Heejakehoon's girl

The wedding night was quiet in the worst way.

Wonyoung sat at the edge of the bed in her wedding silks, watching Sunghoon stand by the window with his back to her, still in his ceremonial clothes, not moving. She'd known this marriage was political from the start — everyone had known — but some small part of her had hoped that maybe, given time, something real could grow between them anyway.

She stood, crossed the room slowly, and rested a hand against his arm. "Sunghoon."

He didn't turn around.

She tried anyway, leaning up to press her lips to his — and he pulled back so fast it was almost cruel, putting distance between them before she could even process what happened.

"Don't," he said, voice flat. "Not tonight. Not like this."

"We're married," Wonyoung said quietly. "Whether either of us wanted it or not."

"I'm aware." He was already reaching for the door. "I need air."

He left her standing alone in the room they were supposed to share, and she sat back down on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing, wondering exactly what kind of life she'd just signed herself up for.

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It didn't get better with time. If anything, it calcified.

Sunghoon buried himself in work — council meetings, border disputes, anything that kept him out of rooms where he might have to be a husband instead of a king. At state dinners, he and Wonyoung performed the marriage beautifully, smiling at the right moments, exchanging polite words for the court to see. The second the doors closed and the audience disappeared, so did the performance.

The Queen noticed, of course. She always did.

"You will produce an heir eventually," she told them both, cornering them after one particularly cold dinner. "This family does not have the luxury of a marriage that exists only on paper."

"I'm aware of my duties," Sunghoon said, in the same flat voice he used for everything now.

"Then act like it." The Queen's eyes flicked to Wonyoung. "Perhaps you should try harder, dear."

Wonyoung said nothing. She'd learned by then that saying anything back only made things worse.

The Queen tried, more than once, to engineer moments meant to force them together — a private dinner arranged without warning, a garden walk she insisted they take side by side while she watched from a window. Sunghoon found reasons to be elsewhere almost every time. Meetings that ran long. Sudden business at the border. Wonyoung stopped expecting him to show up at all.

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One evening, months into the marriage, Wonyoung finally asked him directly — no audience, no performance, just the two of them in the cold quiet of his study.

"Why won't you even try with me?"

Sunghoon didn't look up from the papers on his desk. "This marriage was never something I chose."

"Neither did I," she said, sharper than she meant to. "But I'm still here trying to make something out of it."

"I don't know what you want me to say."

"Something. Anything real." Her voice cracked slightly. "I know there was someone before me. I know that's not my fault, and it's not fair to either of us that I'm the one paying for it."

That finally made him look up.

Surprise flickered across his face perhaps because she knew that much, perhaps because she’d finally said aloud what neither of them had dared to acknowledge.

His lips parted slightly, as if he meant to speak.

But no words came.

The silence stretched between them until it became unbearable.

Wonyoung gave him a small, defeated nod.

“I understand,” she whispered.

Then she turned and walked away, her chest aching with something that wasn’t quite heartbreak…

Because you couldn’t lose a heart that had never truly been yours.

Han found her later that evening, sitting alone in the east garden with her eyes fixed on the fountain.

He paused for a moment, almost as if he’d expected to find her there, before quietly taking a seat beside her.

"You look upset," he said gently.

"He won't even talk to me."

Han's face arranged itself into something sympathetic. "I probably shouldn't say this. But I've heard things — from the guards, mostly. About why he keeps his distance." He paused, letting it land. "There might be someone else. Even now. I don't know who. But a man doesn't shut a door that completely unless there's another one he's still holding open somewhere."

It wasn’t true—not the way Han had painted it.

But Wonyoung had no way of knowing that.

His words settled quietly in her heart, taking root before she even realized it.

Over the weeks that followed, every silence felt deliberate.

Every late-night meeting became suspicious.

Every excuse sounded less believable than the last.

The distance between them, once born from grief alone, slowly transformed into resentment.

A marriage that had begun in quiet loneliness was becoming something far colder.

Neither of them knew that Han reported every detail back to the Queen, convinced that feeding Wonyoung’s insecurities would push her to fight harder for her marriage. Instead, it only drove the two of them further apart.

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Sunghoon , for his part, spent most of his private hours the same way he had before the wedding — alone.

He still went to the garden sometimes, the same fountain, the same stone wall he used to sit on waiting for a girl who never came back. He told himself, every single time, that he was only there for the quiet. He never quite believed it.

He still sang, too, late at night when the palace was asleep and no one could hear him but the walls. It didn't feel the same anymore. The music came out heavier now, slower, like something in him had gone permanently a half-step flat.

Winter passed. Then spring. A formal summit with a neighboring territory came and went, Sunghoon performing king and husband both with the same practiced hollowness. By the time a second winter rolled around, he'd built himself into someone almost unreachable — polite, competent, utterly closed.

His father, retired from the throne and increasingly frail, watched all of this from a distance with an expression no one could quite read.

It was Sunghoon's own idea, eventually, to start visiting the smaller villages across Lunaria — a good king's duty, he told the council, checking on harvests and repairs and the people the crown so easily forgot about. Jake suspected it was less about duty and more about needing somewhere to be that wasn't the palace. He didn't say so out loud.

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The village was small, tucked against the eastern hills, the kind of place that rarely saw anyone from the capital, let alone the king himself. Sunghoon went from house to house with his small escort, listening to complaints about roads and grain stores, nodding along, doing the job properly even with half his mind elsewhere the way it always was these days.

Then he turned a corner near the well and saw her.

YN was crouched by a low stone step, tying a cloak around a small boy who couldn't have been older than six, her mother close by with a basket of washing, another younger child trailing behind her skirts. She looked thinner than he remembered. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

For one full second, neither of them moved.

Then something in both their faces closed like a door slamming shut.

Sunghoon's jaw tightened. Two years of believing she'd taken the money and run rose up all at once — the wedding day, the empty meeting point, his mother's careful, gentle lies delivered like a kindness. He looked at her now and felt something ugly twist under all the old hurt: there she was, alive, well, clearly not hiding from poverty or shame, just living her life like none of it had ever mattered to her at all.

YN felt her whole chest cave in at the sight of him. Two years of believing he simply never came — that whatever they'd had wasn't strong enough to survive one difficult night, that he'd chosen his crown and his new wife over her the second it got hard — came rushing back with a force that nearly buckled her knees.

Neither of them said a word.

For the briefest moment, it felt as though the entire village had disappeared.

No guards.

No villagers.

No kingdom.

Just the two of them, standing exactly where fate had placed them again after two long years.

Then the moment passed.

She turned back to the boy's cloak as though nothing had happened. He turned back to his escort and asked, too evenly, what village this was again. They passed within ten feet of each other without a single sentence exchanged, both of them convinced, in their own separate ways, that the other simply hadn't cared enough to stay.

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Sunghoon barely made it back to his own chambers before he broke.

He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, hands pressed against his face, breathing like he'd been running. When Jake knocked and let himself in without waiting for an answer — a habit from twenty years of friendship — he found Sunghoon like that, unraveled in a way he hadn't seen since the wedding day itself.

"I saw her," Sunghoon said, before Jake could ask.

Jake went very still. "Where?"

"The village. Today." Sunghoon's voice was rough. "She looked—" He stopped. Shook his head. "It doesn't matter how she looked." ( But It mattered far more than he wanted to admit.)

Jake wanted to ask a hundred things. He didn't, not yet — Sunghoon was clearly too raw for it, and pushing now would only shut him down completely. So he just sat with him a while, said nothing that needed saying, and left him to whatever he needed to feel alone.

But Jake didn't stop thinking about it. Not that night, and not the next morning either.

He remembered, suddenly, a conversation from years ago — Sunghoon, half-distracted, mentioning once that if things ever went wrong, YN had someone who'd help her get out. A friend. A fellow maid. He'd said the name once, in passing, and Jake searched his memory for what felt like forever.

Then, suddenly…

“Momo.”

The name came back to him all at once.

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It took him half a day to track her down in the maze of palace staff quarters. When he finally found her — arms full of linens, clearly on her way somewhere — he didn't waste time.

"Momo?"

She turned, wary immediately at a noble addressing her by name. "Yes?"

"I need to ask you about something. Someone. From a few years back." He kept his voice low. "YN."

Momo's whole body went rigid. The linens nearly slipped from her arms. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Please." Jake’s voice softened. "I'm not here to hurt anyone. I'm Sunghoon's closest friend — I've known him since we were children. I saw him yesterday, after he ran into her in the village, and I have never seen him fall apart like that. Something doesn't add up about what happened two years ago, and I think you're the only person who might actually know the truth."

Momo hesitated a long moment, searching his face for a lie. Whatever she found there — or didn't find — made her lower the linens slowly onto a nearby bench.

"She didn't run," Momo said finally, quiet and fierce. "I swear on everything I have. She was ready that night. She was so happy, Jake — happier than I'd ever seen her. She left to meet him with her whole heart in it. And then she was just... gone. No note. No warning. I never saw her again after that night, not until she left the palace for good a few weeks later. I don't know what happened in between. But I know she didn't take a single coin, and I know she never stopped loving him, whatever anyone else says."

Jake felt something settle in his chest — grim confirmation of what he'd already started to suspect. "Do you know where she is now? Which village?"

Momo told him the name without hesitating this time.

Jake asked, half out of instinct, if Momo might come with him — her presence would make YN trust him faster, cut through years of walls in a way his own unfamiliar face couldn't. But the Head of Staff overheard enough of the conversation to intervene before he could finish asking, reminding him coldly that no servant left the palace grounds without the Queen's explicit permission — an old standing order, apparently, that had never been lifted.

So Jake went alone, riding out before dawn the next morning with nothing but Momo's description to go on — the shape of her face, the color of her eyes, the small details a friend remembers that a stranger never would.

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He found her exactly where Momo had said he might — outside a small house near the edge of the village, scrubbing laundry in a wide basin, her sleeves pushed up, sunlight catching in her hair. He recognized her instantly from the description alone.

She didn't look up as he approached. Villagers passed strangers all the time; she had no reason to think this one was for her.

"Excuse me," Jake said gently. "Are you YN?"

Her hands stilled on the fabric. She turned, and the second she registered a stranger from outside the village — someone who knew her name — every fear she'd buried for two years came rushing back at once.

"I—" her voice shook. "I'm sorry!!plz! Nothing really happened between us, we only met, that's all. Please, don't hurt my family, I'm begging you—"

Jake’s eyes went wide, both hands raised immediately. "No, no — wait, wait. I'm Jake. I'm not here to hurt you."

