#catchtherabbit

❧ a/n: one would assume that with the sheer volume of filthy smut i've produced in my lifetime, primal play would've shown up at least once. one would assume wrong. hence this. my little guinea pig. my experiment. my white rabbit.

so. i've read primal play. plenty of it. and it almost always leaves me with that specific unsatisfied feeling, you know the one. either she's just lying there while he chases her like she's a speed bump with a pulse, or he catches her and immediately skips the entire point and goes straight to insertion. no foreplay. no savoring. criminal. actually criminal. so after a few minutes of bemoaning and at least two 'must i do everything in this house's, i sat down and wrote the thing i wanted to read. i am, for the record, still writing it. so honestly this is an interest check to see how many people would actually be interested in something like this and whether i should hyperfixate on finishing it or not.

also. yes. it's an OC this time, which is deeply strange for me given that my entire brand is shoving you headfirst into second-person and making it your problem. but i could not in good conscience slap x reader on this when yunjin is, very specifically, based on lesserafim's yunjin—pink hair, soft voice, absolutely no business being in a forest at midnight with that man. if you're coming from my longfic kkangpae you already know. if you're new: godspeed, genuinely, and maybe start there.

pray for the pink bows. may they rest unripped.

also yes the banner was completely self-made so i expect at least 3 praise comments thank you and you’re welcome.

mwah. 🎀

© jungkoode 2025

“I c—” She swallows. “I can’t—”

“You can.”

“V, I can’t—”

He pushes forward, and his chest presses into the blade, just a fraction—just enough that she feels the resistance, feels the tip bite into fabric, feels the knife start to go somewhere—and every alarm in her body fires at once.

Yunjin wrenches backward.

Her hands yank the knife away from him so fast the momentum almost tips her over, her arms pulling the blade toward her own body in her desperate retreat from the idea of piercing someone, of steel going through shirt and skin and muscle—

The knife ends up clutched against her chest, point up, her whole body curved around it protectively.

Not protecting herself from the weapon.

Protecting him from her.

V watches this happen with an expression of quiet, absolute satisfaction.

And then he chuckles.

The sound rolls through his chest and out into the cold air between them, and it sounds—god, it sounds genuinely charmed. This soft, private laughter of someone who ran an experiment and got exactly the result they wanted.

He’d known.

He’d known she wouldn’t do it.

That’s why he pushed forward—because he knew she’d pull back.

Because the equation was already solved in his head before he even placed the blade.

Because V doesn’t gamble. He calculates.

“Good bunny,” he murmurs.

Her chest cracks open and floods warm.

She hates it.

She hates that those two words in that voice make her feel—make her feel—

Happy.

Which is insane.

She’s holding a knife in a forest with a man who kills people and she feels happy because he called her a good bunny.

She really needs to schedule an appointment with J-Hope’s second.

V reaches for her. Slow this time.

His hands cup her shoulders—gently, so gently it doesn’t match anything else about this, doesn’t match the knife or the chase or the counting—and he eases her back down onto the ground.

Pine needles prick through the thin cotton of her ruined hoodie. The cold seeps into her shoulders.

He follows her down, settling his weight over her again, and his hand finds her wrists and gathers them back together above her head.

The knife stays in her grip for one more second before he takes it from her. She lets it go without resistance, fingers uncurling like petals, and it’s the easiest surrender she’s ever made.

The knife spins.

She catches it in her periphery—a flash of silver movement at the edge of her vision, his right hand a blur of practiced rotation, the blade folding and unfolding in that hypnotic figure eight she’s seen a hundred times and still can’t track.

The handles click.

The steel flashes.

And then his hand comes down.

Fast.

The blade slams into the earth right beside her neck.

THUNK.

Yunjin flinches so violently her whole body leaves the ground for a second. A high, choked sound punches from her throat—and it’s not a scream but the shape of one that got caught behind her teeth. Her head snaps to the side and she feels it: the knife buried to the hilt in the soil, the handle still vibrating faintly, the blade maybe two inches from the tendon in her neck.

Her pulse hammers against the ground.

V holds the position for a beat. Just long enough for her to feel the proximity—the almost of it, the near-miss singing in her nerve endings like a plucked string.

Then simply leaves the knife there. Planted in the earth beside her throat like a headstone for her composure.

“Now,” he says, as if they’d just paused for a commercial break. “Where was I.”

Jesus Christ.

His freed hand finds her left breast—the one his mouth hasn’t touched yet—and he cups it fully this time. His palm is warm, broad enough to cover the whole small swell of her, and he just—holds it.

Then he simply pinches her nipple between his thumb and forefinger. Not hard, but enough to hold it—to trap the stiff peak and roll it slowly, tugging it up from her chest, stretching the skin gently before letting it spring back.

Her back bows. A moan slips out—an actual throaty moan that rings in the trees—and her face goes nuclear.

V’s eyes go half-lidded. That pleased, sleepy look settles over his face.

“See?” he murmurs. “Sensitive.”

He lowers his mouth to the one he hasn’t tasted yet.

This time he doesn’t start gentle. His lips close around her left nipple and he sucks—immediate, firm, hollowing his cheeks against her small breast. His tongue presses flat against the peak inside his mouth and drags, and the wet heat combined with the suction pulls something from so deep in her chest that her hands clench into fists above her head.

“Nnh—”

She can’t form words. Her hips shift against the ground and her legs are shaking where his thighs bracket them.

“V—that’s—ah—”

He alternates in his sucking, first flicking the tip of his tongue against the trapped nipple—quick, flicks that send jolts straight to her clit. Then sucking again, slow and deep, drawing the nipple further into his mouth than seems possible, as if he’s trying to take the whole breast in.

His hand works the other side. Rolling and tugging the right nipple between his fingers, pinching it lightly just to feel her flinch, then soothing it with a slow rub of his thumb.

He pulls off with a wet sound.

Studies her nipple. It’s swollen now, glistening with his saliva, flushed a deeper shade than before—almost red, angry-looking, slick and shining in the moonlight.

“Pretty,” he says. Then, tilting his head: “Prettier wet.”

She makes a noise that is, generously, a whimper.

He switches. Mouth to the right nipple now, hand to the left, and the sensation of cool night air hitting saliva-slick skin makes her gasp briefly. Goosebumps erupt across her chest. The abandoned nipple tightens painfully, exposed, and then his fingers find it—still slick—and tug.

Immediately, he draws a slow circle around the areola before closing in on the nipple, spiraling tighter and tighter until the tip of his tongue flicks across the very peak.

Then he bites.

Just the edges of his teeth closing around the stiff nub, the pressure strange after all that softness, and Yunjin’s whole body jolts.

V hums against her skin. His teeth release the nipple and his tongue soothes over it in flat strokes.

“Piercings” he says, mouth still brushing against her breast.

Her brain stutters to a halt. “W—what?”

He lifts his head enough to look at her nipple. Considers it. His thumb and forefinger catch the wet peak and hold it up, stretching it slightly, examining it from the side.

“A needle,” he says. “Through here.”

His other hand releases her wrists—briefly, just long enough to tap the opposite nipple with one finger before returning to pin her.

"And here. Matched set.”

She stares at him with her mouth open.

“Small gauge,” he continues, warming to the subject. “Something delicate. Gold, maybe—“ He pauses. Reconsiders. “No. Rose gold. To match.”

He’s redesigning her like a moodboard.

“Pink bows,” he adds, and his voice goes soft on the words—almost dreamy. “Threaded through each ring. Little satin ones. The same shade as—” His gaze flicks to her hair. “—these.”

Yunjin cannot believe this is happening to her.

She cannot believe she is lying on a forest floor with her tits out while the most dangerous man in Kkangpae describes his ideal nipple piercing aesthetic with the enthusiasm of someone planning a Pinterest wedding.

“You’d heal fast,” he muses, thumb circling her areola absently. “Small breasts heal faster. Less tissue strain.”

“How do you know that—”

“And then they’d be even more sensitive.”

His eyes brighten fractionally, like this possibility truly excites him.

“Right now, you can barely handle my mouth. After the piercings?”

He dips his head and drags the flat of his tongue across her nipple in one gentle stroke.

Her spine arches on reflex, a broken ’ah’ falling from her lips.

“You’d cry.”

He says it like it’s the whole point.

“Every touch. Every brush of fabric.” He kisses the wet nipple between words—soft. “A breeze. Water in the shower.” His tongue flicks out, quick, and she jerks. “You’d feel everything.”

She is going to lose her mind.

He lowers his mouth again, and this time there’s intent behind it—not idle exploration but dedication.

He sucks her nipple into his mouth and works it with his tongue, rolling it, pressing it against the roof of his mouth, and his hand kneads the other breast in rhythm, thumb brushing the peak in time with each pull of his lips.

The sensation builds in layers—heat and pressure, the ache of overstimulation starting to glow at the edges—and she’s squirming now, unable to stay still, shifting restlessly against the ground.

She grinds up.

One involuntary, desperate roll of her pelvis against him, seeking friction it hasn’t been offered, pressing up into the weight of him between her legs—

She feels him.

Hard. Thick through his pants, pressed against the dampness between her thighs.

The contact is brief—a fraction of a second—but the shape of him is unmistakable.

Yunjin freezes.

V’s mouth goes still on her breast.

He lifts his head.

Slowly.

His eyes find hers.

His tongue traces his lower lip—a quick, absent gesture, collecting the slick of his own saliva—and his expression makes every organ in her body rearrange.

He doesn’t look surprised. He looks like something just clicked into place. Like a lock engaging. Like a wolf who’d been playing with its food just felt movement and remembered ‘oh, right, hungry.’

Yunjin’s stomach drops.

“That—” Her voice comes out reedy, cracked. “I didn’t—that was—I didn’t mean to—”

“Careful.”

One word. Quiet.

It’s not the smile from before—not the amused one, not the fond one, not the pleased-with-his-experiment one.

Thhis one has teeth.

The thorned-rose feeling wraps around her ribcage and squeezes.

Her stomach turns inside out.

Her clit throbs so hard she can feel her own pulse between her legs, a sick, swooping rush of butterflies and dread knotted together so tightly she can’t tell which is which.

He holds her gaze. His smile completes itself—wide, eerie, the kind of smile that belongs on a presence that hunts in the dark.

“You do that again,” he says, voice dropping low enough to feel in her spine, “and I’ll start eating you from the bottom up instead, bunny.”

The forest is very, very quiet.

Yunjin doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink.

Her clit throbs again.

Don’t move. She must not move.

Her hips twitch.

And V’s smile—impossibly—gets wider.

But he doesn’t move right away.

That’s the worst part.

He just stays there—hovering over her, his weight balanced on his knees, that terrible smile still seated on his face—and he lets the moment breathe. Lets her feel the full scope of what she just did.

The involuntary twitch.

The grind.

The way her hips had moved toward him like bound by magneticism, completely beyond the jurisdiction of her brain.

He waits until her face has gone through every shade of pink available on the human spectrum.

Then he reaches for the knife.

The blade slides out of the soil with a soft, gritty hiss.

He holds it loosely, tipping it once in the moonlight to inspect the edge, and his gaze returns to her.

“Give me your hands,” he says.

Her stomach plummets. “What—”

“Hands.”

He releases her wrists.

The sudden absence of pressure is disorienting—she’s been pinned so long that freedom feels wrong, feels like a trick—and her arms ache as blood floods back into her fingers.

She brings them down slowly, stiffly, and he catches them. Both of her hands. He gathers them together as if wrapping a gift, folding her fingers around the blade of the knife.

She yelps.

Though, before she can protest, he lifts her hands above her head and presses them back against the ground.

“Hold this,” he says.

She stares up at her own hands. “V—”

“Don’t move.” His voice drops a register.

The playfulness thins, thorned quality rising to the surface like it that had been swimming just below the waterline.

He leans in, way too close for comfort.

So close she can feel the cinnamon touching her skin, smell the whiskey from his breath and something metallic and animal underneath all of it.

“That blade,” he murmurs, and his finger comes up to tap once, lightly, against the flat of the steel, “is very sharp.”

Tap.

“And your hands—” His gaze flicks upwards. “—are shaking.”

They are.

She can feel the tremor traveling from her shoulders through her biceps into her wrists into her fingers into the handle into the blade.

A fine, constant vibration, like a tuning fork someone struck twenty minutes ago and forgot about.

“If you move,” V says, and his voice is quiet now, stripped of the warmth, stripped of the playfulness, just the clean bare architecture of a statement, “that edge will open your skin. Your palms. Your fingers.”

She swallows hard enough to hear it.

“And that would make a mess.” He pulls back a fraction. Considers her. “Wouldn’t want that.”

His smile comes back. Smaller this time. Private. Surgical.

“So. Stay still for me.”

He leans back.

Her hands stay where they are. Above her head, wrapped around the blade, shaking.

She doesn’t move. She doesn’t dare move.

The steel hums against her palms with every tremor and she can feel how thin the line is between holding and cutting, between this and red.

V’s gaze travels from her hands—good, still—to her face—flushed, wet-eyed, lips parted—to her bare chest—nipples swollen and slick from his mouth, glistening rosy in the low light—to the waistband of her leggings.

The leggings he’d already sliced into. The fabric gapes at the hip where he’d cut earlier, torn enough to expose a stripe of what’s beneath, but the rest is still mostly intact. Mostly in the way. Mostly between him and whatever’s under the cotton candy wrapping.

He fixes this.

Both hands grip the tear he’d made and pull.

The sound of fabric ripping fills the clearing—louder than the knife had been, longer, a sustained rrrip that makes Yunjin flinch and then immediately freeze because—knife, knife, don’t move—and the leggings split wide along the seam.

He tears them open from hip to mid-thigh on one side, then the other, peeling the ruined cotton back like he’s unwrappiing something that needs careful handling.

