Three Months to Earn Mercy

The water in the obsidian bath has gone the color of a bruise, red bleeding into black stone until you cannot tell where the blood ends and the marble begins. The Crimson Moon hangs low outside the arched window of your bathing chamber, fat and swollen and the color of a fresh wound, and you think, distantly, that you picked this night for a reason you can no longer remember. Something about symbolism. Something about power. You always did love a good performance.

Hongjoong's hands close over your shoulders first.

You feel the calluses along his palms, the strange dragon heat that lives under his skin even in human form, and for one absurd heartbeat you think he means to steady you, the way a servant might when you slip getting out of the water. Then his grip tightens, and you understand. His copper hair falls forward, damp with steam, and his black eyes have gone flat and endless, pupils slit thin the way they only go when the dragon presses close beneath the man.

"Hold still, Princess," he says, and his voice does not shake at all.

You open your mouth to laugh, to mock him, to say something cutting the way you always do when you are frightened, because mockery has always been easier for you than fear. Nothing comes out. The water has already climbed to your collarbones, warm and perfumed with the oils you demanded be imported from three kingdoms just for this bath, and Mingi steps out of the shadow of the doorway with a blade you recognize.

It is your own dagger. The one with the violet stone in the hilt that matches your eyes, the one you gifted yourself on your last name day and had a servant beheaded for admiring too openly.

Mingi's silver hair is a wild mess around his face, damp at the temples, and his ice-blue eyes do not look away from yours even once as he wades into the bath fully clothed. Water darkens his shirt to his skin. The old whip scars on his forearms, the ones you gave him and the ones he refused to let you heal because he wanted you to see them every single day, catch the moonlight like pale rivers.

"Should've begged," he says, low, almost gentle, the way you might speak to something wounded. "Would've been easier for you."

You do not beg. Even now, even with your heart slamming so hard against your ribs you can feel it in your teeth, you do not beg, because some broken, poisoned part of you still believes that begging is the one thing they can never be allowed to see. The knife goes in low, under your ribs, angled up the way a soldier is taught to kill something that heals fast. Pain detonates through your body in a white sheet, and you scream, and the sound of it bounces off obsidian and comes back to you distorted, already sounding like someone else's voice.

Elven blood surges to the wound immediately, an old and automatic thing, threads of gold light knitting under your skin the way they have knit every wound you have ever taken since you were an infant. You feel it start. You feel it fail.

The water around you goes suddenly, violently cold.

Yeosang stands at the head of the bath now, porcelain-pale, white-blond hair catching the crimson moonlight like frost catching fire, his fingertips already gone translucent at the edges. The pink birthmark beside his eye looks almost black in this light. He does not raise his voice. He never does.

"Breathe it in," he says softly, and it is not cruelty in his tone so much as something worse, a terrible patience, the patience of a man who has waited a very long time for exactly this. "You always liked the cold on your skin. Let's see how you like it in your lungs."

The water crawls up your throat, up over your chin, up over your mouth, and it is not water anymore by the time it reaches you, it is ice, fine crystalline shards of it forcing themselves down your windpipe with every gasping, panicked breath you cannot stop yourself from taking. You claw at the sides of the bath. Your nails, sharpened points that once tore skin from servants who displeased you, find no purchase on wet obsidian.

Somewhere above the roaring in your ears you hear Yunho's voice, quieter than the others, almost apologetic, which is somehow worse than all their fury combined.

"I'm sorry," he says, and you do not know if he is speaking to you or to himself or to the seven other men crowded into this room to end you. "I've died enough times to know it doesn't have to hurt like this. But you never gave anyone that mercy, did you."

His hands find the sigils burned into the skin of your inner arms, the marks of ownership and dominion you had tattooed there in silver ink after each of them was bound to you, one mark for each concubine, eight brands like a collection of hunting trophies. Fire blooms under his palms, gold-black flame that should not be able to touch flesh without turning it to ash, and yet it only burns the ink, peeling the sigils away in curling black smoke that smells like your own vanity dying.

You are drowning and burning at once. Your body does not know which threat to answer first, and so it answers neither, and somewhere in the chaos of your own dying flesh you feel the healing magic that has saved you your entire life simply give up.

Eight bonds. Eight torcs. Eight blood oaths sworn in a magic older than the kingdom itself, all of them breaking in the same handful of seconds, all of that power tearing loose from your body at once like eight ropes snapping in a storm. Your elven blood was built to mend a wound. It was never built to survive this.

