be a permanent audience.”

The study that crossed Jungkook’s face had weight. Something dark moved under his eyes, not rut but a thought sharpening its teeth on opportunity.

“After,” Jungkook said finally, and the single word chose to be serious. “After the Red Audience, we’ll talk about what useful things you can do.” His mouth twitched at one corner; the glance he let fall down Taehyung’s body to the belt and back up was unrepentant, a man imagining uses and letting some of them be political. “Maybe even politics.”

The look promised many politics that happened horizontal.

Taehyung stepped back. Precise. Not flinching, not flight—just a measured withdrawal that let air rush into the space that had been Jungkook and heat. The gloved hand fell from his thigh because it had to.

“We should go,” he said, turning his face toward the door before the Omega in him could make a fool’s decision for a brave one. “If you do not want to be late to your theater.”

For a breath, the heir seemed to argue with himself. The Alpha’s scent thickened, then thinned: storm rolling in, breaking on the mountain, deciding to rain somewhere else. “Very well,” he said lightly.

The hall outside had arranged an audience of its own.

The Sovereign stood already looking. Jeon Taehwan’s eyes were the correct temperature for steel. They did not ask permission for where they went. They moved—mouth, throat, belt, the geometry of hip announced by lacquered leather, the bare line of thigh where the slit revealed what it was designed to reveal—and considered all of it as inventory. The glance landed where it should not and then sat, unapologetic. Taehyung kept his jaw unclenched by will and felt the fine ache in his molars pay for it.

Seo Dalya’s gaze cut like a mirror held up to a room that badly wanted a window. Lifeless would be the wrong word; there was life in the strictness, only it did not appear in the usual places. She looked as if she stood at the end of a long corridor and had been doing so for years.

Minhyun was a quiet in human shape. He did not widen his eyes, did not look away, did not do anything at all that could be described and yet he saw everything. His gaze spent too long, perhaps, on the slits, but his mouth did not change.

Yoongi’s face was a polished surface into which nothing wished to fall. Impenetrable did not mean unfeeling; it meant secure enough to refuse leak.

“Your Majesty,” Yoongi said, turning slightly toward the Sovereign, voice returned to its instrument register, “my father requests your pardon for his absence. He is unwell.”

Jeon Taehwan did not bother a full nod. One degree of chin implied acknowledgment, indifference, and a note of It does not matter all at once. “He has often requested many things,” he said. “We will drive without him.”

They moved as a practiced unit through the lower hall, Red Guard in matched pairs bracketing the procession, lacquer shining like fresh oil. Outside, a motorcade waited—the Sovereign’s sigil bright against the black of the lead car, mirrored again and again down the line faint as a warning echo. The sky over the second estate was the color of a bell before it is rung. Flags hung from the gates like tongues red from too much speech.

Inside the Sovereign’s limousine, leather held the day’s smell. The Sovereign Pair took the forward bench without a word; Dalya’s hands folded in her lap, rings quiet. Taehyung slid into the back bench; Jungkook’s thigh found his because that was what thighs did when the bench was narrow and neither wished to surrender space. Opposite, Yoongi and Minhyun settled like two versions of patience—one exacting, one decorative.

The door shut with the muffled finality of a verdict.

Silence began as respect and became a game. The city unfurled outside the smoked glass in measured frames: perimeter walls the Red Guard loved as if they had been born to keep them; the switchback descent to the low town where roofs tiled like fish scales; the approach to the Citadel rising from old stone.

The car’s suspension dug its teeth into the road and did not let the passengers feel more than intention. Taehyung felt other things.

The heir’s hand—gloved, idle—found the edge of the slit again with the absent-minded focus of a man toying a knife he has no intention of using and every intention of knowing. The fingers played the silk’s hem, then slipped under it with that same deliberate impatience as before. Cool leather met skin. This time Jungkook did not speak. He let touch do the speaking because touch has always been the older language.

Taehyung’s breath shortened in the small way a hunted animal’s does when it hears a twig. He shot Jungkook a look that would have carried an indecency charge in a politer carriage. It said: stop. It also said: try me.

The lazy grin that followed showed teeth in a way that was not friendly and not unfriendly; it was an enjoyment of power’s small sport. Jungkook kept his palm flat against the heat of Taehyung’s thigh, then trespassed exactly one knuckle’s breadth further, following the muscle’s line under the slit, under the panel, up where the belt began to rule the territory and beneath it, just enough to let the edge of leather pressure find the place where tendon lifts.

Yoongi’s gaze did not move. That was how Taehyung knew he had noticed: true restraint has a weight, and the weight was present. The jaw muscle ticked once, twice, quiet as a metronome for patience. His eyes studied the passing roofs as if the tiles could confess. Everything in him seemingly refused to acknowledge what the back bench was displaying for whomever wished to read it.

Minhyun did not exercise that nicety.

The Second Heir’s attention slid with unhurried frankness, curious as a student of anatomy observing a new articulation of limb. His gaze tracked Jungkook’s hand with clinical interest—as if calculating force required for a curl, degrees of tilt, the change in Taehyung’s breathing. He watched when the glove’s seam disappeared under fabric and his mouth adjusted by a fraction—neither smile nor frown, only a recording of the event for later filing. He looked up, met Taehyung’s eyes as if by mistake, and held the look a heartbeat too long. It was observation pressed until it flirted with indecency.

Heat went to Taehyung’s face in a bloom he could not stop; shame and want burn the same color when they move too fast. The Omega in him did not care about audience, as promised; it recognized the closeness of an Alpha it had opened for and leaned toward that remembered key. Scent bled sweet under pine—honeyed rose, a ridiculous flower opening in a steel box.

He turned his head a degree and let Jungkook see the accusation in his profile. Stop. We are not alone. The heir’s thumb stroked once in direct contradiction. Not stop. Never alone.

The road rose. The Citadel accepted the motorcade under its throat. Stone swallowed sound and returned only the muffled thunder of tires on ceremonial floor. They passed under an arch cut with old words about blood and balance and covenant that no one alive actually believed; they believed in performance, which is different and sometimes the same.

Jungkook’s fingers withdrew as the car slowed. Not graciously; the retreat carried the promise of return, as if the glove had taken a measurement and would send a tailor. He left his hand at Taehyung’s knee like an idea placed there to ripen.

Taehyung smoothed the panel as if it had wrinkled, which it had not. He forced his scent narrow, pine’s resin sharpened, rose leashed.

No one spoke as the door opened to the Citadel’s red light. The air that came in smelled of damp stone, candle-warmed pigment, iron polished to a ceremonial shine, and a thousand heartbeats queued for entertainment.

Then he stepped out.

The Citadel’s inner court took light and made a wound of it. Banner cloth breathed the hue of arterial certainty; lacquered floors shone as if they had been polished with someone else’s patience. Far above, the vaults were ribbed with black-gold spines; each seam bore a verse from the Crimson Codex hammered into leaf so thin the words looked like scars that had learned to gleam.

Nobles arrived like weather fronts colliding.

Lightborn flowed in on the left—white silks stitched with dawn, veils that diffused faces into holy rumor, the air around them pulsing with the warm pressure of life-magic. Their pheromones tasted of fruit left to ripen in sun: pear, fig, the syrup of summer. Eyes followed them the way parched mouths follow a pitcher.

Darkborn arrayed the right in oxblood and obsidian, hems edged in runes that caught the light like restrained teeth. The temperature fell on that side by a degree no steward would acknowledge; Alphas shouldered the cold as if they’d brought it. Gloves creaked. Rings counted themselves quietly against chair arms. The Omegas among them sat bowed by collars or custom, backs straight, throats soft, silence doing all the talking their mouths were not allowed to do.

Between them—a corridor of polished emptiness like the parting of a stern river. It would run red today by design.

The Sovereign did not pause to be admired. Jeon Taehwan moved like a law making its own aisle, Red Guard unspooling before him in matched pairs. The hall rearranged itself around his walking the way trees will lean if a mountain tells them where to bend.

Taehyung followed in the gravity well the Sovereign left. The robe and belt did what the Sovereign’s tailor had meant them to: directed gazes, prolonged them, turned his body into thesis. He felt eyes catch on the oxblood yoke and refuse to unhook. He felt the slits whisper when he stepped.

They entered the hall proper and memory doubled him. The last Red Audience—he had sat in the left-hand tiers with House Baekho, womb unpriced, his right hand still only a hand. He remembered Jimin’s whisper at his ear, paper fans like moth wings, Namjoon’s steady shoulder beside him. Now: the chair set beside the First Heir at the Sovereign bench, a place that was both promise and chain. He took it because not taking it would have been a different theater and he had not rehearsed that play.

He found them in the crowd when his breath would allow it. Namjoon—formal, severe, Baekho’s cloth sitting on him as if tailored by law; his eyes found Taehyung and warmed at the edges despite himself, a shore acknowledging a returning tide. Jimin—bright even under white gloves and dull light, eyes already wet with laughter he would not permit here. Their parents—Baekho’s lord and lady—bowed and preened at once, their satisfaction oiled and shining. They looked at the Sovereign’s bench the way farmers look at rain. They did not look at their thirdborn except as a number moved successfully from one ledger column to another.

“Attend,” Jeon Taehwan said without raising his voice, and the hall obeyed.

He did not explain himself. He did not speak of rumors or letters, did not dignify kitchens torn apart, physicians’ bafflement, or a boy who had poured tea and then poured his life out involuntarily on tatami. The Codex’s language slept along the vaults; he did not wake it. His voice was quieter than the banners and heavier.

“Order,” he said, as if announcing the name of a son. “Order is the shape of obedience. Law is the knife that remembers how to cut the shape back when it strays.”

He lifted a hand. A Red Guard captain, lacquer and scarlet arranged into piety, stamped once; the doors in the hall’s eastern wall gaped and produced a prisoner.

They had chosen well for theater. The man was neither so low the room would be bored by his dying nor so high that the dying would embarrass the throne. A minor bannerman from a river house that had gotten itself fat on tariffs and leaned into corruption as if it were a pillow. His robe had been stripped to a white under-layer to take the dye; his wrists were bound behind him by red cord that glistened as if oiled. A gag turned his mouth to obedience. The scent coming off him—Beta—carried no comfort, only the acrid chemistry of fear.

Charges were read because theater loves a prologue: Treason per §14—seditious assembly, counterfeit seals, unlawful interference with levies, the purchase of forbidden substances not for use but for possession—the Codex cares about both.

Words stacked. The room enjoyed them because words are foreplay to punishment here.

The prisoner was taken to the Red Stone. The platform had been polished to a mirror, then etched shallow with sigils that only show when blood darkens them. Chains hung from its sides like ornaments pretending not to be purpose.

The sanctioned headsman mounted the platform in silence and took off his right glove. There was no Lightborn summoned to witness or bless; the penalty was death, and when death is the point, life is not invited to contradict it. Even the Lightborn tiers held still and allowed this exclusion to be its own liturgy.

Taehyung could see the man’s hand from where he sat: pale, long-fingered, unremarkable the way a key looks among spoons. The headsman approached with the courtesy predators show to prey out of respect for the function, not the individual. He set his fingers on the prisoner’s neck with the gentleness of a lover who will not bruise.

Death went out of him like winter from a door thrown open.

The Beta jerked once, twice, all the way through his body, vertebrae speaking to one another with wooden knocks, then his gaze lost its hold on the world. A web of fine black veining bloomed beneath his skin in a flower that had never been allowed a name and then vanished, as if the body was embarrassed to show how the world ends. The hall breathed, a sound like polite rain.

No one asked a Lightborn to step forward and try. No one pretended hope. This was not a court of mercy. The purpose was display, and the display had been perfectly achieved.

Jeon Taehwan did not look at the body again. “Let it be recorded,” he said, “that the law’s edge is sharp. That the kingdom remembers how to hold its shape.”

The body was removed with practiced reverence.

The Red Hall became reception hall because power insists on feeding after feeding.

Music stitched itself into the corners—strings plucked to court tempo over a drum so disciplined it might as well have been a clock. The tiers were not dismantled; people simply spilled down them and made new strata with their clothes and smiles.

Gazes came to Taehyung like hands held up for blessing or proof.

Hungry—Alphas assessing pelvic breadth, the oxblood yoke, the gentle wideness of bone, the promise of a womb pressed into service like cavalry. Dismissive—courtiers and Betas for whom he was merely a solved equation glinting on the First Heir’s arm. Envious—Omegas and some Alphas reading the cut of silk and imagining new rank tasted in the mouth.

House approached the Sovereign Pair with a humility that looked like prayer. His father’s bow angled until vertebrae complained; his mother’s rings clicked like abacuses answering questions about profit. Their smiles did not find their son; they found the man who had converted him into policy. Taehyung watched from a pace behind Jungkook and felt nothing he would show on a face; inside, something old and tired sat down.

He abandoned etiquette on purpose when he found Jimin.

“Taehyung,” Jimin breathed. Taehyung folded him into his arms and pressed his face to hair that smelled of tea and sugar and stubbornness. The Binding Glove creaked faintly against Jimin’s back; the Dark under it lay flat, a hound told to stay. Jimin’s hands slid up his sides, firm in a way someone might call disrespectful if they were counting rules instead of grief. Are you okay? lived in his grip. Breathing, Taehyung’s body answered. Barely.

Namjoon hovered two paces away like a shore, keeping watch even while decorum demanded he not touch. His eyes were too bright for a second—then the composure came back and made a shelter.

Music swelled. The Sovereign signaled, and the dance floor became a hunting ground disguised as grace. Namjoon was claimed within three measures by a duchess with daughters arranged like bouquets and uncles arranged like contracts. He took the Omega’s hand the way a general takes a bridge. Jimin laughed once, then was snagged by a cluster of admirers who loved him as a toy more than a person; he threw Taehyung a look over his shoulder that said I hate them in the language of a grin.

The Sovereign and Jungkook detached together, as if purpose had arranged their molecules. They stepped into a side corridor with two Red Guards and a conversation like a knife wrapped in velvet. Taehyung watched their heads lean the fractional degree that means law deciding where to fall. Minhyun was nowhere, and that felt like a card being kept. Dalya sat, finally, on a chair that had already learned her weight. Rest did not relax her; it only permitted stillness to become more precise.

It was then the sound came: a bone tapping stone, measured, disdain dressed as rhythm.

Han Isayeon of House Namsaeng announced herself with the white of her hair first, then the cane she balanced on. It was polished to a warmth that bone should not know outside a body; carvings hid in its smoothness like fish in deep water. Her face had long ago shed the vanity of pretending not to be old. Her eyes had not shed contempt; they wore it the way some wear kohl.

She stopped at Taehyung’s side and let her gaze make a slow, appropriative tour—hair, mouth, the oxblood yoke framing hip, the way silk confessed muscle when he breathed. It crawled with professional cruelty; finally, it halted at his right hand where the Binding Glove sat like an apology presented as a jewel.

She made a sound. It might have been a laugh cut in half and left to dry. “So it is true,” she said, Beta voice sanded down by years into something that could abrade marble. “The Thirdborn of Baekho has manifested.”

There were things he could say that would be mistakes and things he could say that would be punishments. He chose neither. He inclined his head the precise degree courtesy requires and offered the smallest word in the language. “My lady.”

Han Isayeon twirled the cane’s tip, inscribing a small circle of permission to insult. “How everything falls so conveniently into place for them,” she observed, and did not trouble to look toward the Sovereign as she said them. “A fertile thirdborn Omega, delivered by the Codex, manifesting Death on schedule—gods do love timing. The First Heir’s succession secured with a womb he did not have to earn.” Disgust poured like black tea. It smelled wonderful if you were the kind of person who liked bitterness.

It was one thing to know the houses bit at each other in private. It was another to have a Beta rank speak against the Sovereign so close to his shadow. Taehyung’s surprise was a small lift in the ribs, not in the face.

“Do not look so shocked,” she went on, amused at his self-control. “Your voice is worth exactly what they paid for you, child. Which is to say: nothing. They brought you for your throat and your hips, not your sentences. Your mouth is for obedience and for making powerful men forget how to speak. It is not for being heard.”

Society had said as much since he learned to walk; hearing it spoken with such exact, elderly boredom pushed something hot and unwise through his bones. His Dark shifted its back along the inside of his glove like it wanted to scratch.

“I have noticed,” Taehyung said, and packed respect into the line so thin it could be used as wire if needed, “that truth requires no invitation to be spoken.” He let the corners of his mouth go flat. “My mouth can still do that.”

Han Isayeon’s regard tilted to something almost pitying—as if he were a child insisting a wooden sword could cut a throat if swung properly. “Ah,” she said softly. “Belief. The last pretty toy they will let you keep.” Her eyes cooled. “They dress you in red and call it power. Do not mistake display for seat.”

Her cane kissed the floor twice as she shifted closer. The scent of her—Beta—carried dry herbs and winter rooms: sharp, old, unimpressed. She lifted Taehyung’s left hand without asking, pinching the fingers as if weighing them, angling the palm, considering the blunt, harmless pads of skin there with clinical contempt. “This is the hand they will praise,” she murmured. “The one that cannot hurt them. They will fill your palm with silk and rings so you forget what your other hand is for.”

Blood rushed behind Taehyung’s eyes, then back down. The Dark moved, a winter wind trying to test shutters. He held very still.

Then Han Isayeon stepped back. The cane made its ugly, hollow music again, tapping the world into place with every measure. “Do enjoy your dance,” she added, voice bright with elderly malice. “The music dulls the sound of chains.”

She turned and went, not looking to see if she had been heard because she knew she had.

Taehyung stood where she had left him with anger splayed like heat across his skin, with confusion knotted under it, with the sharp new idea of suspicion. Isayeon’s distaste for the Sovereign stank of old politics and older injuries. A cane of bone; a house of Namsaeng that smiled with one side of its mouth and bit with the other; a rank that sat fourth in the line and would never rise except by catastrophe.

Could she—

He turned his head as if to see whether anyone had watched him be lectured like a novice in his first season. In a corner where the light failed and shadow made a better cloak than any silk, Minhyun stood with his hands folded, his face the same polite emptiness one wears when listening to a mediocre aria. Only his eyes betrayed interest. They had been there long enough to have watched the whole exchange.

He did not look away when Taehyung found him. He did not smile. He only held the gaze—a heartbeat, two—and let an almost invisible courtesy show: a fraction of a bow you could argue you had imagined.

Then he turned his head, and the corner reclaimed him like water reclaiming an oar dipped and lifted.

Taehyung stood in the raveling noise of strings and shoes, the drum dictating where hearts were supposed to beat. The hall’s red light made everything look tenderized—the lacquered pillars, the polished floor, the bone-white faces tilted toward gossip. Han Isayeon’s parting click of cane still ticked against his nerves like an after-sound that refuses to die.

His Omega registered Alpha before Taehyung could turn his head—recognition sliding into his bones with a relief so swift he almost disliked it.

Yoongi.

He cut through the crowd without appearing to cut anything; people just found themselves slightly elsewhere, as if the hall were a chessboard and he a quiet rook. His eyes went everywhere first—balconies, doors tucked under banners, the path the Red Guard would take if something required dying fast. He drank the room like a physician reads a pulse, then he looked at Taehyung.

“What did she want from you?” he asked, voice soft enough to pretend politeness and hard enough to cut through a drum-beat. Which was to say: he had seen.

Of course he had; Yoongi noticed the small hinge in people where choice lives.

Taehyung kept his face the way the court liked Omegas’ faces—quiet, beautiful, unrelated to thought—and shaped his voice into something that could pass unnoticed if overheard. He told him.

Yoongi listened without interrupting, his face the same composed page. His gaze didn’t flick to Taehyung’s mouth; it didn’t drop to his throat the way so many Alphas’ did—the way the room’s did in waves whenever he moved and the scandalous slits in his oxblood silk caught light. He stared level, which somehow felt more intimate than a stare anywhere else.

Taehyung’s throat felt raw. He turned his body a sliver closer until the music could swallow his next words whole.

“Do you think she’s behind it?” he breathed, the it between them a shape: a servant locking and unlatching like a broken doll, black veining around a heart.

Yoongi’s head bent as if he were considering the pattern of Taehyung’s sash. The set of his mouth changed with almost-reverence for the danger of the topic. Around them, laughter struck porcelain and splintered harmlessly.

It was almost a ritual now.

He offered his hand.

He did it with the casualness of habit and the precision of a code: a palm angled in a way that meant protection when seen by the right eyes and nothing at all when seen by fools. “Dance with me,” he said as if he meant only the dance.

They entered the current. Silk learned to speak; the slit at his hip found air and painted it with the tanned inside of his thigh. Heads turned as if he were a bell and they had been waiting for a reason to listen. Yoongi’s other hand settled high at his waist.

Musicians shifted; the drum eased, strings opened like a throat. A court pavane unfurled—measured, elegant, the kind of choreography that turns eavesdropping into hard work.

Safer, speaking while your feet pretend to obey.

Yoongi waited until the first figure turned them past a pillar where a banner cut the room in two like a merciful blade. Only then did he answer the question Taehyung had asked near the wall.

“House Namsaeng,” Yoongi said, “has always been hungrier than their teeth justify.” The faintest edge of disdain. “Fourth is a number that encourages ambition and punishes impatience. They collect grudges the way priests collect offerings: meticulously, publicly, with books you can never quite audit.” He turned them through a lane where Alphas made room automatically for him and only later realized who he had been escorting. “If she is playing, she will not show you the hand that matters on the first deal.”

“Or,” Taehyung said,, “she thinks telling me is as good as telling no one. In her world, Omegas have no voice. And if I spill, it’s only pretty noise.”

“And yet here you are,” Yoongi said. “Refusing to be only pretty noise.”

Taehyung felt the startling ache of being listened to. It arrived like a bruise remembered.

“For an Alpha,” he heard himself say, soft with the shock of the thought, “you have an uncommon habit.”

“What habit,” Yoongi asked, gloved thumb making a millimeter of pressure at his hip to steer him through a crowded knot. His scent—black tea—stayed as disciplined as the rest of him.

“Treating my sentences as if they were meant to be heard, not endured.”

Yoongi did not look away. “You keep offering me knives I can use,” he said simply. “Who wouldn’t take them.”

They pivoted. The slit in Taehyung’s oxblood yoke flashed again; air licked his thigh like a rumor. Taehyung felt gazes slide like oil wherever the silk bared him. His Omega preened despite itself, traitor and child; he pushed it down with the heel of his will.

Yoongi felt the shift—of course he did—and followed the line of Taehyung’s eyes to the watchers. His mouth thinned the width of a blade sharpened too many times.

“I still don’t like their eyes,” Taehyung said, and the scorn leveled him a degree.