She froze, chest still heaving. "Jake? I don't know you. What do you want? Do you work for the crown?"

"No — I'm Sunghoon's closest friend. I don't know if he ever mentioned me to you before... but I'm here to help. Out of care. That's all."

Something in her expression flickered — recognition, maybe, or just the faintest thread of relief. "Oh... his closest friend?"

"Yeah," Jake said, lowering his voice like he was trying not to spook something fragile. "He used to talk about you. Never by name, not that I remember — but there was a girl who made him laugh again after years of barely smiling at all. I always knew it was serious, the way his whole face changed when he mentioned you."

YN's throat tightened. She looked away, back down at the laundry, like it might anchor her. "That was a long time ago."

"Two years," Jake said quietly. "And he still hasn't looked at anyone the way he used to look when he talked about you. Not even his own wife."

Her hands trembled. "Please don't say that to me."

"I'm not trying to hurt you," Jake said. "I need to understand something, because the story I heard back then — that you took money and ran — never sat right with me. And after yesterday, watching him fall apart over seeing you again, I think it's a lie. I think it's been a lie the whole time."

YN’s eyes filled before she could stop them.

Jake didn’t interrupt her.

He simply listened.

Every few sentences, she’d stop, trying to steady her breathing before forcing herself to continue. Some memories were harder to say aloud than others.

Piece by piece, she told him everything—the Queen’s first offer of money, the second visit with its threats, the plan to run that final night, how she’d left to meet Sunghoon with her whole heart racing with hope… and how she never made it. Hands grabbed her before she reached the meeting point. Guards she didn’t recognize dragging her away from the road, warning that if she ever tried to reach him again, her family would pay the price. And worst of all, they told her that Sunghoon had already changed his mind—that she’d only ever been someone to pass the time before his real wedding.

She'd believed it. She'd had no reason not to. So she went home, broken, and never said a word to anyone, terrified for her mother and her brothers every single day since.

Jake sat with her a long moment after she finished, quiet with fury he was trying hard not to show. "That wasn't true," he said finally. "None of it. He never changed his mind. He was standing at that meeting point until the sun came up, waiting for you."

YN pressed a hand over her mouth, tears finally spilling over completely.

"Come with me," Jake said gently. "Not to the palace — somewhere safe first, close by. I need to go get him myself. He's not going to believe this from anyone but you."

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Jake settled YN into a small house just outside the palace grounds, borrowed quietly from a retired guard who owed him a favor and asked no questions.

She barely had time to take in her surroundings before the door opened again.

“YN?”

She froze.

“Momo…?”

For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.

Then they rushed toward each other at the same time.

They collided in a tight embrace, holding on as though they could somehow make up for the two years they’d lost. Both of them laughed through tears, neither willing to let go first.

“Oh my God…” Momo whispered, pulling back just enough to look at her. “Look at you.”

YN let out a shaky laugh, quickly wiping at her eyes. “No, look at you. You’ve changed.”

“I was going to say you’ve gotten even prettier.”

“You liar.”

“I’m serious!” Momo laughed. “I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too.”

For a little while, they talked like no time had passed at all, filling the silence with small stories, laughter, and tears that had waited far too long to be shed.

Jake watched them quietly before clearing his throat.

“I’ll go get him.”

YN’s smile disappeared instantly.

Jake offered her a reassuring nod before slipping out the door.

—

Sunghoon was, predictably, locked away in his study.

Jake lied through his teeth about urgent business that couldn’t wait, and Sunghoon followed with obvious irritation, asking questions Jake refused to answer.

By the time they reached the small house, Momo had already spotted them through the window.

She looked back at YN and smiled softly.

“I think someone’s here to see you.”

YN’s breath caught.

Without another word, Momo slipped outside, gently closing the door behind her.

Jake exchanged a knowing glance with her before quietly stepping aside.

Sunghoon walked in.

The moment he saw her, every excuse died in his throat.

“You.”

The word came out rougher than he’d intended.

Two years of grief curdled instantly into something sharper.

“You have some nerve.”

“Sunghoon, please, let me explain—”

“Explain what?” His voice cracked upward, control slipping. “That you took the money and disappeared? That you let me stand at that gate all night like a fool while you were busy planning your new life somewhere else?”

“That’s not what happened! The Queen’s guards took me before I even reached you. They threatened my family. They told me you’d already chosen Wonyoung on your own—”

“Convenient,” he snapped, though something in his own chest was already cracking under the weight of how much he wanted to believe her. “Two years, YN. Two years, and not one letter. Not one attempt to find me, if any of this were even remotely true.”

Her eyes filled instantly, tears gathering before she could stop them, and she looked away—toward the window, toward anywhere that wasn’t his face—because she had no answer for that part that didn’t sound like an excuse, even though it was the truth. Fear had kept her silent every single day since.

Sunghoon watched her look away, watched her jaw tremble as she tried to hold herself together, and something in him broke clean through the anger before he even realized he was moving.

He crossed the room in three steps and caught her hand in his.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice suddenly wrecked. “I’m sorry… I don’t… I’ve known. Some part of me has known this whole time that something was wrong. I just couldn’t let myself hope, because hoping and being wrong again would’ve killed me.”

“I never stopped loving you,” YN whispered. “Not for one single day.”

He didn’t answer with words.

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her—deep, aching, two years of grief and longing pouring out of both of them at once.

Neither of them noticed they were crying until they finally pulled apart.

For a long moment, neither of them heard the quiet click of the door being pulled shut outside.

Jake leaned against the wall with a grin.

Beside him, Momo folded her arms, smiling to herself.

“I think we should give them a minute,” she whispered.

Jake chuckled. “Yeah… probably.”

Several minutes later, Jake knocked lightly before pushing the door open.

The two of them were still standing close together, looking as though the rest of the world had simply disappeared.

Jake couldn’t help but grin.

“Finally.”

Momo laughed beside him, and a second later all four of them were laughing together—real, unguarded laughter, the kind none of them had shared in years, filling the tiny borrowed house with something that finally felt like hope.

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They spent that night making a plan, all four of them around a small table, talking in low urgent voices about how exactly to stop the Queen for good.

"She's not going to give up quietly," Jake warned. "Not after everything she's already done."

"I know," Sunghoon said. "But I'm the king now. Not her. My word is the final word in that palace, whether she wants to accept it or not."

The plan was simple, in theory: walk in together, announce the truth in front of the court, divorce Wonyoung, and marry YN as his final word on the matter. Nothing about it, of course, went the way they planned.

They arrived at the palace with their hands laced together, steady and certain in front of the entire assembled court, and the room went utterly silent. Wonyoung's face drained of color the second she saw them. Sunghoon didn't wait for anyone to recover — he turned straight to the guards and ordered the divorce papers drawn up immediately.

The Queen arrived within minutes, fury barely contained behind a mask of composure, her eyes landing on YN like she'd expected exactly this kind of betrayal all along.

"So you came back," the Queen said, voice like ice. "Do you remember what I told you would happen if you did?"

"You don't get to decide anything here," Sunghoon cut in before YN could answer, stepping fully between them. "This is my life. My choice. Because of you, I lost two years I should have spent with the woman I love — years I could have had children in, years I could have been happy in. But those two lost years are not going to cost us forever. I'm divorcing Wonyoung, and I'm marrying YN. That is my word, as the ruling king after my father."

The Queen laughed — a short, cold, humorless sound — and then turned to her personal guards with a single sharp nod.

They moved instantly, pulling YN away from Sunghoon's side with brutal efficiency, and before anyone could react, one of the guards drove the blade into her lower side, just beneath her ribs. It wasn’t deep enough to kill her instantly, but the force of it sent her collapsing to her knees with a cry that echoed through the hall. Sunghoon lurched forward instinctively, but the guards closed ranks before he could reach her.

“Don’t touch her!” he shouted, struggling against the men holding him back.

"If you don't stay with Wonyoung and leave her behind," the Queen said calmly, as if she were discussing the weather, "my next order will be somewhere far less forgiving. I will watch her bleed out in front of you, Sunghoon, and there is nothing you can do to stop it unless you obey me."

Sunghoon's whole body went rigid with panic. Jake and Momo lunged forward instinctively and were shoved back hard by the guards blocking them.

"Stand down," Sunghoon ordered, voice cracking with fury. "I am your king. You answer to me, not her."

The guards hesitated, glancing between him and the Queen — clearly terrified of whatever hold she had over them — but didn't move.

"I will not leave her behind again," Sunghoon said to his mother, voice shaking with rage. "Not even if it costs me my own life. I already lost her once because of you. I will not do it twice."

The Queen's expression hardened completely. "You know what to do," she told the guards. "Make sure the wound is fatal this time."

The blade rose again.

And that's when the doors at the far end of the hall opened, and the retired king walked in.

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He was frail, leaning heavily on a cane, his old physician trailing a step behind him like a witness who'd been waiting years for this exact moment. But the second his voice cut through the hall — "Stop. Now." — every guard in the room froze completely.

A former king's word, it turned out, still outweighed a queen's in the blood of every soldier raised under his rule. The blade lowered instantly. The guards stepped back from YN like she'd suddenly become untouchable, which, in that moment, she had.

The old king crossed the hall slowly, every step clearly costing him something, until he stood level with his wife of nearly thirty years.

"I have said nothing for a very long time," he said, voice weaker than it used to be but somehow louder than anything else in that hall. "I let you run this family because I no longer had the strength to fight you. But I will not let you take from our son what was taken from me."

The Queen's composure finally cracked. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"I know exactly what I'm talking about," the old king said. "Because I lived it. Before you, there was a woman I loved — a servant, like this girl. She carried my first child. We were happy, happier than I have ever been since. And then my parents decided love was beneath a crown, and they had her killed Her and his child both. And they gave me you instead, and I let them, because grief had hollowed me out completely by then." His voice broke, just slightly. "I am not going to let my son bury the same happiness I buried. Not while I still have breath to stop it."

He turned to the physician at his side, who confirmed quietly, for the whole hall to hear, every detail the old king had just spoken — a witness he'd apparently kept close for exactly this reason, all these years.

"Take her," the old king said to the guards still loyal to him, nodding toward the Queen. "Hold her until I decide what's to be done."

The Queen was dragged out screaming accusations that no one in that hall had any interest in hearing anymore.

"Get her to a physician," the old king said next, turning to Sunghoon, nodding toward YN, who was still on the floor, blood soaking through her dress, barely conscious from the pain.

Sunghoon didn't need telling twice. He scooped her up in his arms like she weighed nothing at all, terror written across every line of his face, and ran.