Seongwha kneels at the rim of the bath, close enough that you can see the faint scale pattern along his collarbones catching moonlight, close enough that when he cups your jaw in one elegant hand, gentle as a lover, you almost believe for one deranged half-second that he means to save you instead. His nearly black eyes have gone soft at the corners, sorrowful even, and his voice when he speaks is the same silken purr he has always used to seduce information and obedience out of you both.

"Open," he says.

You do not open. He makes you open, thumb pressing hard against the hinge of your jaw the way he has done a hundred times before for far less lethal reasons, and then his mouth is against yours, and you taste the venom before you understand what it is, bitter and metallic and spreading numbness down your throat in a wave. Your own viper, the one you paraded through court like a jeweled leash on a beautiful thing, is the one who paralyzes you.

Your throat squeezes uncomfortably around it. You cannot scream anymore. You cannot do anything but feel.

Wooyoung comes last of the ones who touch your upper body, and when he does, the torchlight along the walls simply goes out, all of it, all at once, plunging the chamber into a darkness lit only by the bloody moon through the high window. You hear feathers before you feel them, a rustle like a held breath let out slow, and then his wings, man-sized and black as spilled ink, close over your face.

You cannot breathe past the venom. You certainly cannot breathe past feathers.

"Should've let me fly," he murmurs into the dark, close to where your ear must be beneath the wing, and there is something raw underneath the practiced cruelty of his voice, something that sounds almost like grief. "Would've been so easy. Just open a window."

Your legs, kicking uselessly against water that no longer offers any resistance because your muscles have started to fail, go suddenly, completely still. San's weight settles over them, human hands pressing your knees flat against obsidian with a gentleness that does not match the violence of what is happening to the rest of you. You cannot see his face beneath Wooyoung's wing, but you know the shape of those hands. You spent a year admiring them, showing them off, using them, and now they are the last thing holding you down.

He does not say anything at all. Somehow the silence is the cruelest thing yet.

You are drowning, burning, poisoned, blind, and pinned, and every nerve in your body screams a single animal demand to survive, and beneath all of it, distant and strange, you feel something enormous and grieving move through the bond in your chest, eight threads of fury and heartbreak all twisting together into the same terrible decision.

Then hands settle at the base of your skull.

You know before you feel the turn that it is Jongho. You know it the way you know the weight of a door closing, final and unhurried. His hands are broad, powerful, the kind of hands that could crush stone, and they are shaking, just slightly, just enough that you feel it against your scalp before the world snaps sideways in a single sharp motion that ends everything at once.

You do not feel your neck break so much as you feel the exact moment the rest of the pain stops mattering.

The last thing you see, through water gone the color of your own blood, lit red by a dying moon, is your own face looking back at you from beneath the surface. Violet eyes, wide and glassy, the color draining out of them slow, like ink diffusing in water, until there is nothing left in them at all. Not fear. Not fury. Nothing.

You watch yourself die.

And then there is nothing.

You gasp.

The sound tears out of you so violently that you choke on it, half sitting, half convulsing upright in a wash of warm water that sloshes over the rim of the bath and onto obsidian tile, and your body moves before your mind catches up, hands slapping against slick stone, throat working around a scream that comes out instead as a wet, ragged cough. Bathwater pours out of your mouth and nose in a rush, and you retch over the side of the tub, your whole body convulsing with the force of it, until there is nothing left to bring up but bile and breath.

You are alive.

The thought arrives strange and wrong, like a key that does not fit the lock it was cut for. You are alive, and the water around you is warm, not cold, not red, warm and clear and smelling faintly of the same oils you remember demanding, and your heart is hammering so hard against your ribs that you press a shaking hand flat over your chest just to be sure it is still doing its job inside you.

No dagger wound.

You look down at your own body with a kind of frantic disbelief, running your palms over your ribs where Mingi's blade went in, over your inner arms where Yunho's fire ate the ownership marks down to smoke, and there is nothing there. No wound. No scar. No sigil, old or new, burned or whole. Your skin is the same luminous pale gold it has always been, unmarked, unbroken, as if none of it ever happened at all.

Your first thought, insane as it is, is that they failed. That somehow, impossibly, your elven blood found a way to knit itself back together after all, the way it always has, the way it always will, and that you are simply lying in the aftermath of your own survival, shaking apart in a bath gone lukewarm from however long you've been unconscious in it.

Then you notice the moon.