Yoongi hummed something that read as agreement and warning both. The drum changed its mind; they adjusted seamlessly. The crowd was a moving wall of breath and hunger.

The next words came out of Taehyung without permission, light as a joke and poorly judged, a stone tossed at a surface he had not measured the depth of. “I’m just grateful you never watch me like that.”

The second the words left, he wanted them back.

Yoongi’s eyes, always instruments, registered impact before emotion—like a glass vibrating at a frequency you only hear with your bones. Something in him that had been perfectly caged stood up.

It was not dramatic. No teeth bared, no sudden greenhouse of pheromone. It was a change of angle in his gaze, the smallest drift in scent. The hand at Taehyung’s waist did not move, but the air around that hand acquired intent. It was as if an animal had come to the front of its skin and put its forepaws on the bars to look.

Alpha, said Taehyung’s Omega, delighted and terrified in one gulp.

Yoongi blinked once like a man putting a lid back on boiling water. The animal took a step back inside him, not tamed, merely obeying. He stopped dead at the edge of a turn without making the halt look like refusal, cleared his throat and when he looked again the gaze had become metal, inscrutable, safe for public consumption.

“Excuse me,” he said mildly.

The music offered them a neat exit; Yoongi took it. He let go with the care of a man diffusing something that might choose to detonate out of spite, stepped back half a pace, and bowed exactly to protocol, not to Taehyung. Then he was gone into shadow.

Taehyung found himself with empty air where severe warmth had been and a shiver walking his vertebrae like a polite intruder. He turned—only a fraction

—and met Jungkook’s eyes across the hall.

The First Heir had returned from whatever conversation power requires, and displeasure had dressed him better than any tailor. He stood at the mouth of a corridor with the Red Guard pretending to be plants to either side; his suit was the kind of black that turns other black into gray by proximity. Dark hair fell forward over his brow, untidy in a way that suggested hands had been there in frustration or desire. The storm in his scent had sharpened—ozone close enough to lift the tiny hairs along Taehyung’s arms, rain about to decide whether it was mercy or flood.

He was not amused.

Jungkook’s gaze made the distance between them a lie. It found the line of Taehyung’s throat above the yoke, the press of silk where Yoongi’s hand had rested, the slit’s breath; it measured the lingering flush at Taehyung’s mouth the way a hunter calculates wind. A shadow of possessive heat crossed his face and was leashed in the space of a breath, but not before it made Taehyung’s Omega whine silently and his reason swear at itself. The heir’s jaw flexed.

Around them the dance kept being beautiful because beauty is obedient. The drum did not care who you were angry with.

Jungkook held Taehyung where he stood with nothing but his looking, and in the distance between two beats said without speaking: later.

Later had teeth.

Chapter Text

The limousine was a lacquered coffin sliding through the Citadel’s veins. Taehyung stepped up into leather and dimness. His own reflection hovered faintly in the smoked glass opposite: oxblood silk, the audacious slit the Sovereign’s tailors had cut to argue that his hips were a national resource, the Binding Glove black as a priest’s secret on his right hand. His pulse showed where the yoke hugged his waist; he could see it if he looked long enough. He chose not to.

Jungkook’s look from the hall had followed him like a hand around his throat—hot, possessive, not violent yet. What if he had seen Yoongi’s moment on the floor, that shift, the Alpha showing like the blade under scabbard? Jealousy in a man like Jungkook did not arrive alone; it brought weather, it brought wolves, it brought the smallest necessary cruelty.

Minhyun entered next with the silence of a man who had paid attention to silence as a child and found he could afford more of it as an adult. He took the diagonal seat, one leg neatly crossed, hands folded on his knee as if prayer were an aesthetic. He met Taehyung’s eyes, offered the smallest civil curve of mouth.

Taehyung’s breath stuttered when Jungkook appeared. Taehyung, stupidly faithful to habit, made half-inch of space at his side for him. The heir did not slide in at Taehyung’s side the way he had on the outward journey, all heat and storm, almost touching, hand idly lawless under the slit. He faced him, sat directly opposite, let the bench take the weight of his thighs the way a horse takes a rider it approves of. Darkness lived in his eyes without smoke to hide it; there was a stillness there that belongs to deep water before something breaks the surface.

The door stayed open a beat too long, the night offering an out it did not mean. Yoongi filled the frame as if he were measuring the opening for a coffin lid. He took in the seating at a glance—Minhyun poised, Jungkook quiet as an arrow on string, Taehyung small and bright in sovereign red—and hesitated once, exactly the pulse between thought and concession. Then he sat in the only space left: the place beside Taehyung where heat could be read by an Alpha three feet away.

He arranged himself with an exactness that brooked no interpretation—back straight, shoulders laid like bricks, hands open and flat upon his knees. The scent off him was ironed flat, a black tea gone cool; if he had been breathing harder on the dance floor, he was not now.

The door shut, and the car began to move.

Streetlight slid the length of Jungkook’s cheekbone; a quick quiver of gold on the jaw, then gone. He watched Taehyung the way men watch a rival’s city from a hill—the kind of looking that measures the walls and thinks about ladders. Taehyung swallowed, heard it, hated that he heard it. The Omega in him lifted its throat as if asking to be scented, to be claimed, to be reassured that the animal it recognized across the car was for it and not for anyone else.

He wanted Jungkook next to him—wanted, against reason, the scald of a palm against his knee, the ordinary indecency of a hand where the slit breathed. It would have been easier; the wanting would have had one shape. Across from him, Jungkook’s stare multiplied the shapes until they blurred.

Outside, the world unrolled its black silk: brief temples, shutters, the Citadel’s back turned now and receding. Inside, Minhyun watched the passing lamps with a calm that was either innocence or expertise in faking it. Yoongi did not move. Taehyung saw the tension in the way his palms spread on his knees—pressed flat, made them two obedient animals.

Jungkook’s stare never left Taehyung’s face. Taehyung kept his own eyes soft and blank in the court way and felt the animal under his skin tick its tail. He breathed pine and rose narrow, careful not to sweeten the air further. It made exactly no difference; Jungkook’s nose flared once, and the vein at his temple ticked, and the weather in the car tilted to storm.

The gate yawned; the car settled into familiar stone. The moment the handle clicked, Yoongi was a spill of black onto the gravel—out, away, a neat subtraction. Minhyun slipped after him and became a shadow inside a wider shadow, second son vanishing like a coin palmed by a bored magician.

Taehyung followed the Red Guard’s red sash down the corridor that had been rebranded as home. Every lantern made a small red river along the lacquer of the floor; every paper screen breathed as he passed, silk belly rising and falling. He didn’t look over his shoulder. He didn’t need the evidence that Jungkook wasn’t there.

The room was dark when he reached it, and he let it remain so. Light, tonight, felt like a confession. He sat on the bed’s edge, counted breaths as if they were coins. He slid back onto the mattress, let his eyes close, permitted a single, unguarded exhale—

—and felt it, before he knew it.

Water answers gravity. A tide answers the moon. An Omega answers the Alpha he is entangled with whether he hates it or not. Presence tasted him first—the thrum in a closed room when something bigger than you is holding its breath. Taehyung’s body recognized Jungkook before the mind could say no, scent sparking and then caught, caged back down.

He opened his eyes into the dark. The corners had arranged themselves into a shelter for a man. For a heartbeat it was nothing but shape; then the shape stood and became Jungkook, peeling himself free of shadow with eerie, patient calm. There were ways into these rooms that weren’t doors. Heirs learned their houses the way assassins learn their rivals. Of course he had been here before Taehyung reached the corridor; of course he knew passages.

“Gods,” Taehyung breathed, light as a dropped pin, more to his own pulse than to the man. “When—”

Jungkook did not answer when. His eyes still wore the weight from the hall, the displeasure that had not been spent; the black of them held the room and squeezed. Calm sat on him like a cloak; heat smoldered under it like an ember that hadn’t decided which forest to take.

He came forward in a slow, deliberate line. The faintest chime as his glove brushed the bedpost. The mattress gave a whisper when his knee met it—not a claim, not yet. He did not touch Taehyung.

He did not need to, for Taehyung to feel touched.

“How close,” Jungkook asked, voice low, careful, “are Yoongi and you?”

Taehyung had practiced his face. He put it on now: serenity lacquered over a tremor. “Close enough to do what your father requires,” he said. “Not more.”

The heir’s mouth did nothing. The eyes did everything. “Has he touched you?”

“No.” The word came fast, instinct and strategy kissing the same syllable.

Jungkook’s head tilted, hunting for a flinch. He didn’t find one. He did not seem to trust that. The next word left his mouth wearing weight. “Answer me truthfully,” he said again, not louder—deeper.

Alpha command carried a specific gravity. It moved along the floor and up the bedpost and into Taehyung’s throat like smoke that had memorized the house. He knew this weight now; Yoongi had taught him how to feel it, how to recognize the hooks in it and leave them without letting them catch. Not tonight. Not for this question.

He let it in. The command touched his tongue; his mouth unclenched on its behalf. “No,” he said, and the truth pleased the compulsion; it released clean. Something inside him despised how relieved it felt.

The heir’s exhale left him like a man stepping out of armor. His head tipped back; the tendons in his throat stood like cords. He was beautiful in the uglier way—relief and want intersecting. When he looked down again, the calm had softened into something more perilous: intimacy grown possessive by proximity.

Another command slid out of him, soft and slick. “Do you have feelings for him then?”

The command rode under the question again, pared down to bone now. Taehyung’s throat opened obediently. “No.”

Another truth. Not a simple one, but a true one.

Relief hit Jungkook as if the word had been a draught poured straight into the vein. His scent shifted, rain brightening, metal singing. He crossed the last of the distance then and let his gloved fingers find Taehyung’s hair—not a rough grip, a slow combing through the dark, feeling texture as if it mattered. The intimacy was more naked than anything lawless; it made Taehyung’s skin draw tighter over bone.

“I had to ask,” Jungkook said against the quiet, and the honesty of it rang like a true coin. “I don’t like him near you. I don’t like him putting his hands on you to teach you what should be mine to teach. I won’t have anyone—least of all him—steal you from me.”

A dry sound left Taehyung without permission. It could have been a laugh if you stripped the humor away. The Omega in him preened in secret, pleased to be declared, pleased to be held where it couldn’t be seen.

“Do you want to know,” Taehyung said, eyes on his, not dipping, not offering his throat, “what I like about Yoongi?”

Dark thickened along Jungkook’s iris in a slow spill. “Enlighten me.”

“He respects me,” Taehyung said. He kept the edge off his voice and let it cut anyway. “He listens when I speak. He does not look at me and see only an Omega-shaped mouth and a womb wearing red.”

Jungkook laughed. Not nicely. “You think Yoongi’s a saint? That his good manners aren’t just a way to make it easier when he decides to take you apart?” The grin that accompanied it was a sliver of cruelty, the shared joke of men who know the tricks of their own kind. “He’s an Alpha, Taehyung. He smiles, and behind it is the same want every Alpha carries. He’s just tidier about it. A polite wolf is still a wolf.”

“Maybe.” Taehyung’s chin lifted. “At least he has the decency to act as if I am a person first.”

Jungkook’s jaw flexed. Retort crowded his teeth. Taehyung didn’t let it out.

“Perhaps,” Taehyung said, and his own voice surprised him with its steadiness, “we should stop talking about Yoongi and talk about you.”

Brows drew, unreadable for a heartbeat. “What do you mean?”

“What do you expect from your Omega?” Taehyung sat up, the movement small and somehow defiant.

Confusion skated through the heir’s gaze; interest caught its tail. “Expect?”

“Obedience,” Taehyung said, counting the words off like prayer beads. “Stillness. A mouth that says yes when you ask and yes when you don’t, hands folded, eyes soft, a body you can—” he chose the verb because he wanted to be heard, “—mount without thinking about who lives inside it. A shell. Beautiful. Empty of everything that might slow your hunger down.”

The words hung between them like a drawn bowstring. Jungkook’s pupils widened a fraction at one of them—mount—his breath deepening before his control took it back by the neck. The Alpha in him had excellent hearing.

Taehyung leaned in before the echo could own the floor. He lifted his right hand—glove smooth and cold—and traced an idle, precise line along the inside of Jungkook’s forearm. Leather over cloth. The contact was chaste, almost monastic. Jungkook’s body didn’t think so. The muscle under Taehyung’s fingertip went tight, the heir’s breath kinked a fraction at his throat.

“Or,” Taehyung said, the word quiet as a match struck, “do you want an Omega who respects you. Who is interested in the words your mouth makes and the ideas behind them. Someone whose insight is a blade you can use, not a flower you press in a book and show to foreign dignitaries. Imagine” He let the glove climb another inch, felt Jungkook’s pulse under it, “what we could do if you wanted a partner instead of a possession.”

Jungkook stared into him for a long beat, then his mouth kicked into a grin that made everything narrower and warmer without conceding anything at all. “Why not both?”

Taehyung withdrew his hand. The absence made sound: the small animal noise alphas make when heat suddenly goes cold. Jungkook’s forearm flexed after nothing, like a body reaching for a rung that wasn’t there. The heir’s eyes cut up, irritation bright as iron. It would have been funny if it had not been so dangerous.

“You can’t have both,” Taehyung said.

A beat. A choice. He made the worst possible one and the right one at once. “Or have you never looked properly into your mother’s eyes.”

The change was immediate. Jungkook’s shoulders angled a degree as if to guard something soft under bone. The vein at his temple lifted its head. “Don’t talk about my mother,” he said, and the voice was no longer velvet; it had found iron. “You don’t know her.”

Protectiveness, yes. Blindness, perhaps.

“Maybe I don’t,” Taehyung allowed. “But her eyes tell me everything I need. They are a house with the lights off. Whatever person lived there—it has been emptied, and what fills the rooms now has your father’s scent on it. She is an Omega made into a symbol. If that is the shape you want for me, say so. You are the First Heir; your word weighs more than mine ever will. But know this: what you would keep beside you would not choose you. It would obey you. It would warm the bed and cool your temper and nod at your orders. It would never like you. You could pour yourself in until you drowned and you would still be alone.”

The heir’s face did not know which color to be. Anger flushed it; something else paled it under the anger. He looked all at once younger and more dangerous—hurt flickering and then stitched into something denial could wear in public. His eyes cut to Taehyung’s mouth and back up with something feral and unsure crowning the black in them. His hand flexed; the glove creaked.

“And if not that,” Taehyung said, and he did not whisper it. “then take the other thing. Take a mind that will stand beside yours, not beneath. Take a voice that cuts in the same direction, that will argue you out of your own bad ideas and polish the good ones until they can blind a room.”

He stood. The oxblood silk drew a red line when he rose; the slit breathed along his thigh and cooled a heat he refused to name. The heir’s breath was heavier now, shoulders making a slow weather of it. He looked at Taehyung’s mouth as if debating whether to punish it or memorize it. The muscles at his jaw were ropes pulled too tight. He took one step closer and every nerve in Taehyung’s body lifted its head to watch.

“If you want that second thing,” Taehyung said, “you know what you have to do.”

Jungkook’s brows drew in with a violence he did not spend.

“I want a seat at the table,” Taehyung said, each word its own blade. “Not a cushion, not a corridor. A chair that does not disappear when I sit down.”

The heir’s jaw sawed once. The muscle leapt. He looked at Taehyung like a man weighing the necessary betrayal of a father against the necessary keeping of a mate. Rage, desire, calculation, and some new, unpracticed tenderness contested the same inch of irises.

Taehyung softened nothing. “It’s been a day made of knives,” he said, and he was suddenly, simply tired. “I’m going to sleep.” He turned from that black gaze and felt it like turning your back on a high tide. “You should leave by the way you came.”

Silence throbbed once and then steadied. Behind him, leather breathed as Jungkook’s glove curled and uncurled. The air filled with the sound of a man swallowing something too large and too hot to be healthy. Footfalls moved—a whisper across carpet toward the darker part of the dark.

He did not reach for Taehyung. He did not argue. A panel clicked where there was no panel. The wall took a man back who had not technically been there. The room exhaled the storm by degrees.

What remained was Jungkook’s scent, caught in the weave of the curtains and the mattress edge and the places hands had hovered without touching. Petrichor, the argument in it unresolved.

Taehyung sat back on the bed and peeled the glove from his right hand in the dark, slow, careful, like taking a blade out of a wound. He pressed the bare palm to his own chest for a counted beat and felt the Dark purr under the skin, alive, obedient—for now.

A seat at the table, he had said.

Somewhere in the stone, a passage closed the last of its mouth around a First Heir who had been given a choice and had not answered yet.

*******

Night took him like a patient hunter, and when it finally loosened its jaw, dawn had already bled into the paper screens.

He dreamed in the color of old blood.

It opened with the bone cane: tap—tap—tap—like a knuckle knocking from inside his ribs. The sound crawled under the glove and drummed the long bones of his right hand until the joints answered in Morse. The corridor was the estate and also not—the paper screens breathing in and out, the lacquer floor reflecting a sky that had no ceiling and nowhere to go. In this dream the Red Guard were lacquer statues with their faces sanded smooth, and when they turned their heads it was always to look past him, as if he were only the shadow his body made.

Petrichor came first, a weather front shouldering through the doors: dark storm and hammered metal at the back of his tongue. Jungkook was not there, and also he was everywhere: a shape in every corner of the room if you looked straight at it; the weight of a hand on the back of his neck if you glanced away. The chair appeared beneath him without lowering himself; his wrists were resting on its arms, his knees pressed obediently together by a silk yoke that remembered who it had been made to advertise. A ring of servants stood around him like a wreath of white shirts. They did not lift their eyes. They waited.

Han Isayeon’s cane ticked. Tap—tap—tap—. When the sound reached the servants’ feet, the feet forgot how to be feet. Body after body spilled toward the floor in angles bodies are not supposed to find, elbows hooking back on themselves, spines bowing in a prayer that had never been taught. Taehyung opened his mouth and nothing came out but steam—jasmine and regret. He tried to stand and the chair climbed his hips and would not let go.

There were eyes in the dark corners. Not faces. Just pupils, blooming and shrinking to the rhythm of the cane. Yoongi’s shadow separated once from the rest; it came near and held his gaze with the calm a surgeon wears when the scalpel is in his hand and a life is a technical problem if you name it right. When Taehyung lifted his bare fingers in the dream, the Dark ran down to the pads and lifted itself like frost along glass. He reached to touch the nearest servant at the curve of the neck and his own glove was suddenly there again, corded tight across knuckles he had not consented to bind.

Petrichor pressed into the small of his back, a voice braided into it: be good. The sane part of him remembered the moment of clean defiance the night before, the thin-bladed victory of saying you can’t have both.

The Omega inside him bit him hard for what he had said—dumb pride, rough tongue, you challenged the storm. Apologize, it hissed, kneel, be small and fragrant and good. Another voice—his own—whispered back: say it again. Say it smarter. Win.

When he woke, he tasted iron between his teeth as if he had been carrying a nail there. His pillow smelled faintly of storm.

The knock came in regulation—two beats, pause, two beats. A Red Guard filled the doorway again, red sash, lacquered breastplate, a face that had lent its features to a dozen interchangeable men. “Escort to breakfast, my lord.”

The breakfast room had not forgiven anyone. It never would.

Yoongi was there first, black-on-black, attention scissoring quietly through the air as if cutting it into manageable cloth. Beside him sat an older version of severity. Yoongi’s father carried his rank in the slope of his shoulders and the careful way he put them down; Minhyun had folded himself into pleasant geometry—ankle over knee, fingers bridged, that mild, almost-smile as uninformative as parchment. Jungkook waited opposite, the storm compressed, charcoal made to pretend it isn’t fire.

Taehyung went to his place without letting his eyes linger on any of them. He felt Jungkook’s gaze like a hand pressed flat to his back, not pushing—measuring. He kept his scent narrow and pine-dry, rose tamped down to thorn. The cup by his wrist breathed out steam that smelled like a kinder world.

The door’s rice-paper shudder and wood-breath announced sovereign gravity before the men entered. Jeon Taehwan arrived in a good mood—danger more polished, cruelty in silk rather than chain. Seo Dalya flowed at his side like the reflection of a flame in a bowl of oil. Her beauty had been perfected into a ritual; even her walk seemed calligraphed.

“Ah,” Taehwan said as the room made space the way rooms do when rules walk in. “We are whole again.” He meant: we are arranged. He meant: every piece sits where I put it down.

They sat. Or rather, the room obeyed.

The tasters performed their theatre; the Sovereign did not glance up during it. He let it happen the way weather lets a leaf blow across a road. When the last cup was pronounced sufficiently innocent to approach his lips, he joined the performance by drinking. It would have been farcical if it were not fatal to laugh.

Taehyung watched Jungkook watch his father, and it was like watching a pupil take notes from a storm. The heir’s gaze had sharpened by a notch since last night; his silence had. He tracked the little ways his father made a sentence into a leash: the pause that held someone else’s breath hostage; the tilt of the head that could mean offer me your throat or take the warning and walk away. Jungkook’s eyes touched his mother in glances that seemed accidental: how she folded her hands (fingers aligned to a fault); how she lifted the cup when the Sovereign’s cup lifted (not before, not after); how her stillness listened for the shape of commands the way a hound listens for a whistle you can’t hear.

Conversation began in the Sovereign’s preferred key: soft, indulgent, inexorable.

“Our roads” (his roads) “held,” he said mildly, “in the western district despite the rains. The granaries” (his granaries) “kept their bellies tight. Late harvest,” and he smiled like a man remembering a joke he had told himself, “tastes sweeter when men think I should be worried.” He waved a hand at the notion of worry as if it were smoke he had already gotten on the wrong side of.

Someone made an agreeable sound with the exact amount of backbone in it that courtesy requires. Taehyung thought it was the brother-in-law; the man had built a career out of lubricating friction in rooms like this.

“The Red Audience,” Taehwan continued, and the syllables wore velvet over iron, “was instructive. Nothing educates like consequence. We remind our households, now and then, what it means to live with rules.” His eyes slid along the table, acknowledging and not acknowledging. “The prisoner bled with grace.” He lifted his cup in a tiny toast to the idea of grace under compulsion. “I recommend it.”

Taehyung felt something in his mouth that wanted to be called bile. He was grateful for the leather on his right hand because it had something to dig his nails into while he kept his face uninteresting.

Dalya did not lift her eyes, not really. She looked at the center of the table as if it were a horizon. Her expression held that exquisite neutrality that has learned the exact quantities of smile permissible without becoming a lie. Taehyung knew a well-trained absence when he saw one.