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The palace physician worked fast — the wound was serious but not fatal, thankfully shallow enough to avoid anything vital, though it bled heavily and left her weak for days. Sunghoon barely left her bedside the entire time, holding her hand through the fever that followed, refusing every attempt by his own staff to pull him away for state matters.

"You need rest too," Jake told him gently, on the second night, finding him slumped in a chair beside her bed, eyes red from exhaustion.

"I'm not leaving her again," Sunghoon said. "Not for anything."

The old king came to see her himself once she was stable enough for visitors, sitting carefully at her bedside with more warmth in his face than Sunghoon had seen from him in years.

"I'm sorry it took me this long," the old king told her quietly. "I should have stopped all of this a long time ago. But I am glad, truly, that my son found what I never got to keep."

He gave his blessing for the wedding right there, plain and simple, and by the time YN was strong enough to stand on her own again, the Queen had already been stripped of her title entirely and quietly exiled from Lunaria for good — never to return, under threat of far harsher punishment if she ever tried.

Han and the guards who'd carried out her orders were dealt with swiftly and without ceremony, their betrayal too severe for anything less than the full weight of royal law.

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Wonyoung, it turned out, had been carrying her own quiet grief this entire time — not over losing Sunghoon, exactly, but over realizing, once everything came apart, just how much of her own marriage had been built entirely on lies fed to her by someone she'd trusted. When she learned the full truth about Han — that he'd been working for the Queen from the very beginning, planting doubt in her on purpose to keep the marriage cold and controllable — something in her finally clicked into place.

She didn't fight the divorce. If anything, she seemed relieved by it, like a weight she'd been carrying without ever fully understanding why had finally been set down.

Freed from a marriage she never truly wanted, Wonyoung found her own way forward in the months that followed — a quiet romance with a kind, unremarkable man from among the common folk, someone who made her laugh in a way none of the political maneuvering at court ever had. When she eventually invited Sunghoon, YN, Jake, and Momo to her own wedding, there wasn't a hint of bitterness left in the invitation — just genuine happiness, hard-won and well-earned.

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Jake and Momo, somewhere in the chaos of everything, realized they'd fallen for each other from the very first day they'd met — that awkward, fumbling conversation outside the palace laundry room turning out to be the start of something neither of them had expected. Momo teased him relentlessly about how he'd apparently been half in love with her before he even confirmed she wasn't a threat, and Jake never really had a good comeback for that, mostly because it was true.

Sunghoon and YN's wedding was small compared to the grand political spectacle his first one had been — no forced alliances, no performance for foreign dignitaries, just the people who actually mattered standing beside them. The old king, weaker by then but glowing with something like peace, watched the ceremony from a chair near the front, and told anyone who'd listen afterward that it was the happiest day he'd witnessed in decades.

YN fell pregnant within months. The old king got to see her belly grow, got to place a trembling hand against it once and feel his first grandchild kick, got to watch his son laugh — actually laugh, easy and unguarded — more in those few months than he had in years.

He passed peacefully in his sleep just weeks before the baby was born, at peace, finally, with everything he'd spent his whole life trying to make right again.

Their daughter was born on a soft spring morning — pale skin, full soft lips, and thick dark brows unmistakably her father's, with golden blonde hair and a small mark just beneath the right side of her lips that was entirely her mother's. They named her Gaeul.

Sunghoon held her for the first time with tears in his eyes, YN exhausted but glowing beside him, Jake and Momo crowded in the doorway already arguing over who'd get to hold her first, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, Sunghoon Park felt like every single piece of his life had finally settled exactly where it belonged.

---

The End..

👑🥀🌙🕯️🤍

Bonus Scene.🫡😉

Years later

Spring had returned to Lunaria.

The palace gardens were alive with color once again, sunlight spilling across the old stone paths exactly as it had years ago.

Laughter echoed through the air.

“Papa! Mama! Watch me!”

Little Gaeul darted across the grass, her golden hair catching the breeze as she chased a trail of butterflies through the garden.

Sunghoon watched her with a smile that still felt unfamiliar on his own face.

“She’s fast,” he murmured.

“She gets that from you,” YN teased.

“I was never that fast.”

She laughed.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

They were sitting beneath the very same tree where they’d first met years ago—back when she had no idea the quiet young man sneaking away to sing in the gardens was the crown prince of Lunaria.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

They simply watched their daughter run through the flowers, filling the garden with the kind of laughter that had once seemed impossible for either of them to imagine.

Sunghoon reached for YN’s hand, lacing his fingers through hers.

“I’m glad you came back to me,” he said quietly.

YN smiled.

“I never really left.”

He leaned over and kissed her forehead.

Across the garden, Gaeul turned around and waved excitedly.

“Come play with me!”

Sunghoon laughed.

“Looks like we’re being summoned.”

“As always.”

Hand in hand, they walked toward their daughter.

This time…

love had won.

….

Sunghoon Park was twenty-four the year everything changed. He was the only son of the royal family — tall, almost unfairly so, standing at 1.83m with a build that made him look carved rather than born. His skin was pale, almost porcelain in candlelight, and his hair was a deep charcoal black, always slightly messy no matter how many times his attendants tried to fix it. He had thick, dark brows that gave his face a serious, almost brooding look even when he wasn't trying, and full, soft lips that rarely smiled — because Sunghoon rarely spoke at all. He was a quiet man by nature, the kind who observed far more than he said, who let silence do the talking his crown never allowed him to do himself.

Nobody at court knew he skied. It wasn't befitting of a future king — reckless, they'd call it, undignified — so twice a month he'd slip away before dawn with nothing but a hooded cloak and a horse, disappearing into the mountains outside Lunaria until the sun was fully up, and no one but Jake ever asked where he'd been.

Even fewer knew he sang. He never did it in front of anyone — not his mother, not Jake, not a single soul in all his years of being raised inside palace walls. It only happened late at night, alone, when the weight of the day had finally lifted enough to let something soft slip out of him. It was the one place his voice belonged only to him.

YN was nineteen when she arrived at the palace with nothing but a small bag and a debt she hadn't chosen.

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The carriage that brought her to the palace gates wasn't royal at all — just a rickety cart borrowed from a neighbor, loaded with the last of what her family owned. Her father had worked in the Lunarian palace kitchens for almost twenty years before he passed, and when the debts came knocking, the Head of Staff had offered her a position out of what YN suspected was pity more than anything else.

She didn't know yet that pity would be the kindest thing anyone in that palace felt for her for a long, long time.

"You'll room with the lower staff," said the woman who checked her in, barely glancing up from her ledger. "Kitchens in the morning, halls in the afternoon. Speak when spoken to. Keep your eyes down around the family."

YN nodded, clutching the small bag that held everything she owned.

The other maids weren't cruel exactly — just cold, the way people are when they've spent years working out exactly where they rank and don't appreciate someone new shuffling the order. Momo was the only one who smiled at her that first week, sliding an extra roll of bread across the table when she thought no one was looking.

"You get used to it," Momo told her, low and warm. "The palace, I mean. Not them." She nodded toward the older maids. "They'll warm up. Eventually. Maybe."

YN laughed for the first time in weeks.

It was during her second week, carrying a stack of linens down the east corridor, that she caught her first glimpse of him. The corridor opened onto the courtyard just as the royal procession was passing through. Surrounded by guards and nobles, the Crown Prince moved through the crowd with his mother, the Queen, at his side. YN only caught flashes of him between the people—dark hair, a straight posture, and an unreadable expression before the procession disappeared around the corner.

“That’s Prince Sunghoon,” Momo whispered beside her, lowering her head respectfully. “Well… practically the king now, since his father’s been sick. Everyone says he’s got a heart made of ice.”

YN stared after the procession, trying to make out the face she’d barely seen. From what little she’d caught, he looked less like someone made of ice and more like someone carrying a weight too heavy for anyone his age.

She didn’t think much about him after that. Or at least, she told herself she didn’t.

A week later, unable to sleep, she wandered farther into the palace grounds than she was supposed to, drawn by a sound she couldn’t place at first. Singing—low, quiet, unpolished in the most beautiful way—coming from somewhere near the old music room where no one ever went this late. She crept closer without meaning to and found the door left slightly open.

It was him.

Or at least, she was almost certain it was. The man sat with his back to her at the old piano, shoulders relaxed, his dark hair catching the moonlight. Even without seeing his face, the royal jacket draped over the back of his chair was enough for her to recognize him. Prince Sunghoon.

YN stood frozen in the doorway, stunned—because the voice didn’t belong to the cold, distant prince she’d only caught glimpses of before. It belonged to someone softer. Someone she’d never expected to exist.

She slipped away before he could turn around and notice her, her heart pounding for reasons she couldn’t quite understand.

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It happened almost a month later, and it happened by accident.

YN had been sent to gather herbs from the far end of the palace garden after hours — the head cook always forgot something and always sent her, the newest girl, to fetch it in the dark. She didn't mind. The garden at night was the only place in the whole palace that felt like it belonged to no one.

She wasn't expecting to find someone already there.

He was sitting on the low stone wall near the fountain, jacket off, sleeves pushed up, looking nothing at all like the man she'd seen in the courtyard. In the moonlight he just looked tired. Young. Alone.

"You're not supposed to be out here this late," he said, without turning around.

"Neither are you," she said back, before she could stop herself.

That got his attention. He turned, and for a second she thought she'd made a terrible mistake — talked back to a noble, maybe a guard, someone who could have her dismissed on the spot. But he didn't look angry. He looked almost amused.

"Fair point," he said.

She didn't recognize him without the crown, without his mother beside him, without the whole weight of the kingdom pressing his shoulders back. He introduced himself simply as "hoon" — no titles — and she took it at face value, assuming he was staff, maybe a steward or a guard out of uniform.

They talked for almost an hour. About nothing important — the stars, the way the fountain never quite sounded the same twice, whether the kitchen's bread was better this season or last. He laughed, twice, at something she said, and both times he looked briefly startled by his own laughter, like he'd forgotten he still had it in him.

"You should get back," he said eventually, glancing at the dark windows of the staff quarters. "Before someone notices you're gone."

"You should too," she said. "Whoever you're hiding from."

Something flickered across his face — surprise, maybe, that she'd guessed there was someone to hide from at all. He didn't answer. He just gave her a small nod goodnight and disappeared down the garden path.

She went back to the kitchens with her arms full of herbs and her mind full of a stranger whose name she didn't fully believe was the whole truth.