It hangs in the same arched window it hung in before, the same window through which you watched your own death, except it is not red. It is not swollen and bloated with whatever ancient magic made the Crimson Moon what it was. It is a thin, ordinary crescent, pale silver, indifferent, the kind of moon that means nothing at all.

You stare at it for a long moment, water dripping from your chin, your hair plastered to your back in a wet sheet, and something cold that has nothing to do with Yeosang's magic settles low in your stomach.

You look down.

The bathing slab beneath the water, the wide flat stone at the base of the tub where the palace stonemasons carve the date of every royal bathing chamber's consecration as a matter of tedious tradition you never once bothered to read, sits half-submerged beneath your knees. You have looked at that carved date a hundred times without ever truly seeing it, the way you look past a servant's face or a courtier's bow, background noise to a life you never thought to examine.

You look at it now.

Your hands are shaking too badly to trust what you're reading at first. You lean closer, bracing yourself against the rim of the tub, water lapping at your collarbones, and you read the date again, and then a third time, tracing the carved numerals with one trembling fingertip as if touch alone might change what your eyes insist on telling you.

It is not the night of the Crimson Moon.

It is ninety days before it.

The number does something strange to the inside of your skull, a kind of vertigo that has nothing to do with balance and everything to do with the sudden, sickening sense that the floor of the world has been pulled out from beneath you without your body ever actually falling. You died. You know you died, know it in a way that lives in your bones now, in the phantom ache still lingering in your throat where Seongwha's venom went down, in the place at the base of your skull where Jongho's hands turned your neck into something no longer attached correctly to the rest of you. That was not a nightmare. Nightmares do not taste like bathwater and blood. Nightmares do not carry the specific, particular horror of watching the color drain out of your own eyes from the inside.

And yet here you are. Alive. Whole. Ninety days too early to be dead.

Your ears are still ringing faintly, a high, thin sound like a struck glass, and beneath it you can still feel the ghost pressure of Jongho's hands at the base of your skull, the exact angle of the turn, the exact silence he kept the entire time he was doing it. You press your own palms there now, against the back of your neck, half expecting to find it wrong, bent, broken, and find instead only smooth, unmarked skin and the frantic thud of your pulse.

A sound rises in your throat that is not quite a sob and not quite a laugh, something ugly and disbelieving that gets caught halfway up and comes out as another wave of retching instead, your body apparently unwilling to let you process anything until it has finished emptying itself of bathwater. You grip the edge of the tub with both hands and heave until there is nothing left, until your throat burns raw and your eyes stream, and only then do you let yourself sit back against the cool obsidian, chest heaving, and simply breathe.

The chamber around you is exactly as it should be, exactly as it always is. Steam curls from the surface of the water. The scent of imported oil hangs heavy in the air. Beyond the arched doorway, down the corridor that connects your private bathing chamber to the rooms where you keep your eight concubines caged in beauty and gold, you can feel it. Faint. Familiar. Wrong in a way that makes your stomach drop all over again.

The bonds are burning.

All eight of them, distinct and separate, each one a different thread of heat low in your chest, exactly the way they have burned every single day for the past year of your life. You know each one the way you know the shape of your own hands. Hongjoong's, sharp and proud, banked like coals under careful control. Mingi's, wild and restless, always straining at the leash even when he is sleeping. Yeosang's, cold in a way that should not translate as heat and somehow does. Yunho's, steady, patient, worn thin from repetition. Seongwha's, coiled tight, watchful even from a distance. Wooyoung's, crackling and quick, like static before a storm. San's, quiet, almost apologetic in its steadiness. Jongho's, low and grounded, the anchor at the bottom of the chord.

All eight, whole, intact, unbroken. Exactly as they were before eight men stood in this same room and tore them loose from your body at once.

You bring both hands up to your own throat on instinct, some animal part of you needing to confirm that there is no torc there, no matching mark to the ones burning gold around each of their necks in the rooms beyond this one, and there is nothing, just skin, just your own pulse hammering under your fingertips like something trying to escape.

"This isn't possible," you say aloud, and your voice comes out wrecked, stripped down to something small and frightened that you do not recognize as your own. You have spent a year cultivating a voice that could silence a room, that could make grown men flinch, that could order cruelty the way other women order tea, and none of that voice is left in you now. What's left sounds like a girl who has just watched herself die.

Because that is exactly what you are.