The cold hits her inner thighs first. Then her hips. Then—

The matching panties. The ones she’d put on two hours ago in her room, the ones that had seemed like such an innocent, private decision at the time, the ones that are now on full display in a moonlit forest for a man who literally collects deathly souvenirs and has already mentally designed her nipple piercings.

Worse: they’re wet.

She can feel it. Has been able to feel it for a while, actually—the slick heat between her legs, the way the thin lace clings to her, damp and warm and obvious.

She’d been ignoring it. Refusing to acknowledge the very specific evidence of what his mouth on her tits and his knife against her skin had been doing to her for the last however-many minutes.

V sees it.

His hands go still on the torn fabric. His gaze lowers and stays.

He doesn’t say a word.

The silence is somehow louder than everything that came before.

Yunjin squeezes her eyes shut.

Her fingers tighten around the knife—carefully, carefully, the edge is right there—and her face burns so hot she’s amazed the pine needles underneath her aren’t catching fire.

She wants to close her legs. She wants to disappear. She wants—

“Oh, bunny,” V says softly. “Look at you.”

She does not look. She keeps her eyes sealed shut and her jaw clenched and her hands very, very still above her head, because if she looks down and sees what he’s seeing she will actually, literally, die.

His thumb presses against her. Through the lace. Right over her clit—or close enough that the difference is irrelevant—a firm, warm point of pressure against the soaked fabric.

And that—that brings out a full-body twitch out of her that makes the blade jitter above her hands.

“Still,” he reminds her. Calm. Almost kind.

Still. Right. The knife.

The very sharp knife she’s holding above her own hands.

The knife that will open her skin if she—

His thumb moves, a slow, grinding circle. Pressing against her clit, dragging the fabric across the sensitive skin in a tight rotation.

“Nnh—”

She’s panting. Immediately panting. One touch and she’s panting.

“V—that’s—ah—”

“Shh.”

Another circle. Slower.

He watches his thumb work with intent, and his head tilts slightly, as if paying attention to something she can’t quite figure out.

His other hand comes to rest on her hip—just resting—and his thumb grinds down again, harder this time.

Her hips buck.

He pushes them back down.

“Still,” he says again, and there’s a thread of amusement now. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

She forces her arms to lock. Forces her fingers to grip without squeezing. Forces her brain to split between sensation and survival, the two-track split Seduction Division drilled into her, theoretically, in situations approximately nothing like this.

His thumb circles again.

The lace is so wet now that it’s translucent—she can feel it, feel how the fabric has gone sheer against her, sticking to her folds, outlining everything underneath with zero ambiguity.

Each pass of his thumb drags the soaked material across her clit in a friction that’s maddening—too much texture and not enough pressure, close but not close.

“Mesmerizing,” he mutters, almost absently. “Pink on pink. You’re really all—just one color.”

Her thighs are trembling apart, loose and useless where his body settles.

Then he does something unexpected.

He takes his hand off her hip and presses her thighs together. Just—pushes them closed tighter.!His palm flat against the outside of her left thigh, guiding it inward until her legs seal shut, trapping his thumb against her clit through the lace.

The compression is immediate—her thighs pressing warm and tight around his hand, the fabric of her panties pulled taut against her from the new angle, the pressure on her clit doubling because now she’s squeezing around it.

“Hold,” he says.

And his thumb grinds.

The friction is—god, it’s insane.

Her own thighs clamp the pressure in, squeezing and rubbing and creating a sensation of heat and slick and texture that makes her vision swim.

Her hips try to buck and fail because her legs are pressed together, because his hand is holding them there, because there’s nowhere for the sensation to go except through her, building in her pelvis with nowhere to escape.

“Good,” V breathes. “Good, that’s—”

He sounds fascinated, as if watching something bloom in time-lapse.

Her arms shake above her head. The knife jitters. She can feel the edge kissing above her fingers, feel how close it is, how paper-thin the distance between holding and bleeding, and the awareness of it—the danger—sends a sick, hot pulse straight to her clit.

Like she can’t tell the difference between fear and arousal anymore.

Like the two wires crossed somewhere deep in her brainstem and now they’re soldered together, one signal, one response: more.

“V—” Her voice fractures. “I can’t—I’m gonna—the knife—”

“You’re doing so well.”

God. That doesn’t help.

That makes it worse.

The soft, approving tone, the patience, the way he says it like she’s exceeding his expectations at something important—it hits her between the ribs and between her legs simultaneously.

He withdraws his thumb.

She almost sobs.

Almost—because the breath is halfway out and the sound is halfway formed and then his palms flatten against her knees and pushes them down, and the cold forest air rushes against the wet heat between her legs and she hears herself keen.

“Shh.”

He smiles.

“Stay,” he murmurs, and releases her knees.

They stay. She keeps them down.

He shifts. Lowers himself onto his elbows, his body sinking down until his face is level with her navel—and then lower, lower—and Yunjin’s breath stops.

His mouth touches her stomach. Below her navel. The soft, vulnerable plane of skin where her abs aren’t defined enough to be abs, where her body is just body—soft and warm and human.

His lips press there first. A closed-mouth kiss. Testing the temperature. Tasting.

Then his tongue comes out.

A slow, flat drag from her navel downward. Warm and wet against her cool skin, the contrast making goosebumps explode in every direction.

He licks a deliberate line south, following the fine trail below her belly button, his nose brushing her skin as he goes, and she can feel him inhaling. Breathing her in. Cotton candy and fear-sweat and something underneath both that’s a bit muskier—the scent of how wet she is, rising from between her thighs.

“Mm,” he hums against her lower belly.

The vibration makes her abs clench.

He traces the edge of her panties with his tongue. The waistband sits low on her hips, and he follows it—left to right, slow, the tip of his tongue dipping just barely under the elastic before retreating. Tasting the line where fabric meets skin.

Where pink meets pink.

Her arms are shaking. The knife trembles. She locks her elbows harder and breathes through her teeth.

He nuzzles against the lace.

Just—presses his nose into the front of her panties and breathes, deep and slow, like he’s smelling a flower.

The fabric is thin enough and damp enough that she can feel the heat of his exhale through it, can feel the shape of his nose against her mound, and her hips roll toward his face before she can stop them.

He pulls back. Looks up at her through his lashes with an expression that’s almost curious.

“Be patient,” he says.

She doesn’t have patience.

She has a knife and a heartbeat and a clit that’s throbbing so hard she can feel it in her teeth and he wants patience.

He readjusts.

His hands grip her thighs and push them open, resettling her open legs around his shoulders.

His body slides lower between them until he’s lying on his stomach on the cold forest floor, elbows planted, face inches from the wet lace.

And then he just—looks.

The soaked fabric leaves nothing to the imagination.

Her folds are visible through it, swollen and parted, the mesh clinging to every contour in a way that’s more obscene than nudity. Her clit strains against the thin barrier, a flushed, tight knot pressing at the fabric from underneath. The cotton gusset is a shade darker than the edges—darker because it’s soaked, saturated, and she can feel how much because the cold air makes the wetness feel more obvious somehow, more damning.

“All this,” he says quietly, “from just the top.”

Her face might actually be on fire. She can’t tell anymore. Fire and embarrassment feel the same at this point.

He lowers his mouth.

The first touch is soft. Just his lips, closed, pressing directly over her clit. A kiss. Gentle.

She feels the warmth of his mouth through the damp fabric, the shape of his lips against her swollen clit, and the contact is so specific after all the teasing that tears prick her eyes.

Then he opens his mouth.

His tongue presses flat through the lace—broad, hot, wet against wet, and the texture of the fabric caught between his tongue and her pussy adds a gritty, delirious friction.

“Oh—” Yunjin’s voice shatters into something unrecognizable.

Her thighs clamp around his head reflexively and then force themselves open again because he told her to stay and she’s staying.

“Oh—god—V—”

He licks upward.

One long, dragging stroke from the bottom of her slit to the top, tongue pressing the embroidery into her folds, collecting the taste of her through the thin barrier. His lips close around the peak of her clit at the top and he sucks—gently—and her entire lower body lifts off the ground.

The knife wobbles dangerously above her hands.

She forces her arms down. Locks them.

Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t—

V’s tongue starts working. Not idle licks—focused ones. He’s mapped her through the fabric, found the shape of her clit beneath the lace, and now his tongue-tip circles it teasingly.

Around, around, press, release, around again.

He hums softly against her.

The sound vibrates through the lace, through her folds, through her clit, into her spine, and it has this low and satisfied cadence that makes her think he’s eating something he’s been thinking about for hours on end.

She can feel his jaw working, feel the movement of his tongue through the soaked fabric, feel how his breath comes hot and uneven against her inner thigh when he turns his head to adjust the angle.

“You—” she manages, barely, voice cracking on the syllable.

Her hands are screaming with the effort of holding still. Every nerve in her body is trying to curl inward, trying to clench, trying to grab something.

“You’re—nnh—through—through my—”

He seals his mouth over her pussy through the panties and sucks, pulling the fabric and her folds together into his mouth, tongue working the bundle of her clit.

Her head presses into the dirt. Her knees shake where they’re pinned open around his shoulders.

And above her head, her hands tremble around the knife—holding it, barely, the blade catching moonlight each time she shakes.

Still. She’s still. She hasn’t moved.

V’s tongue drags down, below her clit, nosing through the fabric to press against her entrance. It gives under the pressure of his tongue, dipping into her just barely.

Then, he licks back up—slowly, agonizingly slowly—tasting the full length of her through the ruined panties.

He pulls back just enough to breathe.

“Sweet,” he murmurs, and the word ghosts warm over her slick, aching pussy. “Like the rest of you.”

Her fingers tighten around the knife, but she does not move.

His mouth returns to her clit—lips sealed, tongue working in those patient little circles through the soaked lace—and then his hand moves.

She feels it on her inner thigh first. The drag of his fingertips, light, traveling upward from where her leg is trembling against his shoulder. Not rushing. Touring. His knuckles graze the crease where her thigh meets her hip, and she thinks okay, okay—but then his fingers drift inward, toward the center of her, and the thought dissolves into vapor.

His middle finger finds her entrance through the panties.

Not pressing in. Not yet. Just resting there—the pad of his finger settled where it clings to her opening.

She can feel how the fabric dips slightly under the pressure, molding into her.

His tongue flicks her clit. His finger traces a slow circle around her entrance.

She sobs.

A wrenched, involuntary sound from somewhere behind her sternum.

“Nnh—V—please—”

He hums against her, finger circling, tracing the rim of her entrance in that slow, maddening orbit, and his tongue keeps working, and—

He pulls his mouth away.

The sound she makes is humiliating.

A thin, high, desperate thing that she would absolutely deny making later under any circumstance.

The cold air rushes against her clit where his mouth had been—wet, exposed, throbbing—and she jerks.

V lifts his head from between her thighs, lower lip glistening. Looks at her face. Then at his fingers, still resting against her entrance.

“Bunny,” he says, conversational. “You’re drenched.”

She wants to disintegrate.

His finger presses—just slightly—against the lace over her entrance, and the fabric gives. Sinks inward.

The wet cotton molds into her opening around his fingertip without actually letting him inside, and the tease of it—almost-in, not-quite-in, the stretch that isn’t a stretch—makes her thighs spasm.

“Bet I could fuck you through the lace,” he muses.

His tone. God, his tone.

It sounds like this is a logistics problem to him, and nothing more. An engineering question, if you will—and not his finger pressing the mesh into her pussy while she shakes apart on a forest floor holding a knife above her own head.

He pushes slightly harder. The fabric dips deeper, his fingertip dragging the fabric into her entrance.

“Ah—” Her voice breaks. “That’s—you can’t just—”

He can. Apparently. He does.

His mouth returns to her clit, lips sealing over it through the lace, tongue pressing flat and grinding, and his finger works the fabric into her entrance in shallow, rhythmic pushes.

Not penetrating her properly—just working the wet cotton in and out, stretching her opening around, and the sensation is unlike anything she has a framework for.

It’s too much and not enough at once.

It’s the idea of being fucked while being denied the actual thing, and her body doesn’t know whether to chase or retreat, so it does both—her hips rolling in frantic little circles, her thighs clamping against his ears, her arms locked rigid above her head as the blade trembles.

He does this for—she doesn’t know. A minute. Three.

Long enough that her breathing goes ragged and thin, long enough that the coil in her pelvis tightens to something unbearable, long enough that she’s making these continuous, broken little noises—“ah, ah, nnh, please, ah”—that she can’t control and can’t stop.

Then he sits up, plucks the knife from her grip.

Her fingers don’t resist. They’ve been clenched so long they barely respond at all, cramped and aching, and the blade slides free from her loosened fist like it was never hers to begin with.

The relief of not holding it hits her like a wave.

Her arms drop to her sides, heavy, tingling, and she flexes her fingers and winces at the stiffness.

V flips the knife shut with a casual click-clack and tucks it somewhere behind him—she hears it thud softly into the earth, planted handle-up, placed with the absent precision of someone who has a relationship with every surface within arm’s reach.

Then he grips her thighs.

His hands close around the backs of her knees and he lifts—scooping her lower body up and toward him, dragging her across the pine needles until her thighs bracket his hips.

Her ruined hoodie bunches up under her shoulders. Her legs settle on either side of his kneeling frame, thighs draped open over his thighs, and she’s—

She’s spread around him. Looking up at him from below. Hoodie split, bra destroyed, leggings torn, panties soaked through, and he’s kneeling between her open legs like this is a position he’s designed the evening around.

(It is. She knows it is. Every single step of this has been choreographed.)

His hand goes to his belt.

Yunjin’s brain comes back online.

“V—” She pushes up onto her elbows, eyes wide. “We’re—we’re outside.”

He glances at her.

The belt buckle clinks.

“We’re in the forest,” she clarifies, like maybe he’s forgotten this critical environmental detail. “Someone could—there are—V, the castle has—”

“No cameras in this quadrant,” he says.

His tone is calm. Informational. Manual-flat.

