OUR LOVE IN TWO LINES ── taehyung always wears his heart out on his sleeves. you get pregnant unexpectedly, why don't his emotions come rushing through as usual? @youmistme

HEAT AFTER DARK ── he’s been around forever—your brother’s best friend, charming, off-limits, and slowly getting under your skin. when a group camping trip forces you too close for comfort, the tension finally snaps. @divinelyparkjimin

COME BACK TO ME ── to see you cry hurt the deepest part of his being, he wanted to kiss away the tears and take you somewhere you would never be upset. where you would only smile and laugh. but he couldn’t, he told himself. because here you were, still crying, and his hands were void of the worlds he wanted to give to you. @bebetae

DAMN CHOCOLATES ── taehyung and channi show up to their friends christmas party in matching pajamas, expecting a cozy night of holiday chaos, however white elephant games, and laughter later- everything goes off the rails when gifts get stolen, & spicy adult chocolates missing… with taehyung eating them by accident. now he’s stuck in a hilariously awkward situation inside his pants that he definitely did not plan for, and channi is trying not to laugh at his very obvious predicament. @sntjk

HALFWAY BETWEEN THE GOLDEN HOUR AND YOUR LIPS ── nothing kim taehyung does should surprise you. he's been your best friend for the last two years and so you know his ways of passing time, including the entertainment of a large audience. so when he asks you if you just want to make out to pass the time, you shouldn't be taken so aback, but there's absolutely nothing that could’ve prepared you for what the question unfolds. @jensthwa

LET ME FOLLOW ── you disappear just before your anniversary, leaving behind a man who has survived everything except your absence. each step draws him closer to a truth he isn’t ready to face. @mrsvante

GIRL CODE ── y/n is falling for her best friends crush, but she won’t make a move because she doesn’t want to break girl code. that doesn’t stop taehyung from falling for her and trying to make a move. @allysonhope

NEXT YEAR ALL OUR TROUBLES WILL BE MILES AWAY ── determined to break down his walls as a new year’s resolution, (y/n) impulsively signs up for taehyung's art class. what follows is a series of lingering looks, whispered names, and enough "friendship energy" to make the rest of the group (specifically Jimin lmao) suspicious. from an almost kiss at a new year’s countdown to a cozy, candlelit moment during a winter storm, (y/n) and tae slowly realize that they aren't just student and teacher, but they are two people finally learning to see each other clearly. @hazytaezy

VANILLA ── taehyung is usually a very conservative person. he’s also the type of person who is not fond of PDA at all. channi however is the total opposite. she thrives for new things & experiences. she’s wild & spontaneous in every way. what happens when channi calls taehyung a “vanilla” person in bed? how would he react & would he give Into her little reckless request of doing something naughty in public sight…? @sntjk

THE THINGS WE DONT SAY UNTIL WE DO ── a quiet morning, a shift neither of them names, and a night where unspoken things finally find their shape. a slow, gentle unraveling of two people who learn each other in the small moments—soft looks, shared spaces, and the kind of closeness that sneaks up on you long before you realize it’s there. @mytaegiheart

STROKE GAME ── teasing taehyung while he's playing golf has consequences. @jungkussyficrecs

ONE OF THE BOYS ── all your life you wanted only one thing- for kim taehyung to like you. you did everything you could to make this happen, from picking up his hobbies and rejecting anything feminine. but who do you start to become when you stop trying to impress him? @littlemisskookie

WHILE YOU SLEEP ── you and your husband haven't had sex in days. both sexually frustrated, taehyung had enough of this stress pent up in him and decides to take it out on you while you sleep. @younithv

BAD DECISIONS ── drug dealer taehyung x fem reader. @n9mgi

NOBODY ELSE ── runaway lovers. @btsvt-bar

SHOW YOU I LOVE YOU ── your husband proves he is perfectly fine. @milk-moonbunnies

AFTER MIDNIGHT ── @watashijeon

CLAIR DE LUNE ── the softest taehyung smut. @gukslut

YOU CALL, I RUN ── @layover-mp7

PEELING MANDARINS ── your bi-weekly movie nights with taehyung had always been the safest part of your life, until the night a forgotten promise dragged you both to a housewarming party instead. what should have been just another evening between best friends slowly unravels when a single mandarin and one honest confession shift the air between you. after so many years of pretending nothing has changed, one night might be all it takes to finally peel back the layers. @yoongiofmine

THE ONE ── after accepting the lead role in a romance series, taehyung finds himself in a quiet rural town where, for the first time in over a decade, he’s free to exist without being recognized. It’s just his luck that the one person who finds him is the one who once knew him best. and the one he never truly had. @taevescence

FANCY DINNERS, EMOTIONAL PROPOSALS ── you and taehyung go out to dinner for your 5th anniversary of being together, but on this particular night, your boyfriend has an emotional trick up his sleeve. @kooslovv

DIAMONDS DANCING ── @layover-mp7 (we all love grills taehyung)

TOWERING HEIGHTS ── he was a sweet neighbour, a friendly face that made you feel like you weren't alone in this new city. Until one day, you accidentally uncovered what he did for work, and now he's trying his best to keep you out of his tangled mess. @layover-mp7

TOO LONG; DIDNT READ ── this is the story of how you trolled your way into taehyung’s heart. @fortunexkookie

FARM BOY ── farmertaehyung! @dreamescapeswriting

SWEET NOTHINGS ── @dreamescapeswriting

KING OF THE CLOUDS ── you were in an arranged marriage with a man you’re convinced isn’t fit to be your husband. he’s got his head too high in the clouds. @httpjeon

DRUNK LOVE ── “Jerk off for me.” @edytae

OWNER OF A LONELY HEART ── you’re still single nearly two years after breaking up with your ex, and the lack of intimacy in your life is finally starting to get to you. If only there was someone out there, someone willing to help you feel a little less... lonely. @jinfizz

RIDE WITH ME ── while on location for taehyung’s driving vlog, he shuts the camera off to make a confession. @theharrowing

MARIPOSA ── @cupoftaae

SWEETBITTER ── you always hated him, his cockiness and his teasing. but after five years when circumstances lead you to spend more time with him, you start to question your true feelings. you still can’t stand him but this time, you don’t know if it’s because of your hate or your knees. @rosedtae

DAISY ── sleeping with your infuriating, unfairly attractive rival in art school? stupid. sleeping with him without protection? even more stupid. when you became pregnant with kim taehyung’s child at 21, your young lives suddenly derailed for the worst. fulfilling your parental roles early on proved difficult, but five years later, perhaps it was time to give your complicated relationship a second chance; not only for yourselves, but for your baby daughter—daisy. @chateautae

(mini & long) SERIES

THE BRIDE ── "a former assassin awakens from a four-year coma after her ex-lover taehyung tries to kill her on her wedding day. driven by revenge for the loss of her unborn child and stolen life, she creates a hit list and embarks on a ruthless mission to take down everyone responsible." @chimcess

OUT OF LINE ── "you don't flirt back. you don't fold. and taehyung is running out of rules left to break." @jungkoode

THE HAND WHICH STILLS THE WILDEST SOUL ── “For if she doesn’t, he will never find calm. the healer and the knight, connected by fate, find peace in each other and comfort at night.” @borathae

WHITE DRESS ── being a waitress in a small town was a comfortable and familiar routine. however, when police officer kim taehyung, AKA the most annoying man in town asks you for help with a murder case, you realize your life is about to become much less mundane. @strawbarryjiminie

THINGS WE DONT SAY ── three years after graduating college, everything seems to be falling into place for you: stable job, cozy apartment, and a long-term boyfriend with a ring box hidden in his desk drawer. but when a mutual friend makes a remark that your best friend of nearly two decades is clearly in love with you, you realize that life may not be as simple as it seems. @wintaerbaer

FOREVER AND A DAY ── your lifelong friend is forced to face his true feelings for you once he breaks the number one rule of becoming friends with benefits: dont fall in love. he knows he loves you, but you on the other hand need more convincing of the most important thing: the right decision. @cupoftaae

Your husband struck fear into many on the battlefield, his eyes hooded and dark like the armor he wore. He was without mercy, the last thing you may see before he swung his sword. And the only reason the men who came across him were given the graciousness of living another day was because of you.

You, his wife, were the complete opposite of him. His hands were rough, scarred, hands meant for death, while yours were soft, gentle, hands meant for healing the world he was trained to destroy.

It was also why you were in this medic tent, only miles from where the battle was taking place.

You were the best healer of your kingdom, a title passed down generations in your bloodline. Some may call it a gift, the way you were trained to stitch up even the worst situation. And others just figured you were favored, but either way, people flocked to be seen by you, to be healed from their aches and pains. And it was your king who had asked you to be here during the war.

War wasn't a place for a woman. To be surrounded by so much death and blood. But you and the people who helped you were as crucial a part in winning this war as your husband was.

Not that Taehyung was pleased by that.

As an army general, the highest-ranking knight, Taehyung's shoulders carried the weight of fighting for his people, for his king, but most of all, for you. And it's why when severely wounded men were brought into your medical tent, lips chapped, struggling to breathe, they knew to tell you, even if it may be their last breath, that your husband loves you.

It sounds morbid, and it is, the way you tried to heal while a man blabbered, "he says he holds you in his mind always!" The man's teeth chatter, and the words swirl around your mind as you try to placate him from the adrenaline racing in his veins.

"Sir, please lie down."

"Says he will come for you!" The haunted eyes swam with fear, like his only choice was death or playing messenger that allowed him to see another day.

"Sir-"

It was an endless cycle of men wounded and shaking, grabbing onto you like a lifeline and playing as pigeons with scrolls relaying your husband's words to you.

And that's why after another long day of trying to mend the broken, you're pissed. Everyone knows whether you're wounded or not, you come to the medic tent to be seen and cleared. Everyone. No exceptions. And yet, your husband does not come.

You know better than to fear the impossible, that he may be one of the fallen. That he doesn't mean to break his promise of coming home to you.

It leaves you in a slight panic. Your mind swirling with the unthinkable as you set your shoulders back, your jaw clenching as you marched to a specific tent. His tent is one of a thousand tents in the encampment. And the one Taehyung gets to call home was one of the bigger ones, a luxury, given his higher rank and command. And as his wife, you were graced with the privilege of sharing it with your husband.