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It kept happening. Not every night — but often enough that YN started finding reasons to linger near the garden after her work was done, telling herself it was just fresh air, just a break, nothing more.

He always seemed to be there first.

They talked about books one night — he'd read more than anyone she'd ever met, and for once he didn't sound like he was reciting facts to impress her, just genuinely happy someone wanted to listen. Another night he asked her about her family, and she told him about her father, the kitchens, the way grief sits in a house long after the funeral is over. He listened like it mattered. Like she mattered.

"You don't talk like the other staff," he said once.

"Is that a compliment or a warning?"

"Both, probably."

It was almost three weeks before everything fell apart — or came together, depending on how you looked at it.

There was a formal reception that evening, some visiting dignitary from a neighboring territory, and YN had been pulled from the kitchens to help serve. She was carrying a tray through the receiving hall when she saw him again — properly this time, in full royal dress, a circlet at his brow, his mother the Queen at his side and half the court bowing around him.

The tray nearly slipped from her hands.

*hoon.*

Not a steward. Not a guard. The prince. The future king of Lunaria. The man she'd been meeting in the garden for three weeks like they were equals, like there was nothing between them but moonlight.

He caught her eye across the hall — just for a second — and she watched something like panic cross his face too, like he'd been caught at something, though he was the one who'd let her believe a lie.

She managed to avoid him for two full days after that. It wasn't easy in a palace, but she managed.

On the third night, he was waiting for her at the garden gate.

"You lied to me," she said, before he could speak.

"I never lied," he said quietly. "I just... didn't correct you. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like one right now."

"It feels exactly like one."

He looked down at his hands. "Out there," he said, nodding toward the palace behind them, "I'm not allowed to just be a person. Everyone wants something from me, or they're afraid of me, or they're performing for me. You didn't do any of that. For three weeks I got to just talk to someone. I wasn't ready to give that up by telling you who I was."

YN didn't have an answer for that. Because some small, traitorous part of her understood exactly what he meant.

"So what happens now?" she asked.

"Now," he said, "I suppose you get to decide if you ever want to talk to me again. Prince or not."

She should have said no. She should have walked away and gone back to being invisible, the way the other maids were, the way was safest.

She didn't.

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Word travels fast in a small kingdom and faster in a smaller palace. It wasn't long before Sunghoon started requesting YN specifically for small tasks — bringing tea to his study, arranging his books, small errands that had absolutely no reason to require the newest kitchen maid except that he asked for her by name.

The Head of Staff raised an eyebrow but didn't argue with a prince's request. Momo raised both eyebrows and did argue, in her own way.

"You're playing with fire," she told YN one night, braiding her hair before bed. "Everyone's noticed. Even if nothing's happened —"

"Nothing has happened," YN said, too quickly.

Momo just looked at her. "Right. Nothing."

But Momo kept her secret anyway, because that's what best friends do, even when they think you're being reckless.

Jake noticed too — Sunghoon's oldest friend, a noble who'd grown up alongside him and knew him better than almost anyone in the palace, including his own mother. He found Sunghoon in his study one evening, staring at a book he clearly wasn't reading.

"You're going to get her hurt," Jake said, without preamble. "Or yourself. Probably both."

"I know," Sunghoon said.

"But you're not going to stop."

Sunghoon didn't answer that, which was answer enough. Jake sighed, dropped into the chair across from him, and said, "Then at least be careful. My mother notices everything, and yours notices twice as much."

Sunghoon and YN's evenings together became something neither of them could quite name — not official, not spoken of, but real all the same. He told her about the crushing weight of a crown he hadn't wanted yet, about a father too sick to rule and a mother who ruled in his place with an iron grip. She told him about a life spent making herself smaller so no one would notice how much she'd lost.

Somewhere in all of it, without either of them deciding to, the space between "friend" and something else started disappearing.

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The trouble arrived with a name: Wonyoung, a noblewoman from the neighboring territory of Elmsworth, brought to Lunaria for what everyone but Sunghoon seemed to already consider a settled matter — his future marriage.

She was beautiful in the practiced, polished way of someone raised to be looked at. She was also, YN noticed immediately, sharp — the kind of sharp that watched a room and filed away everything it saw.

"She's perfect for him," one of the older maids whispered approvingly as Wonyoung swept through the halls on her first visit. "Good family, good alliance, good match."

YN said nothing. She had no right to say anything.

At the welcome banquet, YN was assigned to serve near the head table — close enough to watch Sunghoon sit beside Wonyoung, close enough to see him nod politely at whatever she said, close enough to feel something twist in her chest that she had absolutely no claim to feel.

Later, alone in the garden, Sunghoon found her before she could avoid him.

"You looked miserable in there," she said, trying to keep her voice light.

"I was," he admitted. "She talks about alliances the way other people talk about weather. Pleasant. Meaningless."

"She's going to be your wife."

"She might be," he said, and something in the way he said it — resigned, almost grim — made YN's chest ache worse, not better.

Han, Wonyoung's constant shadow and closest ally at court, noticed the way Sung's eyes kept drifting toward a certain maid during the banquet. He mentioned it to Wonyoung later that night, phrased carefully, like a gift.

"Interesting," was all Wonyoung said. But she remembered.

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It happened almost by accident — the way most important things did between them.

Sunghoon had been thrown from his horse during a hunting trip, nothing life-threatening, but a nasty fall that left him bruised, feverish, and confined to bed for several days under strict palace physician's orders. YN, given her low standing, was one of the few allowed in and out of his chambers without suspicion — bringing meals, changing linens, small tasks the higher staff considered beneath them.

On the third night, his fever spiked. YN found him tangled in the sheets, restless, murmuring things that didn't make sense, his forehead burning under her palm.

She sat with him until it broke, near dawn, exhausted and terrified in a way she had no right to be for a prince who wasn't hers.

When he finally woke, clear-eyed for the first time in days, he found her still sitting at his bedside, half-asleep in the chair, her hand still resting near his on the blanket.

"You stayed," he said, voice rough.

"You had a fever. Someone had to."

"That's not why you stayed."

She didn't answer that. He didn't push it. But something had shifted, quiet and undeniable, in the space between them.

Two nights later, once he was steadier, she came to check on him one final time before the physicians declared him fully recovered. He was sitting up against the pillows, looking better than he had in days, but there was something heavy behind his eyes.

"Can I tell you something," he said, "and you don't say anything back until I'm finished?"

She nodded, settling into the chair beside his bed.

"I don't know if I've ever really lived," he said quietly. "Not before all this. I was raised to be a king before I was ever allowed to just be a person. But somewhere in the last few months, I met someone — a girl, kind, sharper than she gives herself credit for — and she made this cold, tired heart of mine feel something again. I don't know how to explain it except that I can't picture what comes next without her in it. And I know that's not fair to say to you, of all people, given everything. But I needed to say it out loud, just once, even if nothing can come of it."

YN's chest ached so badly she thought it might crack open right there. Because she knew — of course she knew — that he wasn't talking about anyone else. And she also knew, with the same certainty, that a maid and a king had no future the palace would ever allow.

So she smiled, soft and a little sad, and said the only thing she could bring herself to say.

"Don't lose hope in her, then. Whoever she is. She'd be lucky."

She said it like she wasn't the girl he meant. Like her own heart wasn't breaking in the exact same shape as his.

Sunghoon opened his mouth to respond — and then, suddenly, coughed, hard, his whole body curling forward with the force of it, still weak from the fever. YN moved without thinking, sliding to the edge of the bed and rubbing firm circles on his back.

"Easy.. easy, breathe—"

Before she'd even finished the sentence, his hand caught her wrist. And in one motion, gentle but certain, he pulled her forward — off the chair, onto the bed, close enough that her breath caught in her throat — and kissed her.

It wasn't rushed. It wasn't careless. It was slow and certain, like something he'd been holding back for months and finally let go of all at once. YN froze for half a second — shock, disbelief, the impossibility of it all — before she kissed him back, both hands curling into the front of his shirt like she was afraid he'd disappear if she let go.

When they finally broke apart, neither of them said anything for a long moment. Just breathing. Just looking at each other like the whole world had rearranged itself in the space of a kiss.

"It's you," he said finally, voice barely above a whisper. "It was always you."

"I know," she whispered back. "I think I've known for weeks. I was just too scared to say it."

"So was I."

They stayed up talking until the sky started turning grey outside the window — everything finally said out loud that had been unspoken for months. And when exhaustion finally caught up with both of them, she fell asleep in his arms, tucked against his chest, his heartbeat steady under her ear, neither one of them thinking, for once, about crowns or kingdoms or what any of this would cost.

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After that night, they found ways.

Small windows of stolen time — the garden after midnight, an empty hallway between his study and hers, a locked door and twenty minutes before someone came looking. It wasn't enough, not nearly, but it was theirs, and for a while, it was enough to survive on.

Jake knew, obviously — Sunghoon couldn't hide the way his whole face changed lately, softer, lighter, and Jake wasn't blind. He didn't approve, not entirely, but he kept the secret and ran interference when he could, covering for Sung's absences with practiced ease.

Momo knew too, from the way YN started humming while she worked, from the exhaustion of stolen late nights written plain across her face some mornings. She didn't approve either — she was terrified for her friend, honestly — but she kept the secret just the same, because YN's happiness meant more to her than anyone's rules.

"Just be careful," Momo told her one morning, tucking a loose strand of hair back from YN's face. "Please. For me."

"I will," YN promised. She didn't know yet how hollow that promise would turn out to be.

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It couldn't stay hidden forever. The Queen had built her entire reign on noticing things other people missed, and she'd noticed the shift in her son weeks before she said a word about it — the softness in him, the way his eyes tracked a certain maid across a room he wasn't supposed to be looking at all.

She summoned YN alone, late one evening, to a private study far from prying eyes and ears.

"I know what's happening between you and my son," the Queen said, without any preamble at all. Her voice was calm. That was somehow worse than shouting would have been. "And I'm going to give you the chance to end it quietly, before it becomes something neither of us can control."

YN said nothing, her hands twisting together in front of her.

"I'll pay you," the Queen continued, sliding a folded paper across the desk — an amount so large YN's whole family could have lived on it for years. "Enough to leave Lunaria entirely. Start somewhere new. Somewhere he'll never find you, and you'll never have to explain yourself to anyone again."

"I don't want your money," YN said quietly.

Something flickered across the Queen's face — not quite surprise, more like disappointment that this would take longer than she'd hoped. "Think carefully before you refuse me again," she said, standing. "I am not a woman who makes the same offer twice."