“AD’s surveillance grid covers the perimeter in a two-hundred-meter radius from the castle walls. Forty-six fixed-lens cameras on the north face alone—twelve with infrared, eight with motion tracking, the rest standard resolution. But the treeline past the eastern access road—” He unthreads the belt from its loop with a soft hiss of leather. “—sits in a dead zone. Intentional. AD left it as an exfiltration corridor for stealth ops. No fixed lenses, no PTZ rotation, no laser tripwires.”

He unbuttons his pants.

“The nearest motion sensor is three hundred meters northeast.”

He unzips.

“It’s a dual-tech passive infrared and microwave unit—sensitive to body heat and mass displacement. At this distance—” He pauses, considering. “—we would need to be approximately four meters closer and moving at walking speed for it to trigger.

Yunjin is staring at him with her mouth open.

“Ground-level vibration sensors along the southern access road, but those are calibrated for vehicular weight—anything under ninety kilograms won’t register. The patrol rotation for the eastern quadrant runs on a forty-five-minute cycle. Last pass was—” He tips his head back slightly, thinking. “—twenty-two minutes ago. Gives us twenty-three. More than enough.”

He says ’more than enough’ the way other people say ’pass the salt.’

“There’s a thermal imaging drone that sweeps the full perimeter every two hours, but AD programs it on a predictable west-to-east arc. It passed the eastern treeline at eleven-fourteen. Next pass is one-fourteen.” Another pause. “It’s twelve-oh-seven.”

He knows the time. He knows the time without checking.

She’s lying here with her tits out and her panties soaked and he’s reciting AD’s entire security architecture from memory like a man reading a train timetable.

“The biometric scanners are door-mounted only—irrelevant out here, really. Pressure pads are concentrated at entry points, not forest floor.”

He tilts his head at her.

“The ventilation ducts that double as listening posts have a range of approximately fifty meters from the castle wall. We are—” He glances at the treeline behind them, calculating. “—roughly seventy-three meters out.”

Yunjin opens her mouth.

Closes it.

Opens it again.

“How do you know all of that.”

The smile that crosses his face is small and private and deeply, profoundly unsettling.

“I read.”

He says it like the explanation is sufficient. Like ‘I read’ covers the entirety of having memorized the castle’s security grid down to sensor calibration thresholds and drone flight timing.

(It probably does, for him. He probably does just read things and then they’re in his brain forever, filed and indexed and cross-referenced, because he’s V, because his mind works like a filing cabinet that someone set on fire and the fire made it smarter.)

“Also,” he adds, almost as an afterthought, “AD talks in his sleep.”

She doesn’t know if he’s joking. His face gives nothing away.

He pushes his waistband down.

Yunjin looks at the sky.

It’s—oh.

Oh, it’s beautiful.

The canopy thins here, where the trees are older and taller and their branches spread wide enough to leave gaps. Through those gaps, stars. Thousands of them, more than she’s ever seen, more than the city ever allows. The Milky Way is a pale, milky smear across the black, and there’s no light pollution out here, nothing to compete with—just the deep, velvet dark and the impossible scatter of light, and it’s stunning.

It really is.

It’s the kind of sky only seen in movies about rural escapes and coming-of-age romances like the dramas she likes, not in the middle of being undressed by the Chief of Stealth Assassinations while her panties drip onto the forest floor.

She stares at it and thinks that it is the most beautiful ceiling she’s ever had while being terrified for her life.

She hears him palm himself.

The sound is soft—skin on skin, the faint shifting of fabric—and she feels the movement in the way his weight shifts between her thighs, the way the muscles in his legs tense against the outsides of hers.

She can picture it without seeing it—his hand wrapped around himself, stroking once, slow, and the image alone sends a hot flush rolling from her chest to her hairline.

She keeps looking at the stars.

Orion’s belt is right there. Three bright dots in a perfect line.

She focuses on them with the intensity of someone trying to solve an equation.

“Yunjin.”

She counts the stars in Orion. One, two, three. The belt. The sword hangs below.

She remembers that from a documentary. A nice, safe documentary that she watched on her laptop in her room wearing actual clothes.

“Yunjin,” he says again.

“Mm.”

She does not look down. She does not.

V hums.

“You can look,” he says, softly, gently, even.

She feels like a tiny animal being coaxed to eat from his palm.

Exactly like when he ushered the words ’don’t let me catch you’.

The same one that preceded every terrible thing that happened next.

“I don’t—” She swallows. “I’m fine. I’m—the stars are—they’re nice—”

“Bunny.”

One word. Patient.

“You’ve been curious since I unzipped.”

Her face ignites. Nuclear. Sub-surface volcanic.

She squeezes her eyes shut and thinks that this is how she dies—in the forest, with glinting stars, while a beautiful psychopath narrates her own arousal back to her.

“I have not,” she says, weakly.

“Your breathing changed.”

Oh god.

“And your pupils dilated.”

“You can’t—you can’t see my pupils, my eyes are—”

“Were. Past tense. Before you decided the constellation Orion needed your urgent attention.”

He noticed. He noticed her staring at Orion. He identified the specific constellation she was using as a escape hatch.

What kind of person—

“Look,” he says. Simple. Quiet.

She looks.

Down.

She does it fast, like ripping off a bandage, her eyes dropping from the stars to his face to his chest to his—

Oh.

Her eyes spasm.

He’s—he’s holding himself. One hand wrapped around the base, angled toward her, and he’s hard, flushed, dark with blood, the head swollen and slick with pre-cum—and that’s already a lot, that’s already more than she was prepared for—but what stops her train of thought entirely is the glint of metal.

At the tip.

A small, curved barbell.

The steel catches the moonlight—the same moonlight that was illuminating the stars she’d been hiding in a second ago—and the ball sits just below the head of his cock, emerging from the underside and curving up through the slit.

A piercing.

V has a piercing.

On his dick.

Yunjin looks up at the sky so fast she nearly gives herself whiplash.

Stars. Stars stars stars. Orion is still there. Thank god. Orion hasn’t moved. Orion doesn’t have a dick piercing. Orion is safe.

Her face is so hot she could cook something on it. An egg. A whole breakfast. She could sustain a small campfire exclusively through the thermal output of her cheeks right now.

She hears him exhale. Not quite a laugh. The ghost of one, breathed out through his nose, and she can feel him watching her face do eleven things at once.

“V,” she says. Her voice has gone soprano. “You have a—”

“Mm.”

“On your—”

“Yes.”

She presses the heels of her palms against her eyes.

Orion throbs in her retinas—three dots, burned in.

When did this become her life? When did she become a person who lies in forests looking at pierced penises? What series of choices led to this exact moment?

She’d like to audit them. She’d like a flow chart.

He shifts forward on his knees, free hand finding her hip—anchoring, warm—and then she feels it.

The head of his cock pressing against her panties. Just resting there. At first. The hard ridge of him settling against the soaked lace, and the contact—even through the barrier—sends a bolt of sensation from her clit straight up her spine.

He drags himself along her slit. Slow. Up and down, the length of him gliding against the drenched lace, and the piercing catches on the fabric with every stroke—a tiny, hitching drag of steel against cotton that adds this punctuation to the smooth glide.

She moans. Full, open-mouthed, loud enough that it echoes briefly in the clearing.

Her hands fly from her eyes to the ground beside her, fingers digging into pine needles, and her hips roll up to meet him involuntarily.

V watches her with that dark, focused attention.

He strokes along her again. The piercing catches against her clit through the mesh and her whole body jerks—an electric pulse that makes her thighs clamp around his hips and a fractured ”ah” fall from her lips.

“Sensitive here, too,” he mutters, as if he were taking inventory on things he’d like to keep in mind.

She’s going to combust.

She is going to spontaneously combust and they’ll find a scorch mark on the forest floor and a pair of ruined panties and no one will know what happened.

He pulls back slightly. His hand leaves himself and reaches for—his pocket? No, the fabric pooled at his thighs. He pats absently at his back pocket, then the front one, and pauses.

“Mm.” He looks at her. “I don’t have a condom.”

She blinks up at him.

“Though I suppose that’s whatever,” he continues, the sentence finishing itself at its own pace, “given the Nexplanon.”

The world stops.

“The—” Yunjin’s mouth works. “—the what?”

He reaches for her left arm, the one that’s just lying there, and his hand closes around her wrist and turns it, rotating until the soft inner surface faces up.

The pale, thin skin of her inner bicep catches the moonlight.

His thumb finds a spot. Three inches above the crease of her elbow.

He presses.

Under his thumb, a small, thin rod rises against her skin. A ridge. Barely visible, barely palpable, the subdermal implant that she’d had inserted six months ago, the one she’d easily forgotten was there half the time because it sits flush under the skin and she can only feel it if she presses—

If she presses exactly like he’s pressing.

“How—” Her voice is somewhere between a whisper and a screech. “How do you know about that?”

He lets go of her arm. It drops.

“I review personnel files when I’m bored,” he says, as if this is a perfectly normal hobby. “Medical records are attached. AD’s encryption on the health database is good, but—” The corner of his mouth twitches. “—I’m a Chief. Special access. Perks of the job.”

He reviewed the medical files. He checked the medical files and read her contraception records. While bored.

“Also.” He tilts his head. “Flower requisitions birth control for every woman in Seduction. Standing order. Has for years. Smart woman.” A beat. “You came in six months ago. The implant was logged at your intake physical.”

He says it in a way that sounds almost like respect. Not for Yunjin—for Flower. For the system. For the chain of care that Chaewon built into her division like infrastructure, making sure every woman under her watch was protected whether they asked for it or not.

Yunjin stares at him.

Her arm still tingles where he’d pressed.

He’s—he noticed. He noticed a three-centimeter rod under her skin that she herself forgets about.

He read her file. He read everyone’s files.

He knows her medical history and AD’s encryption protocols and Flower’s requisition habits and the contraceptive policies of a division that isn’t even his, and he’s holding all of it in his head right now while kneeling between her legs in a forest at midnight.

She doesn’t know if she’s terrified or turned on or both.

(Both. It’s both. It’s always both with him.)

“You—” she starts.

He lines himself up.

Her breath catches.

He notches himself at her entrance—through the panties, against the thinness that’s the only thing between them—and pushes.

Not slowly.

Not carefully.

He pushes, and the head of his cock strains against the lace, stretching the fabric into her opening, and the thin cotton resists for one second—one taut, trembling second—

The curved barbell hooks into the weave of the embroidery like it was designed for this, the steel ball snagging on the threads, and V doesn’t slow down. He pushes through.

The fabric tears—a specific rip that she feels more than hears, the panties splitting from the inside out as the piercing rips through the lace, the cotton parting around the steel and the cock behind it, threads snapping in rapid succession as he forces his way in.

The sting of torn fabric dragging against her entrance, the abrupt stretch of him entering her through a hole he’s making as he goes, the piercing pulling threads into her alongside his cock—it’s bright and specific and her mouth opens on a gasp that has no sound.

V’s breath hitches.

For the first time all night.

His exhale comes stuttered, punched out of him, and his jaw tightens and his eyes go dark and his fingers dig into her hips hard enough to leave marks.

“Oh,” he breathes. “That’s—”

He pushes deeper, makes her feel the threads giving way around his cock, the fabric shredding in a line from her entrance upward as his girth stretches the small rip wider.

Mixed with the stretch and the fullness of him there’s this gritty, raw friction of torn cotton dragging against her inner walls alongside his cock—texture where there should be only slick, and that…

That tells her he likes it.

Because his face does this thing—this intake of breath and eyes fluttering half-closed, lips half-parted.

V is pushing through it all like someone leaning into a bruise, savoring the ache of destroying something beautiful.

And finally, the lace gives one last soft rip as he bottoms out.

He’s inside her. Fully, completely, his hips pressed flush against hers, his cock buried to the hilt, and she can feel—everything.

The heat of him. The stretch. The warmed hard pressure of the piercing seated deep inside her, the steel ball pressing against a spot on her front wall that makes her vision blur.

V holds still.

He’s breathing through his teeth. A thin, controlled sound.

His eyes are open and fixed on her face with an intensity that makes vines wrap around her ribcage and pull, tight enough that her lungs feel small.

“There,” he says, voice rougher than before. Rougher than she’s heard it all night. “That’s—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence.

His hips shift—a tiny movement, barely perceptible—and the piercing drags against her front wall, and Yunjin hears herself make a sound that doesn’t belong to any language she speaks.

Above them, Orion watches.

The stars don’t blink.

He shifts just a fraction—a slow, experimental roll of his hips—and the drag is different, it pulls the fabric with him.

V's jaw tightens.

He rocks his hips again, and this time the piercing snags on a thread, pulls it taut, and the tiny point of resistance before it gives makes him exhale—harsh, punched out, a sound she's never heard from him before.

It’s almost like he needs it.

This isn't about pleasure in the normal sense. This is about the edge of it. The catch. The sting. The friction that sits right on the line between sensation and pain and he's leaning into the pain side like it's a warmth he's been cold without.

He pulls back slowly, dragging himself halfway out, and she can feel threads pulling against her walls.

He pushes back in. His eyes flutter.

"More," he murmurs.

It doesn't sound like he's talking to her.

His hand reaches behind him, fingers finding the grip of the knife without looking, the way one would find a light switch in your own bedroom.

He pulls it from the soil with a soft scrape and brings it forward. Flicks it open with his thumb. Click-clack.

Between one moment and the other, he’s holding the knife out, handle toward her.

Yunjin stares at it.

"Take it," V says.

She takes it, fingers closing around the warm handle, and he doesn’t wait a second to hold up his left hand, palm toward her. Long fingers splayed, the skin pale in the low light, the lines of his palm visible—life line, heart line, all the stupid fortune-teller lines she used to trace in middle school.

"Here," he says, and taps the center of his palm with his other hand's index finger, right in the meat of it, the fleshy mound below his fingers.

Her stomach drops.

"V—"

"A cut." His voice is even. Instructional. "Shallow. Diagonal."