Your eyes narrow when it comes into view. A white tent dirtied by mud, secured by rope, and patrolled by foot soldiers dressed in full armor.

Your makeshift home is in the middle of the encampment, protected by many smaller ones that housed ten to twelve soldiers each, and it was guarded twenty-four hours a day. It was another thing to add to your list of annoyances, including that you'd give up your tent if it meant your people would be better off.

As you think this, you still acknowledge the foot soldiers guarding your tent with a smile, nodding your head in greeting as they stand more at attention. "My husband." You don't ask, but your voice is soft like the fur blankets provided during the winter, your only concern being to verify with your own eyes that your husband is inside and alive.

"M'lady," the soldier on the left bows his head, and you're close to just shoving past them. "Sir Kim is inside."

Oh, thank the king.

"Thank you," you flash another charming smile and give them a look soon after, "when you are done here - remember to be checked before supper."

A chorus of "yes, m'lady" rings in your ears as you move the flap of your tent back and step inside before letting it fall into place behind you.

The inside of your tent is cozy. Rugs are layered on the floor, a bed with furs was to your left, a wooden desk was to your right that held miniatures of battle strategies you did not understand, and a bathtub was in the back. It was all the privileges of your husband's rank, and you had done your best to make it a home while you both were far from your actual one.

You had watched endless nights of Taehyung leaning on the desk, going over battle tactics until the sunlight rose once more. You had given up nearly the rest of the furniture you were previously provided to the other soldiers who needed it more, and you tried not to dwell on the fact that you got to go to sleep in a bed and not in a cot like many others.

And out of habit, you slipped off your shoes barely two feet inside before your eyes met your husband's.

Taehyung stood tall in the middle of the room, fully in armor, beside the sword and shield he had left next to the desk. His hair was wavy, falling in front of his piercing eyes as he took his time taking off his armor piece by piece. He had already removed his helmet and pauldrons, moving onto his breastplate as you watched.

"You didn't get checked out." You don't greet him; instead, you close the distance between you two and help him unbuckle the straps at his waist, your eyebrows furrowing as you do.

"I didn't need to." His words are blunt and to the point, and you step back as he removes his shin guards with expertise. He's left in mail and padding, his shoulders broad, his waist lean as he gives you a look that asks for a challenge. And when you don't speak right away, he continues to strip, shedding all of his clothes until he is naked.

Years of training in the knighthood, in guarding the king and his subjects, had made your husband strong. His body is sculpted in ridges and lines like marble, near perfection, but you may be biased in that regard. He barely glances at you before turning on his heel and heading towards the bathtub, making you bristle with renewed anger.

From where you stood, you could see the steam spiraling up from the tub, and you knew it had been freshly filled with steaming hot water just for your husband. "Do not walk away from me, I'm not done talking to you." You huffed, following your husband as he stepped inside the tub, sinking into it until the water reached just under his chest. His arms hung around the rim, his head tilting back as he gave you another look.

"I'm fine." The two words send you over your boiling point, and your hands go to your hips as you scold him.

"Only someone careless would say such a thing! This is why everyone gets checked over; you are not the exception, Kim Taehyung." Each word you hiss brings you closer to him, and the amused smirk he gives you does nothing to calm your nerves.

"Woman, I said I am fine." Only you would ever be allowed to speak to him as you have. And normally, even if that was true, you never did. You were always soft and kind, the support he didn't know he needed until you were brought into his life.

But that doesn't stop you from telling him off when needed, which was now.

"Fine? Your armor is covered in blood. Am I to assume it's not entirely yours? That you weren't harmed at all?" You rant, and Taehyung follows your movements with sharp eyes. He watches the way your eyebrows pinch in frustration, your hands waving about as you point a finger at him.

In all honesty, he was going to see you. But one of the stewards had informed him that they had prepped a hot bath for him, and his aching muscles screamed for that more than his mind debated checking on the wounded brought to you. It was entirely selfish, and he knew that, but a little part of him would rather just be looked at by you in private anyway.

So, that's why he doesn't hesitate. While you rant at him, his arms reach out for you. He grabs you by the waist, and in less than three seconds, you're straddling his hips, your bottom half soaked by water as you gasp in shock. "Taehyung!" Your hands instinctively rest on your husband's shoulders for balance as he tilts his head back more with a wolfish grin. "I am still clothed!"

"And I told you, I'm fine." He murmured low and sure. His large hands held your waist, keeping you anchored over his lap, and it caused your cheeks to flush in color. "Do you want me to show you just how fine I am?" He asks you with a small eyebrow raised, a voiced challenge as one of his hands slides under the water line.

His calloused fingertips glide down your waist, then your thigh, until he reaches under your wet dress, and up to your pretty pussy. And that's when he shows a little teeth while smirking, his hand cupping your pretty cunt as your thighs tense. He watches you from under hooded eyes, waiting for you to stop him, knowing you won't.

You are acutely aware that your husband is naked underneath you, his cock swelling and pressing into your thigh as his fingers brush over the fabric separating you from him. You are also acutely aware that soldiers are guarding right outside, and you weren't hidden behind walls but merely in a thin tent. "Taehyung, people are outside."

Your warning falls on deaf ears as Taehyung relaxes further, his fingers gliding up your covered puffy folds until his fingers dip further to press into your pretty clit.

The moment he does, your thighs spread more out of instinct, your arms giving out as your chest melts into his. Your hand comes to the back of Taehyung's head, your fingers curling into his hair as he drawls rough, sloppy hearts into the sensitive nub between your swollen folds with a cocky grin. "Am I supposed to care?" His voice is low in your ear, his lips brushing your earlobe as he continues to make you dizzy with his touch.

"Someone will hear," you whimper, and Taehyung slips his other hand between you two. His knuckles brush your inner thighs before you feel him tear the little fabric covering your sweet pussy from him. It makes you gasp at his strength and audacity to be impatient as his fingers spread your folds apart, giving him more room to play with your pretty pussy.

Taehyung takes. He doesn't ask. His life was meant to serve in everything he does. And he takes the most pleasure not serving his people, or his king, but you - his pretty wife.

"Let them hear you. Let them know who makes you feel this good," Taehyung demands, and two of his fingers sink into your cunt in one smooth plunge. His fingers curl deep, stretching your gummy walls as his other hand grabs your chin, pulling your head back to look at him as his fingertips find the soft, spongy spot inside you with ease.

He pulls you into a rough kiss, swallowing your whimpers as he abuses the tender spot over and over again, working you open as you lay your hands on his chest for stability. The water in the tub ripples with the movement of his arm between your plush thighs, and his tongue coaxes your mouth open to deepen the kiss, stealing your breath as heat pools in your lower stomach with each stretch of his thick fingers. He had you melting in mere minutes, your mind swirling as he added another finger to your cunt.

"My love," your mewl is said across his lips, and he groans low in response. You were rocking your hips, riding his fingers almost shyly as your cheeks flushed a deeper color.

If you thought you were dizzy from his touch, nothing compares to how he feels when you make such sweet noises on top of him.

Kim Taehyung was a fierce warrior, death incarnate on the battlefield. People parted from him like the Red Sea, cowering at just a mention of his name, but not you. You were his everything.

The sun rose and fell for you in his mind, and his heart was always going to be yours. So, when you hold onto him tighter, your thighs quivering as he stuffs you deliciously with his fingers, he gives you no mercy - just like he was trained to do in everything in his life.

When you cum, it's with a cry of his name, your gummy walls milking his fingers like it was his cock as you shiver in his lap from the pleasure. His fingers never stop moving, fucking you through your orgasm as his other arm holds you to him, forcing you to ride it out as he rubs your clit into sensitivity.

You're boneless when he finally slips his fingers from your fluttering hole, the water in the tub has grown cold as he strips your dress from your pliant body, letting the wet fabric puddle over the side of the tub.

"You believe I am fine, now?" Taehyung asks as he lifts you, making you cling to his wet body as he carries you out of the bathtub with ease. "Or should I convince you some more? Hmm?"

You can barely recover, processing his words too late when he sets you down, bending you over his desk. Your body is slick with water droplets rolling down your legs, your wet skin staining the map laid out on the wooden desk as Taehyung stands behind you. He holds you in place with one hand on your hip as he guides his thick cock to your weeping cunt, gliding his fat tip between your puffy folds.

He doesn't warn you. He doesn't go slow. He takes you in one swift movement, bullying his cock inside you as he did on your wedding night, stretching you open until your jaw slacks and your eyes roll to the back of your head.

When he reaches the back of your sweet pussy, the head of his cock greets your soft cervix with a filthy kiss, and he drapes his body over yours until his lips are by your ear. "Wives shouldn't fight their husbands." You can feel his smirk, his teeth nipping your earlobe before he holds the back of your neck, keeping you in place as he slides almost all the way out.

He sets a brutal pace, filling you balls deep with each thrust, knocking your hips into the wooden desk as the miniatures rattle, falling over from the force of his hips smacking into your ass.

The room fills with the lewd sounds of his cock pounding into your dripping cunt, making you squelch around his thick shaft as you moan so sweetly for him. He pushes the noises from you, sliding in deeper with each thrust as your fingers curled around the desk for support.

"Not too worried about anyone hearing you now, huh?" He murmurs low enough for just you to hear, and your pussy throbs around him in response.

He feels too good, molding you to his cock as he forces you onto your tiptoes. And your pussy tells him just that when you happily suck him deeper, making it harder for him to leave you, not that he ever wanted to in the first place.

Taehyung's teeth gritted, and his jaw clenched as your whines grew louder. He knew the two foot soldiers in the front had to hear you by now, and it only made his stomach flex, heat pooling low enough that his balls tensed in warning.

But he wasn't going to cum first, not if he had anything to do with it. And much to your impending orgasms' displeasure, he slips from your weeping cunt with a growl, flipping you around until you are facing him. "You don't get to cum unless you're looking at me, just me. Only me."

And then he's lifting you again, carrying you to the bed with his hard cock pressed against your sweet pussy. He lies you down on the furs, pushing your legs up until your cunt is on full display for him, and giving him the perfect angle to fill you up again. He uses his weight to fuck you hard and slow, smacking into your G-spot with each pound of his hips against the back of your thighs.