You sit very still in the cooling water and let the truth of it settle over you in pieces, too large to take all at once. You were murdered. You remember every second of it with a clarity that should belong to nightmares and does not, the water gone red, the venom bitter and spreading, the specific weight of San's hands on your knees and the specific silence Jongho kept while he ended you. You remember it the way you remember your own name, immovable, permanent, already scarring itself into whatever passes for your soul.

And now you are here. Three months earlier. In a body that shows no evidence any of it ever happened, wearing bonds that have not yet been broken, sitting in water that is warm instead of red, beneath a moon that has not yet turned the color of blood.

You think of the eight men down the corridor from this room, sleeping or scheming or simply enduring another night in the cages you built for them, and something twists sick and hot behind your ribs, because you know, with the same bone-deep certainty that told you the water was too cold and the venom was too bitter, that they are the ones who did this to you. Not out of madness. Not out of cruelty for its own sake, the way you might have once believed of anyone who dared raise a hand against you. Out of a year of exactly what you did to them.

You think of Mingi's scars, the ones he refused to let you heal because he wanted you to see them every single day, and you understand, with a clarity that makes you want to be sick all over again, exactly why he was the one who drove the blade. You think of the sigils Yunho burned away, brands you had tattooed onto your own arms like a collector marking prized specimens, and you understand why a man who has died and come back more times than he can count would choose fire as his instrument. You think of Seongwha's mouth against yours, gentle even in betrayal, and you understand that gentleness was never really the lie. You were.

Something hot and wet slides down your cheek before you realize you are crying. You have not cried in longer than you can remember, not real tears, not the kind that come from somewhere other than performance or rage. These come from somewhere deeper, some place you sealed off years ago and told yourself did not exist anymore, and once they start you cannot make them stop, sitting alone in a bath that should not still hold you, weeping for a death that has not happened yet and somehow already has.

You do not know how long you sit there. Long enough for the water to go fully cold around you, long enough for your fingers to prune, long enough for the shaking in your hands to slow from violent to merely constant. The moon outside continues its slow crawl across the sky, silver and thin and utterly unremarkable, giving you nothing, promising you nothing, simply marking the passage of a night you were never supposed to see.

Ninety days.

You have ninety days before eight men who currently sleep down that corridor, who currently wear torcs that burn only because your cruelty forged them, who currently hate you with a purity you have not yet fully earned but soon will, decide together that killing you is the only mercy left to give the world. Ninety days before Hongjoong's hands find your shoulders again. Ninety days before Mingi decides that begging would have been easier. Ninety days before your own eyes go dull beneath red water while you watch it happen from inside your own dying body.

You press both palms flat against your face and breathe, in, out, counting the way some long-forgotten tutor once tried to teach you when your mother's rage grew too large for the room to hold. It does not work as well now as it did not work then. Your hands are still shaking when you lower them.

Somewhere in the wreckage of everything you have just remembered, a single thought surfaces, quiet and terrible and entirely new, because it has never once occurred to you before tonight to think it at all.

You deserved it.

The thought does not arrive with the drama you might have once assigned to it. It arrives simply, plainly, the way facts do when there is no longer any use in denying them. You built eight cages out of eight beautiful, powerful, unwilling men, and you filled a year with cruelty you called correction and violence you called love, and when they finally found the courage to end you, it was not madness. It was justice wearing eight different faces.

And somehow, impossibly, you have been given ninety more days before that justice comes due.

You do not know yet what you intend to do with them. You do not know if ninety days is long enough to become someone worth sparing, or if it is simply long enough to understand exactly how much you are not. You do not know if the men down that corridor, the ones whose bonds burn low and constant against your chest even now, would believe you if you tried to tell them any of this, and some cold, honest part of you thinks they should not. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

But you are alive, in a body with no wounds, three months before the knife that should have already found you, and for the first time in longer than you can remember, you are afraid of something other than losing power.

You are afraid of becoming, again, the woman who made this necessary.

The water around you has gone fully cold now, and gooseflesh rises along your bare arms, but you do not move to leave it. You sit in the dark, ordinary silver moonlight, listening to eight distant heartbeats you cannot actually hear but somehow feel anyway, threaded through your chest like wire pulled too tight, and you let yourself understand, fully, for the first time, exactly what it will cost you to survive the next ninety days as someone worth surviving them.

Outside the arched window, the thin crescent moon continues its climb, indifferent to the girl shaking in cold water below it, indifferent to the eight men sleeping in gilded cages down the hall, indifferent to the fact that somewhere in the space of one death and one impossible waking, everything about the next three months has already changed.

You just don't know yet if it has changed enough.