The Sovereign’s smile found Yoongi’s father. “Lord Min,” he said, a solicitousness that had been sharpened until it could cut, “you deprived our assembly yesterday. I trust your body remembers which house it belongs to.”

The elder Min inclined. It was a bow and an apology and an admission all in one measured bend. “It is stubborn, Your Majesty,” he said, voice a dry page turned carefully. “But it obeys.”

“It should,” Taehwan murmured, and the room warmed a degree with the heat insult leaves behind.

Jungkook did not glance at his father then. He watched Dalya and not in the way a son watches a mother. It was the watchfulness of a boy trying to see the trick: which thread made the puppet’s wrist lift, which subtle flex at the corner of the sovereign’s mouth made a woman’s mouth remember to perform pleasure.

He tested something.

“Mother,” Jungkook said into the white space between two Sovereign sentences. His tone was almost casual. “Do you enjoy the breakfast?”

Dalya lifted her eyes as if woken from a very shallow sleep. For an instant Taehyung saw a person look out of them. Then the reaction that had been stitched into her muscles took the reins back.

She looked to the Sovereign first.

Not quite a turn of the head. More the tilt of a flower to a sun it cannot see but has been taught to trust.

Taehwan’s good mood enjoyed it. He did not even hide the way he enjoyed it. “Dalya,” he said with a soft laugh that made cruelty sound like charm, “likes what is given to her. Don’t you?” He didn’t look at her when he said it. He looked at Jungkook.

Dalya smiled the way a tide comes in: precisely to the line the shore is expecting. “Yes,” she said, voice a clear chime. “I do.”

There was no trace of taste in the word. It did not concern itself with pears or rice or salt. It did not name hunger.

Jungkook’s eyebrows knit as if he had been shown a simple equation that suddenly refused to equal what it always had. It was a small change and loud. Taehyung watched it happen: attention acquiring additional gravity. A lake deciding it had been misnamed a puddle. Something in the heir’s face took a slow step back from the altar he had knelt at his whole life and asked, without speaking, what is actually being worshiped here.

Across the table, Yoongi’s expression did not change. But Taehyung felt the tiny click in the air—the way silence sometimes registers understanding more loudly than words.

The Sovereign continued as if he had made the sun rise. He spoke of boundaries and tribute, of a Beta clan in the south that had learned the difference between private ambition and public consequence, of a Lightborn delegation that had been taught humility and the polite acceptance of their subservience—“our friends,” he said with a smile that had no teeth because it preferred not to need them, “shine brightest when they are polishing what belongs to us.” Laughter followed him around the table the way expensive dogs follow a man with raw meat in his pocket.

Dalya’s hands did not move. Jungkook’s gaze rested on them once, then on her face, then on the Sovereign’s mouth as he shaped the words that shaped her.

The knock at the door made the Red Guard at the wall twitch; professionalism put him back into stone at once. Another Guard entered—the cadence of his steps unalarmed, everything under the skin not. He knelt with the geometry of a man who had practiced kneeling in a mirror.

Even before he spoke, the Sovereign’s good mood drew its head back like an animal sensing a scent it hates.

“Majesty,” the Guard said. “We have received notice from House Namsaeng. Han Isayeon was found dead in her estate this morning.”

Air changed its thickness. The room took the news into its lungs and held it exactly one beat too long for comfort.

“What,” Taehwan said. It was not a question in the ordinary sense. It was a lever.

“The death report,” the Guard went on, offering the folded paper sealed with Namsaeng bone-white wax. “Physician notes attached.” A hesitation, visible only because every other movement had been so well rehearsed. “Preliminary suspicion of poison.”

Sovereign teeth met. The sound was almost delicate and somehow echoed as if the room had been built to hold it. Taehyung felt it in his molars, in his glove, in the bridge of his nose. Dalya did not flinch. Minhyun’s almost-smile did not move at all.

The Guard, as if remembering a second blade, lifted a smaller folded slip. “There was also an anonymous letter addressed to Your Majesty.”

Jungkook did not move, but his scent flickered—rain finding stone.

The Sovereign’s face reshaped. The man who had enjoyed himself a moment ago vacated the mouth; something older sat down in it and arranged its knives.

“Remove the omegas,” he said, the same words he had used when the ironstone pot had rolled and the servant had stopped being a person. Ritual made obedience fast: the Red Guard took one step forward; chairs whispered. Dalya rose with the grace of a sleepwalker following music you could not hear if you were not trained.

Taehyung stood without hope, because hope in rooms like this is a punishment you apply to yourself. He wanted to know the contents of the letter with a greed that felt like a new sin; he wanted to watch the lines of the Sovereign’s mouth around the word poison; he wanted, simply, to be allowed to remain a person in a conversation for once.

He had almost pushed his chair back when Jungkook’s voice struck the table like a palm.

“Taehyung stays.”

No adornment. No Your Majesty, no apology smoothed over the edge of it. The words were simple. The room was not.

Taehwan turned his head toward his son with the measured slowness of a man who has never in his reign needed to move any quicker. He laughed, once, the way a man laughs when a dog barks at thunder. “I fail to see,” he said lightly, and the light was poison, “how the presence of an Omega would benefit this conversation by any measure.”

Jungkook’s jaw clenched. Taehyung saw the muscle jump, saw the lake deepen behind the eyes. The heir did not look at his mother. He looked at his father as if measuring the length of a leash between them and finding, for the first time, that he did not recognize the knot that made it.

“My Omega,” Jungkook said, each word cut clean, “stays.”

Chapter Text

Jungkook’s words still rang like struck iron in the room.

My Omega. Stays.

Taehwan’s eyebrow rose the width of a blade. His gaze moved from son to Taehyung and back again—appraising, not truly looking. A small smile touched the Sovereign’s mouth; he let the smile stand there a moment, like a foot placed lightly on a throat just to prove it could be.

Then he turned away from Taehyung as if from a vase that had been set in the correct corner. Not a person. Decoration—an expensive shape arranged to please, not to speak.

“Read,” he told the Red Guard.

The Guard came forward and knelt onto the woven hush of the tatami. He broke the bone-white wax of House Namsaeng with professional fingers, unrolled the letter to the exact angle required, and lifted his voice just enough to reach every part of the room without waking the gods.

“House Namsaeng reports,” he said, eyes on the script, “that Lady Han Isayeon was found unresponsive by a maidservant at the hour before dawn in her private apartments. Attending physician was summoned. Resuscitation was attempted and failed. The body was transferred to the estate’s lower chamber for immediate examination and the death recorded.”

No one breathed incorrectly. Breathing is a way of voting in rooms like this.

Taehyung watched faces instead of words.

The Sovereign’s expression did not change at first; then something old and unpleasant uncoiled behind his eyes and sat down. It was not grief for a Beta who had mocked him in shadows. It was calculation acquiring a fresh number.

Jungkook’s mouth pressed into the hard line he had inherited. Petrichor edged sharp in the air, ozone before the wire bites.

Minhyun didn’t move except for his lashes, which shuttered once, slowly, as if to take a photograph inside his skull for later use. His scent stayed mild, unthreatening. It would have been excellent camouflage if Taehyung hadn’t learned to look for the glint inside it.

Yoongi’s gaze cut quick to Taehyung—the briefest pass, a question without the weight of expectation—and slid back to the paper.

The Guard went on, voice steady, “A second paper, sealed with the estate’s minor crest, is enclosed: the physician’s notes.”

Taehwan held out a hand without looking. The paper was placed in it obediently. He did not unfold it. He let it sit between two fingers while he watched his men bow to the idea of mortality and then stand again.

“Read that also,” he said, because the sound of other men’s voices made the facts easier to punish later.

The Guard unfolded. “External examination shows no breach of skin, no bruising, no strangulation marks at the throat. Face was composed. The sternum showed no discoloration. Upon incision”—the Guard’s mouth hesitated on civility, then resumed its neutral shape—“black veining was found radiating from the heart outward, frostwork in pattern and texture. The tissue surrounding the heart was darkened as if touched by fire, but no heat damage at the ribs or skin was observed. No known toxin was detected by the estate physician’s reagents. A sample has been sent to the Citadel’s archive. Time of death is estimated within the hour prior to discovery.”

Taehwan’s smile was gone. He looked at the paper finally, then at the Red Guard. “Call the court physician,” he said, and the room took two degrees of temperature from the syllables. “Immediately.”

The man arrived fast and out of breath no matter how he tried not to be, Beta in a physician’s grey—hair too fine, fingers accustomed to ink and questioning, eyes rimmed red from being pried open by duty. He bowed low enough to make a point of his throat. Then he rose and came forward carefully, as if the floor planks might be arranged to trap him if he moved without permission.

“Majesty,” he managed, voice arranged into calm. He was young for the mystery he had been handed.

“Speak,” Taehwan said. He placed the papers in the physician’s hands the way a butcher places a knife in an apprentice’s. “And do not waste my morning with apologies for what you do not yet know.”

The physician read fast, lips compressing once. The Beta’s scent frayed into fear and tried to hide itself behind respect. He swallowed. “It… it corresponds with the first case in presentation, Your Majesty. The same frost-veining around the heart. No surface marker. It appears to take place… within. We have tested against the common roster of cardiotoxic agents—herbals, distillates, powders—none show their signature. We—ah—”

He glanced, as if for permission to be less than omnipotent. Permission was not given. He went on anyway.

“We brought in the Lightborn adjuncts—three of their best—” he realized how that sounded and corrected himself quickly, “—three of the ones we keep on permanent retainer. They found nothing to coax. No residue to push. Whatever this thing is, it leaves only the absence behind. No edge we can catch.”

Taehwan’s jaw flexed. “So not poison,” he said, “as we like to name it. Nothing from a bottle. Nothing that sits prettily in a petri dish while you and your archivists stroke your chins and take notes.”

The physician paled. “It may be a poison, Majesty, of a kind we do not yet recognize. Or something… adjacent. Necromantic injuries leave residue. This does not.”

The table broke into fragments of talk—small, sharp opinions thrown like dice. “Inhaled,” someone said from farther down: the brother-in-law. “It must be inhaled.” “Administered at the Red Audience,” another voice—Minhyun, polishedly mild. “Not necessarily,” Yoongi said flat as a black stone skipping once across a lake. “The first case collapsed here; the second died at home. Two locations. One pattern. I don’t like coincidences that try too hard to be cousins.”

Taehyung kept his mouth on its leash and listened, hunger making the edges of the room taste clearer. It was a strange intoxication to be allowed to remain while alpha pretended the world was a chessboard. He had the ridiculous boyish urge to speak sense into the dark. He held it. For a while.

Taehwan lifted a finger. The room’s noise died. “At minimum,” he said, “tell me when.”

The physician faltered. “Majesty… the—ah—the mechanism does not announce itself. I can conjecture a window from necrotic spread along the myocardium. But without a starting point…”

Taehwan’s mouth tipped in dislike so pure it nearly qualified as a clean aesthetic. “You cannot even guess how long the blade had been held to their hearts before it bit.”

The Beta swallowed. The fine bones of his throat moved once, twice. He was shrinking under the table’s heat like wax. “Hours,” he said finally, with all the cowardice of honesty, “to a day. Perhaps more. It depends on—”

“On something you cannot name,” the Sovereign finished for him. He clicked his tongue gently, the way a man might scold a show animal for forgetting a trick in front of company. Dissatisfaction puckered the room around the edges.

The physician flinched as if the words had hit him. „We will be testing wicks and waters, inks and glues, the lacquer on the cane she was fond of,“ he began, hope making him reckless „…but it will take time.”

“Time.” The Sovereign rolled the monosyllable on his tongue and found it sour. “How expensive.”

No one corrected him.

“We have two likely occasions,” Yoongi’s father interposed, voice thin with illness, mind unseduced by drama. “Either the Red Audience or her own estate.”

“Those are not occasions,” Taehwan snapped. “They are places. I asked for time, not geography. Continue this parade of maybe and I will start counting physician heads instead of hours.”

The Beta bowed from the waist and tried not to tremble. “Dermal exposure is possible. A… a contact transfer—gloves, cloth, a handshake. The eyes rarely admit toxin but—”

“But not never,” Yoongi supplied, saving the man from drowning in his own qualifications.

Taehwan collected it all with a sweep of his hand that managed to be both elegant and obscene.

Taehyung felt the smoke of an idea unscroll in his head. It came from the bone cane tapping through his dreams and from the way the frost-veins in those hearts looked like a drawing a cold had made. Not administered. Not ingested. Called awake, not carried in.

What if—

He spoke before his mouth remembered its chains.

“What if it’s not administered at all—what if it’s—”

The Sovereign did not look at him. He pitched his voice to his son, his eyes still on his Beta prey. “If you insist on bringing your pet into counsel, Jungkook, teach it to heel,” he said, so pleasantly his cruelty rang, „And if he must make noise, let it be into your pillow, not over my law. Remind him of that before I do.“

Heat flushed high and ugly along Taehyung’s neck. He made his rage choke itself into small pieces and swallow them. His Omega rose up, embarrassed by the exposure, wanting to roll over and show softness until the danger passed. He forced it down with the same unkindness he had been taught to reserve for himself when he wanted things he could not have. If he showed temper, he would be walked out like a decorative jar and not carried back.

For a flicker, Jungkook’s eyes were all wolf: pupils blown, mouth flat, a growl he strangled in the cradle. He looked at Taehyung—quick, sharp, near-apologetic—and then the mask slid tight over his face like a glove pulled past the knuckles. He turned his head to his father and did not answer the cruelty. He saved his words for strategy.

Conversation went on without Taehyung—as if sound had struck a wall and fallen back into the men who believed they owned it.

The physician talked himself into smaller and smaller circles. Yoongi’s attention touched Taehyung, sharp as a needle, then left him to return to the place where knives were being arranged.

“Read,” Taehwan said, to the Red Guard holding the second slip. “The coward’s note.”

The Guard unfolded the smaller paper.

“‘To His Unassailable Majesty,’” the Guard read, and the honorific sat in his mouth like a joke told behind a fan. “‘Your theater pleases. Keep the footlights bright. The brighter you make them, the fatter we grow in the dark. While you stage your red, remember what shadows are for.

“‘Our demand remains unchanged. Cancel the bonding of your First to the thirdborn Omega, or we will continue our little experiments in subtraction. We have so many subjects to choose from.

“‘Reign well. Reign briefly.’”

Silence fell the way a blade falls—swift, correct, inevitable. It landed point-down in the center of the table and quivered once.

Jungkook’s jaw locked. Taehyung watched the minute leap of tendon and knew he was looking at family—two men in different bodies with the same flawcraft in their mouths. Taehwan’s teeth met with that careful, cutting sound again.

“Disgrace,” the sovereign spat, a soft word made ugly. “A man who murders behind a powder and a letter dares point his finger at the Darkborn elite. A rat brags because we have not yet caught its tail.” He laughed without humor and without surprise.

The Sovereign did not look at the letter again. He let it lie where it had been read, bone-white seal cracked, script exposed. His palm pressed once to the table, heavy, final, as if to declare: here ends indulgence.

“I will go,” Taehwan said, voice low, cutting. “This afternoon, to the Namsaeng estate. The lady’s bones are hardly cold, but mourning will be arranged, and mourning will be arranged on my terms. There will be no display of weakness. Prepare the Guard. Prepare the carriages. Have the priests in their robes and their mouths washed out with clean water. The kingdom will see its Sovereign inspect death the way a man inspects a stable—deciding which horse deserves fodder, which deserves the whip.”

His gaze slid across the table like oil over steel. “And tomorrow,” he said, “we convene again. Every mind sharpened. Every tongue carrying detail, not apology. I do not want wide eyes and maybes. I want answers sharp enough to cut. Every fragment may be of interest.”

Taehyung knew immediately the ‘every’ did not include him. It had never included him.

Then the Sovereign turned his attention. Slowly. Cruelly. The way a boy toys with an insect before pinning it. His gaze dropped on the physician.

The Beta stood already half-shrunken, spine trying to make itself shorter, hands folded so tightly the knuckles blanched like small surrender flags. Sweat darkened the collar of his robes, though the room was cool.

Taehwan considered him as though measuring the cost of killing him now, in this room, in front of everyone—whether it would amuse, whether it would clarify, whether it would buy silence or chaos. He did not move. He only spoke.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said slowly, like reciting a death sentence that had already been signed, “you will bring me insight. Not riddles. Not excuses. Not the pathetic bleating of a Beta who does not want his failures hung out for the sun to rot.”

The physician bowed, mouth working dry.

“Do you understand me?” Taehwan asked.

“Yes, Majesty,” the Beta managed, voice thin, almost cracking.

“You may draw on every resource you possess,” the Sovereign continued, “every herb, every book, every trembling hand under your command. Strip the Lightborn if you must. Drain them. Use their eyes until they go blind.” He leaned a fraction forward. His teeth showed. “And if you stand before me again with nothing—if you dare humiliate my table with the same empty hands—I will have you opened the way you opened the servants heart. I will watch the veins spread from your chest and I will call it research.”

The Beta nearly fell in his bow. His scent was sharp fear and stale sweat, but beneath it, the sour aftertaste of shame.

“Dismissed,” Taehwan said, with a flick of his hand, and the man scuttled backward, bowed again, fled.

The Sovereign rose then, and the room followed like marionettes. His robes whispered against the tatami as he turned away.

The Red Guard was quick: one posted at Taehyung’s elbow at once, body angled, hand brushing him to rise. A reminder. A leash disguised as etiquette.

Taehyung’s cheeks burned still from the earlier cut—pet, pillow—but his mind refused to hold the humiliation. It ran instead over the patterns: Isayeon’s cane, her malice, her words, her sudden subtraction from the board. Poison without residue. Letters taunting. The Sovereign’s fury. Jungkook’s voice. My Omega stays.

He rose and let himself be steered. But his eyes—his eyes caught Jungkook.

The First Heir had risen too, hurried, as if something unsaid had become urgent. His gaze fixed on Taehyung, sharp, hungry, not caring that others saw it.

Taehyung’s step faltered—just a breath.

“You will stay, son,” the Sovereign said, already bored with generosity. “We have something to discuss.” The implication walked on its own legs through the sentence: less conversation, more lesson.

Taehyung saw the tremor pass through Jungkook—one heartbeat of refusal stiff in his shoulders—before it stilled, bent itself into obedience. He stepped back from Taehyung’s path, jaw locked, eyes dark. He turned toward his father.

The Red Guard pushed at Taehyung’s elbow again, and the Omega moved, unwilling. He wanted to resist, to dig his heels in, to stay —the Guard guided him out as if herding expensive livestock.

He looked back once.

The last thing he saw before the wood swallowed the scene was Jeon Taehwan stepping behind his son and setting a palm on Jungkook’s shoulder. The placement was precise—heel of the hand where muscle knots, fingers resting like a claim—and there was nothing of father in the touch.

The door slid shut.

Taehyung’s room greeted him with its lacquered silence, its obedient lamps, its walls that listened but never spoke. He sank into the stillness, but his head did not. Thoughts churned, knotted, refused to settle.

Han Isayeon dead. Frost-veins around the heart. No poison trace. A letter mocking them all.

He was no physician, no Lightborn healer with their glowing hands, no archivist with shelves of toxins and powders. But still he tried to think. How does death get into a body without opening a door? Through the air? Through the skin? What hand writes veins of ice around a heart without leaving a fingerprint?

He remembered Isayeon’s cane. The hollow clack of it on stone. The bone polished warm where it had no right to be warm. The carvings hidden in its length like snakes sleeping under bark.

Her words came back, old and cruel, stinking of contempt: they will praise this hand, the harmless hand, while they bind the other one. Do not mistake display for seat.

How had she looked when they found her in her estate? Alone in her private rooms, eyes perhaps still sharp with mockery even as the veins crawled black and branching beneath her skin.

Taehyung’s Dark shifted uneasily at the thought, like a beast nosing at a door.

He turned it over and over in his head, so many fragments, too many. He wanted to write them down, to give them shape. But Omegas are not given paper, not ink. Education for their kind was limited to how to bow prettily, how to swallow words before they could sour a room, how to make obedience look like pleasure.

He stood before the dressing table and pulled the drawer open. Silk. Combs. A lipstick the color of a bruised plum, meant to make his mouth look like punishment you would beg for.

He crossed to the full-length mirror. It had been placed where the morning light could take him apart and reassemble him for approval. The mirror’s purpose was to return to him the shape of a body the Codex had trained him to curate: hip where Alphas like to hold, throat where Alphas like to look before putting their mouths.

He faced himself. He breathed. For a moment, he allowed the gaze other people used on him to inhabit his own eyes like an intruder.

Dark hair, almost black, with a restless wave that refused to lie entirely even when oil begged it to—loose enough to look touchable, disciplined enough to pass inspection. It framed his face with a cruel, delicate accuracy, like a jeweler’s claws around a stone. Skin honey-warm under the paper light, as if the sun had once been kind to him and then been taught to leave off. The beauty mark at his cheek—small, audacious as punctuation—and its fainter twin at the point of his nose, where a patient painter might have pressed a brush and then thought better of it. Eyes too large for safety: brown, reflective, made to look obedient until they bit. His mouth—full, sulking by nature even when he told it not to be—parted now with breath that would not smooth back into the proper rhythm; the lower lip carried a sheen as if it were already oiled for use. The Binding Glove on his right hand cut a black line into the figure—sleek, severe, seams like razor-straight rivers. Under it, the Dark purred, bored and listening.

He lifted the lipstick.

The red spread across the mirror in strokes, harsh, urgent.

— FROST-VEINS AROUND HEART (STAR PATTERN, NOT SPREAD)

— NO MARKS ON SKIN / THROAT CLEAN

— TWO SITES / SAME SIGNATURE (BREAKFAST ROOM / PRIVATE NAMSAENG ESTATE)

— LIGHTBORN FOUND “ABSENCE” / NO RESIDUE TO COAX

— BONE CANE / HAN ISAYEON’S HABIT / LACQUER? CARVINGS?

— ANONYMOUS NOTE THREATENS FIRST HEIR BONDING

— TIMING WIDOW: HOURS TO A DAY (INTERNAL START?)

— MINHYUN WATCHED THE CONVERSATION / WHY?

— WHO BENEFITS IF THE BOND FAILS?

Soon the glass no longer gave him his reflection but a web of words in crude plum. His face was half-hidden behind them, his body fragmented, his beauty obscured.

It pleased him. A reflection where he was less visible, less decoration. The mirror now showed thought instead of flesh.

A dangerous affront. No Omega was meant to scrawl. No Omega was meant to think in ink, even if only painted in lipstick. A servant could betray him with a glance. He hoped fear would silence them.

He lifted the lipstick again, then stopped. A sound moved down the corridor and the latch turned before he could put everything back into the foxhole disguise of innocence.