The primal need to get you to the edge, milking his cock while looking at him, burns hot in his chest. He doesn't tell you to be safe or kiss you goodbye before heading into battle; he doesn't tell you sweet nothings in your ear when you go to sleep with him. He doesn't know how to say I love you out loud.

But he knows how to show you.

He shows you by surviving another day and coming home to you. He shows you by winning every tournament in your honor, caring for the land he wins for you, and keeping you safe.

And he shows you his love for you when he gets you cumming on his fingers, his tongue, and his dick until your eyes are glossy like the way you coat his cock with your sweet arousal.

Your cunt flutters when he leans over you, his face inches away from yours as he keeps eye contact with you. His one hand pushes your knee up, keeping you open for him as his other hand finds your clit, and it's like your wedding night all over again.

His hips roll deep and hard, pushing soft gasps from your pretty lips as he rubs sloppy hearts into your little nub, pulling you closer to the edge as he watches ardently. He doesn't say I love you; instead, he makes you cum so hard your eyes water.

Your mouth drops in a silent scream, the breath leaving your lungs while your body locks up underneath him as you cum. Your pussy gushes hot and wet all over his cock, milking him with each flutter of your gummy walls as he keeps fucking you, prolonging your high until your legs quiver in ecstasy.

And when your pretty pussy creams a filthy ring around his cock, his head finally dips, falling into the crook of your neck as your ears ring in the aftershocks.

You can feel his breath hitch, his fingers dimpling into the fat of your thigh as he presses his hips into your ass urgently. His cock swells, twitching deep inside you when he finds his orgasm shortly after yours finishes. And he keeps his face hidden as he cums, rope after rope of his white gooey seed filling your pussy to the brim as he groans softly in your ear.

It's the hottest thing, feeling such a powerful man shudder on top of you, stuffing you full of his cum, and it makes your pussy flutter again, milking every last drop until he is mindlessly fucking it deeper inside you.

When he finally leans back onto his knees, he slides from your cunt gently, watching his cum seep from your puffy folds and onto the furs with heavy eyelids. He watches how your legs stay parted, your breath coming up as pants, as you look up at him with stars in your hazy eyes.

Taehyung gives you a loving smirk, happy his wife is fucked out because of him, and speaks up. "Are you convinced, my wife? Or would you like me to use my tongue next?"

대박 - you made it to the end!

Tell me about it.

The slums lay low along the bend of the river, a bruise at the city’s edge. From the higher terraces, the noble districts looked down on you with practiced blindness. They pretended Guhwa did not exist until they needed it to. 

Until they wanted meat. Or labour. Or numbers on a ledger showing how merciful they were to the poor.

You lived in houses that leaned into each other, wood warped by too much rain and too little care. Roof tiles were kept in place with stones and old bones. Here, even the wind came second-hand. It moved through only after it brushed past the temple eaves and palace walls, carrying the faint leftover scents of incense and roasted chestnuts before picking up what truly belonged to you: blood, smoke, stagnant water.

Every morning, the first thing you tasted was the river.

It crawled up from the banks and slipped into your lungs, thick with the stink of rotting fish scales, sewage, and the sour, metallic tang that came from the slaughterhouses lining the eastern edge of Guhwa.

The sheds were long, low things made of dark wood and rusted roofs. Even when their doors were closed, the sound of animals leaked through the gaps.

Guhwa was where meat became ghost.

That was your task. You were cheonmin, lowest of the low, hands paid to touch what others prayed to be cleansed of. Butchers, tanners, grave-diggers, executioners. People who lived so close to death that even the monks pretended not to see you when they passed, clutching their prayer beads a little tighter.

The nobles in Gaegyeong lived off gold and promises. The priests lived off offerings and piety.

You lived off what bled.

Your father used to say it like a joke, a rough humour he pulled over you like an extra blanket in winter. “Others eat the meat,” he would say, wiping his knife on his apron, “and we eat their sins.”

You laughed the first time you heard it, because laughing made it sound like a choice.

By the time you turned twelve, you knew better. 

Cheonmin labourers did not eat meat, not real meat. The best cuts went to the noble houses and the levy-posts; the rest went to the markets. You ate the leftovers of leftovers: dried intestines threaded on thin string, blood clots scraped and boiled into cakes, the parts so poor even the temple dogs refused them.

“Continuous undernourishment weakens the body.” You learned the phrase later, listening outside the levy-post door as clerks spoke about you like you were a herd in someone else’s field.

You did not need their words. You knew the truth already.

You could see it in the way the Guhwa children’s bones showed under their skin. In the yellowish tint of their eyes. In the way any small wound took too long to heal.

In the way your father began to die.

It began with something so ordinary no one even flinched. A nick from his hide knife while he was stripping the skin from a carcass. Just a flicker of red across his palm, lost in the sea of other blood.

“Nothing,” he said when you winced. “It would take more than a whisper like this to quiet me.”

He laughed then, the sound rattling out of him, bigger than the shed. The men around you smiled, shook their heads, and went back to work. No one stopped to clean it properly. Not when there were still three cows hanging from the beams and a cart of pigs waiting outside.

The cut darkened around the edges by the next morning. 

By the third day, the skin around it had swollen and turned the colour of bruised plums.

By the end of the week, the fingers on that hand were too stiff to close, and your father’s breath steamed hot and quick in the cold.

The fever spoke louder than he did.

You had no money for medicine. The herbs sold in the market stalls cost more than a week’s worth of trimmings. The cheap powders the back-alley sellers offered smelled of chalk and did less than hot water. 

You tried what you could: boiled onion skins, scraped ginger, old temple prayers whispered over rice. Nothing cooled him.

The bed came last.

Until then, he still tried to stand, swaying by the door of your house each morning, one hand on the frame, insisting he could go back to the sheds if you just wrapped his palm tighter. 

Your mother argued in whispers, the kind that cracked ribs from the inside.

By the time he lay down, the wound on his hand had gone black and shiny, as if the skin itself had burned. His forearm was bloated. Red streaks climbed toward his elbow, then his shoulder. The smell—sweet, sick, wet—settled into the boards beneath him.

He had been dying long before he took to bed. The bed only made it official.

The levy-post did not care that he was sick.

Your debts remained written in a hand more precise than any you owned. Meat had to be delivered. Labour had to be supplied. The Crown did not wait for a butcher to get better.

When your father could no longer stand, you went to the slaughterhouse in his place.

At first, they laughed. You were eighteen and slight—still more bone than muscle, hair bound in a knot that sat crooked on the back of your head. But your hands were quick. Your grip did not slip. 

Even when your stomach lurched at the first cut—at the way the skin parted, at the warmth that rushed out—you did not move away.

The foreman watched, eyes narrowed. “She’s her father’s child,” he said at last, and that was the only blessing you ever heard from his mouth.

From then on, your mornings smelled of hot fat and iron. The hide knife grew familiar under your hand, its weight a new kind of hunger.

Your mother came with you when she could. You hated it. 

Hated seeing her slender hands plunged wrist-deep into a carcass. Hated the way blood splashed against the soft line of her jaw. Hated the way she wiped her fingers on her skirt when she thought you weren’t looking, as if the apron between you two and the rest of the world had worn too thin.

Even when you left the sheds, you didn’t leave the blood.

Your mother was a gogi-ae—a meat-wife of the cheonmin quarter. When she wasn’t helping you at the slaughterhouses, she stood behind an open stall on the main lane, ladling steaming broth from a battered pot into chipped bowls. The broth was made from bones no one else wanted, simmered until they surrendered what little they had left.

She sold trimmings in small bundles tied with string. Sold scraps—cooked or dried—for families poorer than you and for their dogs. 

Some days, when the pot grew thin, she would press a bowl into your hands with a soft, tired smile. “Eat, my little flower.”

The broth burned your tongue and slid down too easily, leaving a warmth that disappeared as quickly as it came. You ate it anyway. You ate everything.

Then, you hated yourself for it.

You hated the way nobles’ palanquins moved past the outer edges of your quarter without ever facing you. You hated the sound of temple bells from the higher terraces, clear and golden, calling people to pray in halls lit with butter lamps and gold-leaf statues.

You hated that the nobles could live off gold and prayers. You hated that you lived off what bled.

Above you, the city had its own order: Crown, then temples, then the household heads of noble clans, then the artisans and merchants, and finally the rest. On scrolls, they called it harmony. In sermons, they named it balance.

In Guhwa, you just called it what it was. Some people were born standing. Some were born kneeling.

You had been kneeling so long that standing felt like a story told to children.

Of all the things you hated in that life—the smell, the blood, the way your walls leaned inward as if the whole quarter were trying to fold in on itself—the levy collections were the worst.

Nothing made you feel how much you have to crawl just to keep breathing the way levy-post season did.

Every year, the collections came in three waves.

One for the nobles.

One for the temples.

One for the Crown.

They never called it that out loud, of course. They used gentler words: contribution, piety, duty. But the effect was the same. 

Bad things came in threes. Everyone in Guhwa said so.

The year your life changed, the levies followed that rule perfectly.

The first levy was for the nobles.

They called it a protection payment, as if anyone in Guhwa had ever been protected from anything.

You were told—by clerks with soft hands and tidy seals—that it was a privilege to live on land bordering the estates of the Steward of Baekchon. That your sheds and shacks leaned, however distantly, near a Lord’s holdings. That the shadow of his authority brushed the edge of your roofs, and you should be grateful enough to pay for the honour.

The irony was that His Lordship’s land lay on the other side of the red river.

From Guhwa’s bank, you could just see the white walls of his estate when the fog lifted: a pale shape set higher on the opposite rise, ringed with black-tiled roofs and neat lines of trees. 

It was distant enough that the stench from your slaughterhouses never reached him. Distant enough that he never had to see the blood that poured into the water, turning it the colour of bad wine at dawn.

Still, the Steward took his due.

The first levy of the year went to him—an extra toll for the protection of His Lordship’s lands. The words looked clean on paper. In your mouths they tasted of dirt.

Everyone knew it was extortion, even the clerks. 

But the city office stamped the papers, and once something had a seal, it became real in ways hunger never did.

