𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐕𝐄𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐓 ‣ jjk

24. The End of a Season

He clutches onto his chest with trembling hands. And then his heart explodes inside of his body. His bloodshot eyes finally close, his body falling back to the ground like a rag doll.

He stops moving. Stops breathing.

The woman stands, scanning her surroundings one more time before walking away and disappearing into the forest, leaving behind a trail of ice.

Love is a fickle thing, an emotion with the power to heal or destroy.

Saeron has never paid much attention to her emotions. After all, when you have tons of enemies, it's hard to risk your emotions. It's always better to pretend that you have nothing to lose.

So, she halted her emotions—the good and the bad.

And it was going well. She swears it was.

Until the universe just thought it would be funny to rock her life upside down.

Jeon Jeongguk was a presence, a force, a hurricane caught in the hands of the gods and wrangled into the shape of a human. Saeron had wondered, in the beginning, how so much emotion could be contained in such a small body. And not because he was small—and that's saying something.

He comes from a family of outsiders; she'd tried to reason with herself, channelling the hurricane into a more syncopated rhythm. But somehow, he feels safer than anyone else.

There's more to Jeongguk, buried deep in the eye of the storm. Underneath his façade of confidence and bravery, he's so much gentler, so much more... human.

He was the first person who saw her less of a princess, and more of a human. And every time he does something as minimum as meet her eyes, she thinks, why?

All of a sudden, she's sucked into a game of unravel; and it's like the more she thinks she's winning, the further away from the prize she gets. Like she's trying so hard to put the pieces of the puzzle back into place before Jeongguk comes and just flips the entire board over, scattering the pieces again. And as frustrating as it gets; she's too engrossed and enchanted to stop.

But she knows Jeongguk is not a game.

He's so much more than that.

To feel love, such an emotion for a person like that, the idea of it was more foreign that anything she had ever thought of. Jeongguk was a hurricane, a whirlwind that blew over all the walls she'd tried to put up around herself and she feels so exposed, as if all her weak spots are on full display for the world to see.

And only for one person to protect or destroy.

It's scary—to have someone hold that much power over her. And by the time she realises all of this, he's already created a home under her skin.

When she shows up in front of the room he's been tended in, she finds that Jimin is already there sitting by his bedside. On the other side of the room, Jeongguk's father—Sejin, is preparing a basin of water with heavy-lidded eyes and slumped shoulders worn down by devastation. She can only imagine how miserable the old man must feel. And the more she thinks about it, the more she finds reasons to blame herself.

If only she had protected him. If only she had seen through Taeyong's foul play sooner than later. But what's done has been done. Saeron doesn't know what to say or do, so she lets her gaze linger on Jeongguk's frozen body. Even from afar she can see the colour drained out of his face; the usual pink of his lips faded into a dull grey, the vibrance of his cheeks washed away by the rain on the day she so desperately clung onto him as chaos thundered around them like angry waves.