She looks at the knife. Looks at his palm. Looks at his face.

He can't be serious. He can't—but his expression hasn't changed.

That same steady, bird-bright attention, no flinch, no waver, just the absolute certainty of a man who has decided what's going to happen next and is simply waiting for things to rearrange at his will.

"I can't—" Her hand is shaking. The blade jitters. "V, I can't cut you—"

"You can."

"I can't, that's—that's insane, you're asking me to—"

"Yunjin."

He says her name and the forest gets quieter.

"It's a surface cut. Two centimeters." He holds his palm steady, presenting it like a canvas. "I'll guide you."

Her eyes are burning. Not from the cold. From the everything—from the fact that she's full of him and holding his knife and he's asking her to draw blood like it's nothing, like this is a normal thing that happens between people, like the leap from pink lingerie to palm lacerations is a completely reasonable progression of events.

In his head, it probably is.

His other hand comes up—slow, gentle—and wraps around her knife hand. Over her fingers. Steadying.

The tremor in her grip dampens under the pressure of his palm, and he guides the blade toward his outstretched hand with patient, measured control.

"Breathe," he says.

She breathes.

The tip of the knife touches his palm.

He presses. She doesn't. He does it—tilts his own palm forward into the blade, using her hand as the mechanism, and the steel parts skin the way it parts everything else. Easily. Quietly.

A thin, dark line opens across the center of his palm, welling red almost immediately.

V doesn't flinch.

He doesn't even blink.

The blood rises in a slow, even seam—dark in the moonlight, almost black, thick and warm. It pools in the cup of his palm, following the lines there, filling the creases.

A drop spills over the edge and lands on her bare stomach.

Hot. Shockingly hot.

She flinches at the temperature—living hot, blood-hot, hotter than she expected—and a sound comes out of her that she can't categorize.

V takes the knife from her hand. Sets it in the earth beside her head—thunk, blade down, handle up—and lifts his bleeding palm.

She watches, frozen, as he wraps his slick red hand around himself.

He has to pull out to do it. The withdrawal is slow—she feels every inch leave her, the piercing dragging against her walls, the shreds clinging and releasing—and then he's out and his hand is there, gripping his cock, blood mixing with her arousal as he strokes himself once, twice, coating the shaft in dark, slippery red.

The sight is—

She doesn't know what it is.

It's awful. It's the most visceral, stomach-turning, beautiful thing she's ever seen and she hates herself for that last word but it's the one her mind keeps supplying.

His hand, dark with his own blood, wrapped around his cock, the steel of his piercing glinting wet through the red, and his face—

His face is open. Unguarded.

The expression she's watched him maintain all night has cracked along a seam she didn't know existed, and underneath it there's just—want. Raw, undiluted.

Like roses blooming.

He pushes back in.

The glide now hits different, becomes slicker, warmer. It’s like the blood eases the friction the embroidery keeps creating, and adds a new quality to the movement—thick, organic, essentially alive.

And it makes V’s head tip backwards, moans.

An actual, audible moan—low and cracked and wrecked, pulled from somewhere deep in his chest.

Her walls clench around him on reflex and her hands fly to his forearms and she holds on because she has to hold on to something.

His teeth catch his lower lip. She watches him bite down—hard enough to leave marks, hard enough that the flesh whitens under pressure—and his hips snap forward.

"Fuck—" The word falls out of him broken and shapeless. "That's—fuck—"

He's losing it.

She can see it happening in real time—the usual demeanor of his, three-steps-ahead at all times, shredding the way her panties had shredded, the wolf underneath finally showing through.

His hips roll again, grinding deep, and his breath stutters.

"Fuck, that's—so much—" He swallows. His throat works visibly. "—better."

He lowers himself.

Both forearms come down on either side of her head, bracing, caging her in, and his face is right there suddenly—inches from hers, close enough that she can see the individual variations in his irises, the faint sheen of sweat on his temples, the way his pupils have swallowed everything until his eyes are more black than brown.

His hair falls forward, brushing her cheeks.

He starts moving, real thrusts now. Not the experimental rocking from before—driving into her, hips snapping with a rhythm that's not controlled in the slightest.

"Nnh—"

Her back arches off the ground.

Her hands grip his forearms, fingernails digging in.

"V—oh god—V—"

"Look at you," he breathes.

His voice has dropped low enough to vibrate against her skin, murmur and a confession all at once, spoken right against the corner of her mouth where his lips brush with every thrust.

"Taking me all the way to the root—"

His hips roll deep. She feels his pelvis grind against her clit and a moan rips out of her before she can think about catching it.

"—and fluttering. Can you feel that? The way you grip every time I—"

He thrusts. Hard.

She cries out.

"—there. Right there. Squeezing me like you don't want me to leave. God, god—"

She’s panting, open-mouthed, fingers carving half-moons into the muscle of his forearms.

His blood is still slick between them—she can feel it, warm and wet, mixing with her arousal, making each thrust a glide so obscene the sound of it fills the clearing.

Schlick. Schlick. Schlick. 

Rythmic and relentless and made dirtier simply by the wet slap of his hips meeting hers.

"V—oh—nnh—"

"You've been so good, bunny."

The words land somewhere behind her sternum and bloom.

"Letting yourself get caught."

His mouth brushes her temple. His breath comes warm and ragged against her hairline.

"Letting me chase you down and pin you to the floor."

Another thrust.

"And here you are. Spread open in the forest, and you're taking everything—everything I give you—"

He pulls back enough to see her face.

What he finds there makes his eyes go dark.

"—and you're glowing from it," he finishes.

Her throat burns. Her eyes build something behind her eyelids and she knows for a fact it isn’t tears, not yet.

It’s hotter than that.

Because the praise isn't just hitting her subconscious anymore. It's traveling. Down through her chest, through her stomach, pooling hot and urgent between her legs where his cock is dragging in and out of her in blood-slicked strokes, and each word makes the pool deeper.

"Pretty thing," V murmurs. "Pretty pink thing."

She whimpers. It slips out before she can stop it—thin, high, desperate—and she feels her face burn with the sound of it.

Because it's embarrassing, the noise she just made.

It’s a sound that belongs to someone who's lost every shred of composure they ever had and she has, she's lost all of it, it's gone—

He notices.

Of course he notices. His eyes focus—quick, immediate—and his next thrust comes slower, deeper, more intentional. Like he's testing a hypothesis. Like something just clicked into place behind those dark, bird-bright eyes.

"You like that," he observes.

Not a question. The corner of his mouth curls.

"The praise."

She shakes her head. Reflex. Denial.

Because admitting it would be—she doesn't even know what it would be, just that her face is on fire and her clit is throbbing and her walls are clenching around him at the word and that's information she doesn't want to have about herself, that's—

"No?" He tips his head. Watches her. "Hmm."

He thrusts again. Deep, grinding, the piercing pressing hard against her front wall, and then—right at the peak of the stroke, right when her back is arching and her lips are parting and her body is answering a question her mouth is trying to deny—

"How about beautiful?"

She gasps—sharp, fractured, her whole body going rigid—and a gush of slick heat floods the space between them, her arousal doubling in a wet, embarrassing rush that she can feel coating his cock.

V's lips part.

"Oh," he says softly. "Oh, that's—"

He looks down between them. She follows his gaze because she can't help it—because her body has stopped taking instructions from her brain—and sees it.

The absolute, outer worldly mess between her legs.

God, there’s blood. There’s so much fucking blood and it’s not from her, obviously. But it’s mixed with the fluids of her own arousal and it creates something that’s neither—something dark and shining and warm and deliriously wet.

"Look at that," V breathes. "Look what happens when I—"

He rolls his hips while he watches.

"—when I tell you how good you're being." His gaze lifts from where they're joined to her face. "When I tell you how well you take it. How pretty you look stretched around me, all flushed—"

His thumb traces her cheekbone, smearing blood.

His eyes follow the path of it.

"All pink."

His hand drifts down, thumb brushes a swollen, spit-slick nipple and she jerks.

"Here."

He rolls the nipple between his fingers.

She whimpers.

"Here."

His gaze drops between them, to where his cock disappears into her.

"And here. Where it counts."

She makes a sound, broken and raw and high-pitched that comes from the floor of her lungs and doesn't ask permission on its way out.

"Your whole body answers, bunny."

He sounds fascinated. Absolutely, clinically fascinated, like he's watching a specimen do something unexpected under a microscope.

"Every time I praise you, every time I tell you you're—" He thrusts. "Good—" Another. "—pretty—" Another, deeper, harder. "—beautiful—you get wetter. You get tighter. These pretty walls start—"

He groans. Low, rough—the word dissolving into a sound as she does exactly what he's describing, clenching around him in a reflexive squeeze that drags a visible shudder through his shoulders.

"—that," he finishes, breathless. "That. Right there. You like it."

She can’t speak. She can’t form words because a beautiful psychopath figured out that she—that praise—that the words ’good’ and ’pretty’ and ’beautiful’ from his mouth are doing things to her that she doesn’t have the words to even begin explaining—

“I d-don’t—ah—know—"

"You don't know," he says.

He says it with what might be wonder, might be delight. As if he's just been handed a gift he didn't expect and is turning it over in his hands, examining every angle.

"You don't even know what you need." His mouth curves. "You just need someone to tell you you're—"

He thrusts deep.

"—doing well, hmm?"

A sob rips from her throat. An actual, audible sob—worse than pain, loaded with every nerve in her body.

"Ah—nnh—V—please—"

She doesn't know what she's asking for. More. Less. Harder.

The word ’good’ again, one more time, just one more—

"Please what?"

His voice is close. Breath warm against her cheek.

His hips maintain that devastating rhythm—deep, grinding, the piercing pressing against that spot like he's built a blueprint.

"I—"

She can't answer. She can't answer because she doesn't know—because the cadence of his voice saying ’pretty’ and ’good’ and ’beautiful’ in that low, evaluative tone that makes her chest ache.

"Hmm."

He watches her try to form a word and fail.

He lowers his mouth to her ear. His next thrust is purposefully angled to drag the piercing in one long, grinding pull along her front wall—and against the shell of her ear, barely louder than a breath:

"You're the prettiest thing I've had under me in this forest, Yunjin. You know that? Pink and soft and soaking and you don't even know why—you just know it feels good when I tell you you're—"

He bites her earlobe. Light. Just the edge of his teeth.

"—good."

She can feel herself dripping—her arousal flooding out around his cock with each thrust, coating the inside of her thighs.

"Look at this mess," he breathes, his voice going rough at the edges now. "All from words. All from being told you're—"

He thrusts hard.

"—everything I want right now."

Her hands fly to his back. Nails digging in.

She's gasping—open-mouthed, wet-eyed, completely gone—and his lips trail from her ear to her cheek, to the tear tracks, and he presses his mouth against the salt.

"There," he murmurs. "Pretty when you cry, too. Everything matches."

His tongue traces a tear track. She shudders.

"The pink, the tears, you falling apart—all the same pretty color."

His hand comes down over her mouth.

The left one. The bleeding one.

Copper floods her senses like a wall. Smell first—metallic, organic, so thick she can taste it on her tongue before the wetness even reaches her lips. Then the heat. His blood is warm against her mouth, seeping between his fingers, smearing across her chin and her cheeks.

She can taste it. Salt and iron and a flavor that tastes the way his aura feels.

Thorned. Sweet. Dangerous.

The sound she makes against his palm is not a scream.

It's bigger than a scream.

It's every emotion she's felt tonight compressed and detonating against his bloody fingers—fear and arousal and disbelief and the shocking, awful tenderness of being called ’good’ by someone who kills people for a living while his blood smears her face and his cock hits that spot and the stars watch over his shoulder—

She's sobbing.

Full, heaving sobs that push against his palm in wet, muffled bursts, and she's crying—tears spilling hot from the corners of her eyes, streaking through the drying blood on her cheeks, dripping into her hair.

She doesn't know the difference anymore. The tears are coming from the same place as the moans, from the same overloaded circuit, the same fuse that blew the second he counted to two and she ran.

It's too much. It's all too much.

The piercing dragging inside her, the blood on her mouth, the weight of him pinning her to the earth, the thorns crushing her lungs, the fact that she can still see Orion through the gap in the canopy—three stars in a row, steady, indifferent, witnessing—

And she likes it.

God, she likes it.

That's the part that makes her sob harder—the horrified delight of discovering that this is what she wants.

The blood, the fear, the blade stuck in the ground six inches from her ear, and his voice telling her she's good.

She's wet from it.

She's getting off on being called cute things while a man bleeds onto her face.

Yunjin from six months ago would not even be able to fathom it.

Pastel colors itty-bitty-titty-committee Yunjin who can't drink whiskey and blushes when someone looks at her too long and wears matching lingerie sets. Fucking a Chief. Getting railed by the most dangerous man in Kkangpae under Orion's belt with his blood on her face and his cock inside her and she—

She aimed for the stars and the stars aimed back.

And oh, she's close.

She's really close.

"Shh," V breathes against her forehead. His hips drive forward—deep, grinding, the piercing pressing. "You've done everything I asked, haven't you? Held the knife. Held still. Let me catch you, pin you, cut your lingerie—"

A sob pushes against his palm. Hot. Wet. Muffled.

"—and you liked it." Not accusatory. Wondering. "Didn't you. Every part. The chase. The blade. The way it feels when I tell you you're—"

He rolls his hips in a slow, devastating grind, and whispers the word like it's a key and her body is the lock:

"—a good bunny."

She detonates.

The orgasm takes her—seizes her by the spine and pulls.

Her vision whites out. Her walls clamp down on his cock so hard she feels the piercing dig into her front wall from the pressure alone. Her spine arches. Her thighs seize around his hips. The sound she makes against his bloody palm is animal—shattered, sobbing, wrecked—a thing with no language in it.

She feels everythin in maximum, excruciating detail.

V keeps moving through it. Shallow, rolling thrusts that draw out each contraction, his breathing ragged against her forehead.