On the morning the noble levy came due, Guhwa woke earlier than usual. Doors opened before the light had properly risen. Smoke limped out of chimneys, thin and reluctant. People spoke in low voices that never quite became full sentences.

You all knew the sound of collections.

The overseer from Baekchon always arrived the same way: on a palanquin carried by four men whose backs were straighter than your roofs, followed by two riders on narrow horses and a handful of guards. 

The palanquin curtains were dyed a deep blue, embroidered with the steward’s crest—a curling, stylised flower that never wilted.

The overseer himself was not a noble, but he dressed like someone who wanted to be mistaken for one. Heavy sleeves. Polished boots. A hat with a taller crown than necessary. He wore the Steward’s favour pinned to his chest and carried his authority like another piece of jewelry.

He also carried a ledger. Baekchon’s levy-post had its own books, separate from the Crown’s. More lines. More columns. More hunger.

You gathered in the main lane of the cheonmin quarter, standing in clumps outside your leaning houses. No one wanted to be first, but no one wanted to be last either. 

The guards with the overseer didn’t bother hiding their boredom. One picked at his teeth with a sliver of bone. Another yawned without covering his mouth.

The overseer stepped down from the palanquin with exaggerated care, as if the earth here might stain him.

“Line up,” he said, voice sharp as a hide knife. “Household heads first.”

People shuffled forward. A few men bowed too deeply. A few women tugged their children behind them. You stood between your mother and the stall post, hands clenched inside your sleeves.

The overseer took his place by an upturned crate that served as a table. His clerk—thin, ink-stained, eyes already tired—opened the ledger and dipped his brush.

“By order of the Steward of Baekchon,” the overseer announced, loud enough for the lane. “For the keeping of peace on his borders. For the use of his lands. For the protection of his people.”

His people. As if any of you belonged to him by choice.

Payment could be made in grain, in goods, or—in certain cases—in service.

The rumour about that last part had been circling Guhwa for years. If a family could not pay, if their debts stacked too high or their coins rolled too far, the overseer could take a child in place of money. “Sent to service in the capital,” people whispered, their voices fraying on the edges of the words.

No one ever said what kind of service. You all knew enough not to ask.

That year, the overseer seemed especially interested in faces.

As each family stepped forward, his eyes flicked over them, weighing not just their purses and bundles, but their daughters’ height. 

He took coin when it was offered, slipping it into a lacquered box. He accepted wrapped packets of meat, carefully marked, to be sent to the steward’s kitchens. And sometimes—too often—his gaze lingered on a girl for a moment longer than it should have.

He would smile then, small and satisfied, and make a note in the ledger.

Your turn came and went quietly.

Your mother bowed, fingers shaking as she held out a cloth pouch that did not clink as much as it should have. The overseer weighed it in his hand, lips pressing into a thin line. He eyed the bundle of salted offal she also offered, then glanced at you.

You felt his gaze scrape over your face, down your arms, to your chest.

Too scrawny. Too worn out. Too old for what he wanted, too young to be interesting in other ways. Or perhaps too hardened already; there were easier girls to break.

“Next,” he said, flicking his fingers.

You exhaled only once you had stepped back into the press of bodies.

Two houses down lived Gom’s family.

They were cheonmin like you, but their work leaned more toward tanning than butchering. The father and mother spent their days up to their elbows in skins and caustic mixes, the air around their yard always sharp with the sting of lime and ash. They had a boy, maybe sixteen, and a girl of ten.

The boy stood tall for his age, shoulders set, eyes too old. The girl clutched her mother’s skirt, cheeks chapped from the wind. She had the kind of face that still looked soft when she frowned.

When their turn came, the overseer’s expression changed.

“Gom’s household,” the clerk read from the ledger. “Outstanding debt from the last levy. Payment incomplete.”

The father bent so low you thought his spine might snap. “We have more hides ready this week, Sir,” he said, words tumbling out. “The tanners in the upper quarter delayed their orders, but we’ll have them soon. If you could grant us—”

The overseer cut him off with a small shake of his head. “Collection dates are not suggestions,” he said. “The Steward is generous, but not indulgent.”

He looked at the girl. It was a small thing—the way his gaze sharpened. It made your stomach twist. It was the look men had when they weren’t choosing workers. The corners of his mouth lifted. 

Everyone in that lane saw it. Felt it. The air thinned. 

“What have you brought?” he asked, eyes still on the child.

Gom offered grain first. A handful of what would be their entire month’s ration. Too little. Then a bundle of dried organ scraps, tied with rough string. The overseer barely glanced at them.

“Insufficient,” he said.

The mother’s hands fluttered like trapped birds.

“We’ll make up the difference,” she whispered. “Please. Just a few more days. We can—”

“There have already been days.” The overseer’s voice cooled. “There have been weeks. Your debt to the Steward is not a suggestion.”

His gaze lifted from the girl to the boy.

“What about you?” he said. “Are you prepared to do what is needed for your family?”

The boy’s jaw tightened. His hand dropped to his sister’s shoulder, pulling her closer. “Take me,” he said.

The lane held its breath.

The overseer chuckled. It was an ugly sound, all teeth and no humour. “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “You’re hardly worth the food it would take to transport you. You already serve where you are. Your sister, however…”

He let the sentence dangle.

The girl flinched, understanding enough. Children in Guhwa learned quickly. She pressed herself into her brother’s side.

“No,” he said. It was one word, but he put everything he had into it.

The overseer’s smile vanished. “What did you say?”

“I said no.” The boy straightened, pulling his sister behind him fully now. “She’s a child. She’s not going anywhere with you. I refuse.”

Silence. Not the soft kind that fell when people prayed. A hard silence, sharp-edged.

In that moment, he stopped being a boy and became something else in the overseer’s eyes. Something smaller. Something disposable.

“You refuse,” the overseer said quietly.

The word rolled through the lane like a stone. The guards moved faster than thought. One struck the boy across the back of the legs, forcing him to his knees. Another seized his arms. 

The girl screamed, a thin sound that scraped the inside of your ears.

Their mother didn’t move. She simply folded in on herself, hands pressed to her face. Their father stared at the ground as if the right words might appear if he looked hard enough.  They both knew the limits of their anger. Of their power.

Everyone in Guhwa knew what happened to cheonmin who raised their heads too high.

The boy struggled. He kicked, cursed, jerked against the hands that held him. “Let her go!” he shouted. “She’s a child. She’s—”

A guard struck him again, this time across the mouth. Blood spilled over his lip, bright and quick.

“Enough,” the overseer said, already bored. “Hold him overnight.”

“For what charge?” someone whispered behind you.

The answer didn’t matter. It never did.

 By dusk, everyone knew.

Refusing the Steward’s order was treasonous insolence. Attempted disruption of levy duties.  Endangerment of peace. 

The charges came stacked and pretty in the clerk’s neat hand. The punishment was simple.

Hanging. At dawn. No trial needed for refuse.

They took the girl that same evening.

You watched from the shadow of your doorway as a small cart rolled past, its wooden wheels bumping in the ruts. The girl sat in the back, hands bound in front of her with rope that looked too rough for skin so thin. Her eyes were swollen from crying, but she was silent now.

The overseer’s men didn’t look back.

Gom kept his door closed that night.

No wailing. No breaking of pottery. No offerings burned. Grief was something you learned to carry without sound.

Dawn came grey and wet.

Mist hugged the ground, clinging to ankles and roots. The river ran slow and thick, the usual veil of slaughterhouse blood staining the shallows a murky red. Birds sat in the branches along the bank, hunched against the cold, watching as if they understood what was about to happen.

They hanged him from the crooked willow by the water.

That was where they always did it: close enough that everyone in Guhwa could see, far enough that no one from the steward’s estate had to.

You went.

You told yourself you didn’t want to, but your feet carried you straight to the tree.

A few others had gathered already, standing in a loose circle a safe distance away. No one spoke. The only sounds were the lap of water against the bank and the creak of rope as the wind swayed the branch.

A rough sack covered his head. It made him look smaller somehow, as if the only part of him that still belonged had been taken away. His refusal—his refuse—had been reduced to a shape and a sentence.

Someone near you inhaled sharply. Someone else turned away.

You kept your eyes on his feet.

They dangled a hand’s width above the ground, toes bare, skin already bluing in the cold. Mud smeared his heels. One ankle bone protruded sharply where the rope cut into his skin.

Worthless refuse.

The first levy of the year had been collected.

The second levy was for the temples.

They called it the blood offering, but never to your faces. To you, it was je—the purification. As if your hands were filthy for touching what everyone else lined up to eat.

Officially, it was simple: butchers, tanners, and executioners—the cheonmin of the blood trade—had to give part of every slaughter to the temple at the start of each season. Meat, hides, fat. All to cleanse the sin of taking life.

In Guhwa, the saying went, “The hand that kills must feed Heaven, else calamity will fall.” It sounded noble on a scroll. Out loud, it sounded like a threat.

Everyone knew what really happened to the offerings. The meat was almost never burned. 

Not the good cuts. A strip here, a sliver there—enough to make smoke and satisfy the Heavens if they weren’t paying close attention. The rest went into the temple storehouses, or down the ridge in covered baskets to noble kitchens. 

“Blessed meat,” they called it, seasoned with other people’s guilt.

It wasn’t purification. It was coercion in a monk’s robes. A levy to remind you that you were unclean and would stay that way, no matter how often you washed.

That season was the first time your father couldn’t walk to the House of Purity himself.

“Give me the rope,” you told your mother, when she tried to lift the cart handles.

Her wrists shook. She was not old, but months of labour with little food had carved new hollows into her. There was dried blood under her nails from the morning’s slaughter, a dark half-moon against split skin. “You’re already doing his share,” she said. “You’ll work yourself into the ground.”

“The ground’s waiting either way,” you said. “At least this way, the monks won’t come pounding on the door.”

You packed the cart together in the grey before dawn—salted hides folded tight, trimmings wrapped in oiled paper, fat packed into clay jars. It was a heavy cart.

Your father tried to rise when he heard the wheels scrape. “Let me go,” he rasped from the pallet. “They’ll count. They’ll—” He broke off, coughing. Thin red spattered the rag at his lips.

“You’ve already given them enough,” you said, more sharply than you’d meant. “Lie down, Father.”