Jungkook slipped inside and shut the door with a careful firmness that confessed how furious he was. Calm body. Not calm scent. Petrichor snapped, bright and metallic, threaded through with the hot edge of a strike barely missed. One corner of his mouth was split—just enough to ruin the perfection, just enough to say someone’s knuckles had a lesson to teach.

His eyes went to the mirror first. He took in the bleeding script, and something dark and alive moved under his face. Then his gaze slid to Taehyung, and whatever part of him had been trained not to show desire had to work for its living. Taehyung felt it arrive like weather along his skin.

Without asking, Jungkook crossed to the bed and fell onto it on his back like a man who had been running on stone and needed to lie on something that remembered softness. The mattress took him and breathed.

Taehyung approached, slower than his Omega would have preferred. He stood near, hands at his sides to avoid doing something his hands were already arguing for. His voice, when it came, was soft and level.

“Are you all right?”

Jungkook scoffed, the sound low and cutting—a little laugh with none of the laughter left in it. “Don’t worry.” His gaze cut at the ceiling, then flicked to Taehyung’s mouth like a bad habit. “My father just… renewed his rules.” The word tasted like iron. “Rehearsed his opinions.” He curled his tongue against the split in his lip, prodding pain to soothe it. The little flicker of pink was obscene in its helplessness; Taehyung’s body flooded with a stupid, loyal urge—to lean in, to lick the hurt away, to unlearn the lesson the sovereign had written on it with his hand. To soothe his Alpha.

Taehyung stood near the bed, still caught between distance and the pull of his own body, when the words left him before he could dress them in caution.

“Do you… want to talk about it?”

The air held it a moment, measuring the audacity of an Omega speaking that aloud. Jungkook’s eyes slid to him, slow, heavy. When their gazes locked, the sharpness of it was almost unbearable.

“You must be able to imagine what my father said,” Jungkook said finally, voice rasped low. “The same things they drilled into you. Only reversed.”

His tongue darted against the split again, pink over blood, then he breathed out a phrase as if repeating catechism:

“No heir of mine will be confused about what he owns.”

The syllables hung like shackles. Taehyung’s gut tightened. He knew—by the clipped, almost casual way Jungkook said it—that this was one of the milder lessons. The kind spoken not with fury but with practice. Which meant the harsher ones had cut far deeper.

Jungkook exhaled, and his gaze hardened. “He only grew angry when I mentioned my mother,” he added, almost conversational, and in that almost lay the rest: what followed, and what had found his mouth.

Gratitude should not have been necessary for something as small as being allowed to remain in a room where your fate was being decided. In their world, it was—inflated to the size of a favor, wrapped in risk. Taehyung disliked the taste of the thank you on his tongue, but he said it anyway, and did not dress it as anything else.

“Thank you. For letting me stay.”

Jungkook’s eyes flicked to him, unreadable, then slid to the mirror. For the first time that day, his mouth crooked in the ghost of amusement.

“That,” he murmured, nodding toward the lipstick scrawls that almost buried Taehyung’s reflection, “must be a topic of great interest to you.” He let his head sink back against the pillow, lashes low. “You know—you could have asked for pen and paper. But this—” his smile sharpened, sardonic—“this mirror certainly makes for a far more dramatic effect.”

Taehyung didn’t rise to the mockery. His voice stayed dry, stripped down to its bones.

“It was the only way I could hold my thoughts.”

Jungkook frowned slightly, confusion making the line between his brows deeper.

“Because Omegas aren’t meant to hold thoughts,” Taehyung added, softer, but sharp as glass. “Not on paper. Not anywhere. We’re not meant to ask for pen and ink. We’re meant to swallow, not speak.”

The First Heir’s mouth tightened. His pupils widened, black pushing out the brown, as if some echo of his father’s indoctrination had just cracked open inside him, sour and ugly. Taehyung could almost see the words playing back in Jungkook’s skull, rules he had swallowed without question now suddenly tasting of rot.

And suddenly Taehyung could imagine—too clearly—what had been drilled into Jungkook’s bones in the room they had just left.

For a moment neither spoke. They only looked at each other. And Taehyung realized—quietly, reluctantly—that he did not hate Jungkook’s presence the way he had only days ago. Something in him resisted the admission, snarled against it, insisted it was only the Omega in him sighing at its Alpha.

He tore his eyes away. He crossed to the drawer and opened it. His fingers found the small jar of balm—its scent faintly medicinal, undercut with herbs meant to preserve softness after use. His stomach knotted at its implication. Healing for Omega flesh meant to be spent and used until it required repair. He ignored the thought, forcing himself to think only of the split at Jungkook’s mouth.

He dipped his fingertip into the cream. The pale smear clung to the pad of his finger as he crossed back toward the bed.

Jungkook’s eyes tracked him. The weight of that gaze was unbearable—it was not command, not yet, but it pressed at the edges of his skin. Taehyung stopped close, close enough that he could feel the storm-scent shiver in the air, ozone undercut with male heat.

He lifted his hand carefully, placed his finger against the torn lip, pressing the balm with a feather’s touch.

Jungkook inhaled sharply. The sound was low, primal. Taehyung froze, unsure if it was pain or something else entirely that had clawed that breath out of him.

He began to withdraw—relief, fear, restraint all vying for control. But Jungkook’s hand moved fast. His fingers closed around Taehyung’s wrist, iron-hard but not cruel, halting the retreat.

Taehyung’s breath stilled.

Jungkook’s pupils had grown—black swallowing iris, the Alpha inside clawing its way closer, scent rich and raw with possession. Taehyung had not noticed until now how thick it had become in the air, ozone and storm pressing against his skin like a second atmosphere.

Slowly, deliberately, Jungkook guided his hand back. The press of Taehyung’s balm-smeared fingers against his lips was obscene now. Jungkook parted them, let his tongue trace, nibble. His mouth was hot and wet, and his teeth caught gently on the tips, his tongue sliding languidly over knuckles as if tasting obedience from the bone.

Taehyung’s body reacted like a traitor—his Omega howled its delight, scent wanting to spill sweet, thighs trembling with want. But he held still, sat rigid, letting it happen as if observation might protect him from drowning.

Jungkook stopped first. He let Taehyung’s wrist go as if releasing a thought he intended to return to. His chest rose, fell, rose again. The animal in him took a step back from the glass. He looked up with his mouth softened by use, eyes rimmed in that silver of restraint that is more dangerous than any red.

“…Is this—” he swallowed, steadying. “Is this what you want?”

For a moment Taehyung thought he had misheard. The First Heir of the Sovereign House—trained, carved, commanded since birth—asking an Omega if something was wanted.

His body betrayed him instantly. His Omega surged upward with eagerness, begging to nod, to bow, to say yes until his throat was raw, as long as Alpha was pleased, as long as Alpha was satisfied.

He nodded.

But the nod did not belong to the Omega alone. It belonged to the part of him that had said I want a seat and meant it.

The smallest movement. Barely a tilt. You could argue the air had moved and not him.

It was enough. Of course it was enough.

The Alpha in him surged, unleashed. He pulled Taehyung down with abrupt force, the Omega gasping as he landed beneath the weight of him. The bed groaned.

Jungkook’s mouth crashed onto his. The kiss was brutal at first, consuming—teeth scraping, lips swollen, tongue pushing past resistance. Taehyung gasped against it, the sound swallowed whole. His hands clawed at the sheets, glove squealing faintly against silk, body arching helplessly into the press above him.

Jungkook’s thigh wedged between his, forcing them apart. His hips ground down, his hardness pressing against Taehyung’s stomach through layers of cloth—insistent, feverish, marking his place. The friction drew a low sound from him, almost a growl, half caught between frustration and hunger.

Taehyung shuddered, overwhelmed. His Omega wanted to melt, to bare his throat, to surrender fully—but his mind kept watching, cataloguing, damning itself for finding heat in the First Heir’s mouth.

Between kisses, Jungkook spoke like a man confessing something between teeth. “He told me today—” a breath, a swallow, another slide of his mouth that made the sentence stagger, “—that an Alpha’s downfall begins the moment he lets himself be… steered by his Omega. That control must never turn. That love—” he said the word like it might be a trap, “—is another word for leash, and that the hand holding it must be mine.”

His hips pressed, slowly, thoughtlessly. His hand flattened over Taehyung’s ribs as if to feel the words inside. His breath went harsher; he turned his face back and took Taehyung’s mouth again as if to punish the telling and sweeten it at once. When he pulled back, the split lip shone, no longer angry, simply red.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, voice hoarse, “what you do to me.” His thumb drew a bruise-soft circle into the silk at Taehyung’s waist, the gesture at once tender and proprietary. “Maybe you’re doing it now. Maybe I’m already falling. I don’t mind—” he swallowed, and the honesty scraped him raw on the way out, “—as long as you go down with me.”

Taehyung’s breath broke on a gasp, his body trembling under him, the bed thick with storm and pine and the raw perfume of desire. And for the first time, he didn’t know if what rose inside him was only his Omega. It felt darker, sharper, hungrier than that.

Like the Dark itself had been listening, and was eager to see how far down the fall would go.

Taehyung lay there, flushed, breathing, the mirror’s red words bleeding over their doubled reflection like a curse or a cure, and thought: the fall is coming. The only question is who will take it.

Chapter Text

They didn’t stop until the knock came—two knuckles, respectful, then the slide of wood that always sounded like a blade sheathing itself. Jungkook was still kissing him when the panel moved—slow, hungry, unhurried as a man tasting the last of a forbidden thing—until his mouth left Taehyung’s with reluctance that felt like heat torn in half.

Servants entered in a triangle again—two to carry, one to witness. Their faces were the careful blankness of people who had been taught to have no eyes. Of course they knew the First Heir was in the Omega’s rooms. Knowing and acknowledging were different arts. They practiced the first perfectly and the second not at all.

Two trays, two service sets. Sovereign red wax sealed the latches. The witness recited the time, the tasters’ marks, the physician’s countersign; vials were uncapped, touched to steam, stoppered. Jungkook’s dishes drew an extra layer of ritual.

Silver domes lifted. Steam rose—clean rice, char of lacquer-grilled eel, winter greens glossed with sesame, a soup whose surface shivered like fear when touched.

When the servants withdrew, silence resumed where desire had been, the kind of silence that makes the smallest sound feel expensive.

Taehyung slid down onto the floor, legs folding under him, spine resting against the bed frame as if the wood could set him straight. He broke a square of eel with his chopsticks and only realized he was offering it up when Jungkook’s shadow fell over him. The Alpha took it without looking away from him—closed his lips over the morsel and chewed slow, thoughtful.

They ate on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, bodies arranged in an almost-accidental closeness neither of them acknowledged. Porcelain clicked softly against chopsticks. The mirror held its red curse. The room kept whatever the palace’s walls always kept.

After a time, Jungkook set his bowl aside. He dragged a knuckle along his split lip once, then caught himself and stopped. His gaze returned to the mirror, then slid to Taehyung with a deliberateness that made the Omega feel seen instead of looked at.

“What,” Jungkook said quietly, “were you trying to say before my father shut you down?”

“I don’t think it’s administered,” Taehyung said. “Not in the way your physicians want to bottle and label. It doesn’t read like a poison that sits in a cup and waits for a mouth. It reads like… something woken up inside the body. Called instead of carried.”

He lifted a hand, fingertip hovering over the ghost of a vein at his own wrist. “The frost-work around the heart—starburst, not spread. No discoloration at the throat. What if it’s something like… a curse,” Taehyung said, and did not flinch from the word. “Not the Dark as we understand it—the kind, that kills where the hand touches the neck. Something older or narrower. A different branch on the same black tree. A… naming.”

He thought of the bone cane tapping the floor, the way it had been worn warm by years of hands, the carvings sunk like old snakes in pale marrow. He thought of ironstone shining black, steam breathing like a tame ghost.

“If it’s a curse, it doesn’t need to ride in through mouth or skin. It can be tied to an object. If it’s that—” he swallowed, “—then it could be anything. A thing that is expected to be touched. Jewelry. A pen. The lacquer on a box. Something as ridiculous as a napkin folded beautifully by a very proud servant. It would pass every reagent because there’s nothing to test. Maybe the harm isn’t a substance.” He took a breath. “Maybe it’s an… instruction.”

Jungkook nodded slowly, eyes returning to the glass as if the writing might rearrange itself into a map if looked at sternly enough. “That's a very interesting theory. But at the moment,” he said, “there are too many uncertainties.”

He leaned back on his hands, the line of his throat long and unguarded for one breath, then it was gone. “Why,” he asked, and it was not a challenge so much as a curiosity that refused to hide, “are you so interested in this.”

Because Omegas were meant to care about the color of silk and the way to kneel without bruising. Because the Codex loved him best when he was soft and empty.

“Because I am,” Taehyung said simply. He let his eyes meet Jungkook’s long enough to make the truth land. “Because they didn’t give me books and they didn’t give me rooms like your study to think in, so I used the mirror. Because I have always been interested in more than the gossip the court uses to salt the meat. Because—” he breathed, and his Dark shifted awake inside the Binding Glove like a cat opening an eye, “—because the world keeps telling me I’m only a throat and a womb, and I refuse to be only the places other people fill.”

Jungkook’s gaze came back and held.

The heir’s mouth then kicked into a small grin without humor. “You picked a difficult house for that hobby.”

Taehyung let himself smile back, very slightly. “I noticed.” He leaned his forearms on his knees, weight forward, and asked. “Who do you think is behind it?”

Jungkook’s hand went into his hair and came out with frustration caught in it. He scrubbed his palm across his scalp and left a wake of dark strands lifted like a storm had just passed. “I don’t know,” he said, each word bitten. “But if I find out—”

He stopped. The muscle in his jaw moved once, twice. He didn’t look at Taehyung as he finished: “They want to intimidate us. To use this new… method… as theater. So the bond is canceled. So you never stand beside me. ” He laughed, a brief, dry sound. “Whoever it is—he’s hungry. He wants the crown hungrier than he wants sleep. And they will keep cutting pieces off people until we give them what they’re pointing at.”

He turned, the storm scent sharpening. “No one questions Yoongi,” he added, almost a sneer under the politeness his face wore when he talked of his cousin. “He plays uninterested, patient—and everyone buys it because it’s useful to buy. Don’t be fooled. He is not that uninterested in the crown.”

The words landed like thrown stones in the quiet between them. Taehyung’s mind—treacherous, careful—did what minds do: it held two things at once.

“Why do you want to help me?” he had asked Yoongi at the first Red Audience.

Yoongi’s shoulders had shifted in a minimal shrug.“Maybe we have the same ambitions. Maybe it’s time for a change.”

A change.

Yoongi had leaned close enough to breach polite distance—close enough that Taehyung had caught the cool, spare spice of him. “Maybe this is it,” he’d said, voice gentle and entirely unsweet.

Taehyung’s inner Omega had frozen—not from fear but from the electricity of proximity. And yet there had been no flirtation. No predator’s lean. No heat-strung edge. Yoongi had looked at him like a player worth inviting to the board.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Taehyung had tried.

Yoongi’s gaze had held. “I have a plan,” he’d said softly. “But I can’t get into detail—not yet. Not if Jungkook or the Sovereign use the alpha command against you.”

Now, on the floor, with Jungkook’s warmth a breath away and the mirror bleeding notes behind them, the thread pulled taut in Taehyung’s mind.

What if—

No. Yoongi would not—

Would he?

The Dark inside the glove purred its blank, animal indifference to human certainty.

Yoongi had been the first to stand close without wanting to pin him to the bed. He had given him skills an Omega was not meant to learn—how to resist the velvet blade of command; where the backdoors were, under all that law.

He would not put those hands on the mechanism of murder. Would he?

“He’s your cousin,” Taehyung said, keeping his face smooth. “You say that because you’re still angry at him—and anger makes every theory sound true for a minute.”

Jungkook’s mouth made a shape that could have been agreement or warning; it didn’t stay long enough to become either.

The knock this time was not soft. The door opened and a Red Guard filled the doorway, vermilion armor lacquered to a mirror. He bowed—correct, precise.

“Your Highness,” he said to Jungkook, then, a shade lower, “Omega.” The acknowledgment was grudged and perfunctory, but in a room like this, it was currency enough. “His Majesty has returned from the Namsaeng estate. You are summoned to the study.”

Jungkook stood in one efficient movement, the room’s air obeying him as if gravity worked differently when he changed heights. He turned and held a hand out to Taehyung without needing to look. It was not a question. It also was.

Taehyung took it.

The Guard cleared his throat. His eyes didn’t move. “His Majesty expects you alone, First Heir.”

A slow smile cut Jungkook’s mouth. He did not let go of Taehyung’s hand. “My father can expect what he likes,” he said, almost pleasant. “My Omega comes with me. Or the Sovereign can rehearse a different problem: a First Heir who does not arrive.”

The Red Guard bowed without argument, which is the purest argument a soldier is allowed. “As you command, Your Highness.”

Taehyung had never been permitted this far into the second estate; the air itself seemed surprised to be breathing near him. Lanterns burned lower. Scrolls slept behind carved lattice. The hush changed quality—less silk, more wood, the quiet of places where decisions hang like axes and the floor has been taught not to creak under their weight.

Taeyhung should not have enjoyed it. He did. Curiosity put its hands on his shoulders and steered him through a door he had only seen from the wrong side.

The study’s doors were the quiet kind of heavy. They opened inward, a bow reversed. The room received them.

Tatami underfoot, woven into hush. A long oval table lengthened the space like a blade set on the floor, its lacquered surface black enough to be a still pool. Low lamps lit paper shades from within—light like milk, like bone, like tooth’s inside of a mouth. A map of the kingdom in ink and thread clung to the far wall, the threads knotted where supply routes intersected, small black-headed pins stippling the borders like a rash. A bar trolley stood beneath the map: cut-crystal decanters with fat shoulders, a small brass burner to warm the liquor the Sovereign liked in winter, two thick-bottomed glasses already set out. An open window slit on the garden side let in the cold breath of the black pond.

Only two men waited.

Yoongi stood to the right of the table—black on black, hands clasped at the base of his spine, profile like a cut made with a very steady hand. His gaze flicked once to Taehyung and away; his scent had been flat again, nothing for Alphas to challenge.

At the head of the table, Jeon Taehwan pivoted from the window to face them. The look on his face changed by increments when he noticed Taehyung—first startle, then a brief, canine curl of lip, then stone.

“Jungkook,” he said, voice smooth as lacquer poured. He took in the joined entrance. A pause lengthened. “And you have brought your house pet.”

Taehwan’s mouth kept the shape of the insult and then forgot Taehyung existed.
He did not speak to him. He did not look again. He treated Taehyung’s presence as one treats air—useful, uncredited.

“I went,” the Sovereign said, turning his rings idly so the light found their edges, “to House Namsaeng. Their halls have always smelled of varnish and old bone. Today they smelled of fear.” The smallest curl at the corner of his mouth: not humor—enjoyment of order restored by terror. “We viewed the body. We spoke of mourning. The house physician offered something I will dignify by calling a theory.”

Yoongi did not move. Jungkook stood a line away from Taehyung, hands open and easy at his sides, as if he were unarmed even when he was never unarmed.

Taehwan let the silence bow to him. “He proposes,” he went on, almost lazily, “that what we are calling poison is not a substance at all, but a directive. Not carried, but impressed. A geas worked through bone.”

Yoongi’s lashes lowered the width of a hair. Jungkook’s head inclined; his eyes slid to Taehyung, brief, surprised—impressed despite himself. It was not an Alpha’s public look; it was a private admission that escaped before training could net it.

Taehwan continued as if narrating an unremarkable weather. “Bone remembers,” he said. “So says their little archive. Bone in the hand, bone under our feet, bone inside the chest—all of it is an instrument if you carve the right lines into the white and teach it the correct rhythm. The Namsaeng man talks of osteal resonance.”

He turned his head, not to Taehyung, past him. “A directive that seeds in the conductive nets of the heart,” he said, fingertips tapping once on the black of the table, “and waits. Not an immediate blade. A patient one—hours to a day. Frostwork where blood should be.”

Yoongi’s lashes lowered once, a shutter and release, giving no opinion. Jungkook’s jaw set along a familiar axis, the one Taehyung had already learned to read as thought refusing to be rushed. Taehyung’s Dark pricked its ears beneath the glove, not at the danger but the elegance of it: a killing that left only the absence of a fingerprint and the memory of a rhythm.

The Sovereign flicked two fingers as one might call a dog. “You will see what he means.”

He clapped, once. A door that Taehyung had not known was a door sighed open along the book wall, paper and wood being persuaded to become passage.

A Beta physician entered—older, scalp showing through hair as if thought had worn it thin from the inside. His eyes had the alert glint of a man used to being ignored until suddenly he was useful. Behind him came two servants, pushing a low wheeled table draped in a cloth the color of wet clay. Metal shone along its edges, clean and cold. The Red Guard who had become part of the room without being noticed stepped in, stationed at the jambs like punctuation.

For a second, Taehyung’s stomach fell away from him. Not fear. The clean vertigo of looking over a railing at something the world says you shouldn’t see. He had never been this close to the stillness that wasn’t sleep.

They drew back the cloth. The smell came first—clove, spirit, a medicinal sweetness that tried to dress the fact. The servant boy lay as if about to rise and apologize for the inconvenience. Someone had combed his hair. His mouth wore the gentlest of slacknesses. Death, when it is handled by professionals, is tidy.

The torso had been opened—no raggedness, just a seam drawn by a steady hand and held aside with discreet metal. The sternum had been parted and then persuaded to yield its view. What should never be visible was visible.

Taehyung leaned without realizing he was leaning. Not closer to gawk; closer to learn. His breath slowed to keep the room from noticing. The Sovereign’s eyes flicked to him—expectant, a small malicious satisfaction primed for a faint and the permission it would give to speak over him. When Taehyung did not sway, when his pupils did not blow, when his mouth did not whimper, Taehwan’s look cooled back to stone. No toy today.

The physician folded his hands briefly—a prayer to method—and then got on with it. “Your Majesty. Highness.” He did not say Omega. He pointed with a lacquered stick, the gesture exacting, respectful without demeaning the dead. “Observe the patterning along the surface of the myocardium. You see no diffuse mottling, no chemical striation. What you see is stellate. A star with too many points, radiating away from the conduction nodes—the sinoatrial here, the atrioventricular there—like frost cast outward along invisible thread. It is not directly a spread. It may be an instruction followed simultaneously.”

He tapped the very air an inch above the heart, not the flesh. “Traditional toxins travel the highways of fluid. This—this appears to have gone straight to the wiring. It alters rhythm until rhythm is a weapon.”