But his rhythm stays searching.

She feels it as her aftershocks settle. The way his thrusts deepen, angle, adjust—testing, shifting, looking for a frequency that isn't coming.

His jaw is tight. His forearms tremble. She can feel his cock throbbing inside her, feel how hard he is, the blood-hot pulse of him pressed against her sensitive walls—but the peak isn't there.

Like a flame that keeps catching and won't hold.

His hand lifts from her mouth.

Air rushes in—cold, pine-sharp—and she gasps, tasting copper on her tongue.

His bloody handprint stays tacky on her skin.

He's still moving. Deep, grinding rolls. But his face—

His face isn't right.

The expression that's settled there, she hasn't seen from him all night.

Frustration.

His eyes are dark, unfocused, turned somewhere inward. She watches his brow furrow with what looks like annoyance—like his body is defying him, like the orgasm is right there and some door between him and it won't open.

Blood. Pain. The lace. Her pleasure. Her tears. All of it good.

None of it enough.

"Your life," he breathes, "or mine?"

Yunjin blinks up at him.

She's—not here. Not really. Her brain is somewhere in the upper atmosphere with Orion, still twitching from the aftershocks of an orgasm that rewired her from the inside out, and the words ’your life or mine’ are just shapes. Mouth shapes. They don't assemble into meaning while her pussy is still fluttering around his cock and there's blood on her face—

"Wh—" She swallows. Her voice is destroyed—hoarse, wet, cracking. "What?"

He keeps moving. Slow, grinding. His cock drags against walls that are so sensitive now every stroke makes her flinch and whimper.

"Choose."

The word comes through his teeth. His hips roll.

"Your life." A thrust. Deep enough that her vision sparks. "Or mine."

She stares at him. Tears on her cheeks. Blood on her mouth. Post-orgasm tremors still running through her thighs in little aftershock shudders.

"I don't—" She gasps as he grinds up. "—I don't understand, I—"

"Mine, then," he says.

Softly. Simply. The way someone picks a restaurant.

He takes her hand, gathers her shaking, bloody fingers and wraps them around both handles of the butterfly knife. His hand covers hers. Steadies.

And he brings the steel down to his own neck.

The point of the knife rests against the side of his throat. Just below his jaw, left side, right where his pulse beats visible under the thin skin—a greenish channel, steady, pushing blood through the very throat she's now holding a blade against.

He adjusts her grip. Angles the tip in.

"There," he breathes, and his hips start again—slow, deep, rolling thrusts that draw a gasp from her with each push. "Right—there."

She's shaking. Every part of her. Post-orgasm tremors and adrenaline and the crystalline, ringing terror of holding a puncturing object against a throat while the person it belongs to pushes into it.

"V—" Her voice is barely there. "V, I can't—if I—"

"You won't."

Quiet. Certain. Fact, not reassurance. He has run this equation the way he ran the one with his palm and the blade over his heart.

The answer is the same.

His hips snap forward and her hand trembles against his throat.

"Steady," he whispers.

He leans into the blade.

She feels the resistance give—barely, barely—the tip breaking through one paper-thin layer of skin.

A single bead of blood wells up around the steel. Dark, bright, catching moonlight.

It sits at the tip for a suspended second and then rolls—slow—down the side of his neck. A thin red rivulet tracing the tendon, following the column of his throat.

V's eyes close.

And then they open.

Wide. Bright. The pupils blown so dark they've consumed the hazel entirely, but what's behind them isn't the half-lidded pleasure from before. She watches his face change.

The frustration dissolves. Swept out like a tide. And what floods in behind it—what rushes up to fill every line and hollow of his expression—is relief.

Vast, shuddering, whole-body relief, like a lock finally giving, like a door being blown off its hinges.

His mouth falls open. A sound comes out—low, guttural, animal—

And then he grins.

Not a smile. Not the curated not-quite-smile from the hallway or the leashed amusement from the chase.

A grin. Wide and eerie and showing too many teeth.

It resembles something feral, something that hunts in the dark, something that just caught the scent it's been tracking all night and is running toward it full tilt.

He grins with blood running down his neck and a knife at his throat and his cock buried to the hilt inside her and the sight is the most terrifying alluring thing Yunjin has ever seen.

His hips drive forward. Hard.

"Fuck—" The word comes out on a breath that sounds like a laugh. "—yeah—"

He snaps his hips again. And again. His rhythm goes from measured to frantic in the space of a heartbeat.

She feels the shift in her bones—the force of each thrust shoving her up the forest floor, her back scraping against pine needles, her body jolting with the impact.

"Fuck—yeah—that's—" He's panting between each word, breath hitching, and the sound that cuts through his panting is—

A chuckle.

Dark. Breathless. Barely a sound at all—more like air being punched through a grin—but it's there, and it has no humor in it. None.

It's the sound of someone who's found the thing they were looking for and the finding is better than the searching and the pain is better than the pleasure and the blood is running warm down his neck and he's laughing about it.

"Harder."

He presses her hand against the blade.

His hips snap with a force that makes the wet slap of their bodies crack through like a gunshot.

"Press—harder—"

Her fingers tighten. The blade bites deeper. Another bead of blood wells—the line thickening to a glossy thread—and V's head tips back and the sound he makes is guttural, wrecked, dragged from below his lungs.

His hips piston.

Fast. Faster than he's gone all night. Just speed and depth and force, his body driving into hers with an urgency that's feral.

He bites his lip. She can see it—his teeth sinking into his lower lip hard enough to blanch the flesh, hard enough that it looks like it hurts, and above the bitten lip his hair is in his eyes and he doesn't push it back.

He doesn't do anything but fuck her—hard, fast, hips slamming with a rhythm that's coming apart at the seams.

"Fuck—" A thrust. "—fuck—" Another. "—yeah—"

He looks—

He looks happy.

That's the part that makes her stomach turn inside out. Not the blood or the knife or the brutality of his hips—the happiness. The pure, uncut, unperformed joy on his face. Like this is the only context in which his body knows how to feel it. Like the locked door didn't just open—it opened onto what he'd forgotten existed.

And he's standing in the doorway grinning like someone gifted him one of his favorite collectibles while blood pours down his throat.

"V—" she gasps, and her voice is wrecked, pitched high with overwhelm. "V, you're—you're bleeding—"

"Mm-hmm—"

He doesn't slow down. The grin splits wider. His hips slam forward so hard her teeth click together.

"I know—fuck—I know—isn't it—"

He laughs. A real laugh, this time—breathless, cracked, shaking through his chest and into hers—and his eyes find hers and they're shining.

"Fuck—" His rhythm stutters. His hips lose their pattern—snapping erratic, urgent, chasing it now with everything he has. "—yeah—right there—that's—fuck—"

She can feel him getting close.

Can feel it in the way his cock swells inside her, the way his thrusts go shallow and fast and desperate, the way the veins in his forearms bulge where they brace beside her head.

His teeth release his lip—it's red, bitten raw, glistening—and his mouth falls open on a pant that turns into a groan that turns into a sound she will remember for the rest of her life.

"Press," he manages. "More—"

She does.

Her fingers tighten and the blade presses in, another fraction—another fraction—and the line on his throat widens. Goes glossy.

The blood runs faster now, tracing a branching path down his neck toward his collarbone.

She can feel his pulse hammering beneath the steel—fast, fast, the fastest it's been all night.

Then, finally, hips slam forward and freeze. Buried to the hilt.

His mouth opens. No sound at first. Just the shape of it—jaw slack, lips parted, eyes screwed shut, grin gone now.

Then a groan rises. From the floor of his lungs. Low, shuddering, broken.

And she feels the first spurt of heat flood her.

Hot. Blazing hot. Filling her in a thick, pulsing wave, his cock throbbing against her walls with the release.

His hips jerk. Once more. Twice. The final spurts, weaker now, a fading pulse, and his cock twitches inside her as the last of it empties.

His breath comes in harsh, fractured bursts against her face. Panting. Almost keening. A sound that doesn't match anything she's heard from him tonight—not the curated patience, not the clinical observations, not even the broken fucks or the deranged chuckling.

Then his body settles. The tension drains in a slow cascade—arms first, then shoulders, then his jaw unclenching.

His hips stay flush against hers, cock softening inside her. The cum sits warm and heavy between them. Some of it has started to leak—she can feel it, a slow trickle seeping around him, sliding thick down between her thighs.

His blood is cooling on her knuckles. On her face. On her mouth.

His hand finds hers on the knife. Still at his throat. Still trembling.

He eases it away. Gently. His fingers unwrap hers from the handle one by one—patient, careful. The same hands that pinned her wrists and split her hoodie and pressed her thighs open for his mouth.

He takes the blade with a tenderness that doesn't match anything else about tonight.

Folds it shut. Click-clack.

Sets it in the earth beside them. One final thunk.

He stays where he is. Inside her. Forearms caging her head. Blood trickling from his throat in a lazy line that's already slowing—the body doing what bodies do. Closing up. Sealing over. Beginning the quiet work of repair.

His eyes find hers through the haze. Blown wide. Dark. The hazel entirely consumed.

For a long moment there's nothing. Just the forest coming back online around them.

Wind in the canopy. Something small in the undergrowth. The distant, mechanical hum of the castle beyond the treeline. Alive and indifferent.

She can feel his heartbeat through his chest. Against her bare, bitten breasts—against the nipples he'd wanted to pierce and adorn with little satin bows. Thudding. Slowing. Finding its way back to that infuriating, impossible calm.

"Good bunny," he whispers.

The words vibrate against her mouth. Warm. Close.

The praise hits her one last time and the glow behind her ribs overflows. Faint. Ember-quiet.

And maybe she should put it out.

But she doesn't.

Above, through the thinning canopy, Orion hangs.

Three dots in a line, patient and unchanged.

The stars watch the wolf rest his head in the hollow of the rabbit’s throat and don’t blink.

part 1 here.

↝ 𝒕𝒂𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒕: @kookie96 @coletaehyung @unbibiased @sexyevilkitten @maralodiaal @my0hmary @butterymin @quhrtz @lachlaniah @jhopeloverrr @medicinemybish @jjkszn @makulimlim @onyxthornseer @amajikisupremacy @omgstahpp-blog @drwonderbread @angelhyuka @mikrokookiex @ot7girl4l @mar-lo-pap @rossy1080 @fancypeacepersona @ggukjugoo @jadestonedaeho7 @a-kookie-with-my-tae @ironyatitsfinest @impossiblecopoaffire @cannotalwaysbenight @taevescence @itstoastsworld @somehowukook @stutixmaru @chloepiccoliniii @annyeongbitch7 @minniejim @curse-of-art @mellyyyyyyx @rpwprpwprpwprw @sashakittyct @bjoriis @hemmosfear @bettytta @ilikekpop-c @yuyu0y11 @amarawayne @sugak00kie134340 @cravingforbangtan @namgimini @weasleyswizarding-wheezes @dltyum @dailynnt

❥ a/n: Oh boy. Ooooh boy—where do I even begin with this one. I KNEW—I knew—you all were going to thirst over Taehyung in this universe and not a single one of you has disappointed me. Not one. I feel so seen. So validated. So concerned for all of us, collectively. But genuinely—he’s such a layered character, I swear to God. The amount of backstory this man carries? The psychological wiring? The way everything he does has intent behind it even when it looks like he’s just being… whatever the hell that is? Yeah. No wonder you gremlins like him. I get it. I wrote him and even I’m like… oh. Oh that’s… hm. Okay. Which is exactly why I ended up writing this one-shot. I was so immersed while writing it that it genuinely felt like watching a movie in my head. Like I could see the lighting, the pacing, the expressions—everything. It’s one of those pieces where I kind of black out and then come back like ‘oh… so THAT’S what we did today.’ I really hope you guys feel that same intensity while reading it, because it was a ride to write.

Now—before you dive in, let me contextualize a few things just so we’re all on the same page.First of all: everything here is consensual. Yunjin is not being randomly thrown into this—she has been actively seeking Taehyung out for months. She has a crush, she knows what kind of man he is, and she steps into this fully aware of what she’s getting herself into. However—because of the nature of the dynamic (primal play, power imbalance, blood/knife play), there are moments that can read as dubcon. That tension is intentional, but if that’s not something you’re comfortable with, please take care of yourself and step back. Also—this is an OC piece, not x reader. So we are in third person limited POV instead of our usual second person. In the main story, Taehyung is canonically hooking up with Yunjin, and she has established features (pale skin, pink hair, etc.), so I couldn’t in good faith slap a reader-insert label on this. It wouldn’t be fair or inclusive. She’s her own character. And yes—she has small titties. I’m saying it now. If that breaks your immersion or isn’t your preference, that’s completely okay—this might not be the one for you. You’ll also notice a lot of bunny/wolf imagery throughout. That was a very deliberate choice. I love the dynamic, but the usual prey/predator terminology makes my soul leave my body, so this was my way of keeping the psychological tension without wanting to crawl out of my skin while writing it. And lastly—Taehyung is… very out of pocket here. Do not @ me about the things he says. I do not control him. I cannot control him. I am simply a vessel. But if you look closely—if you really pay attention—you’ll see that he’s not just being random for the sake of it. He’s playing a game. He is always several steps ahead, and his seemingly disconnected lines? They’re not random. They’re part of how he destabilizes, guides, and conditions the person in front of him.

So yeah. Have fun with that.

Go ahead and read, and while you do, try to figure out what the fuck is wrong with V.

The answer is everything.

Mwah. <3

The thing is, Yunjin knows exactly why she’s here.

She’d known since this afternoon when the text came through—𝚏𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚛 𝟻, 𝚝𝚘𝚗𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝—no context, no explanation, just that. And she’d stared at her phone screen for approximately four seconds before her face did the thing.

The thing where her cheeks go warm and her mouth tucks in at the corners trying not to smile.

She’d failed at not smiling.