His eyes softened around the pain. “Take the good pieces first,” he murmured. “They’ll say it’s short if you put the scraps on top.”

“They’ll say it’s short even if I give them the cow alive,” you said. “But I’ll try.”

The House of Purity stood at the far end of Guhwa’s ridge, where the slums frayed into scrub and stone. For a place with such a grand name, it was small—a single low hall behind a whitewashed wall, a courtyard barely large enough to turn a wagon in. A weathered sign hung by the gate, its calligraphy still elegant despite the years: House of Purity.

The bigger temple—Temple of Nine Prayers—lay days away to the east, somewhere beyond the hills and the marshes. 

You had never seen it, only heard the stories: nine-tier pagodas, bells that rang for the whole kingdom, monks who didn’t have to glance over their shoulders before talking about compassion.

That morning, when you paused to catch your breath on the last rise, you heard their bells. Faint, thin as a thought, carried on the wind from the east. Too far to see. Close enough to mock. You had no bells in Guhwa. When something important happened, someone just shouted.

A handful of monks waited at House of Purity’s open gate.

They wore pale hemp robes, the cloth wrapped neat and clean around their bodies. Their sleeves were folded inward over their hands so that only fabric—not skin—would touch anything unclean. Thin veils covered their mouth—the kind worn when dealing with sickness, dust, or death. 

From a distance, they might have looked like spirits. Up close, they smelled of perfumed spices and boiled rice. You smelled of animal fat and river water. Between you, the courtyard air carried both incense and blood.

“Blood offerings?” one of them asked, as you dragged the cart to the gate. His voice came muffled through the veil. There was no hatred in it, not even disdain. Just a practiced distance.

“From the eastern sheds,” you said. “First season.”

He nodded once. “Bring them inside. Mind the threshold.”

Of course. The stone under their gate needed more protection than your backs.

You pulled the cart over the raised lip. The wheels bumped, the wood shuddered. Your palms burned where the rope cut into old blisters.

Inside, the courtyard was swept until the stones shone dull and smooth. A brazier sat in the corner, ash piled high and white, threads of scented smoke curling up and disappearing into the pale sky. The hall doors stood open, revealing the shadowy outline of a statue and rows of prayer mats. Bells and drums hung from the beams, quiet now.

The monks regarded the cart like it might lunge.

“Stop there,” one said. “Kneel.”

For a heartbeat, you thought you’d misheard. “Kneel?” you repeated.

“This is an offering to the Heavens,” he said, as if it explained everything. “Your household must show respect. Kneel and touch your head to the floor.”

Your knees ached from work and cold and the walk up the ridge. Still, you sank down. The stone was sharper than it looked. Gravel bit through the thin cloth of your trousers. You were already lowborn. It didn’t seem there was much further to fall, but they always found a way.

A shadow passed over the edge of your vision. When you glanced up, an older monk stepped out from the hall. He was taller than the others, broader through the middle. His robe was made of a finer, pale hemp—cleaner than the rough grey worn by the novices. The thin cloth over his mouth was newer too, its edges unfrayed. He walked with the slow assurance of someone whose knees had never touched Guhwa’s mud.

“Is this the butcher’s family from the eastern sheds?” he asked.

No surname. You didn’t have those. Men like your father were known by their work and their doorways: Duseong from the eastern sheds, the skinner by the river, the man with the chipped cleaver.

For cheonmin, one name was more than enough for the law to find you.

“Yes, Sunim,” one of the monks replied. “His daughter came in his place. He is… unwell.”

The older monk’s gaze settled on you. “Raise your head,” he said.

You did, though only halfway. Your pride had limits; your neck did not.

“You bring the offering?” he asked.

“Yes, Venerable,” you said, repeating the title your mother had drilled into you. “My father, Duseong, is sick—but we slaughtered the cow as ordered. The hides are salted. The meat hasn’t turned.”

“We will see,” he said.

He gestured. Two monks moved forward, sleeves folded, and began to unload the cart.

They lifted each bundle with pinched fingers, trying to touch as little as possible, even through the cloth. They placed the parcels on a low table and unfolded them slightly, enough to see the contents.

The courtyard filled with the familiar smell of salt and old blood. Your stomach tightened from hunger. You had kept the worst pieces for yourselves—the ragged trimmings, the gristle. Even so, seeing it laid out, knowing none of it would come back to you, made something in your chest gnaw.

The head monk moved from bundle to bundle, pressing the meat with two fingers, weighing it on a stone scale, his veil fluttering with each breath.

He frowned more with each piece. “This is short,” he said, at last. “The decree says the hands that deal in death must return a tenth of each slaughter to the Heavens. This is not a tenth.”

“It was,” you said quickly. “We cut it ourselves. Ask any of the men at the sheds. The cow—”

“Rot,” one of the younger monks said, with a wrinkle of his nose. “There’s a sourness under the salt.”

“The hind leg spoiled,” you admitted. “The heat came early this week. We cut away the bad flesh so it wouldn’t sicken anyone. Only the sound meat is here.”

The head monk turned his face toward you. “So you have already decided what the Heavens will and will not accept?” he asked softly. “You have judged the offerings and kept part back for yourselves.”

You felt heat rise under your skin. “We kept nothing that was fit,” you said. “The spoiled parts went into the river. Better the fish get sick than the children.”

A murmur passed among the monks.

“In the sutras, it says all life is of equal value,” one of them said.

“In Guhwa,” you replied, before you could stop yourself, “the sutras don’t have to eat rotten cow.”

Silence dropped into the courtyard.

The head monk’s gaze chilled. “Speak with care,” he said. “The rites are not a thing for mockery.”

You swallowed down the words that wanted to come—that the only mockery you knew was the one where you always lost.

“We followed the decree as best we could,” you said, forcing your voice steady. “If you want us to offer the Heavens the rot as well, we’ll do it next time. But don’t say we deceived. There wasn’t enough unspoiled meat left to make a full tenth. You can ask—”

He cut you off with a flick of his hand. “Enough,” he said. “Whether the cow spoiled from heat or from carelessness, the Heavens will not be mocked with half-offerings.”

He turned to the two monks closest to the table.

“These are unfit,” he said. “They reek of decay and doubt. Carry them to the river. Throw them in. Better the water takes them than the altar.”

Something hot flared behind your eyes. “This is good meat,” you said. “We trimmed it ourselves. If you won’t take it for the Heavens, let us at least feed the quarter. My father—”

“The offering is unclean,” he snapped. “Do you wish to bring calamity? Do you wish the whole district to carry your stain?”

You already carried stain. The only difference was who was pretending not to see it.

“Please,” you said. The word scraped your throat raw. “My father is ill. We counted on—”

A guard by the gate snorted. “The temple doesn’t feed dogs,” he said, loud enough for every monk to hear.

There it was. The truth under the sutras. You felt your fingernails bite into your palms. The monks did not rebuke him. They didn’t agree either. They did nothing, which was worse.

Two guards moved to the table. They didn’t bother with folded sleeves. They scooped up bundles of meat and hide in their bare hands, carried them past you, and out the gate. You heard their boots on the path, the scrape of leather, the low rush of water.

Then the first bundles hit the river.

It was a sound you knew well—the heavy slap of flesh meeting water, the muffled splash as it sank. The smell rose up a breath later, fat and salt and memory mixing with the river’s own rot.

More bundles followed. More splashes. Nearly a tenth of a cow, enough to feed Guhwa’s cheonmin quarter for days if you stretched it thin, thrown where no one would taste it.

The Heavens, apparently, preferred its offerings wasted rather than imperfect.

When the guards came back, they left wet streaks on the threshold. One of them wiped his hands on the side of your cart as he passed.

“Impure,” the head monk said. “All of it.” He nodded to one of the younger brothers, who fetched a bucket from beside the brazier. “At least purify what remains,” he added. “We cannot have the taint of blood lingering at the gate.”

The monk tossed the contents of the bucket without warning. Ash rained down over the cart—over your hands, your sleeves, your face.

It wasn’t soft like snow. It was gritty, fine as ground bone. It found every open cut, every half-healed blister, every hangnail. The mixture of ash and the salt already ground into your skin made your hands sting as if the fire had come late.

You stared at them—the grey coating, the angry red underneath. Your pride cracked a little then. Not loudly. No great shatter. Just a hairline fracture, the kind that spreads over time until the whole thing gives way.

“Your household’s obligation stands,” the head monk said. “Next season, bring the proper amount. Without excuses.”

“Next season,” you echoed, hoarsely. “Yes, Sunim.”

If your father survived. If the sheds had enough cows. If the river didn’t rise up and drown you first.

You bowed because you had no choice, ash sliding down from your hair to the stone. When you straightened, your knees felt like someone else’s.

You left the House of Purity with an empty cart and hands that looked old.

The path back down the ridge felt longer with nothing to show for it.

Guhwa sprawled below—smoke lifting from low roof-lines, the river cutting a dull red line through its middle. Your shoulders shook with the effort of holding the cart steady. Ash clung to your skin, mixing with sweat, turning to paste in the crease of your fingers.

When you reached the lane, your mother stepped out from behind the stall. For a moment, hope flickered in her eyes when she saw the cart. “How much did they leave?” she asked. “Did they—”

Then she saw the ash. The empty boards. Your hands.

Her mouth shut on the rest of the question. “What happened?” she asked softly.

You tried to answer, but the words stuck. Your throat felt full of smoke.

She didn’t push. She took the cart handles from you and leaned it gently against the wall. “Come in,” she said. “Your father’s been asking whether the temple bells sounded different today. I told him the Heavens don’t change its tune for people like us.”

Inside, the air smelt of boiled bones and sickness.

Your father lay where you’d left him, propped against folded blankets. The rag at his lips stained rusty brown. When you stepped closer, ash slid from your hair and fell onto the floor between you.

“You took the meat?” he croaked.

“They took it,” you said.

“Good,” he rasped. “Offerings… must be… made.” He still believed, or wanted to. That the Heavens might notice his name if he was obedient enough. That they might lean down and pinch the illness out of his blood.

You had seen how the monks leaned away.

“They said it was short,” you forced yourself to explain. “They dumped it in the river.”

He stared past you, toward something you couldn’t see. His breath hitched. A fresh thread of red appeared on the rag. Your mother moved quickly, turning his head and rubbing his chest with a careful hand.