Yoongi stepped one pace nearer, silent. He did not breathe differently. Jungkook’s fingers flexed where they hung loose, the shadow of a fist refusing to become a fist. Taehyung watched the star in the dead man’s chest and thought of snow forming on a window from the center outward with nobody touching it.

“Our house keeps,” the physician went on, glancing once at the Sovereign for permission to possess words, “texts on osteal arts. Legitimate—bone setting, memory in ivory, Lightborn grafting. And… less legitimate corners. Thematically related, Your Majesty. Among those is described a family of maledictions that do not stain the surface so much as they impose a habit upon the interior. We call them echo-bindings, for lack of a name that offends fewer ears.”

He set the rod down and lifted a small tuning dish from the trolley’s lower shelf. It was black clay, hairline-thin, unadorned. He tapped it once with a bone wand; the note it made was low and clean. The physician held the dish near the opened chest and did nothing else.

Nothing changed that a layman could swear to. And yet the fine black radiations in the heart seemed to become easier to see, the way ink looks darker when you set a white page behind it. Or perhaps Taehyung’s eyes were answering suggestion with more obedience than he liked.

He replaced the dish. “You may also ask why it struck a servant here and a Lady in her estate. House Namsaeng’s theory—my theory—is that the binding is not tied to a single object’s presence alone, but to ritual acts performed within a triangle: instrument, witness, chosen. If the chosen is absent, the binding bites the nearest available vessel that fulfills the rule the curse was taught. Servants fit any room. Nobles fit a narrower set of rules.”

Jungkook’s mouth tilted, thinking through it, folding and unfolding steps on a board. “Instrument,” he repeated softly. “A cane. A pot. A—napkin.”

The physician did not credit him and did not dare ignore him. “Possibly, Highness. The point isn’t the item’s identity. It is the habit attached to it. The cane that announces an arrival. The pot that begins service. The napkin handed by a certain rank to a certain rank at a certain time. The curse doesn’t ride in an object so much as it rides in a practiced act.”

Yoongi’s eyes might have flicked to Taehyung for half a second. If they did, they were polite about it.

“Why didn’t it eat the whole room,” Taehyung almost said, mouth already opening before the sense of survival slapped a palm over the impulse.

The physician answered anyway, as if the question had been permitted into the air by someone with a better right to put it there. “Echo-work is expensive,” he said, nodding at the heart with its delicate black star. “It costs intent. It costs time. It costs the carver blood and something—else. Whoever is doing this keeps the circle small to keep the circle operable. And because specificity is safer. The broader the rule, the greater the chance it bites the wrong throat and invites its own ruin.”

Taehwan’s patience had the courtesy to extend through the end of the sentence. “You have performed adequately,” he said, and the Beta flinched like a man who had been kissed by a blade.

“I have already summoned,” the Sovereign went on, words falling with the measured cruelty of stones, “the best eyes left in this kingdom. The Lightborn High Adjunct will be dragged by her soft hair if she declines to come when asked. The archivist at Seoryeon who enjoys telling me how rare he is will find how very replaceable his breath is.”

The physician bowed until his back made a complaint. The servants stood with their faces arranged into that lovely state of being where nothing has ever happened in front of you, not even the things you wheeled into the room.

Taehwan lifted his hand.

“Enough,” he said. His gaze did touch Taehyung briefly as he finished. “We are done here for now.”

He tipped his chin at the physician. “Cover it.”

Cloth swallowed the stillness back. The wheeled table pivoted in the hands of men trained to move quietly while the world shook. Doors that were not doors opened their mouths to receive them.

“Dismissed.”

They were already going, the Red Guards resuming their sculpture poses, when the Sovereign’s voice—pleasant, which in him was always the most dangerous color—cut the room back into stillness.

“Stay, Omega.”

It wasn’t loud. It didn’t have to be. The word found Taehyung where he was stepping into the aisle and repinned his feet to the tatami. He felt the fine give of the weave under his soles and hated that the floor remembered his weight.

Jungkook was at his side before he could even blink, his posture straight but his jaw tight. The First Heir’s shadow fell slightly in front of him, protective, territorial. The scent of Alpha bristled beneath restraint — rain, steel, warning.

The Sovereign’s eyes lifted, faint amusement flickering at the corners. His mouth curved into that slow, unsettling smile that never reached his eyes. “Not you, son. You are dismissed.”

Jungkook didn’t move. His voice, when it came, was steady, but the words carried the weight of teeth.

“Anything you want to say to my Omega, you can say with me here.”

The Sovereign’s smile deepened. “Your Omega?” he repeated softly. “He is not yours yet.”

He poured the word yet like oil onto flame.

“Go to your mother,” Taehwan continued. “Tell her Han Isayeon’s mourning will be held in three days. The invitations to the other Houses must be dispatched before nightfall.”

Jungkook stayed still. His shoulders stiffened, the air around him thickening with defiance.

Taehwan’s voice thinned to ice. “That was not a suggestion, First Heir. It was an order.”

One of the Red Guards peeled off his position near the door, not hurrying but with intent enough to draw a line through the heir’s options. Jungkook’s teeth met; the sound was small and final, like a lock closing. His eyes cut once toward Taehyung — a promise, perhaps, or an apology, or both. “I’ll meet you in your chambers after,” he said.

Taehyung nodded. His mouth didn’t trust a word. The door closed behind Jungkook like a fourth wall sliding into place. The air changed temperature by two degrees.

Now it was only law and its chosen prey; two Red Guards stood at the doors with their blank faces trying not to learn anything they would have to die for knowing.

Taehwan crossed to the bar trolley with unhurried, proprietary grace. The decanter there held the color of old bruises. He poured a measure that would have been generous if he had been the kind of man who believed in generosity. The amber rolled up the side of the glass and came back down obediently when he turned to look at Taehyung.

“Why are you here, Omega?” he asked, gentle as a child asked for his name by a priest whose hand is on his neck.

Taehyung’s brows pulled together before he could smooth them. The question was a trick, a game where all the pieces were weighted.

Taehwan’s mouth twitched — a cruel curve of enjoyment. “I don’t repeat myself,” he murmured. “You wanted a voice so badly at my table. Use it now.”

Taehyung opened his mouth. The air in the room was heavy; his throat didn’t trust itself. Still, he forced the answer out.

“Because I am a thirdborn Omega,” he said, evenly.

“Exactly.” The Sovereign’s satisfaction clicked against the crystal glass. “You are here because your body is useful to the Crown. A fertile womb, a docile vessel. Nothing more.”

He took a slow sip, watching Taehyung from behind the rim. “You mistake this place for opportunity. It isn’t. You are here because your body carries what my bloodline requires.”

The sentence dropped its weight in the room and stood upright on stiff legs. He did not soften any of it: use, womb, heirs. He said it like inventory.

He swirled the liquid again, as if to see how cleanly it obeyed the physics of circles, then let his attention return to Taehyung as if he hadn’t left it.

He walked closer, each step soundless on the tatami. “I’ve seen your type,” he went on. “When education is lacking, Omegas begin to confuse their voices for something worth hearing. They start thinking rebellion is a form of identity. A dangerous delusion.”

Taehyung’s breath thinned.

The Sovereign stopped in front of him. He smelled of dark liquor and power left to rot. His hand lifted. For a moment, it hovered as if deciding what kind of cruelty it wanted to be. Then it touched.

The thumb traced along Taehyung’s cheek — a mockery of tenderness — before the fingers closed around his jaw. The pressure was just shy of pain.

Taehyung tried to turn his head, but the grip tightened.

Taehwan looked at him the way men look at horses they intend to breed. A slow, lecherous assessment that wasn’t about lust, not really—it was about quality control. He lifted the corner of Taehyung’s lip with a thumb as if checking a prize animal’s teeth. He seemed to like what he saw; his own mouth stretched a fraction.

“You are beautiful,” he said in the same tone used to praise a table. “No wonder you’ve wrapped my son’s sense around a finger.” The thumb slid across Taehyung’s lower lip, dragged, parted it because it could. Taehyung barely breathed. “He is young. He confuses want for love.”

The hand left his mouth only to stroke his face again, slower. He did it the way men touch things they own and also intend to ruin. “Don’t worry. I will push him in the right direction. Your leash has too much length in it. I’ll help him tighten it.”

He drank. He smiled. It went to his eyes now, but what lived there was all tendon and tooth. “I know plenty ways to make Omegas docile. I’m happy to use them if you insist on pretending to be more than you are.”

He stepped back three deliberate paces. It didn’t help. The touch remained on Taehyung’s skin like a mark.

Shame rose, sudden and violent—his Omega flung itself belly-up in his ribs, begging to show softness, pleading to smile, to say sorry, to say yes, to make this end. Rage arrived at the same time and annihilated the path that shame wanted to take. He turned the begging into static. He refused it his mouth.

Taehwan glanced toward the corner where silence kept itself comfortable. “The servants told me about your mirror,” he said conversationally. “Your lipstick.” Disdain flicked, small and exact. “Adorable.”

He emptied his glass and set it down with a click on the trolley that felt too loud under the circumstances. He turned back with something playful slung across his voice.

“I told my son yesterday what happens when an Omega speaks at a table not his own. Do you know what I told him?,” he asked, “You fuck the words out of them. You remind them the only syllable they carry is a moan.”

The sentence crawled up Taehyung’s skin like insects in summer. His Dark uncoupled in him, annoyed and hungry.

Taehwan walked two fingers along the table’s edge, the same cadence he had used on Taehyung’s face, a parody of tenderness applied to wood. “You want a chair at this table so desperately,” he observed, amused. “Fine. Sit on it.” He tapped the lacquered surface with two knuckles, a signal at a dog only he could hear. “We can breed you over it. Let you leak across the wood while my councillors watch. That’s the seat the Codex gave you. If you whimper an opinion then, perhaps it will be worth hearing—usefulness between your thighs lends a certain credibility.”

Taehyung’s hands shook. He hid them by tightening them into fists at his sides, the glove creaking once, a small animal sound of protest. He had known the man was vulgar and vain. He had not expected him to enjoy it this much.

Taehwan watched him the way a trainer watches a dog refusing a command for the first time. “You disagree,” he said pleasantly. “I can smell it on you.” His smile thinned. “You will find defiance is not a shape that suits you. At the end of the day, you are still an Omega. You need guidance.”

Taehyung’s thighs trembled, betraying him. He refused to move.

The Sovereign came back to stand in front of him. He didn’t bother to take another sip. He didn’t need props for this part.

“Get on your knees, Omega.”

The command wasn’t shouted. It didn’t have to be. Alpha command doesn’t ride in on volume; it lives under the language, a subsonic note that goes straight to the bones short of the spine. It hit Taehyung like a fall in a fast elevator—stomach gone, knees discovering gravity with new interest, the Omega inside him spilling itself into the shape the world preferred.

His body pleaded to obey. Heat flooded low. His throat wanted to bare. The instinct that shared his ribcage with his mind cried out with relief at the instruction.

Yoongi’s training breathed up from a place below panic. He had been taught—quietly, in a room that smelled of wet green and patience—to feel the command and the stillness. To stand aside from it as if it were a stream and let it go past. To count breath, find bone, dig in.

Taeyhung had promised himself he would not show that skill yet; gifts revealed too early become collars built faster.

Anger changed the arithmetic.

The Dark in him woke like a storm opening its eye. He set his jaw, found the seam of the glove with his off-hand, pressed his gloved palm to his own sternum as if to anchor to the only law he trusted. He breathed in on four, the way Yoongi had made him practice until his lips went numb.

No, he told his marrow. No.

The command pressed harder. His knees sang with the stupid joy of imminent surrender. He refused the song.

Taehyung stayed standing. Shaking, sweating, but standing.

For a heartbeat, the Sovereign only stared, confusion etching his face — the first true crack in decades of control.

Then something shifted in the air. The command, denied, twisted. Searching for a body to anchor itself in.Taehyung felt it leave him. Felt it turn.

Taehwan’s eyes widened. His throat tightened as if an invisible thread pulled. Then his knees buckled.

The Sovereign hit the floor with a dull, unroyal thud. The glass on the trolley rocked and did not fall. The echo of the impact walked itself into the corners and crouched, panting.

Silence clapped its hand over the room’s mouth. The Red Guards did not rush forward. They did not dare to make the story louder by moving. One of them, the taller, stared as if he had seen the sun turn to face the earth. Fear slicked his scent into something metal.

Taehyung stood above him, chest heaving, the faint hum of his Dark echoing in the room like a heart too large for its cage. The Sovereign looked up at him — disbelief made him look briefly human.

For one brief, burning second, Taehyung felt power. Real power. The sight of the man who ruled an empire kneeling before him was a vision he would never forget.

Then shame. Fear. The inner Omega screaming, you’ll die for this, you’ll die for this.

Taehyung turned. He walked to the doors. The Red Guards didn’t move to stop him. They wore their stone faces and failed at it. Under the lacquer and the drilled obedience, astonishment crowed, and fear laid down its debts.

“Say nothing,” came the Sovereign’s voice, low, half-growled, from the floor. “If you tell anyone of this, I will kill you.”

Taehyung did not turn. He caught the eye of the taller Guard. The man’s gaze slid away and then back like a fish that knew it had already been hooked. Their fates were written in that look. The Sovereign would not leave witnesses alive to an humiliation.

Taehyung left. He did not run. The corridor’s lamps breathed. His glove whispered against his thigh with each step.

He had gone barely twenty paces when a sound from the room behind found him—the dull, uncompromising sound of a body falling to the floor.

He didn’t look back. He did not slow. He carried the sound with him like a piece of metal in the mouth and walked faster for the taste.

Chapter Text

Taehyung was half-sure when he slid the panel of his chamber that Jungkook would already be there—the storm scent coiled in the corners, the heat in the shape of a body on his sheets. He found only emptiness.

He sat on the edge of the bed and let the day come back and arrange itself in his skull, bead by bead on a string that cut the fingers of whoever threaded it.

His Omega was shivering inside him—not theatrical, not the pretty tremor that gets praised by Alphas at parties—real, animal shaking. The part of him built for obedience panicked at the rebellion, ashamed that his body had dared contradict a command. A powerful Alpha had been angry. A more powerful one had been humiliated. This is how you die, the training whispered. This is how a leash gets shortened.

Cold pressed through him though the room held a civilized heat. The kind that comes from winter gathering at all the windows at once; the kind that comes from remembering the handle of a door you opened and cannot now shut; the kind that comes from a dead servant boy’s face kept unnaturally neat on a wheeled table, black star blooming where stars do not belong.

He stood and went to the bathroom. The tub was hewn stone, deep enough to drown a thought. He turned the brass to scalding and watched steam lift from the surface in tired silk. When he slid in, heat took him whole and gave him back in pieces. His hair lifted and curled in the wet air; his skin flushed the color of pomegranate flesh.

Taehyung lay back until the edge of the tub pressed his shoulder blades and let his eyes go half-closed. His mind did not obey.

It recited the liturgy of the last hour: the command that slid under language like a hook; his marrow’s eager relief at being told what to be; the old stillness Yoongi had taught him lighting up inside him like a temple lamp. His refusal. The way the room had tilted as a command changed direction. The soft, stupid thud of the Sovereign’s knees meeting tatami. The Sovereign’s eyes, wide with a human expression he had never permitted himself in public.

Panic rose like bile. Under it, something grim and clean licked its teeth: satisfaction so sharp it embarrassed him. You made him kneel, it whispered, low and shocked with its own joy.

A beast in him had seen a larger beast bend and had purred. And he would pay for that purr. He knew it. Proud Alphas do not forgive humiliation; they compost it into punishments.

Hot water lapped at his collarbones; gooseflesh rose despite it. Taehyung sank until the water kissed his jaw, then sat up, breath loud in the tile. Steam lifted from him like incense.

Had any Omega ever done it before? The thought came bleak and bright. Yoongi had taught him how to let the command pass through, how to starve the hooks. He had not spoken of reversing it—of turning a velvet hand into a leash for someone else’s throat.

The tub cooled. He rose, water breaking from his skin in clean lines. He combed the water out of his hair and left the ends damp to curl how they chose. When he returned to the bedchamber a tray had appeared by the low table—teapot with its small gold-soldered mouth, cups thin, two sweets dusted with black sugar.

Taehyung poured out a cup with hands that did not quite behave. He then glanced toward the mirror—habit, hope of returning to the only surface that had allowed him sentences—and stopped.

The plum script—his dangerous, urgent handwriting, his attempt to make thought visible—was gone. No ghost of it remained. Someone had set to with vinegar and salt, with a cloth and obedience, until the glass showed only what it was intended to show: a body to be used.

The world loves an empty mirror. Especially when an Omega stands in front of it.

The cup chattered against its saucer. He steadied it with a breath and the kind of smile one uses to hide how rails bite through gloves.

Of course. No words for Omegas. No thoughts unless an alpha has furnished them for you.

He drank because what else was there to do but do the thing laid out in front of him. He dressed in the night clothes that bared what alphas liked bared and hid only the places the Codex considered politically inconvenient.

Taehyung lay down without wanting to. He thought of Jungkook long enough to make his throat ache. He was confused that he wanted the man. Confused that it wasn’t only the animal in him that wanted. He fell anyway—sleep taking him the way a tide takes a thing left on shore.

He woke knowing he was not alone.

It was not Jungkook’s scent. The man was older; the Beta designation sat on him like a uniform. He wore physician grey—cut clean, good cloth, modesty performed with expense. His hair thinned at the crown as if thought had rubbed it down. His mouth was small and prudish. A silver tray rested on a stand beside him, instruments shining in a neat, murderous row: tongue depressor, reflex hammer trimmed in leather, a vial of clear fluid like a captured tear, folded gauze, a precision caliper, a small brown bottle with a paper label. A Red Guard stood at the door with the beautiful blankness of those who pretend to be furniture.

Cold ran its hand down Taehyung’s back. He sat abruptly, sheets dragged to his hips, and heard the room reassemble around his motion.

The Beta rose as Taehyung sat up. He did not bow as low as a man would bow to a Sovereign; he bowed exactly as low as a physician bows to a possession that belongs to kings. “Omega,” he said. “I am Physician Jo of the Sovereign Household. I am specialized in Omega health and maintenance. I am here to see to your condition and ensure that you are… healthy.”

The pause he left around condition was deliberate, a small, velvet-edged insult.

“Who sent you?” Taehyung asked, though the question insulted both of their intelligences.

“My summons comes from the Crown,” the Beta said, dead-leaf courteous. “We will proceed.”

He did not ask permission. He began. A notebook appeared from the leather case; he noted date, hour, ambient temperature, the time since last meal. Questions, delivered with an unblinking calm, not interested in the answers beyond their utility: appetite? sleep? nausea? last heat cycle’s duration and intensity? cramps? discharges? scent fluctuations? any episodes of dizziness, faintness, mood disarray?

Then the hands. “Which is your dominant hand,?” the Beta asked without looking up.

“My right,” Taehyung said, truthful, trapped in the child’s habit of answering questions when men ask them in that tone.

Without asking, the Beta took his wrist and peeled the glove with finicky care, as if he were unwrapping an instrument, not a man’s skin. The air kissed his palm; the Dark under the bones stirred, curious and offended.

Physician Jo examined. Thumb pressed to the heel of Taehyung’s hand, to the pads of his fingers, to the pulse where the glove’s seam had left a slight indentation. He spread Taehyung’s fingers like a fan and measured span and strength with the calipers. He turned the hand over and traced the tendons along the back as if reading a music written for bones. The Dark answered each touch with a different temperature of interest.

The physician lifted Taehyung’s left hand next and repeated the ritual, less intent. He looked down at both of them side by side, as if judging matching porcelain for hairline faults. “Do you train the gift?” he asked.

“I—” Taehyung’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”

“How do you manage it,” the Beta said without looking at his face, eyes pleasant on the architecture of tendons.

“I am getting better,” Taehyung said through his teeth, refusing to elaborate. He would not speak Yoongi’s name for free in a room where the walls had ears and tastes. “At controlling it.”

“Hmm,” said the physician, noncommittal, but something flickered along his mouth as if a problem in his head had just found its solution and then sat down, smug. “Interesting.”

Taehyung leaned forward a fraction. “What?”

The Beta ignored him with professional grace. He set both of Taehyung’s hands neatly back in his lap. “You will require a new Binding Glove,” he announced.

“Why?” The word was out before Taehyung could civilize it.

The Beta let a small smile lift one corner of his mouth. It was not kind. It was the expression of a man who has never had his edicts questioned by an object. “Because what you possess,” he said, “is remarkably strong. To control it, a proper fit is necessary. Null-thread woven tighter. Your current glove is… lax.”

He reached into his coat and produced a glove. It was black—but not glossy like the one Taehyung wore before. Matte as if it drank light. The cuff ended in a narrow band of reinforced leather, through which a tiny steel loop had been set. The loop was threaded with a fine chain. On the end of the chain sat a lock so small it might have been a toy if it had not been real.

The Beta slid it over Taehyung’s right hand with an intimacy that felt obscene. He tugged the cuff tight, not roughly. He closed the lock with a soft click that hurt worse than a slap.

Taehyung’s Dark recoiled as if the glove had teeth and then surged, angry and claustrophobic, testing the seams, finding nothing to bite, throwing its weight against it. It did not like being pressed into finer channels. It purred anyway, ugly and low, as if it had decided to study the cage before it ate it

Jo held up the key—a sliver of blackened steel with a tooth at one end and the sovereign crest at the other. “This,” he said, “goes to your trainer.” He let the title hang; the man’s name did not interest him enough to speak aloud. “He can remove the glove when he deems fit.”

Taehyung swallowed. It felt like someone had stitched his mouth shut by stitching his hand instead.

“Almost done,” the physician said, the kind of smoothness you use to coax a child over the last step of a long stair. He returned to the tray and lifted a brown bottle. The thread seal broke with a whisper. He shook one pill into the porcelain lid and held it up between two fingers. Small. Pale. Coated to slide without argument.

A rush of slick terror sluiced Taehyung’s spine. “What is that.”

Jo saw the fear. He liked it the way a collector likes adding a rare piece to a shelf—quietly, personally. The small smile arrived again. “Nothing to distress yourself with. Supportives. Vitamins, if you prefer a nontechnical word.” His gaze flicked once to Taehyung’s throat. “For your health.”

“I don’t need them.” Taehyung’s voice sharpened. “I’m perfectly healthy.”

Displeasure tightened Beta’s mouth; the professional mask went from serene to pedagogical. “I am the physician,” he said softly. “I will tell you what you need.”