YN left that meeting shaking, but she didn't tell Sung. Not yet. She told herself she didn't want to worry him. Really, she was terrified that if she said it out loud, it would become real.

It became real anyway, three weeks later, when the Queen called her back — and this time, there was no folded paper on the desk.

"You didn't take my money," the Queen said, "so let me be plain instead. If you do not end this and remove yourself from my son's life, I will ruin you. I will make sure you never find work in this kingdom or any other, I will make sure your name is spoken of as something shameful, and if that doesn't move you — understand that I will hurt him too. His position, his reputation, everything he's meant to inherit. You will destroy him just by staying near him. Is that clear enough for you?"

It was clear. It was devastatingly clear. And still, when YN walked out of that room, shaking, sick to her stomach — she went straight to the garden that night anyway, because she couldn't make herself stop loving him even when she knew exactly what it might cost them both.

She told him everything, finally, that night. All of it — the money, the threats, all of it laid bare between them under the same fountain where it had all started.

Sunghoon's jaw tightened, fury and fear tangled together on his face. "She doesn't get to threaten you," he said. "I won't let her."

"She's the Queen, Sunghoon. She can do whatever she wants."

He was quiet for a long time. Then he took both her hands in his, steady despite everything. "Then we don't give her the chance to."

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The wedding to Wonyoung had been arranged for months — a political inevitability neither of them had been able to stop, only postpone with excuses and delays that were quickly running out. As the date crept closer, Sunghoon and YN made their choice in whispered conversations that stretched deep into the night: they would leave. Together. Before the wedding, before the Queen's threats could turn into something neither of them could survive.

They planned it carefully — a place outside the city gates, a specific hour, a story that would only unravel after they were already too far away to be caught. Jake, against his better judgment, agreed to help arrange horses without asking questions he didn't want the answers to. Momo helped YN slip away from her duties that final evening without raising suspicion, her hands trembling as she hugged her friend goodbye.

"Go," Momo whispered fiercely. "Be happy. Don't look back."

The morning of the wedding, the whole palace moved like a machine — preparations, decorations, nobles arriving from every corner of the kingdom for the ceremony that would bind Sunghoon to Wonyoung in front of all of Lunaria.

Sunghoon slipped away before dawn, exactly as planned, making his way to the meeting point at the edge of the city with his heart pounding harder than it ever had in battle.

YN wasn't there.

He waited. Minutes stretched into an hour. He told himself she was just delayed, held up by some last-minute duty, that she'd come running any second with an apology and that same soft smile. But the sun kept climbing, and the road stayed empty, and eventually a rider came for him instead — sent to bring the missing prince back before his own wedding started without him.

He returned to the palace in a daze, refusing to believe what his own mind was already telling him.

That's when the Queen found him, her face arranged into something almost like sympathy — almost.

"I'm so sorry, Sunghoon," she said, and if he'd been thinking clearly, he might have noticed how practiced it sounded. "The girl came to see me late last night. She took a considerable sum from the treasury office — enough to disappear completely — and told the guards at the west gate she was leaving Lunaria for good. She said to tell you not to look for her."

"That's a lie," Sunghoon said immediately, though something cold was already spreading through his chest. "She wouldn't—"

"I saw the missing funds myself," the Queen said gently. "I know this is difficult to hear. But some people, Sung, only ever wanted what a crown could give them. I know it doesn't feel that way now. But it will, in time."

He didn't believe her. Not at first. He tore through every excuse his mind could offer — she'd been taken, she'd been hurt, there was some explanation that made sense of the empty meeting place and the money gone missing and the guards who swore, under the Queen's watchful eye, that they'd seen her leave willingly, alone, in the dark.

But the hours passed, and no explanation came, and no letter arrived, and eventually even Jake — searching quietly on his own, without telling Sunghoon what he feared — came back with nothing. No trace of her. No sign she'd ever meant to keep her promise at all.

By the time evening came, Sunghoon stood at the altar beside Wonyoung in front of the entire kingdom, hollowed out, going through the motions of vows he didn't feel, rings he barely registered placing, a crown of matrimony settling over a heart that had already broken clean in half that morning.

He told himself, standing there, that he'd been a fool. That love like that — sudden, consuming, impossible — was never meant to survive contact with the real world. That somewhere out there, YN was living comfortably on stolen coin, and he was the only one who'd been foolish enough to believe any of it had been real.

He had no idea that the version of events he’d been given was a lie, built carefully, piece by piece, by a mother who would do anything to protect her throne. And as the palace celebrated a wedding built on betrayal, only one person knew what had really happened to YN that morning

---

The end..

Want to know what really happened that morning? 👀

It happened slowly enough that neither of them noticed the exact day it started. A missed call here. A "sorry babe, in the studio" text there. Dates that got pushed from dinner to coffee to nothing at all. She never wanted to be that girl who complained about her boyfriend being busy — so she didn't, for a long time. She just quietly kept count of everything he forgot.

And then he forgot her birthday.

Not "ran ten minutes late" forgot. Full-on, no call, no text, radio silence for the entire day, and when he finally called at 11:47 PM it was to ask if she'd seen his phone charger at her place. She sat there on her bed, cake she'd bought for herself still in the box on the counter, and said, "You didn't even remember, did you?"

Silence on the other end told her everything.

"I can't do this anymore," she said, and hung up before he could say sorry, because sorry wasn't going to un-forget a year of her life.

---

He showed up at her door two days later, hair a mess, looking like he hadn't slept since the phone call. He didn't say anything smart or rehearsed. He just said, "I know I don't deserve five minutes of your time, but I'm asking for it anyway," and when she opened the door to yell at him, he pulled her into a hug instead, tight, like he was scared she'd disappear if he let go.

"I'm going to do better," he said into her hair. "I know I've said it before. I'm going to actually do it this time."

She should've said no. Her friends would've told her to say no. But she felt his heartbeat racing against her cheek and she let herself believe him, because some stupid, soft part of her still wanted to.

They got back together that night.

---

Two weeks later they planned a real date — nothing fancy, just a restaurant they'd been wanting to try, seven o'clock. She got there at 6:50, ordered a water, and waited.

Seven o'clock came and went.

Seven-thirty.

Eight.

By eight-forty-five she'd stopped checking the door every time it opened. By nine she was the only person left at a table for two, water glass sweating onto the tablecloth, and she finally understood that he wasn't coming.

She didn't cry in the restaurant. She waited until she was in the cab home to do that. Then she picked up her phone and typed it out clean and final: *I'm done. You don't have to choose me over your career, I get it, I really do — but I can't keep being someone you schedule in and then cancel on. Stay with your work. You're clearly better at loving that than you are at loving me.*

He called eleven times that night. She didn't pick up once.

---

He tried texting the next morning. Then the morning after that. Then she blocked his number, because seeing "I'm sorry" pop up over and over wasn't an apology, it was just noise.

A few weeks later, a mutual friend threw a party — one of those small gatherings where everyone assumed everyone else already knew the breakup happened, except somehow Jake ended up there too, probably not knowing she'd be there either. Jay spotted her first from the kitchen and elbowed Heeseung, who just muttered, "don't," under his breath, already bracing for how the night was about to go. She saw him from across the room and didn't wait to find out if he'd noticed her first. She grabbed her jacket and left.

He came after her. Of course he did.

"Y/N, wait—"

"Don't." She didn't stop walking. The night had gone cold, streetlights throwing long shadows down the sidewalk, and he kept pace with her the whole way, not grabbing her arm, not blocking her path, just walking a foot behind her like he had every right to be there and every right not to push.

By the time they reached her building, the sky had opened up into a full downpour, the kind that soaks you in ten seconds flat. She got under the awning first. He stayed one step behind, still out in it, hair already plastered down.

"Can I stay until it stops raining?" he asked.

"No! Get out of here right now," she snapped, pointing at the street like that would make him disappear.

She expected him to argue. She expected him to at least step under the awning. Instead he actually turned and walked back out into the rain, like she'd told him to, like he was going to just stand there and take it.

She watched for three full seconds before she broke. She ran out after him, drenched instantly, and grabbed his arm hard enough to spin him around.

"Are you insane?!" she yelled over the rain.

"Crazy," he said, soaked, smiling like an idiot, water running down his face. "Crazy over you. You, baby. Only you."

And she hated that it worked. She hated that her chest cracked open right there on the sidewalk. She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down and kissed him in the middle of the storm, both of them shaking from cold or something else, it didn't matter which anymore.

They went upstairs soaked to the bone, peeled off wet clothes, took a hot shower just to stop shivering, and fell asleep tangled up in her sheets like the last month hadn't happened at all.

---

Two days later her parents finally agreed to meet him. She'd been asking for months — she wanted them to see the version of him she saw, not the tabloid version, not the "idol who's never around" version. She picked the restaurant herself. She got there early, practically glowing, ordered appetizers for the table because she was too excited to wait.

Fifteen minutes past the reservation time, he wasn't there.

Twenty minutes. She texted him — *where are you?* — and got nothing back.

Thirty minutes. Her mom made a joke about traffic. Her dad didn't laugh.

An hour. The food had all arrived and gone cold, and her family ate quietly around her while she stared at her phone, willing it to light up.

He never came.

She apologized to her parents the whole ride home. She cried in the shower so no one would hear. And when he finally showed up the next day with an explanation about an emergency schedule change and a manager who wouldn't let him leave the building, she didn't even let him finish.

"I don't want the excuse," she said, shoving him back a step. "I wanted you there. That's it. That's all I wanted." Third time. Done.

---

Her friends were the ones who picked up the pieces that round. Lisa poured the wine. Rosie made her laugh even when she didn't want to. Nina just sat with her in silence when nothing else helped.

"You know we love you," Lisa said, "but you cannot keep doing this to yourself."

"He's never going to change," Rosie added. "Guys like that don't."

She nodded along every time, agreed with every word, and went right back to him anyway, because agreeing with her friends and actually being able to stop loving him turned out to be two very different things.

Jake threw himself into the comeback prep after that — new title track, new choreo, promotions stacked back to back — and somewhere in the chaos, fixing things with her fell to the bottom of a list that never got shorter. Niki caught him staring at his phone one night in the practice room instead of running the bridge for the fifth time and just said, quietly, "Go see her, hyung. The choreo will still be here tomorrow. She might not be." Jake didn't. Weeks passed. He didn't call. He told himself he'd go see her once the schedule calmed down, and the schedule never calmed down.

So she stopped waiting.