So here she is. Floor five, eleven-something at night, her pink hair in a loose braid because she’d redone it twice and decided she didn’t care, in the pale lavender hoodie she tells herself she chose for comfort and not because it’s soft to the touch.

She raises her hand to knock and pauses for exactly one second—just one—to breathe.

Okay. Normal. This is completely normal.

She knocks.

The door opens faster than she expects, which—okay, that’s something to tuck away and examine later because since when does V not keep people waiting?—and then the thought dissolves because he’s just there, and she’s been around him enough times now that one would think her brain would have developed some kind of tolerance. Some kind of buffer.

…It hasn’t.

V leans against the doorframe with the kind of casual ease that shouldn’t be attractive on a person but very much is, head tilting slightly when he sees her.

He’s got this way of looking at people like he’s already three steps ahead of the conversation. Cunning, and smart, and somehow, making you feel infinitely and forever inferior.

Yunjin hates it.

She also, embarrassingly, loves it.

“You came,” he says.

“You texted,” she points out, like that’s a very reasonable explanation for why she’s standing outside his room at midnight, which it is, actually, and she’s choosing not to analyze it further.

The corner of his mouth does something akin to a smile, but not quite.

It’s the suggestion of one, keeping it on a leash.

“I text a lot of people.”

“Do they all show up?”

“Hm. Yes.”

She makes sure her face doesn’t do any weird expressions, which takes more effort than it should, and she’s very aware of the thorns that loom over him and she’s never quite figured out how to describe.

“Are you going to let me in,” she says, “or is the haunting ambiance exclusive to the hallway?”

He steps aside.

Cinnamon engulfs the room immediately. That scent that is the equivalent of the thorned thing that always envelops him, old and grounding and still, eerily, dangerous.

She can’t not notice the lamp in the corner, low and amber, and then, the fact that the window is cracked just slightly, letting in the cold of the forest outside.

The ambient quiet of trees in late-night wind whispers through.

The castle has that effect, sometimes.

One forgets that just beyond the walls there’s miles of nothing and dark.

“Drink?” He’s already moving toward the windowsill where a bottle sits half-abandoned.

“What is it?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” she says honestly.

He glances back at her with something that isn’t quite amusement, and also, kind of is.

“Whiskey.”

She wrinkles her nose.

He sees it. The not-quite-smile deepens a fraction.

“No, thank you,” she says, very politely.

“Right.”

He pours himself one anyway, unhurried, and she watches him because she can’t really help it.

Even when he doesn’t plan it, he’s hot.

The way he moves is studied without seeming to try, thought-out, like he has opinions about the exact speed at which a person should do things.

She respects it immensely.

He turns and leans back against the windowsill, glass in hand, looking at her in a way ghat makes her feel simultaneously seen and like she’s being very gently taken apart, layer by layer, just to see what’s in there.

“You redid your hair,” he says.

She blinks. “I always have my hair like this.”

“You had it down at dinner.”

The fact that he noticed doesn’t escape her.

She’d known, vaguely, that he had noticed—she’d caught him looking, twice, across the cafeteria, and she had immediately looked away the first time and then very much not looked away the second time.

But hearing him say it out loud does something to the temperature in the room.

“Braid’s more practical,” she says.

“Mm.” He sips his whiskey. Doesn’t look away. “For what?”

It’s frustrating, the effortless tilted thing he does with a sentence, where the words are technically innocent and yet the effect is absolutely not.

Yunjin tips her chin up just slightly.

She’s been in the Seduction Division for six months.

She’s learned a thing or two about not handing a person exactly what they’re fishing for.

“In general,” she says pleasantly. “I’m a practical person.”

“You came here at midnight in a lavender hoodie.”

“It’s very warm.”

“And practical.”

“Extremely.”

He sets his glass down on the windowsill. Just that—just sets it down, a small gesture, and the room gets quieter for it.

He looks at her steadily. She looks back.

The thorned thing presses closer. She feels it in her collarbones, in the soft space below her throat, not unpleasant—the opposite, which is kind of the problem.

“Yunjin,” he says.

She likes the way he says her name.

She wishes she didn’t.

He says it like each syllable is a small decision, like he chose this particular arrangement of sounds deliberately.

«Yun-jin.»

Something thoughtful in it.

Something that makes her feel weirdly, unfortunately known.

“V,” she says.

He tilts his head at her.

What flickers through his expression, quick and unreadable—pleased, maybe, in a way he hadn’t expected to be, she can’t parse it.

“You’re careful,” he says.

“I try to be.”

“Most people aren’t.” A pause. He picks his glass up again, rolls it once between his palms. “It’s boring when they’re not.”

“I’d hate to be boring.”

“You’re not.” His eyes stay on her, steady. “That’s why you’re here.”

Yunjin is trained. She knows what it looks like when someone’s angling for something, knows how to hold a conversation at arm’s length while appearing completely open. She knows all of this.

She’s finding it deeply unhelpful right now.

V sets the glass down with a soft clink and nods toward the window.

She can feel the forest air drifting through the window in slow pulses—pine and dark earth, the particular quiet of trees at midnight that sounds like breathing.

“Have you been out there yet,” he says, but it’s not really a question.

She follows his gaze.

Past the glass, past the perimeter, the treeline is a dark wall at the edge of the grounds—the kind of dark that isn’t empty but occupied.

“At night?”

“That’s the only time it matters.”

She looks back at him.

He’s already watching her, that birdlike attention, head tilted just slightly.

“What happens out there?” she asks. “At night.”

The corner of his lip lifts upwards in a way that looks like he’s tasting the words.

“Depends on who you go with.”

He pushes off the windowsill and crosses to the door—the same leisure gait, hands loose at his sides—and glances back when he reaches it, hand on the frame.

“Come on, bunny.”

She stares.

“…Bunny?”

He looks at her hair. Back to her face.

The look is self-explanatory in the most aggravating possible way.

“V—”

“You can wait here if you want.” He shrugs, easy, like it’s optional. “I’ll come back.”

She grabs her keycard.

The forest is cold in a way that’s not really dramatic.

It’s not cinematic either, honestly. There’s no wind or howl one could expect from a place like this.

But the temperature does drop the moment the treeline closes behind her like the castle warmth was never a guarantee to begin with.

Yunjin pulls the hem of her hoodie down over her palms while V walks ahead.

His hands hang loose at his sides, and between the fingers of his right hand, she can see it:

A butterfly knife, moving, constant, the handles rotating through his grip in a motion so practiced it looks involuntary.

The blade flashes once when a seam of moonlight finds it through the canopy.

Click.

Rotate.

Click.

Yunjin watches it. Then watches him. Then watches the knife again.

“You’ve never come out here,” he says.

“At night? No.”

“Why not?”

She steps over a root.

“Because it’s dark and full of trees and I’m not—” she pauses. “I don’t have a reason to.”

“You have one now.”

He stops walking.

She almost walks into him.

He turns around slowly, unrushed as everything else, and looks at her.

The knife stills in his hand for the first time since they left the building.

“Tell me something,” he says.

She waits.

“What do bunnies do,” he says, “when a wolf is near?”

The cold gets more specific.

Yunjin blinks. Processes this. Looks at him.

He looks back, entirely serene.

“What?” she says.

“Bunnies.”

He’s patient about it, genuinely, infuriatingly patient, like the sentence makes complete sense and she just needs a moment.

The knife starts moving again.

Click.

“When they feel a wolf close by. What do they do?”

“They run,” she hears herself say.

“Mm.” The corner of his mouth does the thing. “They run.”

The silence after that is not empty—it has texture, has the forest shifting somewhere overhead.

“Interesting instinct,” V says, tilting his head. “Prey animals.”

He says it like he finds it fascinating.

“All that speed, all that—” the knife rotates, “—potential, and what do they do with it?”

He looks at her, and the look is warmer than the rest of him.

“They run.”

“Is this going somewhere?” Yunjin asks.

“It’s already somewhere,” he says simply. “You’re just catching up.”

The knife stops again.

He looks at her the way he’d looked at her in the cafeteria—twice, across the room—except there’s no cafeteria here, no distance, no crowd to dissolve it into background noise.

It’s just this.

Just him and the dark and that cinnamon scent threading through the cold pine air, sweet and low and dangerous.

“You’re soft,” he says.

It doesn’t sound like an insult.

It sounds like being assessed.

His eyes move from her face to her braid, and back.

“Soft, pink, won’t drink whiskey—” he takes one step toward her and she holds her ground, barely, “—shows up in a lavender hoodie at midnight.”

Another step.

“Do you know what wolves do,” he says, “when something soft wanders into their territory?”

Her heart rate is, at this point, embarrassing.

“Depends on the wolf,” she manages.

His lip twitches, leashed, then the smile opens slightly.

“Don’t let me catch you,” he says.

She stares at him.

She cycles through interpretations and throws them all out.

“Or what?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer.

He simply looks at her with that smile.

“One.”

Oh. He’s serious—

“Two.”

She runs.

There’s no deliberation. No composure. No six months of Seduction Division training that presents itself as useful in this particular moment.

One second she’s standing her ground and the next something ancient and entirely unreasonable in the back of her brain has looked at V smiling like that with a blade in his hand and simply—decided.

Her feet make the choice. She ratifies it.

The forest is terrible for running. The ground is soft in the wrong places, uneven, roots hiding under pine needle beds that her feet find at angles she can’t predict. Her braid whips against her back. Her breath comes cold and she ducks a low branch without fully breaking stride and has truly no idea where she’s going, which is fine, that’s a problem she’ll solve while moving—

Behind her: nothing. Complete, terrible quiet.

No footsteps. No branches.

Just the ambient breathed-out hush of the forest, which, in a way, makes it worse, because she can’t calibrate against silence, can’t track what she can’t hear, and she slows just enough to check over her shoulder—

Dark. Trees. Nothing.

She faces forward again and nearly runs directly into him.

V stands two feet ahead of her, leaning against a tree with one shoulder, the knife doing its slow idle rotation like nothing has happened, like he’s been here the whole time, like the forest delivered him while she was looking the wrong way.

He’s not breathing hard. He’s looking at her with that bright attentive quality, and his eyes dim when he sees her face—pleased, genuinely pleased, quiet and warm and entirely at odds with the rest of him.

Yunjin stops. Chest heaving. Staring.

“Hi, bunny,” he says.

She stares at him for three full seconds.

Her heartbeat is catastrophic.

“That was quick,” she says, slightly breathless.

He considers her.

“You were never going to outrun me,” he says, not unkindly, just factually.

His eyes drop—brief, quick—to the visible flutter of her pulse at her throat, and back up.

The smile hasn’t left, it’s just settled into a quieter register.

It has patience in it.

“Wolves,” he says, soft, “always catch the rabbit.”

The knife folds closed with a quiet snick.

He pushes off the tree.

Yunjin’s plan, in hindsight, has several critical flaws.

The first being that she is running from the Chief of Stealth Assassinations in a forest he likely knows by heart.

The second is that she is wearing a hoodie specifically chosen for comfort, not aerodynamics.

The third is that she actually thinks she has a chance.

She pushes off the tree trunk before V can finish folding his knife, scrambling backward with a distinct lack of grace.

Pine needles slip under her sneakers.

She nearly trips over a root, rights herself with a frantic pinwheel of arms, and then she is running.

Again.

The forest swallows her instantly.

It’s darker now, or maybe her eyes just haven't adjusted from the brief moment of moonlight. Branches whip at her face, little stinging reminders of her poor life choices, and the air burns cold in her lungs.

Stupid.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But somethin about the way V had looked at her gives her stomach a rush of excitement—like she was something delicious he’d found on his plate.

Behind her, a sound.

Not a footstep. Not the snap of a twig.

A chuckle.

Low, dark, and amused.

The sound comes from everywhere at once.

Yunjin runs faster.

Her breath comes in jagged gasps now, white puffs in the dark air.

Two minutes? Three? It feels like an hour.

Her legs burn, but panic is starting to tap politely on her shoulder.

She skids around a massive oak tree and presses herself flat against the bark, trying to vanish.

Quiet, she orders herself. Be quiet.

She holds her breath until her chest aches.

Silence.

The forest settles around her. The wind sighs through the canopy, a lonely, hollow sound. A nocturnal bird calls out, startling her so badly her heart stutters.

She needs to think. She’s in Seduction. She reads people. She needs to read the forest.

She closes her eyes, tilting her head.

Yank.

Her head snaps back, a sudden pull that drags a gasp from her throat.

Her braid. Someone has her braid.

"Found you," a voice murmurs, right against the shell of her ear.

V.

Of course it’s V.

He doesn’t let go. He reels her in, winding the length of her braid around his hand like a leash, pulling until her back hits a chest that feels solid as a wall.

"Fast," he hums, the vibration of it traveling straight through her spine. "Surprisingly fast. For something so soft."

Yunjin is trembling.

She tells herself it’s the cold. She tells herself it’s the adrenaline.

She knows, with a sinking, swooping feeling in her stomach, that it is neither of those things.

"I—" Her voice squeaks. She clears her throat. "I have good cardio."

"Mm."

He shifts, and she feels it—the unmistakable pressure of him against her lower back.

Oh.

"Too bad," he whispers, his lips brushing the sensitive skin below her ear, sending shivers racing down her arms. "Your hunter is me."

His free hand comes up to her throat. His fingers are long, cool against her flushed skin. He tilts her head back further, exposing the line of her throat to the moonlight, to him.

"V," she breathes.

"Shh."

He tugs on her braid again, tight enough to make her gasp, and the sound seems to please him.

"You like to run," he observes, almost bored. "Instinct?"

"Yes," she admits breathlessly.

"Bad instinct."

He spins her around.

The world tilts.

One moment she’s upright, pinned against him; the next, she’s being maneuvered, not gently, down onto the bed of pine needles.

He follows her down, a heavy, warm weight that settles framing her thighs before she can even think to close them.

He pins her wrists above her head with one hand. Effortless. Like she’s made of paper.