He looked to the Red Guard. The act of looking made the Guard straighten, become taller. The physician returned his gaze to Taehyung. “You can open your mouth and take the pill,” he said, still polite, “or I will have no choice but to call staff to hold you while I administer it.”

The shape of the room shifted in Taehyung’s stomach. He knew exactly how that would look: hands on shoulders, wrists pinned, a thumb and forefinger on the jaw until the hinge obeyed. A pill pressed into the salt-wet of the tongue. A hand under the chin. Swallow.

He opened his mouth.

The pill touched his tongue.

He swallowed.

It held the taste of nothing and the aftertaste of a decision made for you. Taehyung could feel it—the pill—moving not in his stomach but in a map carved under his tongue, then along the river between his ears. It spread the way ink spreads into paper too willing to drink.

Jo turned toward the door. “Guard,” he called. “Ensure this Omega receives one dosage daily, at breakfast. You will witness the swallow. If there is… an attempt to circumvent”—his mouth gave the word a pleasant shape—“vomiting, spitting, palming—double the dose. If twice fails, we will escalate.”

The Red Guard nodded and bowed. “Sir.”

The Beta paused at the threshold to look back at Taehyung, gaze making a neat inventory: the new cuff locked like a wedding band for the wrong part of the body. “You’ll find,” he said pleasantly, “that routine makes everything easier. Attune yourself to it. It will help.”

Help what, Taehyung wanted to ask. The leash sit nicer on my throat?

But his mouth had forgotten what questions taste like. He sat very still in the bright clean of it and realized, with a steadiness that would have terrified him if he had not been so calmly incapable of terror, that whatever the little coin was supposed to do, it had started doing it.

Taehyung listened to the sound the latch made. Then he listened to the way his heart went on beating as if it had not understood that something simple had been taken from it. He pressed the locked glove against his chest and felt nothing but leather and bone and a calm he did not want.

This is how a kingdom reminds a beautiful mouth that it is only supposed to open for certain things.

******

The bed learned his weight and kept it the way obedient furniture does. Taehyung lay on his back because what else was there to do when thought had been turned into a shallow pond. His mind dragged a finger along the surface and made no ripples. The Omega in him had been gentled into a curl—breathing small, dreaming small, pleased with nothing in particular. Calm had been poured into him from a brown glass throat and now it set.

If he had listened properly to the body the kingdom was so intent on managing, he might have heard the faintest voice under the calm—muffled, like a memory speaking through a door. Perhaps just one detail would have been enough to find him—bone ringing like a bell, a man’s knees finding the floor, the taste of No said to his own marrow—but the room was not built to carry memory. It was built to erase it. Even the mirror had been scoured until it shone like a blade; all the plum words he’d dared had been stripped away.

The latch shifted. He did not flinch.

Jungkook came in like weather breaking a drought—the storm-smell of him licked the room, sharp and metallic, then thickened when he saw Taehyung’s face.

“I should have been here earlier,” he said, breath punched thin by haste. “He sent me out—house to house—dispatching invitations like a courier. Like a damn errand boy.” The last words tasted of old insult and new rage.

He was restless enough that, if he had not smelled of anger and rain, he might have scented the glaze—the veil pulled down behind Taehyung’s eyes, the unnatural stillness yawning under his skin.

He reached the bed, knelt on the mattress, and pushed the damp fringe off Taehyung’s temple with the rough care of a man who has never learned gentleness as a separate skill. His thumb lingered. “What did he want,” he asked, softer. “What did my father say?”

Taehyung turned his head slightly, obedient to the hand, blinked at the ceiling.

There had been something. The room with the table like a black river. The way gravity forgot the Sovereign for a breath and then remembered.

But the new stillness found those facts unimportant; the drug arranged a hierarchy where humiliation and danger weighed less than the pleasure of being stroked by an Alpha’s hands. He shook his head, small, compliant. It felt accurate not to say.

Jungkook’s brows drew. He had expected fire or at least heat. He looked around instead, hunting where the blaze had gone. His gaze caught on the mirror—blank, burnished, humiliatingly empty—then swept to the dressing table, to the air itself. “They took this book from you too,” he said, bitter amusement quickly turning to worry. “Of course they did.”

Taehyung turned more slowly, that sentence landing without landing. When he didn’t react, something changed in Jungkook’s face. He took Taehyung’s jaw between both hands and made him look, pushed Iris to Iris as if the truth were written like script there. He saw it then: the eerie quiet laid over the pupils, the curtain settled neatly behind the eyes.

“What did he do to you?”

Anger rose off him hot enough to make the air ache. The Omega shrank at the rise, a small helpless folding of shoulders, belly tucking, throat wanting to show soft skin. Make Alpha calm. Make Alpha pleased. Be smaller. Be quiet. 

Jungkook’s gaze swept the room again, hungry for evidence. He didn’t miss the bottle. Brown glass, placed with the false innocence of necessary objects on the low shelf by the screen. He went to it as if it had been living and needed to be caught. He turned it slowly in his hand. “Did you take these?” Jungkook asked.

Taehyung nodded. The swell of relief at being properly cared for shivered from his Omega like warm water poured along a spine. Good boy, said the new voice that had moved into him; good to do as you’re told. You are better when you are quiet.

Jungkook’s mouth flattened into something ugly and clean. The bottle left his hand and met the wall with a sound that surely made the servants in three rooms flinch without knowing why. The bottle exploded into bright syllables; pills pattered over the lacquer ; dust of brown glass glittered on the floor, pretty the way broken things sometimes are.

“He doesn’t get to do this,” Jungkook said, pacing. “He does not get to pour himself into your veins.” His hands flexed and found nothing. “He will not drug you docile and keep me grateful for it.”

The movement and raised voice plucked the Omega like a string. Taehyung shrank another measured inch, and when his voice came, it had traded sarcasm for something innocent and raw. “Alpha… is Alpha mad at me?”

The change in Jungkook was immediate. Rage slid off his face as if someone had poured water over banked coals. “No,” he said, voice sanded down. He came back to the bed—gait slowed, temper put back on its leash. He reached for Taehyung’s crown, patted, smoothed, fingers combing through the damp-wavy ends that always refused perfect discipline. “No, never at you,” he said, and it made something proud and stupid in Taehyung glow. “At him,” Jungkook added. His thumb found the curved shell of Taehyung’s ear, rubbed once. “Only at him.”

The Omega inside Taehyung uncurled, soothed by contact as if freshly fed. He let himself be gathered. Jungkook eased them both back, a hand to Taehyung’s ribs guiding, until they lay along the length of the bed— the Omega’s face tucked under his jaw. Jungkook’s hand threaded slow through hair, again and again, the rhythm so sure the body mistook it for the rhythm of a lullaby.

“I’ll handle it in the morning,” Jungkook said, tone hard where the words were soft.

“No one harms you while you wear my scent.”

They woke to a knock drilled into etiquette—three even taps—and the whisper of wood. Taehyung was face-first against Jungkook’s sternum, the hard plane warmer than any pillow, mouth filled with the scent of Alpha the way temples fill with incense. Jungkook’s arm was heavy over his hip.

Servants came in bearing the choreography—two trays, one witness. Behind them, a Red Guard stepped half into the room.

It was the Guard, not the servant, who spoke the line that changed the air. “The Omega is to take his prescribed medication. Standing order.” In his palm: a replacement bottle. They had noticed the crime scene on the floor and tidied the narrative to fit it.

Jungkook had rolled to his feet the moment the Guard’s shadow crossed the door. “He will not,” he said, not loud, all edge. He walked to the threshold until he and the red lacquer were in conversation at breath-distance. “You can tell my father that.”

The Guard did not step backward. His eyes remained fixed on an imagined spot above Jungkook’s left shoulder. “Apologies, Your Highness,” he said. “This is by His Majesty’s personal order. Not even the First Heir may countermand it.”

Jungkook’s teeth tapped once—small, controlled fury. “Fine,” he said, the word made of stone. He reached. He took the bottle as if accepting a ceremonial gift he intended to melt down later. He turned back toward the bed and the boy in it that the kingdom insisted on calling vessel when they needed him docile and Omega when they wanted a leash to pull.

He unscrewed the cap. He shook one pill into his palm.

“Open for me,” he said to Taehyung, voice warm with the gentle authority his body was built to wear.

Taehyung’s body, trained to offer, trained to please, trained to obey—opened his mouth when Jungkook’s shadow fell over him. The calm still sat along his veins like something holy and anesthetic; it asked nothing of him but compliance. The Omega in him offered his tongue like a sacrament, pleased at performing well.

Jungkook’s fingers came to his mouth, two of them—index and middle—resting feather-light on his lower lip, then pushing past it, pressing down on the tongue. Heat walked along Taehyung’s spine where Alpha skin met the wet of his mouth. No pill followed. Only the intimate intrusion—his breaths forced to find a path around the fingers.

Jungkook’s eyes held his, steady, instructive. “Swallow,” he said softly.

Taehyung swallowed nothing. A small muscle under his jaw obeyed the shape of the word. His throat completed an action it had been programmed for since boyhood.

Jungkook turned to the doorway with a face that knew how to lie without blinking. He raised the bottle a fraction like a toast executed for a foreign dignitary. “Done,” he said coolly. “You may go.”

If the Guard had possessed the nerve to call him a liar, the narrative would have forked in blood. He did not. He held Jungkook’s stare for the second that duty requires, bowed the degree that law allows, and stepped back, sliding the door with mechanized propriety. Servants made themselves emptier and poured out of the room until only the smell of rice and sesame remained to argue they had been there at all.

Jungkook stared at the bottle. “I’m going to find out what these are,” he said, voice low now, almost for the bottle’s benefit. “This trick will work only once. The Guard will run to tell him. My father will tighten the noose. He will try to watch you swallow.”

He looked at Taehyung’s mouth after he said it. He didn’t hide the way the sight angered him. He didn’t try.

“I’ll be back.” Jungkook kissed Taehyung’s temple so quickly it could have been a shadow and then was gone.

The room felt emptier when he left than it had the night before. The panel slid shut, and the morning came in further to take his place, light platinum on the mirror that pretended it had never known ink.

Taehyung sat up. The calm inside him began to thin, threads pulling, the edges of thought returning as if a tide had finally turned its head. He felt the Dark under the new glove stir resentfully and then subsist. He felt his Omega lifting its head from Jungkook’s chest even though Jungkook was gone, sniffing the air for storm and getting only rice, tea, the shadow of petrichor.

His own thoughts came back like birds, wary, one at a time to a wire they’d been shot off of. Names perched. Shapes returned. The mirror didn’t show him his words, but the words remembered him anyway.

*******

The calm did not leave; it peeled. It came off him in thin, obscene curls, as if someone were stripping old varnish from a table and finding the wood beneath darker than it had any right to be. In its place the real weather returned—bitter and black around the edges. Rage.

Of course the Sovereign would take this tack. Of course he would reach for a leash disguised as medicine and call it care.

Trust is a kind of danger all its own. But the memory of Jungkook’s fury felt real.

If Jungkook hadn’t come—hadn’t thought with his hands and lied with his mouth at the exact right moment—Taehyung understood the shape his days would have taken. A careful daily quiet, a pleasant fog. The world’s teeth blunted for him until he could be carried, arranged, bred.

He felt the echo of that voice still, living damply under his skin like a tenant that refused to vacate. Good boy, it said, and the flattery was velvet over a gag. Good to do as you’re told. You are better when you are quiet.

He shook his head, hard enough that the new lock at his wrist bit his skin. He needed edges. Action. The chamber offered him a curatorial silence—soft pillows, unblinking screens, a mirror that had been scrubbed until it reflected only the shape the Codex approved. Nothing in it could be used as a tool. That was the point of rooms like this.

When they came to fetch him, he was grateful in a way he would not have dignified with language. A Red Guard delivered the summons with the exact amount of voice a guard is allowed. Escort for training. No mention of what else the day expected of him. No mention of obedience, though he could smell that word everywhere now.

He expected to find the conservatory empty or, worse, peopled by a stranger with a clean, loyal smile. Instead—relief, edged and humiliatingly strong—Yoongi stood with his back to the winter light, black on black like someone had cut his silhouette out of the morning and pinned it to the glass.

Yoongi didn’t move toward him. He studied him—eyes cataloguing for damage like a jeweler looking at a gem whose clarity to the naked eye meant nothing. Then, with a brief flick of gaze toward the door, he lifted two fingers and angled them away from the entrance.

They walked to where a stand of bamboo made a screen against the glass and the pond. The light here was a washed gold. The air was private.

Yoongi set his hands behind his back with the exact unremarkable control of a man keeping knives from showing at his cuffs. “Tell me,” he said quietly, “what happened with the Sovereign.”

It shouldn’t have surprised Taehyung that he suspected something. Yoongi’s mind was an archive of other men’s mistakes, and he had the irritant habit of being right without needing to show his work. Still—the question slid into Taehyung’s ribs where the threat of the command still lived like a bruise.

Say nothing, said the Sovereign’s voice, the memory of it still damp and heavy. If you tell anyone of this, I will kill you.

He looked back at Yoongi. The Alpha had always treated him like a mind with a body attached instead of the other way around. If there was a place loyalty could land that wasn’t stupid, it might be here.

Yoongi raised his hand and counted on elegant fingers. “I know three things,” he said. “First—two Red Guards died the night you left the study.” A breath. “That is not a rare weather pattern in this palace, but the timing is too clean to call coincidence.” Second finger. “A Beta physician requisitioned a new Binding Glove for you—proprietary weave, meant to be locked. The key was handed to your trainer.” He let the word sit. “Which is to say, me.” Third finger. “The Sovereign has ordered me to extend your” —his mouth almost made a face at the word— “education. Not only your Dark. Also obedience protocols.”

Taehyung’s teeth found each other. The sound was a small, clean bite in the humid air.

Yoongi lowered his hand. “Those three together draw a shape,” he said mildly. “It looks like something happened to the Sovereign in a room you were in.” He tilted his head a fraction. “Would you like to tell me about it?”

Would like to. A gift, that phrase. In this house, Omega mouths were almost always invited only to say yes. Taehyung looked at the black chain at his wrist—the key missing like a tooth. He already knew what he would do. He exhaled the truth in pieces, each piece feeling like contraband in his mouth.

“When Jungkook was dismissed,” Taehyung said slowly, pulling the words out of the place where fear had tucked them, “his father wanted to… remind me of my place.” Remind was a polite word that implied it needed to be. Yoongi’s eyes didn’t narrow; disgust ghosted his scent—a cool spice soured.

“He tried to make me kneel,” Taehyung went on. “He used alpha command.” He swallowed, the glove whispering where it met his sleeve. “I didn’t want to show him what you taught me. But I was—” he smiled without humor, “—so angry.”

Yoongi’s eyes brightened, clean and lethal. “You stood it,” he said, not a question but an appraisal sharpened to a pleasure.

“Yes.”

The gleam deepened; victory, but not vainglory—engineer’s pride in a mechanism he had built working precisely under stress.

Taehyung swallowed. “Not… just that. The command went—wrong. It didn’t die. It turned. It hit him.”

The mask on Yoongi’s face slid a finger-width. “The—the Sovereign knelt?” he asked, and real disbelief put a color in his voice Taehyung had not heard before.

Taehyung nodded. Slow.

For the first time since Taehyung had met him, Yoongi’s composure cracked in a way that wasn’t anger. His head tipped back, his throat found a sound that had never lived there in front of Taehyung—a laugh, clean and incredulous. It wasn’t loud. But the laugh racked the careful lines of his body like a string pulled on purpose. His eyes, usually black and unforthcoming, flashed—surprise, yes, but topped with something sharp and sweet as a razor-candy: malicious delight. His mouth, which kept its secrets with a professional diligence, grinned wide enough to show a shy of tooth. For a second he looked younger and more dangerous than he ever allowed himself to be in rooms owned by other men.

“I would have paid for that,” Yoongi said, unrepentant delight still ghosting the edges of his mouth. “Anything. I would have sold a minor shrine to watch the great Jeon Taehwan eating floor.”

He clapped once, a dry, delighted semaphore. “And it explains a great deal,” he went on briskly, fanning the cards: “Why two Guards are suddenly not in the census anymore. Why your glove carries a lock suitable for a city gate. Why my orders now include teaching you to fetch and sit.”

The smile faded. The knife of his attention slid back into its sheath of caution. “You poked a dangerous animal,” he said. “We will not always be fast enough. He will not forgive this. He specializes in punishments.”

“It’s already started,” Taehyung said, the bitterness clean in his mouth. “The Beta physician put me on pills.”

The grin went out as if someone had pinched the candle. “What pills.”

“I don’t know what they call them. It was…” He searched for a word, then found only an absence wearing a mask. “A calm. Like my thoughts were… muted.”

Yoongi clicked his tongue against his teeth, a small clock ticking. “Lacuna,” he said. “The court name is lacuna. Old-school obedience pharmacology—the kind brothel-schools like to use when a patron is impatient. It blunts affect, slows associative thinking, dulls the Dark’s prickle, and renders Omega instincts pliable to command.” His lip twitched. “They call it ‘quietus’ in the alleys, which at least has the decency to sound like what it does.”

He tipped his head, studying Taehyung’s pupils, the way his breath moved, the set of his mouth. “But you’re through it, mostly.”

“Because of Jungkook.” He had meant to say the First Heir. The name came out personal without asking permission. Yoongi’s brows went up anyway. “He faked giving it to me this morning. Sent the Guard away satisfied.”

Yoongi’s expression did something odd—an involuntary calculation erasing and rewriting itself in the same breath. The lines of contempt reserved for Jeon blood didn’t find their usual place. “Jungkook did,” he said, as if testing the sentence for splinters. He filed it somewhere behind his eyes; Taehyung could almost see the drawer slide shut on wordless, reluctant credit.

“His improvisation will work once,” Yoongi said. “Twice if the Guard is stupid, which he is not. My uncle is thorough. He will have you watched swallow it next time.”

A pause. “There is no formal countermeasure for lacuna.” His mouth made a shape like a laugh and did not let it out. “Why would there be? We do not make antidotes to compliance in a kingdom that worships it.”

He began to move—four measured steps along the rill, back again—the kind of walk men do when they are hunting a thought that doesn’t want to be found in civilized company. The bamboo hissed softly at every turn. He stopped, nodded to something that had whispered in his private ear. “My father bought a thing when these… heart-etchings began,” he said. The briefest shadow crossed his face; filial piety here was less a matter of love than of accounting for debt. “He has been careful to the edge of paranoia because his body gives him reasons to be. He feared the Sovereign would use illness as etiquette for removing him. He prepared.”

Yoongi looked back. “Have you heard of shellvine?”

Taehyung shook his head.

“A leaf used in the old campaigns when Alpha poisoned Alpha and called it strategy,” Yoongi said. “Bitter as penance. We brew it into a tea and it lays a film along the mouth and stomach for a time—minutes, not hours. It slows uptake, sometimes stops it altogether. A primer for refusing what men want to put in you.”

He lifted a cautionary finger. “It is a crude tool. It does not know poison from food. You drink shellvine and for a while nothing gets in. If you are not careful with timing, the body starves politely.” He tilted his head, mouth thinning. “You may have wondered why my father looks like the illness and the cure are arguing and neither is willing to admit defeat. Now you know part of it.”

Taehyung pictured Yoongi’s father thin beneath cloth; the way his rings hung looser than they should. He nodded once. “We can get it?”

“I will have it in your rooms,” Yoongi said. “Servants are trained to respect the ritual of tea, not identify it. Change the leaves in the caddy and no one’s life will change but yours.”

He stepped closer, voice softening into instruction without mercy. “Listen to me. You will drink at least two cups. Three, if you can keep your stomach steady. Then, if they force a pill into you, swallow quickly. Don’t let it sit in your mouth; mucosa is greedy. Let the shellvine do its work.”

It came together with the clean click of a plan’s first draft. Taehyung could see now why Min Yoongi moved like a man who liked boards and pieces and the manners of games.

“Thank you,” Taehyung said, and it wasn’t the useless gratitude an Omega is made to perform. It was cross-grained, ugly, sincere.

“We’ll try it my way until Isayeon’s mourning to see if it works,” Yoongi said.

Han Isayeon’s name shifted the air back to its old taste: bone varnish, polished malice. Taehyung found himself thinking in that direction with the ease of a mind following a well-worn rut. “Do you have an idea… who,” he asked, quiet. “Behind the deaths.”

The glint returned to Yoongi’s eyes—the one Taehyung had learned to weigh with care because it promised both clarity and trouble. “I have a strong theory,” he said. He saw the second question bloom in Taehyung’s mouth and killed it with a small, courteous lift of his fingers. “I’ll give it to you when it stops being a theory and becomes a lever.”

Taehyung ground his heel into the mat, irritated and unsurprised. He looked at Yoongi and wondered, not for the first time, where the edges of the man’s plan were. How many moves out did he always see before allowing himself to blink.

“Why does the Sovereign trust you,” Taehyung asked, genuine curiosity edging the words, the habit of being underestimated by precisely the people who mattered. “More than his sons, sometimes. Why doesn’t he smell the plan on you.”

Yoongi’s mouth made a small, private smirk.

“Because I tell him the wrong truths in the right rooms,” he said. “Because I let him imagine he invented my loyalty. Because I understand the theater of power and play my part without breaking character, even when I am backstage and alone.” He tipped his chin, not unkind. “The question isn’t whether I can play my part. The question is whether you can play yours.”

“My part,” Taehyung repeated, and the glove on his right hand creaked when his fingers curled.

“You need to make him believe the leash is back on,” Yoongi said. He didn’t soften it. “You need to remember the way the pill felt and reflect it outward, without swallowing another. Walk slowly. Speak softly. Let opinions pass through your mouth like steam, not substance. Simper for him if you can do it without throwing up. Apologize with your eyes.” A beat. “Give him a perfect performance. Then drink your shellvine and swallow his medicine where it can do the least.”

He took one slow step closer, the bamboo hissing approval. “Can you do that.”

Taehyung thought of the Sovereign’s hand on his face, of the thumb that had lifted his lip as if checking the state of a horse’s teeth. He thought of the key in Yoongi’s sleeve, the lock at his wrist, Jungkook’s fingers pressing his tongue and commanding him to swallow nothing. He thought of the word kneel breaking and falling back on the mouth that spoke it.

“I can do it,” Taehyung said finally, voice even. “I can be quiet for now.”

Yoongi inclined his head. “Good,” he said, and turned, already thinking six steps away.

He looked back, the glint in his eyes backlit by something that was not kindness and not unkindness, simply intent. “Let him keep wishing for stillness; he’ll learn the ocean drowns most prettily when it looks calm.”