Rosie set her up on a blind date with a guy named Hendery — tall, well-dressed, said all the right things over dinner. For the first twenty minutes she almost enjoyed herself. Then Hendery started talking, and kept talking, mostly about himself, his job, his ex, how she "wasn't like other girls" in a tone that made her skin crawl a little. When she tried to steer the conversation somewhere neutral he laughed it off and ordered a second bottle of wine without asking if she wanted one, then got visibly annoyed when she said she needed to head home early. He insisted on walking her to her car in a way that felt less like chivalry and more like he wasn't going to take no for an answer easily. She practically had to talk her way out of a second date on the spot. She got home, locked her door, and sat on the floor with her back against it for a solid ten minutes before she let herself breathe normal again.

---

A couple of weeks after that, she was standing in a convenience store at midnight in sweats, waiting for her cup of ramyeon to finish cooking, when someone sat down one stool over at the little standing counter with their own cup. Neither of them looked up. She was tired, half-asleep on her feet, reaching for the shredded cheese packet on the counter to find there was only one packet left — his.

"Can I steal that?" she mumbled, not even looking, just pointing.

A hand held it out toward her.

She looked up to grab it and froze. So did he.

"Oh my god," she breathed, already stepping back, already reaching for her bag. "I have to go—"

He caught her wrist, gentle, not forceful, like he was giving her every chance to pull away if she wanted to. "Please. Just — five minutes. That's all I'm asking."

She didn't pull away.

"I do love you," he said, quiet, none of the performance in his voice that came so naturally on stage. "I know I don't have the time I should have. I know that's not an excuse. But I want to try, actually try, not just say it and disappear again." He looked wrecked saying it, like it cost him something to admit out loud that trying wasn't the same as succeeding. "I'm not asking you to trust that I've changed. I'm asking you to let me prove it."

Her friends' voices were in her head — *he's never going to change, you cannot keep doing this* — and she heard them, she really did. And she went home with him anyway.

---

The fourth time was quieter than the rest. No fight, no blowup, no single moment she could point to. She just stopped waiting up for his calls, stopped rearranging her schedule around the maybe of him having free time. He noticed the silence more than he'd ever noticed her being upset. "Are we breaking up?" he asked her once, almost confused by his own question. "I think we already did," she said. "A few weeks ago. You just didn't notice." That one took the longest to undo — not a grand gesture, just a month of him actually showing up for small, unglamorous things. Grocery runs. Fixing her phone charger himself instead of just buying her a new one. Proof, slowly, that he was paying attention again. Lisa didn't even bother with the usual warning that time. She just sighed and said, "you're going to do what you're going to do," and poured the wine anyway.

---

The pattern didn't break. It just found new shapes.

The fifth time, ENHYPEN left for a three-month overseas leg of the tour, and the time difference ate every good intention alive — she'd fall asleep waiting for his call, he'd wake up to sixteen missed messages he had no memory of missing. They both said it was over in the same week without ever actually discussing it with each other first, two people quitting the same relationship independently from two different continents. Sunghoon was the one who finally said it to his face, backstage in some green room between cities: "You're going to lose her for real if you keep treating a relationship like a side quest, man." Jake flew back on his one single day off — nineteen hours in the air for six hours on the ground — just to sit in her kitchen and prove he still knew which mug she liked her coffee in. It worked. It always worked, for a while.

The sixth time was the ugliest one. A small fight about him forgetting plans again spiraled into two years of unsaid things finally getting said, loud, all at once. She used a word she'd never used with him before — *tired*, not angry-tired, just bone-tired, the kind that doesn't come back from a hug at the door. He didn't chase her right away that time. Jungwon, of all people, told him to sit on his hands for once. "Give her actual space, hyung. Not the kind where you just wait outside her door instead of calling." He gave her actual space, weeks of it, the first time he'd ever done that instead of showing up uninvited. She reached out first, eventually. Two words: *I miss you.* Rosie told her she was an idiot. She agreed. She went back anyway.

The seventh time, the tour hit its peak — his face on every billboard in three countries, a solo stage segment added just for him, interviews that ran longer than their actual conversations that week. She looked at photos of the two of them and didn't recognize herself in them anymore, some smaller, quieter version of a person who'd folded herself down to fit the empty spaces his career left behind. She ended it gently that time, almost kindly, because she wasn't even angry anymore, just tired in a way that scared her. He agreed to go to actual therapy that round — not to win her back, though some part of him hoped it might. Three months later they tried again, slower, more careful, both of them a little more honest about how badly they kept doing this to each other.

---

The eighth time wasn't a fight at all, and

that's exactly why it was the one that stuck.

She sat across from him in her apartment, calm in a way that scared him more than any of the yelling ever had, and said, "I don't hate you. I never hated you, not once, in seven breakups. I just don't think you know how to choose me over everything else, and I don't think I can survive being the thing you choose last one more time."

He didn't beg. He just nodded, because some honest, exhausted part of him knew she was right, and he'd used up every version of "I promise this is the last time" that a person gets to use on someone before the words stop meaning anything.

Lisa, Rosie, and Nina didn't say "we told you so." They just held her while she cried, and this time, when she said it was really over, they believed her, because something in her voice sounded different — final in a way the other seven times never had.

--

She went back to Brazil. Not for a visit — for good. She built a whole life there, an apartment with a view she actually liked, a routine that didn't have his face on a billboard anywhere in it. She didn't come back to Korea, not once, not for anything.

Two years passed.

She cut her hair short. Packed away the soft sweaters and pastel colors for black — leather jackets, sharp eyeliner, a version of herself with edges where there used to be softness. Her Korean and Portuguese made her good at something real, finally — interpreting work, then touring gigs, translating for visiting artists and crews.

Somewhere in there, a coordinator introduced her to a sound engineer named Mark — easygoing, kind, the type who actually listened when she talked. Nothing dramatic. Just easy. They went out once, and it went fine enough that they made plans for a second date, no particular rush behind it.

Then the contract came through — a Korean group's Brazil dates, three shows, good pay, tight timeline. She signed it without reading past the schedule and the fee, the way you do after two years of contracts that all look the same.

She found out which group it was three days before she was due on site.

ENHYPEN.

She almost pulled out. She didn't. Two years was long enough, she told herself. She could stand in a room with him and feel nothing.

She was wrong. She just didn't know it yet.

**Day one.**

She walked in with her clipboard and her earpiece and her most professional voice, and the second he saw her, his whole face went slack, like he'd forgotten how to breathe. "You're the translator," he said. "You're the client," she said back, flat, giving him nothing. The show went smoothly. Professional. Distant. Exactly how she wanted it.

That night she had her second date with Mark — a small restaurant a few blocks from the hotel, nothing fancy, just easy conversation over pasta. She was laughing at something he'd said when the door opened and Jake walked in like he owned the place, spotted her immediately, and didn't stop to think before he crossed the room.

"Who is this," he said, not even a question, just flat and cold, standing at the edge of their table like he had any right to be there.

"Jake—"

"Two years and this is—" He cut himself off, jaw tight, and Mark was already half out of his seat asking, quiet and confused, if everything was okay. It wasn't a big scene, not shouting, but it didn't need to be loud to wreck the whole table — the silence after was worse than yelling would've been. She grabbed her bag, told Mark she was so sorry, and walked out before either of them could say anything else. She cried the whole cab ride back to her apartment, furious in a way that had nothing left in it for him except how much she wanted him gone.

**Day two.**

She didn't look at him once. Didn't speak to him beyond what the job required. He tried, once, in the hallway — "can we just talk—" — and she cut him off with two words, "we can't," and kept walking. But the contract didn't care about her feelings: ENHYPEN's label had a livestream scheduled that afternoon, and she was the interpreter on record. She had to sit ten feet from him, headset on, translating every word in real time while he talked, easy and warm, about missing someone, about a mistake he'd made that he didn't know how to undo. She kept her voice level in Portuguese the entire time. She did not look at him once. The second the stream ended she was gone before he even set the phone down.

**Day three.**

Final show. Last of the three.

The set ends, the fan-interaction segment starts. Heeseung thanks the crowd in careful, rehearsed Portuguese. Jay tells a rambling food story that somehow ends in screaming anyway. Niki gets quiet and sincere, thanking the fans who've stuck around since debut. Jungwon and Sunghoon do a bit together until neither of them makes sense — and then it's Sunoo's turn, and he doesn't do the usual either. He starts talking about how much he's going to miss this leg of the tour, this crowd specifically, and his voice just breaks halfway through the sentence, no warning, no performance to it. He wipes his face with the back of his hand, laughing at himself through it, genuinely caught off guard by his own tears. The crowd goes soft and loud at the same time, that specific stadium sound of thousands of people going "aww" in unison.

Heeseung notices Jake next — standing off to the side, unusually still, jaw tight, hands twisting the mic cord instead of just holding it. He leans over. "You good?" Jake doesn't answer right away. Then it's his turn, and he doesn't do the usual either.

He talks about home. Says this city has felt more like home this week than anywhere the tour's taken them in two years, and it's not really about the country — it's about a person who's half of this place, who used to be the only place he ever wanted to be.

"I'm not going to say her name into a stadium mic," he says, voice cracking slightly, "but I loved her first, and some part of me still thinks she might be my last."

The crowd does the math instantly. The chant starts small and spreads like wildfire.

*"Volta pra ele! Volta pra ele!"*

(Go back to him. Go back to him.)

She's frozen at the edge of the stage, clipboard forgotten at her feet, and whatever's on her face isn't what he was hoping to see. He hands the mic back before the segment's even over and walks straight off stage, past her, not toward her. He doesn't stop.

She follows without deciding to.

She finds him in the hallway, back against the wall, hands over his face. "I shouldn't have said that out there," he says before she can get a word out. "And I shouldn't have done what I did at that restaurant either. I had no right. I know I had no right." He drops his hands. "I don't need you to feel the same. I just needed it to be true out loud once before I ran out of chances."

He turns to walk away. She grabs his wrist.

Outside, it's started raining — the same kind of sudden downpour from two years and a lifetime ago.

"You never learned how to just say something small," she says. "You always have to make it a whole speech."

"So say something back," he says. "Small or big, I don't care which."

She pulls him out into the rain instead, and kisses him like she's been holding her breath for two years.

---

Lisa, Rosie, and Nina flew out for the wedding six months later — a small beach ceremony in Brazil, her family's language and his mixed together in the same vows. Lisa cried through the entire thing. Rosie gave a toast that made everyone laugh and cry at the same time — including a line about "the infamous pasta dinner," which got Jake to bury his face in his hands while the whole reception howled. Nina just held her hand backstage before she walked out, the way she always had.