Yunjin stares up at him.

He looks… wrecked.

Beautifully, terrifyingly wrecked.

His hair is messed up from the run, falling into his eyes. And his eyes—they’re blown wide, dark pupils swallowing the hazel, focused on her with a terrifying intensity.

He looks unhinged.

He looks like he wants to bite something.

He looks like he wants to bite her.

"V," she whispers again.

He ignores her. He brings his other hand up—the one not pinning her wrists—and she sees the glint of metal.

The butterfly knife.

He flicks it open with a flick of his wrist. Click-clack. The sound is loud in the quiet forest.

He traces the line of her jaw with the flat of the blade. She shivers, her breath hitching.

"You’re shaking," he notes, watching the blade slide down her neck.

"I’m cold."

"Are you."

He smiles. It’s not a nice smile.

"You smell," he says, leaning down until his nose brushes the sensitive skin just below her jaw, inhaling deeply, "like cotton candy."

He drags the scent in like a drug.

"Makes a wolf," he murmurs against her skin, his voice dropping an octave, "want to eat the rabbit."

Yunjin feels her face flame. Her entire body feels hot, tight, strung out.

"Do you know what happens," he asks quietly, pulling back just enough to look her in the eye, "when a wolf catches a rabbit?"

"You—" Yunjin swallows hard. "You said that already."

"I said wolves always catch the rabbit."

He moves the knife. The blade rests in the hollow of her throat now, right where her pulse is hammering a frantic, betraying rhythm against the steel.

"I didn’t say," he murmurs, "what happens after."

"Tell me," she hears herself say.

V’s eyes change.

The darkness in them seems to expand, swallowing the last of the light.

But there’s heat there, too.

A terrifying, consuming heat.

"They play with it," he says.

He shifts his grip on her wrists, tightening just enough to remind her she’s caught.

"They like to see," he continues, his voice low and contemplative, "how fast its heart can beat before it gives out."

He taps the knife against her collarbone. Tap. Tap.

"Is your heart going to give out, bunny?"

"I don't know," she whispers honestly.

It feels like it might.

"Good."

He leans in closer, his lips hovering inches from hers.

She can smell the cinnamon on him, rich and spicy, mixing with the scent of pine and dirt and him.

"Tell me," he says, his voice dropping. "Did you run because you were scared? Or because you wanted me to chase you?"

Yunjin stares at him. Her wrists ache where he’s holding them. The pine needles are digging into her back. There is a knife at her throat.

And she has never, in her entire life, been this turned on.

"I don't know," she confesses.

"Liar,” he decides for her. "You saw me, and you thought, 'Oh, look. A monster. I wonder if he bites.'"

He drags the flat of the knife down her chest, over the lavender hoodie, stopping right between her breasts.

"Well," he whispers. "I do."

Then the blade tilts.

Just a little. Just enough that the edge kisses the fabric.

“Hold still,” he murmurs.

She goes very still.

The sound of cotton giving way is shockingly quiet.

He doesn’t rush. He draws the knife down the center of her chest in a glide, and the hoodie parts along the line like it wanted to.

The air hits her skin in a thin, chilly strip, from collarbone to below her sternum, and goosebumps race outwards from the path.

She makes a sound. Embarrassing. Half gasp, half whine.

He hears it.

She can tell he hears it because his mouth curves, slow and pleased, eyes staying on the cut he’s making. He’s careful with pressure, she realizes dimly—close enough to scare the absolute life out of her, but not enough to touch skin.

Not even once.

He knows exactly what he’s doing.

Of course he does.

The hoodie falls open.

Underneath, pale pink lace.

Yunjin wants to disappear into the ground.

“Oh,” V says softly.

That’s it. Just oh, like he’s just unwrapped something he’d been quietly hoping for and doesn’t want to spook.

Heat blasts through her face so fast she actually feels dizzy.

She squeezes her eyes shut on reflex. That kind of just makes it worse, because now she can’t see him, but she can feel everything—the way his gaze drags down over her exposed bra, the way the forest air licks over her newly bare skin, the way her nipples tighten because of course they do, traitors.

“Look at that,” he hums. “Pink.”

She makes a dying noise in the back of her throat.

“Don’t—” She clears her throat. Her voice comes out thin. “Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?” He finally looks up at her face, lazy curiosity in his eyes.

She wants to cover herself, instinctively, but her wrists are still pinned above her head, held in one of his hands like it costs him nothing—and it probably does.

“V,” she mumbles, trying very hard not to look down at herself again and failing instantly.

The bra looks so much more obvious out here, like she’s lit for inspection—the soft lace, the tiny little bow in the center that had seemed cute in her room and now feels… accusatory.

“I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

“You wore pink lace to my room,” he says, matter-of-fact, merely reciting mission intel. “At midnight.”

Her stomach swoops.

He shifts his weight a little, the knife resting now against the edge of the hoodie where it’s fallen away.

“You followed me into the forest.”

His tone stays light, almost conversational, but his eyes don’t move from her chest.

“I think we both know what that means.”

“It’s just—” she tries weakly. “It’s just underwear.”

His mouth kicks up.

“Mm. Just underwear,” he echoes. “Bunny, you color-coordinate your lingerie for your superior and then pretend it’s an accident.”

Superior.

Right. He’s not just some guy, he’s V, Chief of Stealth Assassinations, Council member, terrifying knife man, and she is—what. A Seduction ensign with too many feelings and a bad case of cotton-candy aesthetic.

Her cheeks burn hotter.

“I—it was laundry day,” she lies. Badly.

The knife moves again.

Lower, this time.

He drags the flat of it down to the band of her leggings at her hips, tracing the seam with idle interest. The pressure is just enough to make the elastic dip, not enough to cut.

Her abdomen jumps under the contact.

“Laundry day, hm?” he repeats, sounding deeply unconvinced and also a little entertained.

He tugs at the waistband with the tip of the blade, watching the fabric give. She can feel every tiny shift; the cold metal, the way it threatens to slip lower, the way her skin flinches and then tries not to.

“V—”

“Shh, bunny.” His voice goes soft, almost soothing. “I’m being careful.”

He is.

That might be the most insane part of this.

His hand is steady, fingers loose on the handle, and when he finally angles the edge in and slices, it’s clean.

Her leggings part with another soft rip, the sound so intimate it makes her toes curl inside her sneakers.

The air hits her hips.

He pulls the cut open lazily with the knife, exposing more skin, more lace.

More pink.

He stops.

“There,” he sounds satisfied.

She wants the earth to open up and swallow her down to the molten core.

Matching. She’d put on the matching set.

Because she’s an idiot. Because some traitorous part of her had thought, ’if he sees, it’ll be nice if it all… coordinates.’

Pink bra. Pink panties. Pink hair. Pink face.

She is going to combust.

“Yun,” he says, and this time her name sounds almost like a laugh. “You’re killing me.”

She risks a look at his face, because apparently she hasn’t suffered enough.

He looks… delighted.

Not in a soft way. In that weird V way—eyes bright, smile a little too pointy, like the world just presented him with his new favorite toy and he’s already thinking of every terrible thing he can do to it.

His gaze drags back up, slow and unmistakable, knife tapping lightly against her hip bone, from the damp little scrap of lace between her thighs to the bra straining over her breathing.

“You’re all pink, bunny.”

Her breath stutters.

He sounds obsessed.

“It’s not—” She swallows. Her throat feels too tight. “It’s just… a set.”

That earns her a low, pleased hum.

“I love a matching set,” he says, almost to himself. “Attention to detail.”

He lets the knife rest at the waistband of her panties for a beat, just enough to make her whole body go jelly again, and then—because he’s cruel—he doesn’t cut.

He drags the flat of it back up instead.

Across the little triangle of lace, up over the bare skin of her stomach where the hoodie’s been split, back to her chest.

He notices the way her frame shakes at every inch mapped upwards.

His smile slips toward a lazier tug, smoke curling at the edges. Then tilts the knife so the tip hooks into the tiny bow between her cups.

Yunjin stops breathing.

He could cut it.

He doesn’t.

He nudges the bow gently aside, nudging the knot so it sits just off-center, and then angles the edge to catch on the stitching below it.

“You like this one,” he says, eyes flicking up to her face again. “The little bow.”

She blinks rapidly, trying to keep her eyes on his and not on the steel resting in her cleavage.

“It’s… cute,” she manages.

“Cute,” he repeats, as if testing the word on his tongue. “We’ll keep it, then.”

Of course. Of course the man who carves people open for a living has opinions on preserving aesthetics.

He draws a slow, careful line down with the knife, splitting the bra neatly beneath the bow.

Her breath turns into a high, silent hitch as the tension gives; the bra loosens around her, the cups falling away from the center to either side.

The straps dig into her shoulders for one suspended second and then the whole front of it just… spills open.

Her breasts are bared to the cold air and his gaze in the same instant.

Her nipples are already tight, flushed the deep, humiliating same color.

“Jesus,” she whispers, because she’s has decided that’s the word to go with.

V’s eyes go heavy-lidded.

He lets the ruined lace fall away from the knife, drops the blade to rest idly against the side of her ribcage, and just looks.

The sound he makes isn’t loud. It’s more like a low, satisfied exhale, punched out of him without his permission.

“Pretty,” he says.

Her whole body lights up at the word.

There shouldn’t be this much power packed into two syllables.

He lowers his head a fraction, enough that his breath ghosts over her skin, warm against the chill, and her back arches before she can stop it.

His eyes flick up at the movement, catching the way her chest offers itself, and his mouth does that slow, dangerous curve again.

“Look at them,” he murmurs, almost fond. “All pink too.”

He reaches out with his free hand finally, the one not pinning her wrists, and his fingers curve just under the swell of one breast—not squeezing, not really touching her nipple yet, just cupping, like he’s gauging weight.

She bites down on a sound.

“The rabbit doesn’t need a reason to groom,” he muses, thumb sweeping just close enough to the taut peak that she almost sobs. “It just… keeps itself neat. Clean. Ready.”

Ready.

Indeed, ready.

She shaved. She moisturized. She’d looked at herself in the mirror before heading to floor five and thought, ’Okay. Presentable.’

Her stomach swoops so hard she actually shifts on the pine needles.

His eyes catch it.

“Yun,” he says softly. “You’re adorable.”

That doesn’t help.

Not even a little.

He finally lets his thumb drag over her nipple.

It’s barely pressure. A skim.

Enough to send a bolt of sensation straight down between her thighs, enough to make her hips twitch against his weight.

She hears herself suck in a breath through her teeth.

His pupils blow a little wider.

“I should put bows on those,” he says.

She blinks.

“…What?”

He tilts his head, like the statement is self-evident. Like she’s the one not following.

“Little bows.” He gestures vaguely at her chest with the butterfly knife. “There.”

His gaze moves to her nipples, appraising.

“Little presents.”

She stares at him.

“V,” she says, carefully. “You—”

“You’d look like a gift,” he continues, settling this for himself. Reasoning it through out loud like she’s not there, and also like she’s entirely the subject of conversation. “Wrapped and addressed.”

A pause.

He seems to be imagining it.

The image, apparently, meets some internal standard.

“Yes,” he decides.

She doesn’t know what to do with that.

She legitimately does not know what to do with that.

“V,” she whispers, because it’s the only thing that seems to come out correctly.

“Mmm?”

He gives the nipple a tiny, barely-there pinch between thumb and forefinger.

A soft, broken sound slips past her lips before she can catch it.

The hand holding her wrists tightens minutely. Approval, she realizes, in some fucked-up corner of her brain.

“So much pink,” he says, seemingly proud.

Her heartbeat tries to escape through the point where the blade rests.

“Wonder if you’re pink too,” he muses, voice dropping lower, “under all this lace.”

Yunjin swallows, throat working against the press of fear and arousal that’s become one tangled, buzzing thing.

And she, in truth, doesn’t know what to do with anything—not her body, not her face.

All she knows is that she’s laid out under V in the middle of a dark forest, her hoodie split, her bra ruined, her matching underwear on full display, and he is looking at her like a wolf who’s finally got his rabbit pinned.

And god help her, she thinks she’s never wanted anything so badly in her life.

She suddenly registers the absence of cold before she registers why, still buzzing from where the flat of the blade had traced her skin.

She refocuses her eyes to see V holding it loosely, casually, the handle resting between two fingers like a cigarette—like it’s nothing, like it’s an afterthought—and then his wrist flicks.

One rotation. Two.

The butterfly knife spins through his fingers in a lazy figure eight, handles clicking open-shut-open in a rhythm that sounds almost musical.

Moonlight catches the edge each time it turns, little strobe-flashes in the dark.

And then he throws it.

Yunjin’s entire body seizes.

The knife comes down fast—fast—blade-first, the silver arc of it aimed directly at her hands where they’re pinned above her head, and every cell screams ’no’ at once.

Her eyes slam shut.

Her wrists jerk against his grip.

She makes a sound—high, involuntary, ripped from somewhere below thought—

Thunk.

The blade bites into the earth.

She feels the vibration through the ground. Through her skull, her shoulders, the whole length of her arms.

The handle hums faintly where it’s buried, and when she cracks one eye open—trembling, heart somewhere in her sinuses—she sees it.

The knife. Planted in the soil between V’s index and middle finger. Between the knuckles of the hand that’s still pinning her wrists to the forest floor. The blade embedded in the dirt, close enough that she can feel the residual warmth of the steel against the side of her pinky.

Not a scratch.

Not a single scratch.

Her breath comes out in a shaky, wet rush. Her vision is blurred—she blinks and realizes, mortifyingly, that her eyes are stinging with unshed tears.

Adrenaline tears. Fear tears. The kind that don’t ask permission.

V watches her face with open, lazy interest.

“Shh,” he murmurs. “I never miss.”

She wants to say something. Anything. Something cutting, something that proves she’s not a full-body tremble in a ruined hoodie right now.