Chapter Text

Jungkook was waiting when Taehyung slid the panel aside; a dark figure poured into the corner of the bed, hair finger-ruffled, tunic half-fastened, scent worked raw with worry.

Taehyung sat. The mattress bowed toward Jungkook’s weight until their knees nearly touched. The new lock at Taehyung’s wrist whispered against the quilt like a quiet threat.

“I dug,” Jungkook said without preface, voice pitched low, as if the room itself were a witness he didn’t trust. “Not openly. Different kitchens.” His jaw clicked. “They call it lacuna,” he said finally. “An obedience pill.”

Taehyung’s mouth didn’t move. He knew that word now. He knew what it did. He knew what it wanted to make out of him.

Jungkook’s jaw ticked. “There are other names in uglier parts of the kingdom, but that is the one the court here use because it sounds clean.” He ran a hand back through his hair hard enough to disrupt the order the servants had left him in, and when his gaze returned to Taehyung, something shadowed it that didn’t belong to anger alone. Hurt. Confusion. A boy standing over a set of truths and not yet being willing to kneel to any of them.

“I asked myself,” he said, slow, as if the words were heavy to lift, “if my mother is on them.”

Taehyung’s Omega stiffened, not at Jungkook, but at the shape of the pain in the room. Jungkook rarely let anything he felt out to be looked at.

“Since I was a child,” Jungkook went on, eyes fixed on a point above them as if the lattice of the ceiling were a map of stars only he could see, “she has been this way. Quiet. Soft. As if the world happened in a room next to the one she was in.” He laughed once, without humor. “I thought that’s what Omegas are. That’s what I was taught. That’s what he—” the word father snagged in his mouth; he swallowed it— “drilled into me.”

He did not look at Taehyung when he let the lesson out of his mouth. He spoke it like a catechism learned in a hard voice. “He said: an Omega is a door—you open it. You fuck it. You shut it. That’s all it’s for. He said: you don’t converse with a sheath. You use it. He said: if it speaks, it is because you’re not filling it with anything useful.” Jungkook’s lip lifted a fraction, never quite making it to a sneer.

The words lived in the room like a stain. 

“My father considered it training,”he said. “He called it loyalty lessons. My first was when I was twelve. He brought in a omega girl younger than me and said, ‘She’s acting out. Teach her what submission tastes like.’”

He blinked once, slow. “He showed me how to hold her down. How to silence her.”

“And then,” Jungkook said, voice splintering, “he looked at my mother and smiled.”

He dragged his teeth over the inside of his cheek. The flash in his eyes went a shade darker, then paled, anger moving through its phases without relief. “I never questioned it,” he said. “That this was how it should be. That the leash was part of the attire.”

He looked down then—at Taehyung, not through him. “Until you.”

It came out quiet, stripped of theater. He didn’t look away quickly after all; his gaze held for a count, then slid back up to the ceiling as if he were trying to memorize a constellation that kept refusing to hold still. “Only after you,” he said to the wood and the lantern-light, “did I start wondering what my mother would be if she hadn’t been managed. What she would read if she were allowed to keep a book long enough for the ink to stain her fingers. What questions she’d ask if she knew the sound of her own voice in a room where alphas weren’t waiting to interrupt.”

He closed his eyes, briefly, as if even the imagination of it hurt.

“—and I will not tolerate that happening to you,” he said, opening them. “I won’t have you turned into a piece of furniture that smiles. But I don’t—” the admission tasted like iron—“I don’t have a plan yet. There’s no counter to lacuna. They designed it that way.”

Taehyung let breath out between his teeth. “There is a hedge,” he said. “Shellvine.”

Jungkook’s head snapped. “What?”

“An old campaign leaf,” Taehyung went on. “It coats the mouth and stomach. It slows the way the body lets a thing in. Not an antidote. A… varnish.” He hesitated for the necessary lie, then didn’t adjust it. “Yoongi told me.”

Jungkook huffed. Not derisive. Not quite. A sound like a single laugh someone had stepped on. “Yoongi,” he said—just the name, the way men say the name of a rival they haven’t decided to kill yet. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let his hand fall. “He is terrifyingly knowledgeable,” he conceded after a moment, grudging admiration like a burr stuck to the word. “He collects solutions the way other men collect knives. Sometimes they’re the same.”

He ground his molars once; the muscle in his jaw made a small, violent bloom. “I can’t read what he wants,” Jungkook admitted. “He helps you. But why.” He turned his gaze back to Taehyung, and the black in his eyes had lost its anger; it was unusually bright. Not exactly kind. Precisely attentive.

His hand rose, slow, as if asking permission of air. He traced the line of Taehyung’s jaw with the backs of his tapered fingers, almost chastened by the territory. The pad of his index finger mapped the bridge of Taehyung’s nose, the fine bone like a line drawn by a patient brush. He followed the arc above Taehyung’s upper lip, the philtrum, as if reading a script he had found and wanted to learn by heart. He looked like a general committing a landscape to memory before a campaign, astonished to realize he liked the land.

“Shellvine,” he repeated, more thoughtfully now. “If it buys time, I’ll take time. Yoongi’s idea… it’s a start. It might work.”

“It will work better if we act like it does,” Taehyung said. “I need to be easy when your father is looking. Soft. I need to let him think the pill is sanding me down. That the leash is back on. You’ll have to play your part too.”

Jungkook nodded once, as if sealing a pact with the simplest of motions. “I can pretend I like you compliant,” he said. “I was taught that part too well.”

He leaned forward then, not with the hunger he’d shown before, but with a care that belonged to something else. Softness is one of the more violent choices men like him can make; Taehyung felt the sigh leave him and could not catch it in time. His Omega arched into the touch inside his bones, preened like a creature that had been stroked in the correct direction at last.

They were still kissing when the panel moved—the respectful knock that precedes intrusion already a formality. The witness-servant hovered at the threshold as if a prayer might protect him from seeing the wrong thing. He set the tray down with both hands and did not raise his eyes. Steam breathed from the pot; a bitter green threaded the air. Yoongi had done what he promised. Shellvine rode in under the title of night tea.

It wasn’t for sleep.

They let the tea be. Night ran its hands over the lattice and left the rooms colder. Jungkook fell asleep tangled around Taehyung like a promise; the heir’s face gentled by unconsciousness until the mouth looked almost kind, until the eyelashes made him look young enough to be forgiven. Taehyung lay awake for a small time and studied that softness—the impossible choice he had watched Jungkook make, twice now, to choose something other than what the Codex loved him for. He would not have predicted it at the beginning. He could not imagine something softer than this being allowed to survive in the house that taught alphas to use other people as props in their own worship.

Dawn wrote a gold seam under the shutters. Taehyung eased himself out from under the weight thrown over his ribs, the warmth giving reluctantly, and went to the brazier. He unstoppered the pot. The scent rose—bitter, marine, like a rope soaked in rain left to dry on a ship’s deck. Shellvine looked harmless in a cup.

He took the first mouthful and almost coughed it back out. The bitterness did not live on his tongue; it uncoiled along his throat like a slow, ugly snake. It felt strange, like the liquid was performing a trick as it touched him, changing shape, laying down a thin, invisible lacquer on the soft places where bodies let the world in. He swallowed again. The second cup went down cleaner because the first had already done its work. The third felt like painting the same wall again—a waste and yet necessary if you didn’t trust the first coat to keep it’s color.

Emptiness answered in the stomach, the peculiar carved-out sensation Yoongi had warned of, as if a hand had scooped out a handful of him and left a polite cavity. It was not hunger. It was a refusal.

When he turned back toward the bed, Jungkook had pushed himself up onto his elbows. Sleep had ruffled his hair into disorder, the kind that exists only on men who do not have to carry mirrors into their mornings. He watched Taehyung with an expression that belonged to the last hour of a night watch: tired, intent, unwilling to admit it had ever been anything like tenderness. “Is that—?” he began.

Taehyung nodded.

Whatever Jungkook meant to say, the knock ate it. Not servants. The cadence was wrong; too even, too assured. A Red Guard passed the panel. He bowed.

“The Omega will take his prescribed medication,” the Guard said to the floor. 

Jungkook’s feet found the floor before the sentence finished. He was already moving  when the Guard stepped into his path. The bow he offered was deeper this time, deference drawn to a sharper point. “Your Highness,” he said. “By His Majesty’s order, the Guard administers the dosage. We are to witness its swallow.”

Jungkook’s mouth tensed into a shape that might have cut the room if he had let it. The Guard’s voice added another weight, as if this were merely a scheduling concern: “Also by His Majesty’s order, the First Heir is summoned to attend him before breakfast. After administration, I will escort the Omega to the table.”

There it was: the new choreography, set to a tempo that allowed no improvisation. Jungkook’s displeasure flared, brief and naked in his scent—ozone sharpened to cut. He swallowed it. He looked once at Taehyung. Warmth, quickly hidden; acknowledgment that the stage had risen under their feet. They were players now, whether they liked theater or not.

“Fine,” Jungkook said. The word cost him, and the room knew it. He stepped around the Guard and left by the door with the authority that was his and the obedience that wasn’t.

The Guard turned back to Taehyung—no cruelty, no kindness. Just the beautiful emptiness of a man turned into an instrument. “Open,” he said mechanically.

Taehyung opened. Shellvine made his mouth taste like a field after rain has washed all the sweetness out of it. The pill slid onto his tongue , he did not let it sit. He refused his own reflex to hide. He swallowed fast and the shellvine’s film caught it and pulled it down through a throat that had prepared not to welcome.

“Show,” said the Guard.

Taehyung opened again, presented the empty space. The Guard leaned in with the impersonal focus of a man checking a latch on a gate. 

He nodded, satisfied. “Good,” he said, and even that praise was not his, it belonged to the Sovereign on loan.

Taehyung let his eyes hold the Guard’s for the length of one breath. It struck him, sudden and ungenerous, that this man had swallowed a different sort of pill a long time ago; not a lacquer on the gut, but a lozenge that lodged in the throat and turned every word into an order mirrored back. Duty shaped like a coin on his tongue; obedience a daily medicine with no antidote. A life built on swallowing other men’s choices until his own hunger forgot its name.

“Come,” the Guard said, stepping aside for him to rise.

Taehyung walked inside a borrowed stillness, trying to recall the exact architecture lacuna had made of him: the pleasant fog laid behind his eyes like gauze, the way thoughts slowed until meaning couldn’t quite catch up, the inner Omega curling on its side, pleased with nothing. He practiced the face that went with it; unguarded, slightly addled, a softness that invited hands to test it. He gathered his scent close, let his shoulders slope into the posture alphas liked best on him. Not too much—overplaying calm was as dangerous as failing to perform it. So Taehyung threaded faint confusion through his expression like a light stitch through linen.

Inside him, two animals argued in whispers. His Omega, belly-low and wary, flinched at the idea of the Sovereign’s shadow, already rehearsing its apology with a tail tucked tight. A grimmer part of him, a thing with better memory and worse manners, kept taking the kneel-scene out of its pocket to rub the shine back onto it. Knees that should have never met floor had dented tatami. That part licked its teeth.

Not now, he told it. Irrelevant today. Irrelevant if you want to live.

The breakfast room received him with winter light poured through paper screens, it pooled pale on the black-lacquer table, long as a coffin lid and twice as polished.

The family—if that was a word that could survive here—was already arranged.

Min Yoongi sat one place down the Sovereign’s right hand, shoulders neat, hands gloved in their own restraint. He was dressed to vanish: black on black that let the eye skate. He didn’t look at Taehyung.

Beside him sat his father, thinner than Taehyung remembered; skin like paper that had been folded and unfolded too many times, veins a delicate map under the pale. Shellvine’s work lived in the hollows of his cheeks; a cure and a wasting arranged to occupy the same chair.

Minhyun lounged two places down, not slumping but arranged into a kind of elegant laziness. He rolled a fork between two fingers, eyes apparently on the polished tine as if considering how cleanly it would enter flesh that wasn’t food. In truth his gaze flitted like a hawk’s shadow across the table, uninterested in chatter, interested only in cause and effect.

At the head of the long black river of table: Jeon Taehwan, Sovereign, all gravities gathered in one body. To his right, Seo Dalya, a quieting presence, the kind of Omega who made rooms look softer simply by enduring them. His face wore its usual pleasure in ownership, mouth curved in a way that suggested this moment belonged to him as all moments did, and would continue to do so until the kingdom remembered to die. If his gaze held any stiffness in its hinge, any fresh caution after what had happened on the tatami, it hid it well. He was very good at pretending to have never knelt in his life.

Jungkook was opposite the Sovereign, he had his old arrogance on like a well-tailored coat. Buttoned just so. Elbows easy. The performance fit him like a shirt he’d been dressed in as a boy and never quite grown out of. Only the lightest slip betrayed him: When Taehyung’s scent brushed the room, Jungkook’s head tilted one degree and then corrected; the crack of something soft showed in the eyes for the length of a breath and was gone. Predator turned guardian for a heartbeat. Then the mask went on as if it had never left.

Taehyung let his feet find the right amount of soundlessness on the floor. He kept his scent soft, not the frightened sharp of distressed Omega nor the dangerous musk of a Dark thinking. He sat where an Omega is put: at the First Heir’s right, close enough to pat, far enough to be disregarded without effort.

Breakfast began with choreography rather than conversation. Trays moved; domes lifted; steam wrote soft hieroglyphs above bowls. Taehyung lifted his bowl, but shellvine had sanded his tongue to chalk. It was a small cruelty and an enormous relief. If the world was tasteless, then perhaps the pill would be too.

Alphas talked. Omegas did not. The topics were appropriate: supply shipments diverted to Namsaeng so the mourners could eat suffering on a full stomach, travel schedules for the retinue, minor corrections to the week’s ritual choreography so the kingdom could grieve in the correct order. 

The Sovereign’s attention traveled the table in lazy circuits, always finding its familiar detests. Taehyung could feel that gaze touch him in the corners like a cold fingertip testing skin. He placed the performance carefully where those eyes would find it. He let his face be open and softly empty—inviting without intelligence, a mouth that smiled when spoken to because it had discovered no better use for itself. He blinked a fraction slower. He let his gaze find Jungkook too often, as if tethered.

Seo Dalya was a mirror across from him;her softness reflected his, only older, more polished by repetition. When she lifted her cup and sipped, Taehyung could not tell whether she tasted anything at all.

Jungkook played his part too well. He laughed when a comment required it—not too loud, not too soon; he responded to a barbed aside with a sharper one that didn’t bleed; he observed a point about supply routes as if logistics were a game he had always been delighted by. It was ugly how convincing it would have been, had Taehyung not caught, twice, the crack in the gloss: a halt in the rhythm when Jungkook’s eyes went to him. A glance so quick it could have been an eyelash’s shadow. Then the mask slid down and the First Heir was once more unconcerned by anything softer than steel.

The Sovereign’s gaze swept over his son, testing edges for give. Jungkook did not meet the look head-on. He let it move over him like water and turned instead to busy his free hand. He set one broad palm atop Taehyung’s hair as if the Omega were a house pet tucked under the table to calm an Alpha’s temper. He stroked, absent and ownerly, his thumb catching on the small waves at Taehyung’s crown.

Taehyung’s body betrayed him instantly. The little animal in him—the part bred into obedience over generations—cooed at the attention and arched. It was easier to focus on that creature’s joy than on the taste of the pig-yard that rose in his mind: pretty animals lined up with apples forced between teeth, quiet made by the fruit and the rope. Shut them up and make them decorative. 

The Sovereign’s mouth formed the ghost of an approving curve, satisfied by this choreography. He mimicked it with domestic malice, setting his own hand on Seo Dalya’s head and moving it once, almost tender. Dalya’s eyes lowered as if the floor had grown interesting; her shoulders softened under the touch. The gesture was small, common: two household pets petted to show the guests how tame they were.

The ugliness of it, the way it bent two lives into one motion, made Taehyung’s mouth flood with the taste of iron. His stomach lifted sourly—shellvine or bile or both—but his Omega, traitor built by law and biology, hummed and tried to be good for the hand.

The First Heir made a low amused chuckle when Taehyung nudged his temple into the palm, and it was exactly right, and exactly obscene in its rightness.

The sound drew a thin line of acknowledgment along Minhyun’s mouth; it also dragged the Second Rank’s gaze, at last, from utensil to Omega. The look was neither accidental nor harmless. Minhyun let the fork rest against his lower lip and studied Taehyung the way a bored boy studies an ant hill he is considering setting on fire to see the pattern of panic. His pupils were a little wide, not exactlywith desire but with interest. He spun the fork once, changed his grip to a pinch of the stem between finger and thumb, measuring weight and balance with a fencer’s idle care. Imagining purpose. Imagining the crisp line a puncture makes when drawn across tender skin.

Taehyung’s skin tightened along his shoulders. He kept the softness on his face while something in him coiled around that gaze. The room had been designed so that a submissive posture summoned a particular appetite; it had done its work too well on the Sovereign’s second son.

Yoongi did not look at him. Yoongi was very good at not looking at him. He passed the eel to his father, and kept his mouth polite. Only once, when Taehyung’s performance threatened to drift into something that might be called contempt, did Yoongi’s gaze pick him out and pin him for one instant. It was nothing, that look; it was everything. 

The Sovereign seemed, for now, satisfied that the room was obedient again.

“Han Isayeon’s mourning,” he said, wiping his mouth with a cloth. “Tomorrow. The ceremony will be held on the Namsaeng estate. Our presence is a kindness they can count. The kingdom should see us in union.”

Union. It could have been a domestic word in another mouth. In his it was a leash braided out of duty and performance.

He set his cup down and allowed a small ugliness to inform his smile. “I spoke again with their physician. His theory has gathered some interesting angles.” A spare flick toward Yoongi that acknowledged skills without crediting them. “We will discuss them now.” he lifted the cup as if toasting to bone and malediction.

He let his gaze rest on each of the Alphas in turn—Jungkook, Minhyun, Yoongi and his father—and did not bother to include anyone else in the circle of the word we. His gaze did not touch Taehyung as he delivered the last line, which was the ugliest part of the theater.

“Omegas are dismissed.”

It was neat as a blade. As if no First Heir had ever said in this room, my Omega stays. As if no Sovereign had knelt in a study with tatami and learned what the floor tastes like.

There was a part of Taehyung that wanted to put its hands on the table and flip the world: the Dark that is always hungry for throats. Pride tried to stand to full height inside him and bang its antlers against the rafters.

He found Yoongi’s eyes again and took the orders contained there like medicine. He poured lacuna’s calm over himself from the inside, a self-made dose that came from discipline, not glass. He let his mouth find the gentle curve that says of course. He set his chopsticks in parallel perfection. He smiled the small, pleased smile of someone whose day just got easier because thinking was no longer requested.

Dalya’s gaze floated through him like a moth that had forgotten what flame is, Minhyun’s fork made a slow circle on the porcelain. Jungkook did not move; his palm lifted half a breath as if to call Taehyung back and halted, performance demanding he pat air instead of pet.

Taehyung bowed. He lowered his eyes not in shame but in strategy. He turned from the table like a well-trained tide and went where Omegas go when alphas decide thinking time is over, the Dark stalking under his skin on quiet paws, leashed, but smiling.

*******

The rest of the day went by like a bruise spreading: slow, unnoticed until it was everywhere. Jungkook did not come. Taehyung told himself he hadn’t expected him, that the First Heir would be caged with the Sovereign and the other Alphas, turning whatever “interesting angles” Namsaeng’s physician had conjured into weapons. Still, each time the corridor breathed, the Omega inside him lifted its head and then lay down again, disappointed and pretending it wasn’t.

Lunch arrived, then dinner, with the same curated abundance: pearled rice, lacquered fish, tea that promised comfort and delivered habit. He ate all of it, methodically, even though the shellvine had scoured flavor from the world and even though hunger never arrived. He ate because he remembered the hollows in Yoongi’s father’s cheeks—the way careful starvation makes a shrine out of a man’s bones.

Sleep came mean and intermittent. He woke twice to the sensation of his glove clutching the bones of his hand as if it belonged to someone else. When he finally surfaced in the pale hour before dawn, his body felt miscounted: joints sanded, lungs stingy with air. Weakness threaded him, a peculiar exhaustion like the one that comes after acting for a long time in a very cold room. His tongue remembered bitterness. His mind remembered why. He still drank three cups.

By the time he set the cup down, the knock came: precise, measured, obedient to its own echo.

Two Red Guards this time. The Sovereign’s paranoia had grown a second set of eyes. Taehyung did not resist when they placed the pill on his tongue—one gloved hand steady on his jaw, the other a flat witnessing palm—and watched the swallow. He opened his mouth again on command, tongue obediently offered bare and pink as a small wound. The taller Guard leaned in to confirm emptiness with a clinical regard.

A servant followed on the pill’s heels, carrying a tray for the room and a garment box long enough to carry a spine. “Car will be ready in two hours for Namsaeng,” he said to the middle distance, voice scrubbed down to neutral. “Your… appropriate attire.” He set the box on the bed.

Taehyung ate even though he knew very well that nutrition would not join his blood until the leaf’s little lacquer wore off, but he shoveled the hours ahead into himself anyway. A part of him, the obedient animal that had learned to purr instinctively when an Alpha’s hand stroked, still equated a full belly with safety. He finished his tea and set the cup down carefully, his hand steady because he made it steady.

The box opened on a sigh of expensive air. Mourning, the court had decided, was another opportunity to dress the livestock.

They had made him a garment in six pieces that conspired to look like one—black upon black, shade nested in shade until what remained was a silhouette designed to be possessed. The base was a sleeveless jeogori cut too narrow across the ribs, it fastened along the side with bone toggles the color of old milk; when he drew the laces, whalebone stays hidden in the seams closed around him like a polite fist. Over it, a sheer over-layer of midnight organza fell to knee-length, open at the front to display the strictness beneath. The collar was the worst: a crescent of lacquered leather that hugged the throat too closely to be called a collar, too ornate to be called a shackle, stamped inside with the sovereign crest. A short chain dropped from the front of it, decorative in the way chains never are.

They had left him cosmetics, too, because grief must be beautiful. A tiny dish of soot-black kohl to thin his lashes into longer weapons; a pot of rice powder the color of obedience to ease the olive from his cheeks; a lacquer for the mouth tinged the faintest winter-plum.

Dressing took time because the outfit had been engineered to be a ritual you cannot complete alone. He did it anyway. He turned stays by feel and pried toggles with his teeth and levered the collar into place until it snapped closed with a click that made his stomach feel briefly unoccupied. Breath learned a new discipline. The garment squeezed his ribs in until air arrived on a delay.