“It’s all right,” she murmured. “Lie back. The next cow will be fatter—the next offering will be better and—and the monks will pray louder.”

“We can’t eat prayers,” you said.

Your mother looked over at you. Her face was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. There was ash on her cheek where you had brushed against in passing. It made a pale streak through old splatters of blood.

“Better to bow than to burn, flower,” she said quietly. “We are cheonmin. The King burns rebels. The monks burn heretics. Those who bow still have throats left to swallow with.”

You looked from your father’s blood on the rag to your mother’s hands, where dried red clung stubbornly under every nail. You thought of the overseer’s girl in the cart. Of Gom’s son hanging from the willow. Of the bundles of meat hitting the river, one after another.

“I want to burn them all,” you said. The words came out calm. That scared you more than if you’d screamed.

Your mother flinched, just a little. “Careful,” she said. “The walls have gaps. Words crawl.”

“Let them,” you said. “They already crawl in my head.”

She turned back to your father, but you saw the way her shoulders tightened, as if she were bracing for a blow that hadn’t come yet.

Purity, you accepted that day, was never about the Heavens. It was a story invented by people who could afford to wash.

The third levy was for the Crown. That one cut closest.

The nobles could still their hunger with silk and silver. The temples could fill their bellies with blessed meat and winter stores. But the Crown wanted what you needed most to survive: grain.

Under the provincial authority of the Crown Prince, the quotas had been climbing every year. Not enough to be a riot. Just enough that each season bit a little deeper. They called it adjustment in accordance with the needs of the realm. If a family adjusted to the realm’s needs, they might not see spring. If they held back, the next season would arrive with soldiers.

You had no grain. The nobles ate rice polished to pearl; even the lower city scraped together millet and barley. But cheonmin lived on scraps and blood.

So that morning, you carried what you had. A basket full of meat.

Not fine cuts—you’d sold those already, converted them into thin handfuls of rice and bitter greens. What you carried were thick slabs of salted flesh and two jars of rendered tallow, heavy enough to drag at your arms. If you squinted, you could see how a clerk might be persuaded to call this value. Meat for grain. Fat for numbers in a column.

It was a foolish hope. But foolish hope was the only kind that ever visited Guhwa.

Your father had coughed blood again in the night. Your mother had woken with a fever-brightness in her eyes that she tried to hide under a wet cloth. Your house felt like a boat with both oars broken, drifting toward rocks.

“Take it,” she had said, tying the basket lid with shaking fingers. “Maybe the scribe is new. Maybe he still has a human face.”

If he didn’t, then at least you would know.

The royal levy-post sat lower down the ridge, just before the road leading to the city.

It was bigger than Baekchon’s little office, bigger than the House of Purity. A squat, rectangular building of grey stone and wood, flanked by two tall flagpoles bearing the royal emblem—a coiled dragon inked in black on yellow cloth. The flags hung limp in the damp air, their edges frayed. In front of the building, a wide packed-earth square opened out. 

That day, it was choked with people. Farmers from the paddies below the city, their trousers streaked with mud up to the knee. Tenants from the hillside barley fields, faces burned by wind and sun. Market folk clutching ledgers of their own, hoping to prove they had already paid earlier in the year. And you, with the cheonmins, standing in the lee of the crowd, holding whatever you could pretend was worth counting.

Everyone had something on their backs—sacks of millet, baskets of rice, bundles of dried fish, jars of beans. The lines snaked toward the levy-post doors where two scribes sat at tables, brushes poised. Guards spaced themselves along the edges of the crowd, spears up, eyes bored. The air smelled of damp grain, sweat, and the faint iron tang that never left your clothes.

You took your place in the line closest to the side wall. Men and women shuffled ahead of you, their shoulders sagging under weight and worry.

“Did you hear?” someone muttered near your elbow. “They raised the quota again.”

“For the Crown Prince,” another replied. “The provincial office sent word. Something about repairing fortresses in the north. Or buying horses. Or the King’s procession.”

“The Crown Prince doesn’t even live here,” a third voice said bitterly. “He sits in Gaegyeong and we send him our winter.”

“Shh,” the first one hissed. “The banners hear.”

You looked up at the dragon flag. It didn’t look at you.

The line moved. Slowly. The scribes checked names against lists. Grain was weighed in wooden measures. Those who met their quota were given a sharp nod and a dab of red ink beside their household mark. 

Those who did not were told to step aside and speak to another official under the awning. None of those conversations went well.

When your turn finally crept near, you could see the man you would have to face. He was not old, maybe in his thirties, but his hair was already slicked back with oil as if to hide the thinning at the temples. His official robe was dyed a dull grey, the sort worn by middle-ranking bureaucrats who spent their lives squinting at other people’s misfortunes. An inkstone and brush rested by his elbow. 

More importantly, his hands were clean. Not just clean—untouched. The nails smooth, no ink stains, no calluses. This was not a man who had ever carried his own weight.

He looked up when the man in front of you moved away. “Next,” he said.

You stepped forward and set the basket down on the table. The lid rattled. The scent of salted meat rose, thick and honest.

He frowned even before he opened it. “What is this?” he demanded.

“Meat,” you said. “Cow. From the eastern sheds.”

“I can see that it is meat.” He lifted the lid with two fingers, as if afraid it might bite him. “Why are you bringing this here?”

“We have no grain,” you said. There was no point pretending. “My father is a butcher. My mother and I work the sheds. The levies—we fell behind when he took sick. We thought—” you swallowed. “We thought this might settle the record. For this season. Until the next slaughter.”

A few people behind you shifted to listen. Cheonmin didn’t often speak directly to officials unless it was to say yes, sir or forgive us, sir, we didn’t know.

The collector stared down at the basket as if it were a chamber pot. “The royal tax,” he said slowly, “is paid in grain. Rice, millet, barley, even beans. Not in filth.” His gaze flicked up to you, his lip curling. “Do you plan to smear the ledgers with blood now?” he asked. “Is that the new way of accounting in Guhwa? The Ministry of Taxation forgot to send us that decree, it seems.”

A small, ugly chuckle rippled along the table to where the second scribe sat. You felt every pair of eyes on your back.

“The decree says households must pay according to their means,” you said, before you could stop yourself. “This is what we have. It is worth something. You can weigh it, if you like.”

He snorted. “Your kind always thinks meat is worth more than grain,” he said. “You eat flesh and think that makes you strong. But soldiers march on rice, not fat drippings. The Crown’s coffers hold rice, not cow slabs hacked in the dark.” He made no move to touch the basket. “Take it back,” he said. “You stink of blood. You are fouling my table.”

Heat flooded your face. 

The smell of blood and salt that clung to you had always been familiar, even comforting in its own way—the scent of work, of survival. Hearing it called filth by a man who smelled only of ink and starch made something in you twitch.

Before you could answer, someone beside you dropped into a hurried bow so deep his forehead almost hit the dirt. “Please, Official-Sir,” the man said. “I beg you, count mine.”

He was older than your father, maybe, thin as a drying rack. His cotton jacket flapped loosely around his bones. He held a small sack of millet in both arms. “I know the quota,” he said. “We—we tried. The rain came late. The paddies—”

The collector didn’t even look at the sack. “You are under by three measures,” he said, glancing at the marks on his board. “The numbers do not lie.”

“We’ll make it up next season,” the man pleaded. “My eldest is working on the magistrate’s road. He’ll be paid in rice. We can—”

“And if the raiders come down from the north this year?” the collector cut in sharply. “If the King’s army lacks grain because farmers like you will make it up next season, will you stand on the walls and stop arrows with your face?”

The man flinched. “I have no more,” he whispered. “Please. I am not asking for forgiveness. Just—a delay. My grandson—”

The collector made a small noise of disgust. “Guards,” he said.

Two soldiers stepped forward. Unlike the overseer’s men, these wore proper armour—overlapping plates tied together with cord, the metal dulled by use. Their spears were taller than you, their swords short and serviceable. One had a scar that pulled at the corner of his mouth, giving him a permanent half-smile.

“Move him aside,” the collector ordered. “Next.”

The scar-mouthed guard grabbed the old man by the collar and yanked him away from the table. The man stumbled, knees buckling, but he tried to hold onto the sack of millet. It tore under his fingers. Grain spilled in a pale stream across the packed earth.

“No,” he gasped, scrambling after it. “Please, that’s all we have—”

He reached out, palm flat on the ground, trying to scoop the fallen millet back into his hand. The guard planted his boot on the man’s hand.

It was not a big boot. Just leather and a thin layer of iron for the toes. But it weighed enough. At first, the guard simply stood there, pinning the hand to the dirt. Then—slowly, deliberately—he twisted.

You heard it.

A small, wet crack. The soft grind of bone under pressure.

The man’s fingers spasmed. His body folded around the trapped hand. His breath hissed through his teeth in a sound too thin to be called a scream. His face pressed into the mud, cheekbone scraping the grit.

The guard leaned his weight and ground his heel, rubbing it back and forth as if trying to wipe something off onto the man’s bones. He laughed while he did it. A low, amused sound, like someone watching a clumsy dog. “If your hand can’t hold the quota,” he said, “we’ll see how it holds your bowl this winter.”

No one moved to stop him.

A few people looked away. Most didn’t. Your basket of meat sat untouched on the table. 

The collector had already turned to the next person, dismissing you and the old man both as easily as he’d swatted a fly. “Next,” he said again, voice bored.

Someone shoved against your shoulder from behind, eager to take your place. The line gurgled forward, then jammed as people tried to back away from the guards at the same time.

Panic and duty had always made an untidy pair. Voices rose—some pleading, some angry. A woman further down the row clutched her child to her chest and cried that the measures were wrong. A man shouted that the Crown Prince had no right to bleed them twice in one year for the same road.

“Hold your tongue,” someone hissed. “Do you want to hang next to the tanner’s boy?”

The square tightened. Someone in the back, desperate or foolish, flung a basket of grain. It arced through the air and struck one of the guards in the shoulder. The poorly-tied lid came off. Millet exploded outward in a shimmering burst, tiny seeds pattering across armour and dirt.

For a heartbeat, everything stilled.

Then the guard reached for his sword. “Who did that?” he shouted.

Nobody answered.