But her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth and her heart beats at a speed that would send her to J-Hope’s office right away.

So what comes out instead is a thin, cracked: “You—”

“I know.” He says it warmly. Almost fond.

Now that the knife is tucked away, he has one hand free.

Oh.

Oh, she’s in trouble.

He flexes the freed hand once. Slow. His fingers stretch and curl, working out the stiffness of the grip, and his gaze drops from her face to her chest.

Her breasts are still bare to the night air, small and round, the nipples pulled tight from the cold, flushed that same traitorous color as everything else about her.

She feels horribly, excruciatingly exposed.

And were it for the cold, it’d be fine.

But it’s not becuse of the weather—it’s because of the way he looks at her chest with explicit, rigorous attention—the same way he’d looked at the knife when it was spinning.

His fingertip—just the pad of his index finger, just the tip—touches the center of her sternum. Not her breast. The flat plane between them, where her heart is hammering a riot against her ribs.

“Small,” he says.

And it lands exactly the way she’d been afraid it would.

Her face burns.

She turns her head to the side, chin tucking instinctively, and her eyes find the dark canopy above because that’s easier than this.

Easier than lying here with her nothing-tits out while the Chief of Stealth Assassinations offers a one-word review.

Small.

Yeah. She knows. She’s aware, thanks.

“Don’t do that.”

His voice is quiet. His finger hasn’t moved from her sternum.

She swallows. Doesn’t look at him.

“Yunjin.”

Something in the way he says it—that careful, syllable-by-syllable quality, like each sound is a choice—makes her turn back.

He’s watching her with his head tilted. His expression hasn’t changed. That same bright, alien attention, focused entirely on her.

“Small things,” he says, “are more sensitive.”

She blinks.

“Did you know that?”

His finger traces a slow, considering path from her sternum to the swell of her left breast. Just the outer curve. Barely a touch.

“Smaller surface area. Same nerve supply. Higher concentration. More density.”

He says it the way someone would recite a fun fact at a dinner party.

“Means every—” his fingertip drifts inward, tracing the curve tighter, spiraling closer to the center, “—single—” closer, “—touch—”

He reaches her areola.

Yunjin’s back arches off the ground so fast it’s involuntary.

A gasp rips out of her, and her hands twist above her head where his other hand is still pinning them, fingers scrabbling uselessly at nothing.

V pauses. Watches the arch of her spine settle back down.

“—registers more,” he finishes softly.

She’s panting. She can hear herself panting.

It’s embarrassing.

It’s one fingertip on the edge of her areola and she’s panting like she’s been running again.

“Fascinating,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

His finger circles. Just once. A slow, featherlight loop around the puckered skin of her areola, tracing the border between smooth and textured, and the sensation is so specific, so concentrated, that her toes curl inside her sneakers.

“All this pink,” he says, gaze fixed on the path his finger is drawing. “Like candy.”

He presses the pad of his thumb flat against her nipple.

Just contact—full, flat, warm.

Full, flat, warm contact after the teasing almost-touches, and the sensation floods through her chest, immediate and bright.

Her nipple is so tight it aches, and the warmth of his thumb against it sends electric pulses straight down through her stomach, through her pelvis, between her legs.

She makes a sound she’ll be mortified about for the rest of her natural life. Thin and needy and high in the back of her throat—begging, even though she hasn’t said a word.

V’s eyes darken a fraction, pupils expanding, swallowing hazel, and his lips part just slightly.

He likes it.

He likes the sound.

“Again,” he says. Not a request.

He rolls his thumb. Just a small, tight circle, pressing her nipple down and dragging it to the side, letting it spring back.

The friction—his thumb pad against the sensitive peak—makes her whimper.

Actually whimper.

Mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, the sound pulled from somewhere she can't name.

“Good,” he breathes.

His head lowers.

She feels his breath first. Warm against her cold skin, ghosting over the breast he hasn’t touched yet—the right one, the neglected one, its nipple tight and aching and straining toward nothing.

Her chest heaves with each inhale, and she knows he can see it, the way she’s practically offering herself—

His mouth closes over her right nipple.

Warm. Wet.

The sudden heat of his mouth after the biting cold of the forest air is so intense that her vision whites at the edges.

His lips seal around the stiff peak and his tongue—oh god, his tongue—presses flat against the tip, broad and hot and slick.

“Ah—” Her voice cracks. Her hips shift on the pine needles. “V—”

He hums against her, vibration traveling straight through her nipple, through her breast, down into her ribcage where it rattles around like a trapped bird.

His tongue moves—a slow, wet drag, tasting her with intent.

Her fingers twist above her head. The hand pinning her wrists hasn’t loosened. The knife handle is still right there, she can feel it against the side of her hand, the textured grip warm from being inside his palm—

Wait.

Her little finger brushes metal.

The knife.

It’s right there. Right next to her trapped hands, blade buried in the dirt, handle jutting up.

If she just—shifted her fingers—curled them a fraction—

V sucks in.

Her thoughts scatter.

He draws her nipple further into his mouth with a slow, deliberate pull, hollowing his cheeks around the small peak, and the sensation is so intense and sweet it makes her thighs clench against his hips.

His tongue flicks against the captured tip, quick and wet, and she hears herself gasp—but her hand—

Her fingers curl around the handle of the butterfly knife.

The textured steel sits against her palm like it belongs to someone else’s story entirely, someone braver, someone who doesn’t wear matching lingerie sets to their superior’s room—

V goes still.

His mouth stays on her breast, lips still sealed around her nipple, but the movement of his tongue stops.

She can feel the shift in his attention even before he lifts his head—a quality change, thorns tightening around her like a vine noticing new movement.

He pulls off her nipple with a soft, wet sound.

Looks up.

His eyes find her hand on the knife handle.

Something hungry moves through his expression.

He looks like…

Like he’d been waiting for this part.

“Oh,” he says.

Yunjin’s fingers tighten on the handle reflexively. Her knuckles go white.

She’s not even sure what she’s doing—she didn’t plan this, her hand just—it moved, it found the knife, and now she’s holding a weapon while pinned under the Chief of Stealth Assassinations in the middle Kkangpae’s forest, and this is either the bravest or dumbest thing she’s ever done—definitely the dumbest.

V’s gaze moves from her hand to her face; and his mouth is wet—she can see it, the slick shine of his own saliva on his lower lip, the faint glistening on the corner of his mouth from where he’d been sucking her nipple.

He looks enthralled.

“Go ahead,” he says.

His hand releases her wrists. Just—lets go. Opens his fingers and pulls his hand away, casual as setting down a glass, and suddenly her arms are free. Both of them. No resistance, no weight holding her down.

Just the knife in her hand and him above her and the forest breathing around them.

Yunjin’s brain stutters.

“Try it,” he adds, like an encouragement.

She stares at him. Her wrists ache faintly where he’d been gripping them—the blood rushing back makes her fingers tingle around the handle.

The blade is still buried in the dirt. She’d have to pull it free. She’d have to actually—

His fingers fold over her knuckles, warm and sure, and he tugs the knife from the earth like it weighs nothing.

The blade comes free with a soft, gritty scrape, soil crumbling from the steel, and then it’s just—in her hands.

A real knife. His knife.

The one he’d used to cut her hoodie, her bra, her leggings.

She’s holding it and her arms are shaking so badly the blade jitters in the dark.

V doesn’t take it back.

Instead, his hand grips her shoulder—firm, sudden—and yanks her upright.

And suddenly she’s sitting up, disoriented, the split halves of her hoodie falling off her shoulders while he remains kneeling in front of her with his thighs bracketing hers.

He adjusts her grip. Both her hands around the handle now, fingers layered, his hands guiding hers with the patience of someone correcting a student’s form.

Then he places the tip of the blade against his own chest.

Over his heart.

“V—” Her voice comes out strangled.

The tip of the knife rests against the dark fabric of his shirt, right over the left side of his chest, and she can feel—through the handle, through the steel, through whatever insane connection exists between a blade and the body it touches—his heartbeat.

Steady. Calm. Completely, offensively calm.

“There,” he says, presumably satisfied with the placement. “That’s right.”

She’s shaking so hard the knife tip trembles against him. Her vision is blurring again—those stupid adrenaline tears—and her breath is coming in shallow, hiccupping bursts.

He’s making her hold a knife to his heart.

He’s making her.

part 2 here.

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His tongue flicks her clit. His finger traces a slow circle around her entrance.

She sobs.

Not crying—not exactly—just this wrenched, involuntary sound that comes from somewhere behind her sternum, her body trying to process two points of contact at once and failing spectacularly.

“Nnh—V—please—”

He hums against her, finger circling, tracing the rim of her entrance through the lace in that slow, maddening orbit, and his tongue keeps working, and—

He pulls his mouth away.

The sound she makes is humiliating.

A thin, high, desperate thing that she would absolutely deny making later under any circumstance.

The cold air rushes against her clit where his mouth had been—wet, exposed, throbbing—and she jerks.

V lifts his head from between her thighs, lower lip glistening. Looks at her face. Then at his fingers, still resting against her entrance.

“Bunny,” he says, conversational. “You’re drenched.”

She wants to disintegrate.

His finger presses—just slightly—against the lace over her entrance, and the fabric gives. Sinks inward.

The wet cotton molds into her opening around his fingertip without actually letting him inside, and the tease of it—almost-in, not-quite-in, the stretch that isn’t a stretch—makes her thighs spasm.

“Bet I could fuck you through the lace,” he muses.

His tone. God, his tone.

Like he’s considering a logistics problem. Like this is an engineering question and not his finger pressing wet pink lace into her pussy while she shakes apart on a forest floor holding a knife above her own head.

He pushes slightly harder. The fabric dips deeper, his fingertip dragging the fabric into her entrance.

“Ah—” Her voice breaks. “That’s—you can’t just—”

He can. Apparently. He does.

She makes a dying noise in the back of her throat.

“Don’t—” She clears her throat. Her voice comes out thin. “Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?” He finally looks up at her face, lazy curiosity in his eyes.

She wants to cover herself, instinctively, but her wrists are still pinned above her head, held in one of his hands like it costs him nothing.

It probably does cost him nothing.

“V,” she mumbles, trying very hard not to look down at herself again and failing instantly.

The bra looks so much more obvious out here, like she’s lit for inspection—the soft lace, the tiny little bow in the center that had seemed cute in her room and now feels… accusatory.

“I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

“You wore pink lace to my room,” he says, matter-of-fact, like he’s reciting mission intel. “At midnight.”

Her stomach swoops.

He shifts his weight a little, the knife resting now against the edge of the hoodie where it’s fallen away. The forest floor is cold and prickly under her back. His thighs bracket her hips, heavy and immovable.

“You followed me into the forest.”

His tone stays light, almost conversational, but his eyes don’t move from her chest.

“I think we both know what that means.”

“It’s just—” she tries weakly. “It’s just underwear.”

His mouth kicks up.

“Mm. Just underwear,” he echoes. “Bunny, you color-coordinate your lingerie for your superior and then pretend it’s an accident.”

Superior.

Right. He’s not just some guy, he’s V, Chief of Stealth Assassinations, Council member, terrifying knife man, and she is—what.

A Seduction ensign with too many feelings and a bad case of cotton-candy aesthetic.

Her cheeks burn hotter.

“I—it was laundry day,” she lies. Badly.

The knife moves again.

Lower, this time.

He drags the flat of it down to the band of her leggings at her hips, tracing the seam with idle interest. The pressure is just enough to make the elastic dip, not enough to cut, not yet.

Her abdomen jumps under the contact.

“Laundry day, hm,” he repeats, sounding deeply unconvinced and also a little entertained.

He tugs at the waistband with the tip of the blade, watching the fabric give. She can feel every tiny shift; the cold metal, the way it threatens to slip lower, the way her skin flinches and then tries not to.

“V—”

“Shh, bunny.” His voice goes soft, almost soothing. “I’m being careful.”

He is. That might be the most insane part of this. His hand is steady, fingers loose on the handle, and when he finally angles the edge in and slices, it’s clean.

Her leggings part with another soft rip, the sound so intimate it makes her toes curl inside her sneakers.

The air hits her hips.

He pulls the cut open lazily with the back of the knife, exposing more skin, more lace.

More pink.

He stops.

“There,” he sounds satisfied.

His hand releases her wrists. Just—lets go. Opens his fingers and pulls his hand away, casual as setting down a glass, and suddenly her arms are free. Both of them. No resistance, no weight holding her down.

Just the knife in her hand and him above her and the forest breathing around them.

Yunjin’s brain stutters.

“Try it,” he adds, like an encouragement.

She stares at him. Her wrists ache faintly where he’d been gripping them—the blood rushing back makes her fingers tingle around the handle.

The blade is still buried in the dirt. She’d have to pull it free. She’d have to actually—

His fingers fold over her knuckles, warm and sure, and he tugs the knife from the earth like it weighs nothing.

The blade comes free with a soft, gritty scrape, soil crumbling from the steel, and then it’s just—in her hands.

A real knife. His knife.

The one he’d used to cut her hoodie, her bra, her leggings.

She’s holding it and her arms are shaking so badly the blade jitters in the dark.

V doesn’t take it back.

Instead, his hand grips her shoulder—firm, sudden—and yanks her upright.

And suddenly she’s sitting up, disoriented, the split halves of her hoodie falling off her shoulders while he remains kneeling in front of her with his thighs bracketing hers.

He adjusts her grip. Both her hands around the handle now, fingers layered, his hands guiding hers with the patience of someone correcting a student’s form.

Then he places the tip of the blade against his own chest.

Over his heart.

“V—” Her voice comes out strangled.

The tip of the knife rests against the dark fabric of his shirt, right over the left side of his chest, and she can feel—through the handle, through the steel, through whatever insane connection exists between a blade and the body it touches—his heartbeat.

Steady. Calm. Completely, offensively calm.

“There,” he says, like he’s satisfied with the placement. “That’s right.”

early access (read now) on ko-fi!