Mark, of all people, sent a bottle of wine and a card that just said *glad it worked out, sorry I got dragged into the drama.* She laughed harder at that than almost anything else that week.

"We still think you're both a little insane," Rosie told Jake at the reception, only half joking.

"Crazy," he agreed, looking across the room at his wife like she was the only person in it. "Crazy over her. Always have been."

This time, nobody argued with him.

Sunghoon Park was twenty-four the year everything changed. He was the only son of the royal family — tall, almost unfairly so, standing at 1.83m with a build that made him look carved rather than born. His skin was pale, almost porcelain in candlelight, and his hair was a deep charcoal black, always slightly messy no matter how many times his attendants tried to fix it. He had thick, dark brows that gave his face a serious, almost brooding look even when he wasn't trying, and full, soft lips that rarely smiled — because Sunghoon rarely spoke at all. He was a quiet man by nature, the kind who observed far more than he said, who let silence do the talking his crown never allowed him to do himself.

Nobody at court knew he skied. It wasn't befitting of a future king — reckless, they'd call it, undignified — so twice a month he'd slip away before dawn with nothing but a hooded cloak and a horse, disappearing into the mountains outside Lunaria until the sun was fully up, and no one but Jake ever asked where he'd been.

Even fewer knew he sang. He never did it in front of anyone — not his mother, not Jake, not a single soul in all his years of being raised inside palace walls. It only happened late at night, alone, when the weight of the day had finally lifted enough to let something soft slip out of him. It was the one place his voice belonged only to him.

YN was nineteen when she arrived at the palace with nothing but a small bag and a debt she hadn't chosen.

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The carriage that brought her to the palace gates wasn't royal at all — just a rickety cart borrowed from a neighbor, loaded with the last of what her family owned. Her father had worked in the Lunarian palace kitchens for almost twenty years before he passed, and when the debts came knocking, the Head of Staff had offered her a position out of what YN suspected was pity more than anything else.

She didn't know yet that pity would be the kindest thing anyone in that palace felt for her for a long, long time.

"You'll room with the lower staff," said the woman who checked her in, barely glancing up from her ledger. "Kitchens in the morning, halls in the afternoon. Speak when spoken to. Keep your eyes down around the family."

YN nodded, clutching the small bag that held everything she owned.

The other maids weren't cruel exactly — just cold, the way people are when they've spent years working out exactly where they rank and don't appreciate someone new shuffling the order. Momo was the only one who smiled at her that first week, sliding an extra roll of bread across the table when she thought no one was looking.

"You get used to it," Momo told her, low and warm. "The palace, I mean. Not them." She nodded toward the older maids. "They'll warm up. Eventually. Maybe."

YN laughed for the first time in weeks.

It was during her second week, carrying a stack of linens down the east corridor, that she caught her first glimpse of him. The corridor opened onto the courtyard just as the royal procession was passing through. Surrounded by guards and nobles, the Crown Prince moved through the crowd with his mother, the Queen, at his side. YN only caught flashes of him between the people—dark hair, a straight posture, and an unreadable expression before the procession disappeared around the corner.

“That’s Prince Sunghoon,” Momo whispered beside her, lowering her head respectfully. “Well… practically the king now, since his father’s been sick. Everyone says he’s got a heart made of ice.”

YN stared after the procession, trying to make out the face she’d barely seen. From what little she’d caught, he looked less like someone made of ice and more like someone carrying a weight too heavy for anyone his age.

She didn’t think much about him after that. Or at least, she told herself she didn’t.

A week later, unable to sleep, she wandered farther into the palace grounds than she was supposed to, drawn by a sound she couldn’t place at first. Singing—low, quiet, unpolished in the most beautiful way—coming from somewhere near the old music room where no one ever went this late. She crept closer without meaning to and found the door left slightly open.

It was him.

Or at least, she was almost certain it was. The man sat with his back to her at the old piano, shoulders relaxed, his dark hair catching the moonlight. Even without seeing his face, the royal jacket draped over the back of his chair was enough for her to recognize him. Prince Sunghoon.

YN stood frozen in the doorway, stunned—because the voice didn’t belong to the cold, distant prince she’d only caught glimpses of before. It belonged to someone softer. Someone she’d never expected to exist.

She slipped away before he could turn around and notice her, her heart pounding for reasons she couldn’t quite understand.

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It happened almost a month later, and it happened by accident.

YN had been sent to gather herbs from the far end of the palace garden after hours — the head cook always forgot something and always sent her, the newest girl, to fetch it in the dark. She didn't mind. The garden at night was the only place in the whole palace that felt like it belonged to no one.

She wasn't expecting to find someone already there.

He was sitting on the low stone wall near the fountain, jacket off, sleeves pushed up, looking nothing at all like the man she'd seen in the courtyard. In the moonlight he just looked tired. Young. Alone.

"You're not supposed to be out here this late," he said, without turning around.

"Neither are you," she said back, before she could stop herself.

That got his attention. He turned, and for a second she thought she'd made a terrible mistake — talked back to a noble, maybe a guard, someone who could have her dismissed on the spot. But he didn't look angry. He looked almost amused.

"Fair point," he said.

She didn't recognize him without the crown, without his mother beside him, without the whole weight of the kingdom pressing his shoulders back. He introduced himself simply as "hoon" — no titles — and she took it at face value, assuming he was staff, maybe a steward or a guard out of uniform.

They talked for almost an hour. About nothing important — the stars, the way the fountain never quite sounded the same twice, whether the kitchen's bread was better this season or last. He laughed, twice, at something she said, and both times he looked briefly startled by his own laughter, like he'd forgotten he still had it in him.

"You should get back," he said eventually, glancing at the dark windows of the staff quarters. "Before someone notices you're gone."

"You should too," she said. "Whoever you're hiding from."

Something flickered across his face — surprise, maybe, that she'd guessed there was someone to hide from at all. He didn't answer. He just gave her a small nod goodnight and disappeared down the garden path.

She went back to the kitchens with her arms full of herbs and her mind full of a stranger whose name she didn't fully believe was the whole truth.

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It kept happening. Not every night — but often enough that YN started finding reasons to linger near the garden after her work was done, telling herself it was just fresh air, just a break, nothing more.

He always seemed to be there first.

They talked about books one night — he'd read more than anyone she'd ever met, and for once he didn't sound like he was reciting facts to impress her, just genuinely happy someone wanted to listen. Another night he asked her about her family, and she told him about her father, the kitchens, the way grief sits in a house long after the funeral is over. He listened like it mattered. Like she mattered.

"You don't talk like the other staff," he said once.

"Is that a compliment or a warning?"

"Both, probably."

It was almost three weeks before everything fell apart — or came together, depending on how you looked at it.

There was a formal reception that evening, some visiting dignitary from a neighboring territory, and YN had been pulled from the kitchens to help serve. She was carrying a tray through the receiving hall when she saw him again — properly this time, in full royal dress, a circlet at his brow, his mother the Queen at his side and half the court bowing around him.

The tray nearly slipped from her hands.

*hoon.*

Not a steward. Not a guard. The prince. The future king of Lunaria. The man she'd been meeting in the garden for three weeks like they were equals, like there was nothing between them but moonlight.

He caught her eye across the hall — just for a second — and she watched something like panic cross his face too, like he'd been caught at something, though he was the one who'd let her believe a lie.

She managed to avoid him for two full days after that. It wasn't easy in a palace, but she managed.

On the third night, he was waiting for her at the garden gate.

"You lied to me," she said, before he could speak.

"I never lied," he said quietly. "I just... didn't correct you. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like one right now."

"It feels exactly like one."

He looked down at his hands. "Out there," he said, nodding toward the palace behind them, "I'm not allowed to just be a person. Everyone wants something from me, or they're afraid of me, or they're performing for me. You didn't do any of that. For three weeks I got to just talk to someone. I wasn't ready to give that up by telling you who I was."

YN didn't have an answer for that. Because some small, traitorous part of her understood exactly what he meant.

"So what happens now?" she asked.

"Now," he said, "I suppose you get to decide if you ever want to talk to me again. Prince or not."

She should have said no. She should have walked away and gone back to being invisible, the way the other maids were, the way was safest.

She didn't.

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Word travels fast in a small kingdom and faster in a smaller palace. It wasn't long before Sunghoon started requesting YN specifically for small tasks — bringing tea to his study, arranging his books, small errands that had absolutely no reason to require the newest kitchen maid except that he asked for her by name.

The Head of Staff raised an eyebrow but didn't argue with a prince's request. Momo raised both eyebrows and did argue, in her own way.

"You're playing with fire," she told YN one night, braiding her hair before bed. "Everyone's noticed. Even if nothing's happened —"

"Nothing has happened," YN said, too quickly.

Momo just looked at her. "Right. Nothing."

But Momo kept her secret anyway, because that's what best friends do, even when they think you're being reckless.

Jake noticed too — Sunghoon's oldest friend, a noble who'd grown up alongside him and knew him better than almost anyone in the palace, including his own mother. He found Sunghoon in his study one evening, staring at a book he clearly wasn't reading.

"You're going to get her hurt," Jake said, without preamble. "Or yourself. Probably both."

"I know," Sunghoon said.

"But you're not going to stop."

Sunghoon didn't answer that, which was answer enough. Jake sighed, dropped into the chair across from him, and said, "Then at least be careful. My mother notices everything, and yours notices twice as much."

Sunghoon and YN's evenings together became something neither of them could quite name — not official, not spoken of, but real all the same. He told her about the crushing weight of a crown he hadn't wanted yet, about a father too sick to rule and a mother who ruled in his place with an iron grip. She told him about a life spent making herself smaller so no one would notice how much she'd lost.

Somewhere in all of it, without either of them deciding to, the space between "friend" and something else started disappearing.

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The trouble arrived with a name: Wonyoung, a noblewoman from the neighboring territory of Elmsworth, brought to Lunaria for what everyone but Sunghoon seemed to already consider a settled matter — his future marriage.

She was beautiful in the practiced, polished way of someone raised to be looked at. She was also, YN noticed immediately, sharp — the kind of sharp that watched a room and filed away everything it saw.

"She's perfect for him," one of the older maids whispered approvingly as Wonyoung swept through the halls on her first visit. "Good family, good alliance, good match."

YN said nothing. She had no right to say anything.

At the welcome banquet, YN was assigned to serve near the head table — close enough to watch Sunghoon sit beside Wonyoung, close enough to see him nod politely at whatever she said, close enough to feel something twist in her chest that she had absolutely no claim to feel.

Later, alone in the garden, Sunghoon found her before she could avoid him.