Why should the court care if a body breathes a little shallower, he thought, if the sacrifice makes their inventory shine?

He was fastening the last hook of the right boot when the Guard came: the same pair as before, twin lacquer figures serving as parentheses around his day. They did not comment on the outfit. Men who have agreed to be instruments do not offer opinions; they play the notes placed on the stand. “Escort,” the taller one said softly, and Taehyung stood—careful, practice already turning into grace—and followed them out.

 Taehyung felt the faintest wobble in his step. The shellvine made the edges of angles fuzz for a step and then sharpen again with a temper. He felt dizzy, yes, but the dizziness did not own his thoughts. Dislike still sat in them, dark and dogged, refusing to be laundered. When doubt tapped his shoulder—What if the lacuna slipped past the hedge?—he took inventory. He could name his rage. He could count his fear. He could still imagine the Sovereign on his knees. Lacuna would have stolen all that and left a pleasant pond. No, the pill was trapped under the film, sulking. He could almost taste its impatience.

The Guard led him to the great western hall, the one that ended in the thick doors leading out to the turning circle where cars waited in a row like black animals. They were all already gathered there, precisely arranged according to rank and usefulness, the way people in this house always are when a moment requires witness.

The Sovereign stood at the hall’s mouth speaking low to a cluster of advisors. The red of his formal sash burned against mourning black. Beside him, Dalya wore shockingly little ornament: her mourning hanbok was pure ink, collar cut modest, sleeves long, hair braided simply and coiled at the nape. Minhyun’s mourning coat was cut a fraction tighter than custom permitted, its buttons like small, suggestive bites down the line of his ribs. His eyes found Taehyung as if magnestized and slid slow from the collar to the boots as if trying to decide which would be more satisfying to put a foot on.

Yoongi stood to the Sovereign’s left, exactly where a dutiful nephew built from useful lies should, all in black, the only visible jewelry a flat obsidian signet and the thin chain that held Taehyung’s key inside his sleeve. His face was the room’s best-carved mask. Only the smallest betrayal gave him away: the first time he looked at Taehyung, he did not look away fast enough. It was not much. An intake of breath you could call nothing. An eyelid slower than habit. But Taehyung caught it because his life had been made out of catching such edges: the part of Yoongi that could not quite reconcile anger at the theater with the private horror of how well the costume had been made. Yoongi sealed the crack immediately, gaze snapping back to where the Sovereign’s words required attention.

Then Jungkook was there, coming from a side door. The heir’s mourning was rigorous and severe; black suit cross-belted with satin, throat open to the notch. He did not so much approach Taehyung as arrive beside him, body heat sliding into the narrow band of air allowed by the collar. His scent—rain, the green before lightning—reached and wrapped until Taehyung could feel his own scent being pressed low, contained. It was a greeting more proprietary than any words: I am here. Whatever they think they’re looking at, it belongs to me.

Jungkook’s knuckles ghosted the small of Taehyung’s back—tiny, nothing, the weight of half a word. The gesture read as control from a distance.

Taehyung kept his vision on the doors where winter light pooled under the crack. He didn’t look at the Sovereign. He didn’t need to. He could feel the man’s gaze more clearly than a touch.

“Shall we,” the Sovereign said, and the hall answered like an obedient animal.

Jungkook didn’t take his hand away.

Taehyung stepped forward with him, soft and precise, the chain at his cuff whispering its domestic threat. He let the room keep its story: docile Omega, well-kept, properly leashed. Inside that story, under the film of shellvine that made disobedience possible and appetite impossible, he counted his breaths and remembered: cliffs don’t collapse, they loosen—stone by stone, throne by throne.

Chapter Text

The cars took the curve of the estate drive like well-trained hounds—black, low, glossy enough to reflect the morning’s winter blade. Frost feathered the edges of the turning circle; Red Guards opened doors. Jungkook’s hand hovered at Taehyung’s spine without touching him as they descended the steps, a presence like a warm wall behind him, scent reined in to a civil whisper of rain. The Sovereign’s car slid first into the white breath of the gates, then the heirs’ line. The rest stitched themselves in by rank and usefulness until the road held a dark procession.

The kingdom unscrolled beneath frost-glass light; the river ran like a black ribbon laid between teeth. Beyond the bridges, hills rose, winter-brown. As the convoy left the capital’s heavier breath, the sound in the car became hushed, insulated. Jungkook sat at his side and did not speak, attention split between the window and the line of Taehyung’s throat where the mourning collar bit. The sash and stays allowed only shallow air; the shellvine’s lacquer had taken its tithe. A faint heat prickled at the back of Taehyung’s neck as if an invisible hand were testing his pulse there. He closed his eyes for a count, practiced the small, mindless serenity he had worn like a mask all morning, and opened them on landscape.

House Namsaeng’s estate announced itself before it showed its face. The road began to sprout memory-markers: low shrines tiled in white bone-porcelain, reliefs of knucklebones in the lintels of gatehouses, fences made from pear wood bleached to false ivory. Then the tree line broke, and the house arrived like a lesson in anatomy.

They had built it from what they worshipped.

The outer wall was a pale, bone-lime stone whose surface had been smoothed until it reflected light like polished tibia. Buttresses arced in a series of repeating ribs; between them, fenestration carved like the negative space between vertebrae. The balcony railings were an almost-too-literal run of ribs, each baluster curved and spaced so that to touch would have been to count. Even the gutters wore bone: gargoyles shaped like jawbones cropped at the hinge, water planned to pour from molar rows in summer storm. The koi in the long ornamental canal were white as knuckles, red blooming on them like thumbprints.

It was all theater, of course, but House Namsaeng believed in the ritual of theater: bones remembered, if you taught them to.

The mourning hall was the estate’s heart—a long nave of bone-white and black lacquer, floored in a mosaic that, from far, read as geometric frost; up close, it resolved into a field of tiny tiles in grays and whites. On the far wall, a relief panel depicted a tree whose trunk was a spinal column; its branches were a thousand ribs flowering outward, each leaf a small ivory petal that was not ivory at all and pretended otherwise. At the far end of the hall on the wall hung a mural of a deer’s skeleton leaping a black river, the emptiness between its ribs like windows.

It should have been grotesque. It was captivating, in the way a well-cleaned skeleton is captivating: all truth, no mercy.

The Darkborn elite were already gathering when the doors opened for the Sovereign’s party. Black clothing made the air look like it had been lacquered over; the styles varied—modern jacket lines, traditional coats cut severe—but all had the same grammar: severity, expense, the art of saying nothing loudly. And on every dominant hand, the glove.

Law, warning, liturgy. It was the first thing any eye would clock if you knew what to look for: a right hand (or left, in a few) swathed in leather or silk, matte or gloss; some carried the family seal embroidered discreet at the cuff, a crest stitched in thread the value of a horse; others were deliberately plain, as if simplicity could be piety. In private, men played looser. In public, the glove was civilization pretending not to be afraid of itself.

Jungkook walked at Taehyung’s side with the choreography of ownership perfected by a thousand ugly years: a step half ahead, a subtle angle of shoulder that put his body between Taehyung and any approach, a hand that lightly grazed the small of Taehyung’s back when corners were turned.

The Sovereign’s arrival bent the air. The room folded at the waist in a wash of bowing. The new head of House Namsaeng broke from the line. Han Isayeon’s nephew, Beta, thin like a man grown suddenly into a suit stitched for someone bigger. His mourning coat fit the family’s bone-aesthetic: a pale sash at the shoulder embroidered with an osteal motif, buttons carved from bone-porcelain. He bowed low, then lower. When he lifted his head, his mouth had arranged itself into gratitude as a duty.

“Your Majesty,” he said, “Your Highness. House Namsaeng thanks the Crown for sharing our grief and honoring our dead.”

The Sovereign accepted thanks the way a cliff accepts prayer, with indifference and the occasional echo. He spoke a few words about Han Isayeon—her service, her precision, her devotion—phrases so clean they had no blood in them. Taehyung listened and heard what wasn’t there. With all the theater of sorrow, the Sovereign’s sentences were empty scaffolds. There was no particular in them. No anecdote to prove familiarity. The man had not cared. He cared that the pageant worked.

Behind the mask of obedience, Taehyung catalogued faces. Mirrors upon mirrors—some polished, some foxed at the edges.

If the killer had carved a star into a heart by way of a gesture invisible to law, what would they look like in this room? Would they have chosen a face so ordinary that a mirror would return it without interest—or would the mirror lose its breath and fog, refusing to show what had borrowed it? He imagined them before a glass this morning, practicing grief, the words falling properly and the eyes staying wet but not too wet. He imagined a fingertip drawing a star in the steam and wiping it before it could be read.

On the left aisle, House Hwanbyeok: Seo Jisoo, newly moved up the succession ladder by a corpse, Beta, face calm, eyes that had learned to watch without advertising appetite. Beside her, an uncle with a self-important belly and a ring that faded his knuckle white.

Seoryeon’s delegation stood to the right: Jung Hoseok in a tailored mourning hanbok that managed grace without ornament, glove embroidered with a single thread-drawn wave. His gaze touched Taehyung briefly and slid off.

The House of Baekho was present in quiet strength. Taehyung’s father, shoulders squared into an old uniform np one else could see; his mother a dark river of silk, jaw held so still it made her seem carved. Namjoon stood at their right, Alpha calm with a scholar’s eyes that had learned to hide the places where thought lived; the gesture he gave the Sovereign looked like respect and was, if you knew him, a compromise. Jimin—Omega, mouth too pretty for safety, mind too quick for comfort—wore his mourning with a little sideways glint. He kept his gaze on the Sovereign with discipline, but it flickered back to Taehyung like a moth denying the flame. Concern there. A smirk too, when the mask slipped. Jimin enjoyed the art of small trouble.

 Maybe it was the shellvine’s strange hollowing. Maybe the collar’s insistence at his throat. Maybe the fact of Jungkook’s shadow against his shoulder, and the theater of leash the hall was hungry to read.

Whatever the cause, the stares were heavier than usual—not only the admiring cruelty he had known since boyhood when people said thirdborn like a riddle that explained him. These were weighted, speculative. Some sharpened with the kind of curiosity men feel in zoos when the glass looks thin. Others carried calculation: the Sovereign’s newest asset, scented like an heir, collared like a prize.

Taehyung wanted, with a sudden and unhelpful sincerity, to bare his teeth until the room learned a new grammar for his mouth. But the Sovereign stood less than twelve paces away, and sharks smell blood in the water long before you do. Taehyung let his eyelids lower. He smoothed his expression into lacuna’s mildness, borrowed the haze from the pill he hadn’t truly swallowed, and presented serenity. The dizziness helped. His body felt miscounted. His own shadow seemed too heavy, tethered to his heels with a little extra iron. His skin was over-attentive to air. Jungkook’s presence felt like a hand on a bruise he didn’t know he had.

The hall’s doors sealed them into the ritual. A dais faced the nave, draped in black silk over carved bone-lime; on it, arrangements of deep red roses rose from vases modeled after pelvic bowls, grotesquely lovely, their stems threaded through holes designed to accept them as if the bone bore them. A silver basin waited to receive what the ritual would make of flowers. A low gong sounded once and then was mercifully silenced; the rest would be done in hush.

“Let the offering begin,” the Sovereign said.

Tradition demanded the ordering: crown first, consort second, heir third, then the rest by rank. Hands gloved, hands bared, one after another, bones singing under skin.

Taehyung watched the law move like choreography etched into old wax.

Jeon Taehwan mounted the dais without hurry. A servant in gray offered the tray: a single cut rose, dark as a clot. The Sovereign extended his right wrist, and a Red Guard stepped forward to unbuckle the cuff, two movements like parts of one joint. The glove peeled away from his hand like a shadow. The ungloved palm was tanned, tendons like fine cables, nails plain and moonless. He did not even pretend the law made him gentler. He set his fingers to the rose as a man tests a blade’s temper. For a heartbeat, nothing. Then the petals winced.

It was not dramatic. It didn’t need to be. The red dulled, velvet going to paper; edges curled inward. Dehydration arrived in a swift shiver from calyx to tip; the flower bowed its head as if remembering a rule. When he withdrew his hand, the rose was a small, obedient ruin. He dropped it into the silver basin. It made no sound.

Dalya followed. Her walk had been trained to piety. The Red Guard moved to her wrist too, gentling without thinking, they always gentled for Omegas even when they did not think of them as people, and when the glove came away, her hand looked thin enough to break under a ring. A glaze passed over her eyes the way fog passes over a low field; when she touched the rose, it shivered out of color. She let go and the shriveled bloom joined the first.

Jungkook came next, shoulders squared into the shape a crown had carved for him. His glove unlatched; the hand beneath looked competent, strong. He took up his rose. For him, death arrived like frost—fast and exact, the petals stiffening into the shape of regret before collapsing in on themselves. He did not watch it; he watched Taehyung, a glance brief as an apology, and then he let the ruined bloom fall and stepped down.

By tradition, Minhyun would have followed, and Taehyung felt the hall lean toward that expectation, like a crowd leaning before a runner takes the turn.

“Omega,” the Sovereign said, voice polished as a knife’s back. “You will repeat the First Heir.”

The ripple that traveled the hall was a soundless thing, the smallest pressure wave. Minhyun’s lips made an almost-smile and then did not.

Taehyung did not mistake it. It was not an honor. It was a performance of leashes: the Omega repeats the Alpha’s gesture; the vessel mirrors the lord. The kingdom loves the repetition of learned motions; it calls it reverence, or obedience, or tradition when it is all the same swallowing done to different music.

Yoongi arrived and placed himself a half step to Taehyung’s side and in front—blocking the room’s angle by a hair, as if wandering between sightlines by accident—and showed the small black key as if it had appeared in his hand all by itself. He slid the chain out of Taehyung’s cuff, found the lock, and turned it. The click was indecently loud in the hush.

When his fingers brushed Taehyung’s wrist, the body answered with a small treachery, a tremor that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with heat gathering under skin like kindling. It came from nowhere and everywhere: the collar suddenly too warm, the sash too tight, the skin of his palms too ready to be touched.

Yoongi did not look at him. He never looked at him when it mattered. And yet his hand paused the length of a blink, not on the lock but after it, as though his fingertips had found the temperature of a truth he had not been told. His face did not change; something in it did. A faint crease appeared at one eyelid, confusion penciled in so lightly a lesser eye would have missed it. Then it was gone. The glove slid free. The key vanished like a coin.

Taehyung stepped onto the dais. The dizziness had swelled into a fine, glittering fringe around everything. He could feel the attention vanish into him like rain into dry ground. It is not long since the thirdborn manifested, the gaze said. Let us see the trick.

He lifted his ungloved hand. The Dark in him woke like a cat stretching, spine rippling, claws sheathing and unsheathing under fur. It did not purr for show. It purred because this was its language.

The rose lay on the tray: the kind with petals thick enough to bruise. He put his fingers to it. There was the smallest moment in which he could have pretended nothing. Then the gift took the road it had been given.

Decay is a kind of music.

It moved under his skin and out along his bones and into the soft architecture of the flower. Color dulled; the velvety red remembered it was only water performing itself as flesh. The edges went crisp; the curve of each petal remembered gravity; the whole crown bowed as if hearing an old name. He felt it the way a man feels a note sung at exactly the pitch of his bones—mild euphoria, a little vertigo, relief that the world is obedient for once. The room had stopped breathing.

He withdrew. He let the ruined bloom fall from his fingers without looking ceremonial about it. He turned.

The hall’s gaze remained on him as if the light had not yet reached the floor where he stood. The hush had shape. Jungkook’s face, for a fraction, showed the wrong softness: pride so sudden he was almost a boy.

Taehyung descended, found his mark, and stood inside the little shadow of Jungkook’s body. He did not sway. Yoongi slid past again, lock returning to cuff, the small chain threading home with a whisper that sounded like habit reasserting itself. His mouth remained perfect. His eyes didn’t. For one cloven heartbeat he looked at Taehyung the way a man looks at a map he knows and does not recognize a mark that was not there yesterday. Then the look folded away, filed.

“Second Heir,” the master of rites intoned, unnecessarily.

Minhyun took up his rose by the throat. The withering arrived quicker than mercy, as if it had been waiting for his touch, eager to please. He watched it closely, as if waiting for the exact point it died so he could learn how to do it to something with a pulse. He smiled—small, almost private—and dropped it into the basin with a satisfaction that did not belong to mourning.

Then Yoongi.

If Taehyung had not seen it once before, he might have missed it now. He approached the tray and stopped with his right hand a breath away from the rose. His palm hovered over it, a veil of heat, air around his skin darkening.

To call it withering would be to make it smaller than it was. The bloom changed simply because his body had decided it would. Petals slackened as if relief had found them; dew that had never been there burned off; edges curled with a tenderness that had nothing to do with hands. He didn’t even look at it. He looked—briefly, barely—at Taehyung, and the rose collapsed like a secret relieved to be told. He withdrew, a whisper of mockery written into the law with no ink spilled.

Youngest to pass the Death Rite in nearly eighty years, the record said; Taehyung had heard it with everyone else. Watching it again, he felt the truth of it in his teeth. Talent like that does not come from training alone. The question arrived, uninvited, and sat down: where did it come from in him. What bone had been carved to sing that note so early, and who’s hand had done the carving.

The basin accepted Yoongi’s ruin without remark. The master of rites lifted his face and called the next name. Around the dais, seals gleamed on black cuffs; locks clicked; the ritual moved on, an old machine fed with roses and belief, one noble at a time stepping up to let death recognize their hand.

The hall exhaled after the last rose died.

Sound returned the way blood returns to a limb you’ve sat on too long—pins first, then ache, then the ugly comfort of circulation. Servants slipped in with the silence of necessary ghosts, righting chairs, resetting the bone-white vases. Servants flooded the nave with trays that glinted like scapulae: bone-white porcelain curved into shallow cups, each carrying a bleeding slice of tuna pinned with black sesame, a quarter-fig glossed in vinegar, thin crackers rolled around a smear of smoked eel.

The Darkborn elite began to mingle under mourning’s cover, their little constellations forming and breaking— Beta voices low and exact; Alpha laughter with too much tooth; Omegas silent and placed where the furniture told them to be placed. House banners did not hang in this hall; nonetheless, crests announced themselves on signet rings and cuff embroidery, a heraldry of wrists.

Jungkook didn’t leave his side, not even for the politeness of one pace. His sleeve kept brushing Taehyung’s, his scent curled over Taehyung’s shoulders like a cloak pulled up against weather—storm and steel, leashed tight in deference to the dead and the room, but dominant enough that other Alphas adjusted their trajectories without knowing they had. Taehyung was grateful for the nearness without admitting the shape of the gratitude. The air felt too large and too close at once. The collar ached. His lungs were on a shorter leash than usual; shellvine had left a dry seam along the back of his tongue and that odd, hollowed-out steadiness in his belly. Every scent was turned up half a note—wax, tea, lacquer, Alpha. He kept his mouth soft and unconcerned, but some part of him counted exits with the precision of a thief.

House knots rotated like slow storm systems. Namsaeng’s new Beta head received condolences with a face smoothed to civility; his mother kept a hand on his sleeve as if reprimanding grief for not standing with its shoulders back. Minhyun’s glance was a slow, amused cut. Yoongi didn’t look at him at all, which was how Taehyung knew he was, with sincerity: the angle of his shoulders never turned his back to Taehyung’s flank. Hoseok from Seoryeon drifted past with a nod; Namjoon gave the smallest, respectable bow to Jungkook and offered Taehyung only the briefest swing of gaze—steadier than comfort, brother-to-brother.

Servants offered. Taehyung declined with a small gracious nothing of the head.

“First Heir.” The air altered before the voice arrived; then the Sovereign was simply there, the room obeying its own gravity. Dalya moved with him, hands folded, face made into the soft privacy Omegas are trained to give a room: the absence of disturbance, the promise of calm. He did not look at Taehyung directly; his gaze skipped over him the way light skips off water when you’re not interested in what lives underneath.

He addressed Jungkook as if nothing else deserved verbs.

“House Hwanbyeok requests a word,” he said without preamble. “Seo Jisoo is eager to discuss arrangements in light of her… promotion.”

Only then did the Sovereign allow himself the courtesy of a glance at Taehyung—side-long, weighing, the little satisfied smile that men wear when a leash sits correctly across a throat. “The Omegas,” he added, not bothering with names, “can wait here and enjoy the drinks and hors d’oeuvre.”

The sentence made a cage around the corner of air they were standing in. It presumed Omega mouths existing to swallow sweet things and silence; it presumed Omega feet existing to stay where they were told to be beautiful.

Taehyung felt the little animal inside him flinch; the rest of him smiled the appropriate, empty smile. Jungkook didn’t. Hesitation wrote itself in minute letters through his shoulders, an almost-imperceptible drag at the edge of his breath. He tilted his head toward Taehyung, and for a second the theater almost broke—a line of refusal shaped itself in his mouth.

Then he went with his father. Minhyun, meanwhile, was left to study the party from a corner, a glass turning between finger and thumb. 

Dalya floated two steps away as if carried by a current only she could feel. She sank on a stool, a servant set a cup in her hand. She held it without truly holding it, eyes varnished over with the old glaze Taehyung had begun to hate, the one that polished Omegas down into furniture that breathes. For a moment her gaze lifted and found him. Something like warning, or sympathy’s paler sister, hovered there. Then the glaze resumed its patient work and her attention slid to the empty air a polite omega is supposed to admire.

The rest of the room thrummed with the small predators of grief: politics, curiosity, appetite dressed in black.

Maybe it was the press of bodies; maybe it was that House Namsaeng loved bone too much and bone has its own weather ;maybe the air had been thinned on purpose so the elite would have something else to conquer.

Either way, Taehyung couldn’t get enough of it into his chest. Heat climbed him without asking permission. His skin pricked as if a hundred eyes were hands. The hair at his nape stood up as if a mouth had just breathed there.

A servant passed with a tray. He took a glass and drank. Liquid slid cold and left his throat dryer. His skin overreacted to silk, to the whisper of air; when his fingers went to his nape and pressed, they found dampness: sweat trickling under the neat fall of his dark hair.

He set the empty glass down before his hand betrayed its tremor and walked. A measured exit. Polite. Out past the seated Beta matriarchs with their white-lidded eyes; past the Red Guards who had learned to be furniture; past the door where Namsaeng’s bone crest watched like a dumb witness.

The corridor was a different temperature, a different century. Echoes, low light, an old carpet that had learned the shape of important feet and refused to remember anyone else. He found the bathroom at the end by instinct, the place designed so a single man could rehearse his power in private.

It was obscene the way wealth is when it has just enough taste to pretend it isn’t.