The crowd surged. Bodies pressed together, each person trying to be smaller and somewhere else. 

Another guard swung the hilt of his blade into the face of a boy near the front—a farmhand, by the look of his patched jacket. The blow landed with a dull, meaty sound. The boy crumpled, hands flying to his nose. Blood spilled between his fingers, quick and bright.

Somewhere, a child began wailing. Somewhere else, a basket was dropped and smashed. Around you, panic caught like fire at dry straw.

People shoved, trying to get away from the guards and toward the edges of the square. Where two streams of bodies met, they crushed together—ribs against elbows, breaths stolen from lungs.

You did not move.

Your eyes were fixed on the man with the crushed hand.

He was still on the ground. His body curled inward, spine bowed. His injured hand lay half-hidden under the guard’s bootprint, fingers twisted at wrong angles. The other hand scrabbled weakly at the dirt, as if he could scoop something back into himself.

He reminded you of a slit eel you’d once seen at the sheds—cut open from throat to tail, guts spilling, but still writhing in the trough water as if believing it could swim its way back into wholeness.

Was this what you were all worth?

A hand for three measures under quota. A life for a moment’s inconvenience. A family’s winter for a neat red line in a ledger. If someone smashed your fingers into dust right here, would the dragon banners even stir?

The guard lifted his boot at last and stepped away, bored now that the man had stopped struggling. The old peasant curled around his ruined hand, breath coming in short, sharp pulls. 

No one helped him up. To help someone was to attract notice, and notice was dangerous.

“Enough,” one of the scribes snapped, as if the crowd were children. He tried to shout over the rising noise. “Those who have not yet paid will return tomorrow,” he announced. “The quotas stand. Disperse!”

A spear-butt jabbed into your side, hard enough to make you stagger. “Move,” a guard barked. “Take your stink with you.”

For a moment, you forgot you had a body. The square was a blur of noise and dust and too many elbows. You drifted somewhere just above all of it, watching.

Then someone crashed into your back, hard.

You stumbled, your heel catching on a rut. The world snapped back into place. Sound slammed in—the roar of the crowd, the barked orders, the wet cough of the boy trying to breathe through his broken nose.

Your basket lurched. Instinct made you grab for it. Meat and fat and the last scrap of hope you owned—you clutched it to your chest and staggered sideways.

“Move!” someone shouted behind you.

You tried. The bodies were packed too tight now, pressing and surging as everyone tried to get away from the guards and toward any direction that wasn’t here. The basket strap bit into your shoulder. Your arms burned. You twisted, dragging it with you, head down so no one would see your face and decide it was convenient to hit.

A shadow fell over you. “Didn’t you hear?” a voice said, far too close. “I said move, butcher-brat.”

You looked up.

It was the same guard. The one with the scar. The one who had ground the old man’s bones under his heel.

You were closer than you’d realised. Close enough that you could see your own reflection in the dark of his eyes. You didn’t like what you saw.

A slight cheonmin girl, hair half-loose from its knot. Skin too pale, too yellow, too filthy. Clothes stained with old blood and ash. Shoulders hunched. Hands wrapped tightly around a basket no one wanted. A body small enough that a boot could cover most of your chest if someone pressed hard enough.

Helpless. Worthless. Small. People like him got to decide if people like you breathed.

“Move,” he said again, and there was nothing bored in it now. Just annoyance and the old habit of being obeyed.

He swung. He wasn’t aiming to kill you. Not with that first strike. It was a lazy, backhand sweep of his sword—the flat of the blade, not the edge, arcing toward your shoulder. Something to knock you down, to bruise, to remind you where you belonged.

Time stretched.

You saw the angle of the steel, the way his wrist turned. The way the plates of his armour shifted with his movement, opening a narrow strip of unprotected flesh at the side of his throat just above the collar of his armour. A line of skin between metal and jaw.

You saw your father’s hands on a carcass in the shed, thick fingers pointing. “Here,” he’d said once, guiding your smaller hand with the knife. “If you cut here, it’s quick. The blood goes out before the squeal finishes. Mercy for them, less mess for us.”

The flat of the sword caught your shoulder. Pain bloomed, sharp and bright. Your knees buckled, the basket slipped. Meat shifted and fell out with a sick slap.

He drew breath to shout—to curse, to call you something, to reduce you to nothing.

Your body moved before you decided to.

Your right hand dropped to the small skinner’s knife at your belt, fingers finding the worn handle as if it was a slab on the cutting block and not leather at your hip. You had been carrying that knife since you were twelve. Your hand knew exactly how it fit.

The guard’s head tipped back slightly as he lifted his sword again. The plates at his throat shifted once more. The gap opened. You stepped in, close enough to smell old sweat and boiled leather under the iron, and drove the blade up.

Deep angle. Under the jaw. Not too high; that’s bone. Aim for the softer part, the small hollow just behind the pulse.

Your wrist turned the way it always did at the sheds. The knife went in with a surprising softness, like sliding into dense fabric that fought a moment and then gave way.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the world exhaled in red. Blood sprayed in a narrow arc. A sharp, hot ribbon that cut across your face, your chest, the front of your tunic. It smelled of iron and salt and something faintly sweet.

Exactly like cow.

The guard’s eyes went very wide. The half-smile pulled wrong now, twisted by surprise more than pain. His sword slipped from his fingers. It clattered against the packed earth, sound muffled under the noise of the crowd. His hands flew to his neck, clutching instinctively at the knife’s hilt, but he didn’t pull. Some part of him understood that it was already far too late.

He tried to step back. His knees didn’t agree.

The armour made a dull, heavy sound when he fell. The plates rattled. Dust rose, mixing with the fine spray of blood.

You still had your hand on the knife. The blade jerked as his body hit the ground, then lodged, the hilt warm under your fingers where his blood had already begun to flood around it. 

His pulse beat once—twice—against your skin in a strange, stuttering flutter. Then it broke.

Sound muffled out.

The shouting, the crying, the orders—it all sank under water. You heard only your own breath and the small, wet gurgling from the ruin you had made of the guard’s throat. 

He twitched. It was a familiar twitch. You’d seen it in pigs. In calves. In dogs too old or too sick to keep. The body’s last argument with itself.

Human blood spread under him, darkening the dust, seeping into the grooves left by the cart wheels. It lapped at the edge of your boots. You could see your reflection in it too now—a dark, smeared shape.

You pulled your hand back, slowly.

The knife slid free with a soft, obscene sound, bringing more red with it. It dripped from the tip, thickening as the air hit it. Your arm felt weightless and very, very heavy at the same time.

Not a great warrior’s strike. The knife in your hand knew no difference between a guard and a goat. 

Around you, the square finally noticed.

The woman who’d been clutching her child nearby screamed, a thin, keening sound. Someone shouted, “He’s down!” in a voice cracking with disbelief. The other guards swore—sharp, shocked curses that snapped the air back into motion. The scribe who had called your basket filth scrambled to his feet, chair toppling, inkstone skittering off the table and dumping black liquid into the dirt. His brush fell from his hand, useless.

You just stood there.

Human blood was warmer than a cow’s. That was the only difference you could feel. It slid slower over your skin, thicker and stickier. It soaked into the fabric of your sleeve, turning the worn cotton a deep, ugly colour.

You lifted your free hand to your cheek. Your fingers came away red. It streaked from your jaw to your temple, thin in some places, clotted in others. It smelled the same. That was the part your mind couldn’t get past—that there was no separate scent for a life with a name.

Blood did not care about caste or titles or dragon banners. It all tasted of iron on the tongue.

The guard on the ground made a strangled, bubbling sound. His eyes rolled, trying to find something to anchor to. They landed on you. There was no fury in them. No righteousness. Just confusion. As if he couldn’t quite understand how someone like you had done this.

To be fair, neither could you.

His lips shaped something. A word, maybe. Or just a sound. A thin trail of red spilled from the corner of his mouth. Then his gaze went flat.

He stopped moving.

Noise rushed back into your ears.

“Kill her!”

“Get away from him!”

“Did you see that? She—”

Hands grabbed at you—from the side, from behind, rough and desperate. You jerked back on instinct, knife still in your grip, basket forgotten at your feet.

“Seize her!” a voice shouted—the collector, shrill now, no dignity left in it. “That’s murder! She struck a royal guard! She—”

You hadn’t meant to do it. That thought came too late to matter. You tightened your grip on the skinner’s knife. Somewhere inside, a quiet part of you noted the angle of the cut you had made. If your father had been standing beside you, he would have grunted approval. “You’ll make a butcher yet, girl.”

You wanted to be sick.

Instead, you stood in the middle of the square, dirty with human blood for once, and watched your life change shape around the body at your feet.

By the time they dragged you out, the sun had shifted and the blood on your face had dried stiff.

Your wrists were bound behind your back with rough rope. Every step pulled the fibers tighter, grinding them into the raw skin. You could taste iron when you licked your lips—not fresh, but old and tacky. 

The square that had been chaos earlier was half-quiet now: the crowd driven back behind lines of soldiers, the earth scraped in a few hurried strokes that convinced no one.

Only one body remained.

They had laid the guard out on a reed mat before the levy-post, armour still on. His throat was a dark, ruined hole. Someone had tried to wipe away the blood, but it clung under the plates, in the seams, in the hollows of his ear. Flies had already begun to test their courage, settling in quick darts.

You were hauled forward until you were close enough to smell him.

Human blood, cooling in the afternoon air, smelled almost exactly like animal blood.

A clerk in a stiff grey robe stood to one side, a bamboo slip in his hand. Behind him, under a canopy hastily erected to spare important skin from Guhwa’s air, the inspection party waited.

There were more banners now—the royal dragon on yellow silk, and beside it a smaller standard with a coiled black phoenix. Soldiers in better armour lined the path, their spears upright, tassels stirring faintly.

At their center, cloaked and silent, stood the Crown Prince.

You knew it was him before anyone said his title. You didn’t need to be taught how royalty looked—your body recognised the danger first.

His cloak was black, trimmed at the edge with a thread of intricate gold that curled and knotted like tightly coiled vines. The hood was pushed back enough that you could see his face clearly. Dark hair, longer than most men kept it, fell in loose waves to his jaw, caught back at the crown with a narrow jade ring. A few strands clung to his cheekbones where sweat had dried.