"You looked miserable in there," she said, trying to keep her voice light.

"I was," he admitted. "She talks about alliances the way other people talk about weather. Pleasant. Meaningless."

"She's going to be your wife."

"She might be," he said, and something in the way he said it — resigned, almost grim — made YN's chest ache worse, not better.

Han, Wonyoung's constant shadow and closest ally at court, noticed the way Sung's eyes kept drifting toward a certain maid during the banquet. He mentioned it to Wonyoung later that night, phrased carefully, like a gift.

"Interesting," was all Wonyoung said. But she remembered.

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It happened almost by accident — the way most important things did between them.

Sunghoon had been thrown from his horse during a hunting trip, nothing life-threatening, but a nasty fall that left him bruised, feverish, and confined to bed for several days under strict palace physician's orders. YN, given her low standing, was one of the few allowed in and out of his chambers without suspicion — bringing meals, changing linens, small tasks the higher staff considered beneath them.

On the third night, his fever spiked. YN found him tangled in the sheets, restless, murmuring things that didn't make sense, his forehead burning under her palm.

She sat with him until it broke, near dawn, exhausted and terrified in a way she had no right to be for a prince who wasn't hers.

When he finally woke, clear-eyed for the first time in days, he found her still sitting at his bedside, half-asleep in the chair, her hand still resting near his on the blanket.

"You stayed," he said, voice rough.

"You had a fever. Someone had to."

"That's not why you stayed."

She didn't answer that. He didn't push it. But something had shifted, quiet and undeniable, in the space between them.

Two nights later, once he was steadier, she came to check on him one final time before the physicians declared him fully recovered. He was sitting up against the pillows, looking better than he had in days, but there was something heavy behind his eyes.

"Can I tell you something," he said, "and you don't say anything back until I'm finished?"

She nodded, settling into the chair beside his bed.

"I don't know if I've ever really lived," he said quietly. "Not before all this. I was raised to be a king before I was ever allowed to just be a person. But somewhere in the last few months, I met someone — a girl, kind, sharper than she gives herself credit for — and she made this cold, tired heart of mine feel something again. I don't know how to explain it except that I can't picture what comes next without her in it. And I know that's not fair to say to you, of all people, given everything. But I needed to say it out loud, just once, even if nothing can come of it."

YN's chest ached so badly she thought it might crack open right there. Because she knew — of course she knew — that he wasn't talking about anyone else. And she also knew, with the same certainty, that a maid and a king had no future the palace would ever allow.

So she smiled, soft and a little sad, and said the only thing she could bring herself to say.

"Don't lose hope in her, then. Whoever she is. She'd be lucky."

She said it like she wasn't the girl he meant. Like her own heart wasn't breaking in the exact same shape as his.

Sunghoon opened his mouth to respond — and then, suddenly, coughed, hard, his whole body curling forward with the force of it, still weak from the fever. YN moved without thinking, sliding to the edge of the bed and rubbing firm circles on his back.

"Easy.. easy, breathe—"

Before she'd even finished the sentence, his hand caught her wrist. And in one motion, gentle but certain, he pulled her forward — off the chair, onto the bed, close enough that her breath caught in her throat — and kissed her.

It wasn't rushed. It wasn't careless. It was slow and certain, like something he'd been holding back for months and finally let go of all at once. YN froze for half a second — shock, disbelief, the impossibility of it all — before she kissed him back, both hands curling into the front of his shirt like she was afraid he'd disappear if she let go.

When they finally broke apart, neither of them said anything for a long moment. Just breathing. Just looking at each other like the whole world had rearranged itself in the space of a kiss.

"It's you," he said finally, voice barely above a whisper. "It was always you."

"I know," she whispered back. "I think I've known for weeks. I was just too scared to say it."

"So was I."

They stayed up talking until the sky started turning grey outside the window — everything finally said out loud that had been unspoken for months. And when exhaustion finally caught up with both of them, she fell asleep in his arms, tucked against his chest, his heartbeat steady under her ear, neither one of them thinking, for once, about crowns or kingdoms or what any of this would cost.

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After that night, they found ways.

Small windows of stolen time — the garden after midnight, an empty hallway between his study and hers, a locked door and twenty minutes before someone came looking. It wasn't enough, not nearly, but it was theirs, and for a while, it was enough to survive on.

Jake knew, obviously — Sunghoon couldn't hide the way his whole face changed lately, softer, lighter, and Jake wasn't blind. He didn't approve, not entirely, but he kept the secret and ran interference when he could, covering for Sung's absences with practiced ease.

Momo knew too, from the way YN started humming while she worked, from the exhaustion of stolen late nights written plain across her face some mornings. She didn't approve either — she was terrified for her friend, honestly — but she kept the secret just the same, because YN's happiness meant more to her than anyone's rules.

"Just be careful," Momo told her one morning, tucking a loose strand of hair back from YN's face. "Please. For me."

"I will," YN promised. She didn't know yet how hollow that promise would turn out to be.

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It couldn't stay hidden forever. The Queen had built her entire reign on noticing things other people missed, and she'd noticed the shift in her son weeks before she said a word about it — the softness in him, the way his eyes tracked a certain maid across a room he wasn't supposed to be looking at all.

She summoned YN alone, late one evening, to a private study far from prying eyes and ears.

"I know what's happening between you and my son," the Queen said, without any preamble at all. Her voice was calm. That was somehow worse than shouting would have been. "And I'm going to give you the chance to end it quietly, before it becomes something neither of us can control."

YN said nothing, her hands twisting together in front of her.

"I'll pay you," the Queen continued, sliding a folded paper across the desk — an amount so large YN's whole family could have lived on it for years. "Enough to leave Lunaria entirely. Start somewhere new. Somewhere he'll never find you, and you'll never have to explain yourself to anyone again."

"I don't want your money," YN said quietly.

Something flickered across the Queen's face — not quite surprise, more like disappointment that this would take longer than she'd hoped. "Think carefully before you refuse me again," she said, standing. "I am not a woman who makes the same offer twice."

YN left that meeting shaking, but she didn't tell Sung. Not yet. She told herself she didn't want to worry him. Really, she was terrified that if she said it out loud, it would become real.

It became real anyway, three weeks later, when the Queen called her back — and this time, there was no folded paper on the desk.

"You didn't take my money," the Queen said, "so let me be plain instead. If you do not end this and remove yourself from my son's life, I will ruin you. I will make sure you never find work in this kingdom or any other, I will make sure your name is spoken of as something shameful, and if that doesn't move you — understand that I will hurt him too. His position, his reputation, everything he's meant to inherit. You will destroy him just by staying near him. Is that clear enough for you?"

It was clear. It was devastatingly clear. And still, when YN walked out of that room, shaking, sick to her stomach — she went straight to the garden that night anyway, because she couldn't make herself stop loving him even when she knew exactly what it might cost them both.

She told him everything, finally, that night. All of it — the money, the threats, all of it laid bare between them under the same fountain where it had all started.

Sunghoon's jaw tightened, fury and fear tangled together on his face. "She doesn't get to threaten you," he said. "I won't let her."

"She's the Queen, Sunghoon. She can do whatever she wants."

He was quiet for a long time. Then he took both her hands in his, steady despite everything. "Then we don't give her the chance to."

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The wedding to Wonyoung had been arranged for months — a political inevitability neither of them had been able to stop, only postpone with excuses and delays that were quickly running out. As the date crept closer, Sunghoon and YN made their choice in whispered conversations that stretched deep into the night: they would leave. Together. Before the wedding, before the Queen's threats could turn into something neither of them could survive.

They planned it carefully — a place outside the city gates, a specific hour, a story that would only unravel after they were already too far away to be caught. Jake, against his better judgment, agreed to help arrange horses without asking questions he didn't want the answers to. Momo helped YN slip away from her duties that final evening without raising suspicion, her hands trembling as she hugged her friend goodbye.

"Go," Momo whispered fiercely. "Be happy. Don't look back."

The morning of the wedding, the whole palace moved like a machine — preparations, decorations, nobles arriving from every corner of the kingdom for the ceremony that would bind Sunghoon to Wonyoung in front of all of Lunaria.

Sunghoon slipped away before dawn, exactly as planned, making his way to the meeting point at the edge of the city with his heart pounding harder than it ever had in battle.

YN wasn't there.

He waited. Minutes stretched into an hour. He told himself she was just delayed, held up by some last-minute duty, that she'd come running any second with an apology and that same soft smile. But the sun kept climbing, and the road stayed empty, and eventually a rider came for him instead — sent to bring the missing prince back before his own wedding started without him.

He returned to the palace in a daze, refusing to believe what his own mind was already telling him.

That's when the Queen found him, her face arranged into something almost like sympathy — almost.

"I'm so sorry, Sunghoon," she said, and if he'd been thinking clearly, he might have noticed how practiced it sounded. "The girl came to see me late last night. She took a considerable sum from the treasury office — enough to disappear completely — and told the guards at the west gate she was leaving Lunaria for good. She said to tell you not to look for her."

"That's a lie," Sunghoon said immediately, though something cold was already spreading through his chest. "She wouldn't—"

"I saw the missing funds myself," the Queen said gently. "I know this is difficult to hear. But some people, Sung, only ever wanted what a crown could give them. I know it doesn't feel that way now. But it will, in time."

He didn't believe her. Not at first. He tore through every excuse his mind could offer — she'd been taken, she'd been hurt, there was some explanation that made sense of the empty meeting place and the money gone missing and the guards who swore, under the Queen's watchful eye, that they'd seen her leave willingly, alone, in the dark.

But the hours passed, and no explanation came, and no letter arrived, and eventually even Jake — searching quietly on his own, without telling Sunghoon what he feared — came back with nothing. No trace of her. No sign she'd ever meant to keep her promise at all.

By the time evening came, Sunghoon stood at the altar beside Wonyoung in front of the entire kingdom, hollowed out, going through the motions of vows he didn't feel, rings he barely registered placing, a crown of matrimony settling over a heart that had already broken clean in half that morning.

He told himself, standing there, that he'd been a fool. That love like that — sudden, consuming, impossible — was never meant to survive contact with the real world. That somewhere out there, YN was living comfortably on stolen coin, and he was the only one who'd been foolish enough to believe any of it had been real.

He had no idea that the version of events he’d been given was a lie, built carefully, piece by piece, by a mother who would do anything to protect her throne. And as the palace celebrated a wedding built on betrayal, only one person knew what had really happened to YN that morning

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The end..

Want to know what really happened that morning? 👀