His features were wrong for a human. Too cleanly cut. High, straight nose. Mouth full and soft even when he wasn’t smiling. Eyes the colour of smoked amber, long-lashed, set beneath straight dark brows. 

Observant eyes—not gentle. Those eyes flicked over the square and missed nothing.

The lower officials bowed so deeply their hats almost fell off. No one said his name aloud; they used titles instead. 

Jeoha. His Highness. Taehyung of the Kim clan. The one who stood between the King and the rest of the people.

A royal physician knelt at the dead guard’s side, fingers pressing at cooling flesh around the wound, lips moving in low explanation. You couldn’t hear his words, but you watched the Crown Prince listen.

He crouched, the cloak pooling around his boots, and studied the cut. His hand—ungloved, pale, with a single gold ring at the thumb—hovered inches from the torn flesh. His fingers traced the air, following the line you had carved.

His gaze sharpened.

It wasn’t the dull curiosity of a bored noble. His eyes flicked from the throat, to the angle of the wound, to the pattern of blood spray on the leather plates.

Then he looked at you.

Your heart slammed once against your ribs, hard enough that the ropes at your wrists jerked.

He stood, cloak rustling. The physician bowed again, retreating with short, careful steps.

“Bring the accused forward,” someone barked.

The soldiers obeyed. They shoved you until your knees hit the packed earth.

Pain flared in your shoulder where the guard’s sword had struck earlier. You kept your head bowed, eyes fixed on the ground. There was a patch of half-dried blood in front of you, darker than the soil.

The clerk cleared his throat and read from the bamboo slip. “Daughter of a butcher’s family in Guhwa,” he intoned. “Status: lowborn. Household in arrears to the Crown by six measures of rice and two of millet. Accused of rioting, assault on a royal official, and the killing of a royal guard in service at the levy-post.”

The words felt distant, like someone else’s life drifting through fog.

Around you, the gathered officials murmured. One of them—the magistrate in charge of this district, if you remembered right—stepped forward, sleeves of his dark robe swaying.

“Your Highness,” he said, bowing toward the Crown Prince. “As you can see, this cheonmin caused the unrest. Witnesses say she stabbed the guard without provocation. The law is clear. For a base-born butcher to shed the blood of a royal soldier is—”

“High treason,” another official supplied eagerly. “Punishable by immediate decapitation, by the articles of the Hyeongjo.”

“Yes.” The magistrate seized on that. “We were prepared to carry out the sentence at once, but word of Your Highness’s arrival reached us. We thought it best to wait for your judgment.”

Not best for me, you thought. Best for them. If they killed you wrong in front of a royal, someone might lose their position. The Crown Prince didn’t answer immediately.

You could feel his gaze on the top of your head. It was like standing under a summer sun—not comforting, just too bright. “Raise her head,” he said at last.

A guard’s hand fisted in your hair and yanked. Your neck screamed. Your eyes watered. You had no choice but to look up.

He stood only a few steps away now.

Up close, he was worse.

The embroidery at the edge of his hood caught the light, each tiny loop of gold thread glinting like a chain. His under-robe was of fine white ramie, collar lined in subtle patterns of cloud and wave stitched so delicately you’d miss them if you weren’t raised to notice. The jade at his crown was pale, almost translucent, veins of green running through it like moss.

He smelled faintly of something unfamiliar—foreign cedar oil, perhaps, and expensive ink. Underneath, there was the metallic shadow of the square: blood, iron, the ghosts of sweat.

His face was expressionless. Not blank, exactly; more like everything he felt had been pulled inward, away from where anyone could see.

He took his time looking at you.

His gaze flicked over the ash smeared on your clothes, the bruised shoulder, the dried red on your cheek. It lingered on your hands bound behind your back, the rope biting into skin roughened by years of work.

When his eyes returned to your face, he tilted his head a fraction. “Do you understand what you have done?” he asked.

His voice wasn’t deep or booming. It was smooth, level, with a softness at the edges that made the words sink under the skin instead of bouncing off.

You should have answered quickly. You should have thrown yourself flat, smacked your head into the ground, sobbed for mercy.

Instead, your tongue stuck.

Your throat felt raw. When you finally managed to force sound out, it scraped. “I killed,” you said. That much was true. “I—” Your voice shook. “I killed.”

A small scoff escaped him. “Wrong,” he said.

The square held its breath. You stared up at him, confused despite yourself.

“You lived,” he said, each word landing slow and precise. “He didn’t.”

The magistrate made a strangled noise. “Your Highness,” he said quickly. “Regardless of the… circumstances, she struck down a royal guard. If we do not execute her, word will spread. The farmers and cheonmin will think they can raise their hands to the King’s men without consequence. The Ministry of War will blame us for—”

“Let them blame me,” the Crown Prince said lightly.

It was the sort of statement only someone born in the inner palace could make. The magistrate faltered, mouth opening and closing.

“B-but the law—”

“The law,” Prince Taehyung cut in, “also states that those who owe levies to the Crown may be taken into service to repay their debts.” He nodded toward the clerk’s bamboo slip. “You read it yourself. Her household is in arrears. How much?”

“Six measures of rice, two of millet, Your Highness,” the clerk stammered.

“Then we will consider the debt paid,” the Crown Prince said. “I will take her into my service. Her life now belongs to the Crown. Mine to punish. Mine to use.”

Murmurs rippled around you, sharper now. Some shocked, some amused.

“Your Highness—” the magistrate tried again, a bead of sweat breaking free at his temple. “To… keep a cheonmin butcher? She is—”

The Crown Prince looked at him. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t move. He simply turned his head and let his gaze settle on the magistrate’s face.

It was enough.

The man’s words snapped off. He lowered his eyes so fast it was a wonder his neck didn’t break and bowed, spine pressing almost flat.

“Of course,” he muttered. “As Your Highness wills.”

The interpretation bloomed in the space left by his silence. The Crown Prince, Taehyung of the Kim clan, sparing a butcher girl from execution? There were only a few stories people told themselves to make that make sense. You could hear them already, rising at the edges of the square like steam.

“She’s pretty, for a cheonmin.”

“Lowborn or not, she has all her teeth and the right shape. Men kill for less.”

“Imagine. From Guhwa mud to the Prince’s bed in a day.”

“I heard the Crown Prince likes strange things. Maybe he wanted to see how butcher girls scream.”

The words weren’t said aloud where you could clearly hear them, but they didn’t need to be. You grew up in Guhwa learning how to fill silence with cruelty.

Prince Taehyung stepped closer. The soldiers around you shifted, making space. The air seemed to thin. He bent at the waist in one smooth movement until his face was level with yours.

Up close, you could see everything.

The faint shadow of stubble along his jaw that no amount of good breeding could prevent. A tiny pale scar at the corner of his mouth, half-hidden when his lips were still. The way one strand of hair had escaped the jade ring and fell across his brow. A gold fleck in his left iris that caught the light when he moved.

His hand came up. His fingers were cold.

He gripped your chin between thumb and forefinger—not rough—but firm enough that you couldn’t turn away. His skin was smooth, with the faint dry callus of someone who held brushes, not blades. A single thread of embroidered gold from his cuff tickled your jaw. “Look at me,” he said softly.

You had no choice. Your eyes met.

There was no warmth in his gaze. Only interest. The kind a man might show toward an unusual animal.

He studied you.

“The law says,” he murmured, and though his voice was quiet, everyone heard him, “that those who owe the Crown must repay with what they have. If she owes the Crown…” His grip on your chin tightened, just a fraction, “…she will repay it with her hands.”

The words were simple. The meaning they grew in other people’s minds was not. Behind him, a few officials shifted, trading sidelong glances. At the back of the crowd, someone let out a low, knowing laugh before swallowing it quickly.

They all heard it the same way: you’ll serve him personally. Warm his bed. Use those rough butcher’s hands for something nobler.

A royal plaything, dragged from the mud and polished enough to entertain until he grew bored and threw you back to the mud.

For them, it was salacious, shocking, a story to tell in whispers later over wine. For you, it landed like a brand.

Not just the touch—though that alone made your skin crawl. 

It was the weight behind it. The fact that the Crown Prince could turn your fate with one sentence and a hand on your face. 

The humiliation came wrapped as mercy.

Your heart pounded against the cage of your ribs, so hard you were sure he must feel it through the narrow bones of your jaw.

You could already see your mother’s face when someone came to tell her. The way her mouth would twist—with relief, with shame, with something too tangled to name. 

Better to bow than to burn, she’d always said. Was this what bowing looked like now? Your daughter on her knees in front of the Crown Prince, her life balanced on whether he found her amusing.

The worst part was knowing the alternative.

If you jerked away, if you spat, if you snapped your teeth at his fingers like a dog, there would be no debate. A single gesture from him, and your head would be decorating a spike by the levy-post before the day ended. Your parents would lose even the bitter comfort of thinking you had died quietly.

Survival demanded submission. Submission, in front of men like this, looked like gratitude.

So you did nothing.

You did not pull back. You did not lower your gaze. You did not beg or thank or flinch. Every muscle locked. If you moved at all, it would be in the wrong direction.

He seemed to mistake that stillness for composure. Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. A tiny upward tug, as if he’d found a particularly interesting toy. “Untie her,” he said, straightening, dropping his hand. Your chin felt oddly cold without it. “She is now property of the Crown Prince’s household. Mark it in the record.”

The clerk bowed so fast his hat slipped. “Yes, Your Highness. Cheonmin from Guhwa, attached to the Crown Prince’s retinue in lieu of levy payment. To be transferred to the palace quarter.”

Palace quarter. The words hit harder than any spear-butt.

You watched, numb, as a guard moved behind you and cut the ropes from your wrists. The hemp fell away in stiff coils. Blood rushed back into your hands in a painful pins-and-needles surge.

For a moment, you thought of running.

There were alleys. There was the river. There were a hundred ways to vanish in Guhwa if you were willing to be hungry enough. 

But not from them. Hands that had just held your life like a bit of twine could take it back any time they liked.

That was the day your life changed.

You stopped being just a butcher’s daughter from the slums of Guhwa.

You became the Crown Prince’s property—tainted, indebted, powerful only through the proximity of a man you already despised.

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